Related papers: Why the smectic A -- hexatic phase transition does…
Simple symmetry considerations would suggest that the transition from the smectic-A phase to the long-range bond orientationally ordered hexatic smectic-B phase should belong to the XY universality class. However, a number of experimental…
We present a theory of the elasticity and fluctuations of the Smectic A and C phases in uniaxial, anisotropic disordered environments, e.g., stretched aerogel. We find that, bizarrely, the low-temperature, lower-symmetry Smectic $C$ phase…
Addressing the nature of an unexpected smectic-A' phase in liquid crystal 54COOBC films, we perform large scale Monte Carlo simulations of a coupled hexatic-nematic XY model. The resulting finite-temperature phase diagram reveals a small…
We report on X-ray studies of freely suspended hexatic films of three different liquid crystal compounds. By applying angular X-ray cross-correlation analysis (XCCA) to the measured diffraction patterns the parameters of the…
We study the smectic AC transition in anisotropic and uniaxial disordered environments, e.g., aerogel with an external field. We find very strange behavior of translational correlations: the low-temperature, lower-symmetry Smectic C phase…
We study the smectic $A$-$C$ phase transition in biaxial disordered environments, e.g. fully anisotropic aerogel. We find that both the $A$ and $C$ phases belong to the universality class of the "XY Bragg glass", and therefore have…
The continuous nematic to smectic-A (N-SmA) phase transition has been studied by high-resolution ac-calorimetry in binary mixtures of the liquid crystal octylcyanobiphenyl(8CB) and a non-mesogenic, low-molecular weight, solvent…
We model the phase transition of a superconductor as a U(1) lattice gauge system, and determine its critical behavior. For this, we perform Monte Carlo simulations, treating the order parameter field and the gauge field on equal footing,…
We explain theoretically peculiarities of the smectic A -- hexatic B equilibrium phase coexistence in a finite temperature range recently observed experimentally in free standing smectic films [I.A.Zaluzhnyy et al., Physical Review E,…
We show that above the critical temperature of superconductor - metal phase transitions, both the longitudinal and Hall conductivity exhibit strong temperature dependent mesoscopic fluctuations, with amplitudes much larger than the…
We study the yielding transition of a two dimensional amorphous system under shear by using a mesoscopic elasto-plastic model. The model combines a full (tensorial) description of the elastic interactions in the system, and the possibility…
The hexatic phase predicted by the theories of two-dimensional melting is characterised by the power law decay of the orientational correlations whereas the in-layer bond orientational order in all the hexatic smectic phases observed so far…
Phase transitions in superconducting mesoscopic disks have been studied over the H-T phase diagram through heat capacity measurement of an array of independent aluminium disks. These disks exhibit non periodic modulations versus H of the…
We study theoretically the smectic A to C phase transition in isotropic disordered environments. Surprisingly, we find that, as in the clean smectic A to C phase transition, smectic layer fluctuations do not affect the nature of the…
We study the quantum fidelity approach to characterize thermal phase transitions. Specifically, we focus on the mixed-state fidelity induced by a perturbation in temperature. We consider the behavior of fidelity in two types of second-order…
Two dimensional crystals melt via an intermediate \textit{hexatic} phase which is characterized by an anomalous scaling of spatial and orientational correlation functions and the absence of an attraction between dislocations. We propose a…
Critical phase transitions contain a variety of deep and universal physics, and are intimately tied to thermodynamic quantities through scaling relations. Yet, these notions are challenged in the context of non-Hermiticity, where spatial or…
A diathermal wall between two heat baths at different temperatures can be mimicked by a layer of independent spin pairs with some internal energy and where each spin $\sigma_a$ is flipped by thermostat $a$ ($a=1,2$). The transition rates…
We present a novel mechanism for the anomalous behaviour of the specific heat in low-temperature amorphous solids. The analytic solution of a mean-field model belonging to the same universality class as high-dimensional glasses, the…
Heat fluctuations of a harmonic oscillator in contact with a thermostat and driven out of equilibrium by an external deterministic force are studied experimentally and theoretically within the context of Fluctuation Theorems. We consider…