Topic
Phase transitions research, explained
9 open-access phase transitions studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- How do cholesterol and heat reshape lipid membrane domains?
More cholesterol shrinks the thickness difference between ordered and disordered membrane domains, which should lower the boundary energy and help the ordered domains melt.
- Does RNA length change how protein droplets form and hold together?
Long RNAs sit in the core of protein-RNA droplets and make them more stable, while short RNAs gather at the surface and act like soap that lowers surface tension.
- How do fleeting lipid clusters differ from true membrane domains?
Above the demixing temperature lipid bilayers contain short-lived, rough-edged clusters that do not line up across the two leaflets, whereas true phase domains are persistent, smoother and largely aligned.
- Can AI find the conditions that make colloids form quasicrystals?
A neural network that recognises phases from their diffraction patterns can steer simulations to the narrow conditions where particles self-assemble into a chosen structure, even quasicrystals.
- Can a laser flash change a metal's Fermi surface topology?
A femtosecond infrared pulse briefly pushes an empty electron pocket in MoTe2 below the Fermi level, changing its Fermi surface topology for under a picosecond.
- Can magnets show the long-sought superradiant phase transition?
In the magnetic crystal ErFeO3, one coupled spin mode drops toward zero frequency while the other kinks at the same field, the signature of a Dicke superradiant phase transition.
- How does a magnetic field reshape electrons at a ruthenate surface?
A magnetic field pushes a special point in the surface electron bands of a ruthenate through the Fermi level, changing the Fermi surface and switching on stripe-like charge order.
- How does a false vacuum decay on a quantum chip?
When a chain of quantum spins is pushed out of a metastable state, bubbles of the stable state form only at specific quantized sizes, and they then grow by trading spins with neighbouring bubbles rather than on their own.
- How much energy does it take to open a bubble in stretched liquid?
Averaging the work from many fast, non-equilibrium simulations recovers the full energy barrier for opening a nanoscale cavity in a stretched liquid, even under mild conditions that ordinary simulations cannot reach.