Related papers: From Continuous to First-Order-Like: Amorphous-to-…
Across natural and human-made systems, transition points mark sudden changes of order and are thus key to understanding overarching system features. Motivated by recent experimental observations, we here uncover an intriguing class of…
Recent experimental results indicate that phosphorus, a single-component system, can have two liquid phases: a high-density liquid (HDL) and a low-density liquid (LDL) phase. A first-order transition between two liquids of different…
Understanding how a flow turns into an amorphous solid is a fundamental challenge in statistical physics, during which no apparent structural ordering appears. In the athermal limit, the two states are connected by a well-defined jamming…
Mixed-order phase transitions display a discontinuity in the order parameter like first-order transitions yet feature critical behavior like second-order transitions. Such transitions have been predicted for a broad range of equilibrium and…
Structural defects in a crystal are responsible for the "two length-scale" behavior, in which a sharp central peak is superimposed over a broad peak in critical diffuse X-ray scattering. We have previously measured the scaling behavior of…
Revealing phase transitions of solids through mechanical anomalies in the friction of nanotips sliding on their surfaces is an unconventional and instructive tool for continuous transitions, unexplored for first-order ones. Owing to slow…
Glass-to-glass and liquid-to-liquid phase transitions were observed many years ago in bulk and confined water with or without applied pressure. It is shown that they result from the competition of two-liquid phases separated by an enthalpy…
We study phase transitions and hysteresis in a system of dipolar bosons loaded into triangular optical lattices at zero temperature. We find that the quantum melting transition from supersolid to superfluid phase is first-order, in contrast…
In this conference proceeding, I discuss in detail the deconfinement to quark matter that takes place at large densities and/or temperatures. The first-order phase transition that is assumed to appear beyond a critical point gives rise to…
The properties of hydrogen at high pressure have wide implications in astrophysics and high-pressure physics. Its phase change in the liquid is variously described as a metallization, H2-dissociation, density discontinuity or plasma phase…
The structural relaxation of amorphous materials is described as arising from the superposition of elementary processes with varying activation energies. We show that it is possible to obtain the kinetic parameters of these processes from…
We find an order-disorder transition from crystals to disordered crystals for static packings of frictionless spheres. While the geometric indicators are mostly blind to the transition, disordered crystals already exhibit properties apart…
Discontinuous quantum phase transitions besides their general interest are clearly relevant to the study of heavy fermions and magnetic transition metal compounds. Recent results show that in many systems belonging to these classes of…
Apart from not having crystallized, supercooled liquids can be considered as being properly equilibrated and thus can be described by a few thermodynamic control variables. In contrast, glasses and other amorphous solids can be arbitrarily…
We investigate the equilibrium and off-equilibrium behaviors of systems at thermal first-order transitions (FOTs) when the boundary conditions favor one of the two phases. As a theoretical laboratory we consider the two-dimensional Potts…
The state of matter above the critical point is terra incognita, and is loosely discussed as a physically homogeneous flowing state where no differences can be made between a liquid and a gas and where properties undergo no marked or…
The random first-order transition (RFOT) theory of the structural glass transition is reviewed in a pedagogical fashion. The rigidity that emerges in crystals and glassy liquids is of the same fundamental origin. In both cases, it…
We introduce a family of two-dimensional lattice models of quasicrystals, using a range of square hard cores together with a soft interaction based on an aperiodic tiling set. Along a low temperature isotherm we find, by Monte Carlo…
The main objective of this article is to study the nature of the Andrews critical point in the gas-liquid transition in a physical-vapor transport (PVT) system. A dynamical model, consistent with the van der Waals equation near the Andrews…
We demonstrate that the phase transition from columnar-hexagonal liquid crystal to hexagonal-crystalline solid falls into an unusual universality class, which in three-dimensional allows for both discontinuous transitions as well as…