A dynamical test of phase transition order: New things in old places or old wine in new bottles

Conference · Fri Mar 01 00:00:00 EST 1991 · Journal of Statistical Physics; (United States)

OSTI ID:5444530

Cladis, P ^[1]

---

1. AT and T Bell Lab., Murray Hill, NJ (United States)

The author first discusses nonlinear aspects of phase transition theory applied to a particular liquid crystal phase transition. A simple derivation is given to show how two coupled Goldstone modes (one appearing as gauge fluctuations of the ordered phase) can force a phase transition, against all expectations, to take place discontinuously (theory of Halperin, Lubensky, and Ma) - but the discontinuity may be immeasurably small. Then, he describes a new dynamical test of phase transition order, developed by Cladis et al., that turns out to be more sensitive than x-ray diffraction and adiabatic calorimetry. Quantitative data found by this new method are in excellent agreement with the measurements of adiabatic calorimetry and x-ray diffraction as well as expectations implicit in the predictions of HLM.

• OSTI ID: 5444530
• Report Number(s): CONF-9006380-; CODEN: JSTPB
• Journal Information: Journal of Statistical Physics; (United States), Vol. 62:5-6; Conference: Workshop on dynamics of concentrated systems, Los Alamos, NM (United States), 13-15 Jun 1990; ISSN 0022-4715
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS
SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND SUPERFLUIDITY
71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS
GENERAL PHYSICS
LIQUID CRYSTALS
PHASE TRANSFORMATIONS
ORDER PARAMETERS
CALORIMETRY
DYNAMICS
EXPERIMENTAL DATA
FLUCTUATIONS
INTERFACES
MATHEMATICAL MODELS
MEAN-FIELD THEORY
MIXTURES
NONLINEAR PROBLEMS
STATISTICAL MECHANICS
SURFACE TENSION
TEMPERATURE DEPENDENCE
TEMPERATURE GRADIENTS
TESTING
X-RAY DIFFRACTION
COHERENT SCATTERING
CRYSTALS
DATA
DIFFRACTION
DISPERSIONS
FLUIDS
INFORMATION
LIQUIDS
MECHANICS
NUMERICAL DATA
SCATTERING
SURFACE PROPERTIES
VARIATIONS
665000* - Physics of Condensed Matter- (1992-)
661300 - Other Aspects of Physical Science- (1992-)