Information-entropic signature of the critical point

We investigate the critical behavior of continuous (second-order) phase transitions in the context of (2+1)-dimensional Ginzburg–Landau models with a double-well effective potential. In particular, we show that the recently-proposed configurational entropy (CE)—a measure of the spatial complexity of...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Marcelo Gleiser, Damian Sowinski
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier 2015-07-01
Series:Physics Letters B
Online Access:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269315003950
Description
Summary:We investigate the critical behavior of continuous (second-order) phase transitions in the context of (2+1)-dimensional Ginzburg–Landau models with a double-well effective potential. In particular, we show that the recently-proposed configurational entropy (CE)—a measure of the spatial complexity of the order parameter in momentum space based on its Fourier-mode decomposition—can be used to identify the critical point. We compute the CE for different temperatures and show that large spatial fluctuations near the critical point (Tc)—characterized by a divergent correlation length—lead to a sharp decrease in the associated configurational entropy. We further show that the CE density goes from a scale-free to an approximate scaling behavior |k|−5/3 as the critical point is approached. We reproduce the behavior of the CE at criticality with a percolating many-bubble model.
ISSN:0370-2693
1873-2445