Study of phase transitions from short-time non-equilibrium behaviour

E. V. ALBANO; M. A. BAB; G. BAGLIETTO; R A BORZI; T S GRIGERA; E S LOSCAR; D E RODRIGUEZ; M L RUBIO PUZZO; G P SARACCO

REPORTS ON PROGRESS IN PHYSICS

IOP PUBLISHING LTD

Año: 2010 vol. 74 p. 265011 - 2650128

0034-4885

We review recent progress in the understanding of phase transitions and critical phenomena,obtained by means of numerical simulations of the early dynamic evolution of systemsprepared at well-specified initial conditions. This field has seen exhaustive scientific researchduring the last decade, when the renormalization-group (RG) theoretical results obtained at theend of the 1980s were applied to the interpretation of dynamic Monte Carlo simulation results.While the original RG theory is restricted to critical phenomena under equilibrium conditions,numerical simulations have been applied to the study of far-from-equilibrium systems,irreversible phase transitions, the investigation of the behaviour of spinodal points close tofirst-order phase transitions and the understanding of the early-time evolution of self-organizedcriticality (SOC) systems when released far form the SOC regime. The present review intendsto provide a comprehensive overview of recent applications to those fields, which can give theflavour of the main ideas, methods and results, and to discuss the directions for further studies.All these numerical results pose new and interesting theoretical challenges that remain as openquestions to be addressed by new research in the forthcoming years.