I discuss the global structure of the strongly interacting gauge theory of quarks and gluons as a function of the quark masses and the CP violating parameter. I concentrate on whether a rst order phase transition occurs at = : I show why this is expected when multiple avors have a small degenerate mass. This transition can be removed by suucient avor-breaking. I speculate on the implications of...

First order phase transitions proceed via nucleation. The rate of nucleation varies exponentially with the free-energy barrier to nucleation, and so is highly sensitive to variations in this barrier. In practice, very few systems are absolutely pure, there are typically some impurities present which are rather poorly characterized. These interact with the nucleus, causing the barrier to vary, a...

Generally, phase transitions are seriously affected by spatial confinement. This effect is important for its own sake, but also for applications to nanotechnology. Here we report the first systematic experimental study on confinement effects on a liquid-liquid transition of a molecular liquid. We found that one liquid can be transformed into another purely by spatial confinement. This indicates...

If stable electroweak strings are copiously produced during the electroweak phase transition, they may contribute significantly to the presently observed baryon to entropy ratio of the universe. This analysis establishes the feasibility of implementing an electroweak baryogenesis scenario without a first order phase transition.

We investigate the tricritical scaling behavior of the two-dimensional spin-1 Blume-Capel model by using the Wang-Landau method of measuring the joint density of states for lattice sizes up to 48×48 sites. We find that the specific heat deep in the first-order area of the phase diagram exhibits a double-peak structure of the Schottky-like anomaly appearing with the transition peak. The first-or...

We investigate ice polyamorphism in the context of the two-dimensional Mercedes-Benz model of water. We find a first-order phase transition between a crystalline phase and a high-density amorphous phase. Furthermore, we find a reversible transformation between two amorphous structures of high and low density; however, we find this to be a continuous and not an abrupt transition, as the low-dens...

An external force dynamically drives an isolated mean-field Hamiltonian system to a long-lasting quasistationary state, whose lifetime increases with population of the system. For second order phase transitions in quasistationary states, two nonclassical critical exponents have been reported individually by using a linear and a nonlinear response theories in a toy model. We provide a simple way...

The phase transitions to absorbing states of the branching-annihilating reaction-diffusion processes mA-->(m+k)A, nA-->(n-l)A are studied systematically in one space dimension within a new family of models. Four universality classes of nontrivial critical behavior are found. This provides, in particular, the first evidence of universal scaling laws for pair and triplet processes.