Complete universal scaling in first-order phase transitions

Abstract

Phase transitions and critical phenomena are among the most intriguing phenomena in nature and society. They are classified as first-order phase transitions (FOPTs) and continuous ones. While the latter show marvelous phenomena of scaling and universality, whether the former behaves similarly is a long-standing controversial issue. Here we definitely demonstrate complete universal scaling in field driven FOPTs for Langevin equations in both zero and two spatial dimensions by rescaling all parameters and subtracting extra contributions with singular dimensions from an effective temperature and a special field according to an effective theory that possesses a fixed point of a seemingly un-physical imaginary value. This offers a perspective different from the usual nucleation and growth but conforming to continuous phase transitions to study FOPTs.

6 pages, 1 figure

References in corpus (3)

• Dynamic off-equilibrium transition in systems slowly driven across thermal first-order phase transitions
• Renormalization-group theory for cooling first-order phase transitions in Potts models
• Dynamic hysteresis at a noisy saddle-node shows power-law scaling but nonuniversal exponent

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Coercivity Landscape Characterizes Dynamic Hysteresis
• Nucleation and growth manifest universal scaling, surely
• Finite-time and Finite-size scalings of coercivity in dynamic hysteresis
• Is there Kibble-Zurek scaling of topological defects in first-order phase transitions?
• Complete universal scaling of first-order phase transitions in the two-dimensional Ising model