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Matter organizes into various phases or states of matter depending on its constituents and external factors like pressure and temperature. In common temperatures and pressures, atoms form the three classical states of matter: solid , liquid and gas .
Forms of matter that are not composed of molecules and are organized by different forces can also be considered different states of matter. Superfluids (like Fermionic condensate) and the quark–gluon plasma are examples. In a chemical equation, the state of matter of the chemicals may be shown as (s) for solid, (l) for liquid, and (g) for gas.
Phase diagrams can use other variables in addition to or in place of temperature, pressure and composition, for example the strength of an applied electrical or magnetic field, and they can also involve substances that take on more than just three states of matter. One type of phase diagram plots temperature against the relative concentrations ...
Iron-carbon phase diagram, showing the conditions necessary to form different phases. Distinct phases may be described as different states of matter such as gas, liquid, solid, plasma or Bose–Einstein condensate. Useful mesophases between solid and liquid form other states of matter. Distinct phases may also exist within a given state of matter.
Phase transitions commonly refer to when a substance transforms between one of the four states of matter to another. At the phase transition point for a substance, for instance the boiling point, the two phases involved - liquid and vapor, have identical free energies and therefore are equally likely to exist.
The figure shows the schematic P-T diagram of a pure substance (as opposed to mixtures, which have additional state variables and richer phase diagrams, discussed below). The commonly known phases solid , liquid and vapor are separated by phase boundaries, i.e. pressure–temperature combinations where two phases can coexist.
A typical phase diagram.The solid green line applies to most substances; the dashed green line gives the anomalous behavior of water. In thermodynamics, the triple point of a substance is the temperature and pressure at which the three phases (gas, liquid, and solid) of that substance coexist in thermodynamic equilibrium. [1]
The state functions satisfy certain universal constraints, expressed in the laws of thermodynamics, and they depend on the peculiarities of the materials that compose the concrete system. Various thermodynamic diagrams have been developed to model the transitions between thermodynamic states.