Related papers: Critical Slowing Down and Defect Formation
Phase transitions are prevalent throughout physics, spanning thermal phenomena like water boiling to magnetic transitions in solids. They encompass cosmological phase transitions in the early universe and the transition into a quark-gluon…
Classical phase transitions, like solid-liquid-gas or order-disorder spin magnetic phases, are all driven by thermal energy fluctuations by varying the temperature. On the other hand, quantum phase transitions happen at absolute zero…
The Kibble-Zurek (KZ) hypothesis identifies the relevant time scales in out-of-equilibrium dynamics of critical systems employing concepts valid at equilibrium: It predicts the scaling of the defect formation immediately after quenches…
The QCD phase diagram may feature a critical end point at a temperature T and baryon chemical potential $\mu$ which is accessible in heavy ion collisions. The universal long wavelength fluctuations which develop near this Ising critical…
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…
Phase transitions are emergent phenomena where microscopic interactions drive a disordered system into a collectively ordered phase. Near the boundary between two phases, the system can exhibit critical, scale-invariant behavior. Here, we…
The Kibble Zurek mechanism in a relativistic $\phi^{4}$ scalar field theory in $D = (1 + 1)$ is studied using uniform matrix product states. The equal time two point function in momentum space $G_{2}(k)$ is approximated as the system is…
In the nonadiabatic dynamics across a quantum phase transition, the Kibble-Zurek mechanism predicts that the formation of topological defects is suppressed as a universal power law with the quench time. In inhomogeneous systems, the…
In this work we focus on the thermodynamics consistency of a new set of solutions emerging from a cosmology in which dark matter is able to decay into relativistic particles within the dark sector. It is important to stress that the…
Quasi-static transformations, or slow quenches, of many-body quantum systems across quantum critical points create topological defects. The Kibble-Zurek mechanism regulates the appearance of defects in a local quantum system through a…
These lectures address the dynamics of phase ordering out of equilibrium in condensed matter and in quantum field theory in cosmological settings, emphasizing their similarities and differences. In condensed matter we describe the…
Topological defects can have significant cosmological consequences, so their production must be examined carefully. It is usually assumed that topological defects are produced if the temperature becomes sufficiently high, but in reality…
We investigate the role of large amplitude sub-critical thermal fluctuations in the dynamics of first order phase transitions. In particular, we obtain a kinetic equation for the number density of sub-critical fluctuations of the…
Symmetry-breaking quantum phase transitions lead to the production of topological defects or domain walls in a wide range of physical systems. In second-order transitions, these exhibit universal scaling laws described by the Kibble-Zurek…
Quantum criticality describes the collective fluctuations of matter undergoing a second-order phase transition at zero temperature. Heavy fermion metals have in recent years emerged as prototypical systems to study quantum critical points.…
Despite the numerous successful applications of lattice QCD in nuclear and particle theory, fundamental algorithmic challenges remain. Among those, relevant for numerical studies of QCD on a space-time torus, is topological freezing--a form…
Recently, a morphological transition in the velocity distribution of a relativistic gas has been pointed out which shows hallmarks of a critical phenomenon. Here, we provide a general framework which allows for a thermodynamic approach to…
The Kibble-Zurek mechanism describes defect production due to non-adiabatic passage through a critical point. Here we study its variant from ramping the environment temperature to a critical point. We find that the defect density scales as…
Kibble-Zurek mechanism is a theory of defect formation in a non-equilibrium continuous phase transition. So far the theory has been successfully tested by numerical simulations and condensed matter experiments in a number of systems with…
We study the effects of modifying the expansions history of the Universe on Dark Matter freezeout. We derived a modified Boltzmann equation for freeze-out for an arbitrary energy density in the early Universe and provide an analytic…