Related papers: Continuous and discontinuous realizations of first…
Experimental evidence for the existence of strictly higher-order phase transitions (of order three or above in the Ehrenfest sense) is tenuous at best. However, there is no known physical reason why such transitions should not exist in…
At first order phase transition the free energy does not have an analytic continuation in the thermodynamical variable, which is conjugate to an order parameter for the transition. This result is proved at low temperature for lattice models…
We overview the concept of dynamical phase transitions in isolated quantum systems quenched out of equilibrium. We focus on non-equilibrium transitions characterized by an order parameter, which features qualitatively distinct temporal…
We present a numerical technique employing the density of partition function zeroes (i) to distinguish between phase transitions of first and higher order, (ii) to examine the crossover between such phase transitions and (iii) to measure…
We develop a general theory for discontinuous non-equilibrium phase transitions into an absorbing state in the presence of temporal disorder. We focus in two paradigmatic models for discontinuous transitions: the quadratic contact process…
The dynamics of phase transitions plays a crucial r\^ole in the so-called interface between high energy particle physics and cosmology. Many of the interesting results generated during the last fifteen years or so rely on simplified…
The dynamics of dislocations can be formulated in terms of the evolution of continuous variables representing dislocation densities ('continuum dislocation dynamics'). We show for various variants of this approach that the resulting models…
We investigate experimentally the dynamic phase transition of a two-dimensional active nematic layer interfaced with a passive liquid crystal. Under a temperature ramp that leads to the transition of the passive liquid into a highly…
A new microcanonical equilibrium state is introduced for quantum systems with finite-dimensional state spaces. Equilibrium is characterised by a uniform distribution on a level surface of the expectation value of the Hamiltonian. The…
We explore the stability of certain many-body quantum states which may exist at zero or finite temperatures, may lack long-range order and even topological order, and still are thermodynamically distinct from uncorrelated disordered phases.…
The following is a thermodynamic analysis of a III order (and some aspects of a IV order) phase transition. Such a transition can occur in a superconductor if the normal state is a diamagnet. The equation for a phase boundary in an H-T (H…
We consider two different collective spin systems subjected to strong dissipation -- on the same scale as interaction strengths and external fields -- and show that either continuous or discontinuous dissipative quantum phase transitions…
We investigate the dynamics of a first order transition when the order parameter field undergoes resonant oscillations, driven by a periodically varying parameter of the free energy. This parameter could be a background oscillating field as…
First order phase transitions are described in terms of the microcanonical and canonical ensemble, with special attention to finite size effects. Difficulties in interpreting a "caloric curve" are discussed. A robust parameter indicating…
Homogeneous nucleation of a new phase near a second, continuous, transition, is considered. The continuous transition is in the metastable region associated with the first-order phase transition, one of whose coexisting phases is…
We study first-order electroweak phase transitions nonperturbatively, assuming any particles beyond the Standard Model are sufficiently heavy to be integrated out at the phase transition. Utilising high temperature dimensional reduction, we…
A general formulation is presented to derive the equation of motion and to demonstrate thermodynamic consistency for several classes of phase field models at once. It applies to models with a conserved phase field, describing either uniform…
The thermodynamics of phase transitions of binary solutions into spatially inhomogeneous one-dimensional states is studied theoretically with taking into account nonlinear effects. It is shown that below the spinodal decomposition…
The properties of the first-order phase transition in a set of plasma models with common feature - absence of individual correlations between charges of op-posite sign, have been studied. Predicted discontinuities in equilibrium non-uniform…
A first-order, confinement/deconfinement phase transition appears in the finite temperature behavior of many non-Abelian gauge theories. These theories play an important role in proposals for completion of the Standard Model of particle…