Related papers: Thermal Mixing of Phases: Numerical and Analytical…
We numerically examine the effect of thermal fluctuations on a first-order phase transition in 2+1 dimensions. By focusing on the expansion of a single bubble we are able to calculate changes in the bubble wall's velocity as well as changes…
In this lecture at a school for condensed matter physicists, I begin with basic concepts and tools for investigating phase transitions in quantum field theory. The very different roles of global and gauge symmetries in phase transitions…
A full understanding of polycrystalline materials requires studying the process of nucleation, a thermally activated phase transition that typically occurs at atomistic scales. The numerical modeling of this process is problematic for…
The mean-field approximation predicts pairing and shape phase transitions in nuclei as a function of temperature or excitation energy. However, in the finite nucleus the singularities of these phase transitions are smoothed out by quantal…
An exact analytical solution of the statistical multifragmentation model is found in thermodynamic limit. The model exhibits a 1-st order phase transition of the liquid-gas type. The mixed phase region of the phase diagram, where the gas of…
Two roads are presently being followed in order to establish the existence of a liquid-gas phase transition in finite nuclear systems from nuclear reactions at high energy. The clean experiment of observing the thermodynamic properties of a…
The many-body physics at quantum phase transitions shows a subtle interplay between quantum and thermal fluctuations, emerging in the low-temperature limit. In this review, we first give a pedagogical introduction to the equilibrium…
We study the dynamics of cosmological phase transitions in the case of small velocities of bubble walls, $v_w<0.1$. We discuss the conditions in which this scenario arises in a physical model, and we compute the development of the phase…
A new point of view about the deep origin of thermodynamic phase transitions is sketched. The main idea is to link the appearance of phase transitions to some major topology change of suitable submanifolds of phase space instead of linking…
We report a kind of quantum phase transition which takes place in isolated quantum systems with non-thermal equilibrium states and an extra symmetry that commutes with the Hamiltonian for any values of the system parameters. A critical…
I present a numerical package (CosmoTransitions) for analyzing finite-temperature cosmological phase transitions driven by single or multiple scalar fields. The package analyzes the different vacua of a theory to determine their critical…
We describe a finite inhomogeneous three dimensional system of classical particles which interact through short and (or) long range interactions by means of a simple analytic spin model. The thermodynamic properties of the system are worked…
The most complicated phenomena of equilibrium statistics, phase separations and transitions of various order and critical phenomena, can clearly and sharply be seen even for small systems in the topology of the curvature of the…
Experimental nuclear level densities at excitation energies below the neutron threshold follow closely a constant-temperature shape. This dependence is unexpected and poorly understood. In this work, a fundamental explanation of the…
The topological theory of phase transitions was proposed on the basis of different arguments, the most important of which are: a direct evidence of the relation between topology and phase transitions for some exactly solvable models; an…
Singularities in macroscopic systems at discontinuous phase transitions are replaced in finite systems by sharp but continuous changes. Both the energy differences between metastable and stable phases and the energy barriers separating…
The scaled particle theory is developed for the description of thermodynamical properties of a mixture of hard spheres and hard spherocylinders. Analytical expressions for free energy, pressure and chemical potentials are derived. From the…
We introduce a general formalism to analyze nucleation phenomena in inhomogeneous media which considers the influence of the metastable phase, which is treated as a heat bath in which clusters are embedded, in the dynamics of the nucleation…
As phenomena that necessarily emerge from the collective behavior of interacting particles, phase transitions continue to be difficult to predict using statistical thermodynamics. A recent proposal called the topological hypothesis suggests…
Cosmological phase transitions are predicted by Particle Physics models, and have a variety of important cosmological consequences, which depend strongly on the dynamics of the transition. In this work we investigate in detail the general…