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Phase transitions

A complex view of criticality

Nature Physics volume 3, pages 594–595 (2007)Cite this article

The study of the critical state of matter has brought us concepts such as universality and power laws. Looking at mixtures of complex molecules could help us to understand the transition from non-critical to critical behaviour.

For good reasons the critical state has been at the centre of interest of the statistical physics community over the past forty years. It has a couple of unique features; for example, in the critical state there are correlations between local properties of the constituent particles, even when the distance between the particles is much larger than the size of the particles. In fact, at the critical point, correlations extend over arbitrarily large distances, limited only by the size of the system. Usually the size of the constituents in these systems is at the atomic level. However, critical behaviour is also seen in so-called complex fluids, which are made up of relatively large molecules. Complex fluids offer the possibility of tracking individual particles while the external parameters are changed. Advances in visualization techniques for such mesoscopic objects have now enabled us to obtain a rather complete picture of the phase transition in a colloid–polymer system, as Patrick Royall and co-workers report on page 636 of this issue1. Fluctuations were captured both close to the critical point, where they happen on a large scale, and far away from it, where fluctuations take place on the single-particle level.

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Figure 1: Schematic phase diagram of a simple substance in the pressure–temperature plane.

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  1. Luciano Reatto is in the Department of Physics, University of Milano, Via Celoria 16, 20133 Milano, Italy. luciano.reatto@mi.infn.it,

    Luciano Reatto

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  1. Luciano Reatto
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Reatto, L. A complex view of criticality. Nature Phys 3, 594–595 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys702

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