Statistical Mechanics of Phase Transitions. J. M. Yeomans

Statistical Mechanics of Phase Transitions


Statistical.Mechanics.of.Phase.Transitions.pdf
ISBN: 0198517300,9780198517306 | 161 pages | 5 Mb


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Statistical Mechanics of Phase Transitions J. M. Yeomans
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA




Abstract 5Centre for Statistical Mechanics and Complexity (SMC), CNR-INFM, I-00185 Roma, Italy 7Department of Physics, Waseda University, Tokyo 169-8555, Japan. When phase transition occurs, the correlation length of the system grows to infinity and the critical system is invariant under scale variances. This debate is especially relevant to the relation between statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, and the physics of phase transition. We investigate Lee-Yang zeros of generating functions of dynamical observables and establish a general relation between phase transitions in ensembles of trajectories of stochastic many-body systems and the time evolution of high-order cumulants of such observables. The crucial claim is that phase transitions are qualitative changes that cannot be reduced to fit the more fundamental explanatory principles of statistical mechanics. In 1989, I met Bill Kline, who was Once you think of them like that, you can describe them with a field theory, which is pretty much the same way they describe phase transitions in high-energy physics—the decay of the false vacuum in the early universe, for instance. I was doing classical geophysics until the mid-1980s when I became aware of this area called complexity and chaos theory, which sounded like statistical physics, a subject I had always enjoyed. 2School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, United Kingdom. Critical phenomena are what happens near a phase transition in statistical mechanics (stat mech is thermodynamics' sophisticated sibling). In statistical mechanics, we want to obtain the critical properties of a physical system. Entropy-driven phase transitions of entanglement. Received 18 September 2012; published 28 January 2013. Kadanoff's work in the theory of phase transitions in statistical physics, for example, led to a better understanding of the conversion of water to ice or water to water vapor.