Related papers: ``Cosmological'' scenario for A-B phase transition…
When a system crosses a second-order phase transition on a finite timescale, spontaneous symmetry breaking can cause the development of domains with independent order parameters, which then grow and approach each other creating boundary…
We study the dynamics of the relative phase of a bilayer of two-dimensional superfluids after the two superfluids have been decoupled, using truncated Wigner approximation. On short time scales the relative phase shows "light cone" like…
We analyze the thermodynamics of the atomic and (nematic) pair superfluids appearing in the attractive two-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model with a three-body hard-core constraint that has been derived as an effective model for cold atoms…
While quantum phase transitions share many characteristics with thermodynamic phase transitions, they are also markedly different as they occur at zero temperature. Hence, it is not immediately clear whether tools and frameworks that…
We propose a novel method to distinguish states of matter by identifying spontaneous symmetry breaking on extended objects, such as vortices, even in the absence of a bulk phase transition. As a specific example, we investigate the phase…
New defects (Z-vortices and Nambu monopoles) are found to become thermodynamically relevant for the broken phase near to the (weakly first order) electroweak phase transition, and below the crossover for higher Higgs mass. The symmetric…
Because of the extreme purity, lack of disorder, and complex order parameter, the first-order superfluid $^3$He A-B transition is the leading model system for first order transitions in the early universe. Here we report on the path…
The ground state of the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model at unit filling undergoes the Mott-superfluid quantum phase transition. It belongs to the Kosterlitz-Thouless universality class with an exponential divergence of the correlation…
Superfluid 3He-A and high-temperature superconductors both have gapless fermionic quasiparticles with the "relativistic" spectrum close to the gap nodes. The interaction of these "relaitivistic" fermions with bosonic collective modes of the…
We numerically study the density of topological defects for a two-dimensional assembly of particles driven over quenched disorder as a function of quench rate through the nonequilibrium phase transition from a plastic disordered flowing…
Kibble and Zurek have provided a unifying causal picture for the appearance of classical defects like cosmic strings or vortices at the onset of phase transitions in relativistic QFT and condensed matter systems respectively. In condensed…
We investigate the formation of topological defects in the course of a dynamical phase transition with different boundary conditions in a ring from AdS/CFT correspondence. According to the Kibble-Zurek mechanism, quenching the system across…
In the light of recent difficulties in observing vortices in quenches of liquid $^{4}$He to its superfluid state we re-examine the Zurek scenario for their production. We find that the standard prediction is suspect because of a confusion…
We use laser-cooled ion Coulomb crystals in the well-controlled environment of a harmonic radiofrequency ion trap to investigate phase transitions and defect formation. Topological defects in ion Coulomb crystals (kinks) have been recently…
We investigate rarely explored details of supercooled cosmological first-order phase transitions at the electroweak scale, which may lead to strong gravitational wave signals or explain the cosmic baryon asymmetry. The nucleation…
We show that when spin and orbital angular momenta are entangled by spin-orbit coupling, this transforms a topological spin-triplet superfluid/superconductor state, such as $^{3}$He-B, into a topological $s^{\pm}$ state, with non-trivial…
Kibble-Zurek theory (KZ) stands out as the most robust theory of defect generation in the dynamics of phase transitions. KZ utilizes the structure of equilibrium states away from the transition point to estimate the excitations due to the…
The dynamics of quantized vortices in rotating $^3$He-B is investigated in the low density (single-vortex) regime as a function of temperature. An abrupt transition is observed at $0.5 T_{\rm c}$. Above this temperature the number of vortex…
We show that vortex nucleation in superfluid $^3$He by rapid thermal quench in the presence of superflow is dominated by a transverse instability of the moving normal-superfluid interface. Exact expressions for the instability threshold as…
We show that the improper ferroelectric phase transition in the multiferroic hexagonal manganites displays the same symmetry-breaking characteristics as those proposed in early-universe theories. We present an analysis of the Kibble-Zurek…