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Concept
Critical exponent
Summary
Critical exponents describe the behavior of physical quantities near continuous phase transitions. It is believed, though not proven, that they are universal, i.e. they do not depend on the details of the physical system, but only on some of its general features. For instance, for ferromagnetic systems, the critical exponents depend only on:
the dimension of the system
the range of the interaction
the spin dimension
These properties of critical exponents are supported by experimental data. Analytical results can be theoretically achieved in mean field theory in high dimensions or when exact solutions are known such as the two-dimensional Ising model. The theoretical treatment in generic dimensions requires the renormalization group approach or the conformal bootstrap techniques.
Phase transitions and critical exponents appear in many physical systems such as water at the critical point, in magnetic systems, in superconductivity, in percolation and in turbulent fluids.
The critical dimension above which mean field exponents are valid varies with the systems and can even be infinite.
The control parameter that drives phase transitions is often temperature but can also be other macroscopic variables like pressure or an external magnetic field. For simplicity, the following discussion works in terms of temperature; the translation to another control parameter is straightforward. The temperature at which the transition occurs is called the critical temperature Tc. We want to describe the behavior of a physical quantity f in terms of a power law around the critical temperature; we introduce the reduced temperature
which is zero at the phase transition, and define the critical exponent :
This results in the power law we were looking for:
It is important to remember that this represents the asymptotic behavior of the function f(τ) as τ → 0.
More generally one might expect
Let us assume that the system has two different phases characterized by an order parameter Ψ, which vanishes at and above Tc.
Official source
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