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Updated: Aug 16, 2026

Orientational Transition in a Liquid Crystal Triggered by the Thermodynamic Growth of Interfacial Wetting Sheets
Published on: May 15, 2017
Clusters and fluctuations at mean-field critical points and spinodals
1Department of Physics and Center for Computational Science, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215 and CNLS, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA.
Abstract:
We show that the structure of the fluctuations close to spinodals and mean-field critical points is qualitatively different from the structure close to non-mean-field critical points. This difference has important implications for many areas including the formation of glasses in supercooled liquids. In particular, the divergence of the measured static structure function in near-mean-field systems close to the glass transition is suppressed relative to the mean-field prediction in systems for which a spatial symmetry is broken.
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