Related papers: Origin of scale-free intermittency in structural f…
Phase transitions are divided into first-order phase transitions and continuous ones in current classification. While the latter shows striking phenomena of scaling and universality, the former is generically characterized by discontinuous…
The presence of frozen-in or quenched disorder in a system can often modify the nature of its phase transition. A particular instance of this phenomenon is the so-called rounding effect: it has been shown in many cases that the free-energy…
Critical behavior of the contact process is studied in annealed scale-free networks by mapping it on the random walk problem. We obtain the analytic results for the critical scaling, using the event-driven dynamics approach. These results…
We report on the computer study of a lattice system that relaxes from a metastable state. Under appropriate nonequilibrium randomness, relaxation occurs by avalanches, i.e., the model evolution is discontinuous and displays many scales in a…
Experimentally there exist many materials with first-order phase transitions at finite temperature that display quantum criticality. Classically, a strain-energy density coupling is known to drive first-order transitions in compressible…
The origin of the non commutativity of the limits $t \to \infty$ and $N \to \infty$ in the dynamics of first order transitions is investigated. In the large-N model, i.e. $N \to \infty$ taken first, the low temperature phase is…
We report avalanche criticality of thermal relaxation in glassy systems after a rapid quench by molecular simulation. Our analysis of the energy landscape and the scaling reveals that particle rearrangement is critical. The critical…
Disordered elastic networks provide a framework for describing a wide variety of physical systems, ranging from amorphous solids, through polymeric fibrous materials to confluent cell tissues. In many cases, such networks feature two widely…
The coil-globule transition of an isolated polymer has been well established to be a second-order phase transition described by a standard tricritical O(0) field theory. We provide compelling evidence from Monte Carlo simulations in four…
Experimental systems with a first order phase transition will often exhibit hysteresis when out of equilibrium. If defects are present, the hysteresis loop can have different shapes: with small disorder the hysteresis loop has a macroscopic…
We study the approach to global breakdown in disordered media driven by increasing external forces. We first analyze the problem by mean-field theory, showing that the failure process can be described as a first-order phase transition,…
On microscopic and mesoscopic scales, plastic flow of crystals is characterized by large intrinsic fluctuations. Deformation by crystallographic slip occurs in a sequence of intermittent bursts ('slip avalanches') with power-law size…
We investigate by means of computer simulations the effect of structural disorder on the statistics of cracking for a thin layer of material under uniform and isotropic drying. The layer is discretized into a triangular lattice of springs.…
We use the zero-temperature random-field Ising model to study hysteretic behavior at first-order phase transitions. Sweeping the external field through zero, the model exhibits hysteresis, the return-point memory effect, and avalanche…
We propose an explanation for the self-organization towards criticality observed in martensites during the cyclic process known as `training'. The scale-free behavior originates from the interplay between the reversible phase transformation…
We consider the random wetting transition on the Cayley tree, i.e. the problem of a directed polymer on the Cayley tree in the presence of random energies along the left-most bonds. In the pure case, there exists a first-order transition…
At low temperature T, a significant difference between the behavior of crystals on the one hand and disordered solids on the other is seen: sufficiently strong disorder can give rise to a transition of the transport properties from…
Scale-free behavior as well as oscillations are frequently observed in the activity of many natural systems. One important example is the cortical tissues of mammalian brain where both phenomena are simultaneously observed. Rhythmic…
Disordered solids respond to quasistatic shear with intermittent avalanches of plastic activity, an example of the crackling noise observed in many nonequilibrium critical systems. The temporal power spectrum of activity within disordered…
We address the question of why larger, high symmetry crystals are mostly weak, ductile and statistically sub-critical, while smaller crystals with the same symmetry are strong, brittle and super-critical. We link it to another question of…