Phase transitions within crystals that are aperiodic by construction

Phase transitions in liquid crystals

Cortical aperiodic ‘ clock ’ enabling phase transitions at theta rates

Brains are open thermodynamic systems, continually dissipating metabolic energy as heat in constructing spatiotemporal patterns of neural activity. Here observations on patterns of cortical oscillations are described as Prigogine’s “dissipative structures” forming at conditionally stable operating points far from equilibrium. The approach is to locate experimentally a small-signal, near-linear ...

Phase Transitions within Grammatical Inference

It is now well-known that the feasibility of inductive learning is ruled by statistical properties linking the empirical risk minimization principle and the “capacity” of the hypothesis space. The discovery, a few years ago, of a phase transition phenomenon in inductive logic programming proves that other fundamental characteristics of the learning problems may similarly affect the very possibi...

Exploring structural phase transitions of ion crystals

Phase transitions have been a research focus in many-body physics over past decades. Cold ions, under strong Coulomb repulsion, provide a repealing paradigm of exploring phase transitions in stable confinement by electromagnetic field. We demonstrate various conformations of up to sixteen laser-cooled (40)Ca(+) ion crystals in a home-built surface-electrode trap, where besides the usually menti...

Phase Transitions and Critical Phenomena.phase Transitions in Liquid Crystals

The present text is the transcription of an introductory lecture discussing two phase transitions : nematic-isotropic and smectic A-nematic. The emphasis is on simple qualitative features, including Landau ~heories, coherence lengths and scaling properties.