Phase transitions and critical phenomena articles from across Nature Portfolio

Hubbard excitons are elusive quasiparticles that are predicted to form in strongly correlated insulators. Detecting their internal structure and dynamics clarifies the involvement of spin fluctuations in their binding and recombination processes.

Phase transitions in charge density wave materials could be useful for memory and electronic device applications. Here, the authors correlate the temperature-driven transitions in the electrical and optical properties of H-TaS₂/1T-TaS₂ heterostructures to the number of endotaxial metallic H-TaS₂ monolayers.

Na₃Ni₂BiO₆ with a honeycomb lattice is found to host a one-third magnetization plateau phase signifying frustrated interactions and indicates that Kitaev interactions can be realized in high-spin magnets.

A single field-enhanced terahertz pulse was used to create 1\({T}^{{\prime} }\)-MoTe₂ out of few-layer H-MoTe₂ crystals, providing insights into the ultrafast polymorphic transition dynamics and resolving a long-standing debate over the realization of this transition by high-energy photon irradiation.

In this work, the authors report atomistic molecular dynamics simulations showing that solvation entropy and protein-protein interactions are the main thermodynamic driving forces for the formation of condensates of the intrinsically disordered domain of the protein FUS.

Hubbard excitons are elusive quasiparticles that are predicted to form in strongly correlated insulators. Detecting their internal structure and dynamics clarifies the involvement of spin fluctuations in their binding and recombination processes.

An experimental approach enables the observation of the microscopic details of the relaxation of a highly equilibrated glass back to the liquid phase in real time. This points to a scenario where devitrification proceeds via localized seeds separated by macroscopic length scales.

Chains of coupled superconducting islands known as Josephson junction arrays were predicted to be insulating at high impedance, but superconducting behaviour has been observed. A study of the arrays’ transport suggests thermal effects are responsible.

Amorphous gel structures are present in our everyday lives in the form of food, cosmetics, and biological systems. Experiments now show that their formation cannot be explained within the framework of equilibrium physics.

A paper in Nature Physics reports on freezing droplets that expel themselves from a textured surface.

The interplay of quantum measurements and local interactions in many-body systems can lead to new out-of-equilibrium phase transitions. An experiment has now shown that quantum simulators can meet the challenge of detecting them.