Related papers: Singularities in Free Energy: Lee-Yang Theory
A phase transition indicates a sudden change in the properties of a large system. For temperature-driven phase transitions this is related to non-analytic behavior of the free energy density at the critical temperature: The knowledge of the…
Homogeneous nucleation of a new phase near an Ising-like critical point of another phase transition is studied. A scaling analysis shows that the free energy barrier to nucleation contains a singular term with the same scaling as the order…
We study the possible phase transitions between (2+1)-dimensional abelian Chern-Simons theories. We show that they may be described by non-unitary rational conformal field theories with c_eff = 1. As an example we choose the fractional…
Phase transitions between two competing vacua of a given theory are quite common in physics. We discuss how to construct the space-time solutions that allow the description of phase transitions between different branches (or asymptotics) of…
We consider thermal QCD in the large N_C limit, mainly in 1+1 dimensions. The gauge coupling is only taken into account to minimal order, by projection onto colour singlets. An expression for the free energy, exact as N_C goes to infinity,…
These lecture notes give a pedagogical introduction to phase transitions in disordered quantum systems and to the exotic Griffiths phases induced in their vicinity. We first review some fundamental concepts in the physics of phase…
We calculate the $\theta$ dependence in a cousin of QCD, where the vacuum structure can be analyzed exactly. The theory is $\mathcal{N}=2$ $SU(2)$ gauge theory with $N_F=0,1,2,3$ flavors of fundamentals, explicitly broken to $\mathcal{N}=1$…
The study of critical phenomena and phase transitions is an important part of modern condensed matter physics. In this regard, the phenomenological Landau theory has been extraordinarily useful. Hereby we present an alternative theoretical…
The dynamics of first order phase transitions are studied in the context of (3+1)-dimensional scalar field theories. Particular attention is paid to the question of quantifying the strength of the transition, and how `weak' and `strong'…
The phase transition in the mean-field XY model is shown analytically to be related to a topological change in its configuration space. Such a topology change is completely described by means of Morse theory allowing a computation of the…
A simplified Ginzburg-Landau theory is presented to study generally a coupling of a first-order phase transition (FOPT) to a second-order phase transition (SOPT). We show analytically that, due to the coupling between the two phase…
The standard field-theoretical procedure to study the effect of long wavelength fluctuations on a genuine second-order phase transition is applied to the Mode-Coupling-Theory (MCT) dynamical singularity at $T_c$ in the $\beta$ regime.…
The temperature phase transition in scalar $\phi^4(x)$ field theory with spontaneous symmetry breaking is investigated in a partly resummed perturbative approach. The second Legendre transform is used and the resulting gap equation is…
A central concept in the theory of phase transitions beyond the Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson paradigm is fractionalization: the formation of new quasiparticles that interact via emergent gauge fields. This concept has been extensively explored in…
Density functional theory has made great success in solid state physics, quantum chemistry and in computational material sciences. In this work we show that density functional theory could shed light on phase transitions and entanglement at…
Driven particle transport in crowded and confining environments is fundamental to diverse phenomena across physics, chemistry, and biology. A main objective in studying such systems is to identify novel emergent states and phases of…
We consider a theory of a scalar one-component field $\phi$ coupled to a scalar $N$-component field $\chi$. Using large $N$ techiques we calculate the effective potential in the leading order in $1/N$. We show that this is equivalent to a…
The equilibrium properties of classical self-gravitating systems in the grand canonical ensemble are studied by using the correspondence with an euclidean field theory with infrared and ultraviolet cutoffs. It is shown that the system…
We study singularities in the large deviation function of the time-averaged current of diffusive systems connected to two reservoirs. A set of conditions for the occurrence of phase transitions, both first and second order, are obtained by…
In this paper, we suppose a possible extension of Gibbs ensemble theory so that it can provide a reasonable description to phase transitions and spontaneous symmetry breaking. The extension is founded on three hypotheses, and can be…