Phase transitions and critical phenomena articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article |

    Colloidal suspensions are known to exhibit interesting phase transitions. Here, the authors report a glass–glass transition with an associated waiting time in a colloidal clay (Laponite) under ambient conditions.

    • Roberta Angelini
    • , Emanuela Zaccarelli
    •  & Barbara Ruzicka

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It has been suggested that photo-switchable magnetic systems could be grouped together to form complexes with multiple accessible electronic states. Here, the authors report a tetranuclear iron cluster, addressable by laser stimuli, which exhibits three discrete electronic phases.

    • Takuto Matsumoto
    • , Graham N. Newton
    •  & Hiroki Oshio

  • Article |

    Potential energy landscape models are often used to describe transitions in the glassy state. Here, the authors report that the landscape is much rougher than usually assumed, and demonstrate that it undergoes a transition to fractal basins before the jamming point is reached.

    • Patrick Charbonneau
    • , Jorge Kurchan
    •  & Francesco Zamponi

  • Article |

    The class of quantum phases with symmetry-protected topological properties can be generalized in the concept of symmetry-protected topological phases. Here, Chen and colleagues present an intuitive way of constructing a large class of those phases in different dimensions.

    • Xie Chen
    • , Yuan-Ming Lu
    •  & Ashvin Vishwanath

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The point at which a magnetic field kills superconductivity in the cuprates has been difficult to measure. Grissonnanche et al. use thermal conductivity measurements to reliably determine this field and find that it drops suddenly below some critical doping, suggesting the onset of a new competing phase.

    • G. Grissonnanche
    • , O. Cyr-Choinière
    •  & Louis Taillefer

  • Article |

    Colloidal particles may experience a long-range force because of the confinement of solvent fluctuations. Gnan et al.show numerically that such Casimir-like effect also occurs when colloids are immersed in a chemical sol close to percolation, which provides an alternative way to tune colloidal interactions.

    • Nicoletta Gnan
    • , Emanuela Zaccarelli
    •  & Francesco Sciortino

  • Article |

    The mechanisms by which Johari-Goldstein relaxation is accommodated in metallic glasses are difficult to clarify. Here, the authors elucidate the mechanism in an ultra-quenched metallic glass with a cooling rate of ~1010 K s−1, by extended X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy.

    • Y. H. Liu
    • , T. Fujita
    •  & M. W. Chen

  • Article |

    A K-core of a complex network is a cluster of nodes that are connected to at least K other nodes of the cluster. Zhao et al. show that the influence of nodes outside a percolating K-core of protected nodes determines the size of the core and may cause an abrupt breakdown of the core.

    • Jin-Hua Zhao
    • , Hai-Jun Zhou
    •  & Yang-Yu Liu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Fundamental understanding of the kinetics of phase transitions in phase-change materials has been hindered by challenges in the experimental quantification. Via an in situ laser reflectivity technique, Salinga et al.measure the crystal growth kinetics, revealing an extremely high fragility in the supercooled liquid.

    • Martin Salinga
    • , Egidio Carria
    •  & Matthias Wuttig

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