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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. Below the boiling point, the ...
The Berezinskii–Kosterlitz–Thouless (BKT) transition is a phase transition of the two-dimensional (2-D) XY model in statistical physics.It is a transition from bound vortex-antivortex pairs at low temperatures to unpaired vortices and anti-vortices at some critical temperature.
A cosmological phase transition is a physical process, whereby the overall state of matter changes together across the whole universe. The success of the Big Bang model led researchers to conjecture possible cosmological phase transitions taking place in the very early universe, at a time when it was much hotter and denser than today.
Phase Transitions and Critical Phenomena is a 20-volume series of books, comprising review articles on phase transitions and critical phenomena, published during 1972-2001. It is "considered the most authoritative series on the topic".
Mathematically, a phase transition occurs when the partition function vanishes and the free energy is singular (non-analytic). For instance, if the first derivative of the free energy with respect to the control parameter is non-continuous, a jump may occur in the average value of the fluctuating conjugate variable, such as the magnetization ...
Phase transitions (phase changes) that help describe polymorphism include polymorphic transitions as well as melting and vaporization transitions. According to IUPAC, a polymorphic transition is "A reversible transition of a solid crystalline phase at a certain temperature and pressure (the inversion point) to another phase of the same chemical composition with a different crystal structure."
1974 – Kenneth G. Wilson develops the renormalization group technique for treating phase transitions [23] 1980 – Klaus von Klitzing discovers the quantum Hall effect [24] 1982 – Horst L. Störmer and Daniel C. Tsui discover the fractional quantum Hall effect [25] 1983 – Robert B. Laughlin explains the fractional quantum Hall effect [25]
Single phase regions are separated by lines of non-analytical behavior, where phase transitions occur, which are called phase boundaries. In the diagram on the right, the phase boundary between liquid and gas does not continue indefinitely. Instead, it terminates at a point on the phase diagram called the critical point.