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Register a new userThe structure of fluctuations near mean-field critical points and spinodals and its implication for physical processes
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We analyze the structure of fluctuations near critical points and spinodals in mean-field and near-mean-field systems. Unlike systems that are non-mean-field, for which a fluctuation can be represented by a single cluster in a properly chosen percolation model, a fluctuation in mean-field and near-mean-field systems consists of a large number of clusters, which we term fundamental clusters. The structure of the latter and the way that they form fluctuations has important physical consequences for phenomena as diverse as nucleation in supercooled liquids, spinodal decomposition and continuous ordering, and the statistical distribution of earthquakes. The effects due to the fundamental clusters implies that they are physical objects and not only mathematical constructs.
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Continuum models with critical end points are considered whose Hamiltonian ${mathcal{H}}[phi,psi]$ depends on two densities $phi$ and $psi$. Field-theoretic methods are used to show the equivalence of the critical behavior on the critical line and at the critical end point and to give a systematic derivation of critical-end-point singularities like the thermal singularity $sim|{t}|^{2-alpha}$ of the spectator-phase boundary and the coexistence singularities $sim |{t}|^{1-alpha}$ or $sim|{t}|^{beta}$ of the secondary density $<psi>$. The appearance of a discontinuity eigenexponent associated with the critical end point is confirmed, and the mechanism by which it arises in field theory is clarified.
The orientation fluctuations of the director of a liquid crystal are measured, by a sensitive polarization interferometer, close to the Freedericksz transition, which is a second order transition driven by an electric field. We show that near the critical value of the field the spatially averaged order parameter has a generalized Gumbel distribution instead of a Gaussian one. The latter is recovered away from the critical point. The relevance of slow modes is pointed out. The parameter of generalized Gumbel is related to the effective number of degrees of freedom.
The critical Casimir force (CCF) arises from confining fluctuations in a critical fluid and thus it is a fluctuating quantity itself. While the mean CCF is universal, its (static) variance has previously been found to depend on the microscopic details of the system which effectively set a large-momentum cutoff in the underlying field theory, rendering it potentially large. This raises the question how the properties of the force variance are reflected in experimentally observable quantities, such as the thickness of a wetting film or the position of a suspended colloidal particle. Here, based on a rigorous definition of the instantaneous force, we analyze static and dynamic correlations of the CCF for a conserved fluid in film geometry for various boundary conditions within the Gaussian approximation. We find that the dynamic correlation function of the CCF is independent of the momentum cutoff and decays algebraically in time. Within the Gaussian approximation, the associated exponent depends only on the dynamic universality class but not on the boundary conditions. We furthermore consider a fluid film, the thickness of which can fluctuate under the influence of the time-dependent CCF. The latter gives rise to an effective non-Markovian noise in the equation of motion of the film boundary and induces a distinct contribution to the position variance. Within the approximations used here, at short times, this contribution grows algebraically in time whereas, at long times, it saturates and contributes to the steady-state variance of the film thickness.
Recent numerical studies of the susceptibility of the three-dimensional Ising model with various interaction ranges have been analyzed with a crossover model based on renormalization-group matching theory. It is shown that the model yields an accurate description of the crossover function for the susceptibility.
We discuss the polarization amplitude of quantum spin systems in one dimension. In particular, we closely investigate it in gapless phases of those systems based on the two-dimensional conformal field theory. The polarization amplitude is defined as the ground-state average of a twist operator which induces a large gauge transformation attaching the unit amount of the U(1) flux to the system. We show that the polarization amplitude under the periodic boundary condition is sensitive to perturbations around the fixed point of the renormalization-group flow rather than the fixed point itself even when the perturbation is irrelevant. This dependence is encoded into the scaling law with respect to the system size. In this paper, we show how and why the scaling law of the polarization amplitude encodes the information of the renormalization-group flow. In addition, we show that the polarization amplitude under the antiperiodic boundary condition is determined fully by the fixed point in contrast to that under the periodic one and that it visualizes clearly the nontriviality of spin systems in the sense of the Lieb-Schultz-Mattis theorem.
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