Related papers: Metastabilities across disorder-broadened first-or…

We investigate the effects of disorder on a layered superconductor. The clean system is known to have a first order phase transition which is clearly identified by a sharp peak in the specific heat. The peak is lost abruptly as the strength…

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…

We study ground-state quantum entanglement in the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model in the presence of a harmonic trap. We focus on two transitions that occur upon increasing the characteristic particle density: the formation of a…

First-order phase transitions are commonly associated with a discontinuous behavior of some of the thermodynamic variables and the presence of a latent heat. In the present study it is shown that this is not necessarily the case. Using…

The mixed state of type II superconductors has magnetic flux penetrating the sample in the form of vortices, with each vortex carrying an identical quantum of flux. These vortices generally form a triangular lattice under weak mutually…

We investigate the phase diagram of a two-dimensional driven-dissipative system of polaritons coupled to the excitonic reservoir. We find that two critical points exists. The first corresponds to the quasi-condensation and the second to a…

The kinetic exchange opinion model shows a well-studied order disorder transition as the noise parameter, representing discord between interacting agents, is increased. A further increase in the noise drives the model, in low dimensions, to…

Using differential magneto-optical imaging, we address the question of mesoscopic inhomogeneity in underdoped Bi-2212 single crystals. Among other features, it is shown that an anomalous temperature dependence of the penetration field and…

We study the critical properties of three dimensional frustrated magnets, diluted with non-magnetic impurities. We show that these systems exhibit a second order phase transition, corresponding to a new universality class. In the pure case,…

We study the scaling and universal behavior of temperature-driven first-order phase transitions in scalar models. These transitions are found to exhibit rich phenomena, though they are controlled by a single complex-conjugate pair of the…

The formalism used in describing the thermodynamics of abrupt (or first-order) phase transitions is reviewed as an application of maximum entropy inference. In this treatment, we show that the concepts of transition temperature, latent heat…

A Hartree-Fock mean-field theory of a weakly interacting Bose-gas in a quenched white noise disorder potential is presented. A direct continuous transition from the normal gas to a localized Bose-glass phase is found which has localized…

The Anderson model for independent electrons in a disordered potential is transformed analytically and exactly to a basis of random extended states leading to a variant of augmented space. In addition to the widely-accepted phase diagrams…

We present an exhaustive analysis of transport measurements performed in twinned YBa2Cu3O7 single crystals which stablishes that the vortex solid-liquid transition is first order when the magnetic field H is applied at an angle theta away…

We study first order phase transitions that occur when the temperature of the system increases and we identify the conditions that lead to super-heating, a phase where the system can heat up arbitrarily. First order phase transitions with…

A first order phase transition leading to deconfinement and chiral restoration is a likely possibility for QCD, at least in some region of the temperature-density plane. A signal for a unique transition is that the order parameters for such…

This article reviews the unconventional effects of random disorder on magnetic quantum phase transitions, focusing on a number of new experimental and theoretical developments during the last three years. On the theory side, we address…

We observe signatures of disorder-induced order in 1D XY spin chains with an external, site-dependent uni-axial random field within the XY plane. We numerically investigate signatures of a quantum phase transition at T=0, in particular an…

The papers [1,2] consider unbinding of a disordered heteropolymer. They find the first order phase transition [1] when disorder is strong (i.e. the ratio v of the binding energies is large; in DNA v is~1.1) and the Griffiths singularity,…

Disorder induced melting, where the increase in positional entropy created by random pinning sites drives the order-disorder transition in a periodic solid, provides an alternate route to the more conventional thermal melting. Here, using…