Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jan 15, 2026

Using Microwave and Macroscopic Samples of Dielectric Solids to Study the Photonic Properties of Disordered Photonic Bandgap Materials
Published on: September 26, 2014
Chaos controlled and disorder driven phase transitions induced by breaking permutation symmetry
Manju C1, Arul Lakshminarayan2, Uma Divakaran3
1Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad, Palakkad, Kerala, 678623, India.
None:
The effects of disorder and chaos on quantum many-body systems can be superficially similar, yet their interplay has not been sufficiently explored. This work finds a continuous phase transition when disorder breaks permutation symmetry, with details of the transition being controlled by the degree of chaos in the clean limit. The system changes from an area law entangled phase in the permutation symmetric subspace where collective variables exist to volume law entanglement in the full Hilbert space, beyond a critical strength of the disorder. This has potential implications for general many body physics, as well as technologies such as transmon qubits.
Related Concept Videos
Phase Transitions
Woodward–Hoffmann Selection Rules and Microscopic Reversibility
Phase Transitions: Melting and Freezing
Entropy Change in Reversible Processes
The statement can be further generalized to prove that entropy is a state function. Take a cyclic process between any two points on a p-V diagram.
Thermal Sigmatropic Reactions: Overview
Sigmatropic shifts are classified based on an order term [i, j ], where i and j indicate the number of atoms across which each end of the σ bond migrates. Below are examples of a [3,3] sigmatropic shift in 1,5-hexadiene, referred...
Phase Transitions: Sublimation and Deposition

