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McMillan's model, proposed by William McMillan, [70] is an extension of the Maier–Saupe mean field theory used to describe the phase transition of a liquid crystal from a nematic to a smectic A phase. It predicts that the phase transition can be either continuous or discontinuous depending on the strength of the short-range interaction ...
In physics, chemistry, and other related fields like biology, a phase transition (or phase change) is the physical process of transition between one state of a medium and another. Commonly the term is used to refer to changes among the basic states of matter : solid , liquid , and gas , and in rare cases, plasma .
A liquid crystal phase is thermotropic if its order parameter is determined by temperature. At high temperatures, liquid crystals become an isotropic liquid and at low temperatures, they tend to glassify. In a thermotropic crystal, those phase transitions occur only at temperature extremes; the phase is insensitive to concentration.
In chemistry, fractional crystallization is a stage-wise separation technique that relies on the liquid–solid phase change. This technique fractionates via differences in crystallization temperature and enables the purification of multi-component mixtures, as long as none of the constituents can act as solvents to the others.
A typical phase diagram for a single-component material, exhibiting solid, liquid and gaseous phases. The solid green line shows the usual shape of the liquid–solid phase line. The dotted green line shows the anomalous behavior of water when the pressure increases. The triple point and the critical point are shown as red dots.
Chain-melted state: Metals, such as potassium, at high temperature and pressure, present properties of both a solid and liquid. Wigner crystal: a crystalline phase of low-density electrons. Hexatic state, a state of matter that is between the solid and the isotropic liquid phases in two dimensional systems of particles. Ferroics
The solid–liquid phase boundary can only end in a critical point if the solid and liquid phases have the same symmetry group. [5] For most substances, the solid–liquid phase boundary (or fusion curve) in the phase diagram has a positive slope so that the melting point increases with pressure.
Solid; Solid light; Spinodal decomposition; State of matter; Sublimation (phase transition) Sublimatory; Superconductivity; Supercritical liquid–gas boundaries; Superradiant phase transition; Swendsen–Wang algorithm; Symplectite