Universality of Phase Transition Dynamics: Topological Defects from Symmetry Breaking

By A. del Campo, Wojciech H. Zurek. 2013

301 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the course of a nonequilibrium continuous phase transition, the dynamics ceases to be adiabatic in the vicinity of the critical point as a result of the critical slowing down (the divergence of the relaxation time in the neighborhood of the critical point). This enforces a local choice of the broken symmetry and can lead to the formation of topological defects. The Kibble–Zurek mechanism (KZM) was developed to describe the associated nonequilibrium dynamics and to estimate the density of defects as a function of the quench rate through the transition. During recent years, several new experiments investigated the formation of defects in phase transitions induced by a quench both in classical and quantum mechanical systems. At the same time, some established results were called into question. We review and analyze the Kibble–Zurek mechanism focusing in particular on this surge of activity, and suggest possible directions for further progress.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b039c04e20b6d6ec8bce4298e2c11adc2ecd3b21

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Condensed Matter Physics

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

Assembly and phase transitions of colloidal crystals (2016, background): “However, phase-transition kinetics has not been well studied while changing a thermodynamic variable, such as the heating or cooling rate, and the related dynamical theories are limited for first-order [126] and second-order [127] phase transitions.”
Quantum turbulence in trapped atomic Bose-Einstein condensates (2015, background): “In such processes, the system ends up in a symmetry-broken state with defects, resulting from the out-of-equilibrium finite-timescale process (for a review see [201].”
Classical and Quantum Shortcuts to Adiabaticity for Scale-Invariant Driving (2014, methodology): “Nonetheless, phase fluctuations in the newborn condensate are expected to result in the formation of solitons [70] or vortices [71], depending in the dimensionality, as dictated by the Kibble-Zurek mechanism [72, 73].”