Helium condensation in aerogel: avalanches and disorder-induced phase transition

Abstract

We present a detailed numerical study of the elementary condensation events (avalanches) associated to the adsorption of ${}^4$He in silica aerogels. We use a coarse-grained lattice-gas description and determine the nonequilibrium behavior of the adsorbed gas within a local mean-field analysis, neglecting thermal fluctuations and activated processes. We investigate the statistical properties of the avalanches, such as their number, size and shape along the adsorption isotherms as a function of gel porosity, temperature, and chemical potential. Our calculations predict the existence of a line of critical points in the temperature-porosity diagram where the avalanche size distribution displays a power-law behavior and the adsorption isotherms have a universal scaling form. The estimated critical exponents seem compatible with those of the field-driven Random Field Ising Model at zero temperature.

arXiv comment16 pages, 14 figures

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• Influence of the driving mechanism on the response of systems with athermal dynamics: the example of the random-field Ising model
• Evidence for a disorder driven phase transition in the condensation of 4He in aerogels
• Maximum entropy approach to power-law distributions in coupled dynamic-stochastic systems
• Effect of the reservoir size on gas adsorption in inhomogeneous porous media
• Gas adsorption/desorption in silica aerogels: a theoretical study of scattering properties
• Capillary condensation in one-dimensional irregular confinement
• Condensation of helium in aerogels and athermal dynamics of the Random Field Ising Model
• Liquid-liquid coexistence in the phase diagram of a fluid confined in fractal porous materials
• A temperature-controlled device for volumetric measurements of Helium adsorption in porous media
• A statistical mechanical description of metastable states and hysteresis in the 3D soft-spin random-field model at T=0
• Effect of disorder on condensation in the lattice gas model on a random graph
• Recent topics on metastability, hysteresis, avalanches, and acoustic emission associated to martensitic transitions in functional materials