Illustrated Physics
physics, drawn
Concept

Universality — where it appears

The observation that systems with nothing physical in common share the same critical exponents. What decides which systems agree is dimensionality and the symmetry of the order parameter, so a magnet and a fluid have the same four numbers at their critical points — and mean-field theories get all of them wrong in the same way.

Named by 7 essays across 5 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

Two straight lines that are not the same line. Half the difference between the liquid and vapour densities, in units of the critical density, against the distance from the critical temperature — both logarithmic, over 5 decades. The van der Waals curve is solved for the coexisting pair at each temperature and its slope in the last decade is 0.500, which is the mean-field ½. Real fluids give 0.326. The two differ by 11 per cent at t = 0.1 and by a factor of 7.9 at the bottom of the axis, which is why an equation with the wrong exponent in it looked right for eighty years.

The point at which the two become one

Heat a sealed tube of carbon dioxide and the meniscus inside it does not boil away — it fades, the two densities converging until there is nothing to separate. Twenty millikelvin before that happens the fluid turns milky, and the exponent describing the last approach is a number van der Waals got wrong and could not have got right.

thermodynamics · Phase change A stiffness that does not go to zero — it falls off a cliff. The renormalised stiffness of a two-dimensional superfluid against temperature, obtained by integrating the flow of the bare stiffness and the vortex fugacity, with the bare stiffness drawn for comparison. Below the transition the vortices are bound in pairs, screen one another and leave a finite stiffness; above it they unbind and there is none. What is remarkable is the value at which it disappears: 0.6430, against 2/π = 0.6366. That number does not depend on the material, on the bare fugacity, on the core energy, or on anything else — every two-dimensional superfluid loses its stiffness at exactly two over π times its own transition temperature, and measurements on helium films of widely different thicknesses fall on that line. A transition at which a quantity jumps to zero from a value nobody can adjust is unlike anything the usual classification of transitions describes.

The transition with nothing to order

Every transition in this collection so far has an order parameter — a quantity that is zero on one side and not on the other. In two dimensions a continuous symmetry cannot break at any temperature above zero, so there is nothing for such a quantity to be, and by the usual reckoning there can be no transition. There is one anyway, and what changes at it is whether vortices are bound in pairs.

thermodynamics · Phase change Every value the orbit of x → r x(1 − x) settles on. The values a long orbit of x → r x(1 − x) visits, one column of the picture for each of 320 settings of r between 2.8 and 4. A single point means the orbit settles to one value, two means it alternates, and each branching doubles the count with the gaps shrinking by a constant factor. The superstable settings marked run 3.23607, 3.49856, 3.55464, located by bisection on the map itself. They accumulate at r = 3.569946, and past it the orbit visits a band of values rather than a list of them. The bands are not noise: the map has no random number in it, and the same initial value gives the same orbit every time.

The map a dripping tap turns out to be

A universal result about one-dimensional maps is worth nothing to a physicist unless a real system is one, and a tap, a convection cell and a driven circuit are continuous systems with no map in sight. What makes them maps is dissipation — and the systems that have none take a different route entirely.

mechanics · Chaos A magnetisation curve, and the same curve magnified. On the left, the position of a domain wall against the applied field, over the whole of a crystal. It looks like a curve. On the right, a window 2.0% of its width, taken 42% of the way across, at the magnification a sensitive measurement reaches: the wall does not move at all while the field rises, then jumps, then stops again. The largest jump in the window covers 0.67 units of wall position in no field change at all. There is nothing smooth underneath this — the smooth curve on the left is a staircase with 1400 steps in it, drawn small.

The curve that is really a staircase

A magnetisation curve is drawn as a smooth line and is nothing of the sort. Measured finely enough it is a sequence of jumps of every size, audible as a crackle in a coil, with no typical jump and no smooth motion underneath.

electromagnetism · Magnetisation A resonance that goes to zero before it peaks. Fano profiles for asymmetry parameters of 5, 1.5, 0.5, 0, each normalised to its own peak, against detuning in half-widths. A large parameter gives an almost symmetric peak — the resonant path dominates and the shape is nearly Lorentzian. A parameter of zero gives a symmetric dip, a window in which the system transmits nothing on resonance. In between the profile is lopsided, with a zero on one side of the resonance and the maximum on the other, at positions whose product is exactly minus one. The asymmetry is not a defect of the measurement: it is the interference of two ways through the system, and its sign says which side of the resonance the two paths cancel on.

The resonance with a zero in it

Where a resonance is the only way through a system, the response is a symmetric peak. Where there is also a smooth path that does not care about the frequency, the two add before anything is squared — and the result is lopsided, with a frequency at which nothing gets through at all.

waves · Resonance A bound state that lives outside its well. The radial probability density of the one bound state of a square well of radius R, against distance in units of R, for four depths just past the one that first binds a state. In units of ε = ħ²/2μR², a state bound by 0.00589 ε has 93 per cent of its probability outside the well and a mean radius of 7.0 R; a state bound by 0.0397 ε has 82 per cent of its probability outside the well and a mean radius of 3.0 R; a state bound by 0.245 ε has 62 per cent of its probability outside the well and a mean radius of 1.5 R; a state bound by 1.4 ε has 35 per cent of its probability outside the well and a mean radius of 0.9 R. The more weakly the state is bound, the further its exponential tail reaches, and the less of it is where the force is.

The molecule that lives outside its own well

The harmonic picture describes the bottom of a well, where a molecule vibrates near the length of its bond. The last bound level lives at the top, and when it is bound by almost nothing it is not near the bond at all. Two helium atoms whose potential well bottoms out at three ångströms form a molecule whose atoms sit on average about fifty ångströms apart, most of the time where the force between them is negligible. Such a state forgets the shape of the well that made it. Its size, its binding and the way it scatters are all set by one number, and nothing inside the well can be read from them.

mechanics · Harmonic approximation Water's surface tension, all the way to the critical point. The surface tension of water against its liquid vapour, from the international standard correlation, against temperature from 0 °C to the critical point at 373.946 °C. 20 °C: 72.7 mN/m; 100 °C: 58.9 mN/m; 200 °C: 37.7 mN/m; 300 °C: 14.4 mN/m; 370 °C: 0.4 mN/m. It falls almost in a straight line for most of the range and then bends down to reach zero exactly at the critical point, where liquid and vapour stop being two things. The bend is a power law, the gap to the critical temperature raised to 1.256.

The tension that vanishes where the phases meet

Surface tension is usually treated as a property of a liquid, like its density. It is a property of a boundary between two things, and it can only exist while there are two things. Heat water in a sealed tube and its surface tension falls steadily, then faster, and reaches exactly zero at 374 °C, where liquid and vapour stop being different. On the way the surface stops being a surface: the step in density spreads from a molecule's width to thousands, and the rate at which the tension dies turns out to be a number the whole family of critical points shares and the simplest theory gets wrong.

fluids · Surface tension

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

Correlation lengthCritical exponentCritical pointFluctuationsOrder parameterPhase transitionSurface tensionAttractorAvalancheBifurcationBinding energyBound state

All concepts