LANDAU · The Order Parameter — Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

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TEE-SCI-CN-LAN-02-M-BK T-Shirt

Piece

LANDAU · The Order Parameter Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

$ 2,345.00

Description

Landau proposed in 1937 that every phase transition is described with a single magnitude that is zero on one side of the critical point and grows on the other. Printed here is that magnitude crossing the point.

A Author

Lev Landau

B Subject

Theoretical Physics

C Aesthetic

Diagram · Typographic

Exploration

Before 1937 each phase transition was a separate case: a magnet that orders itself, a metal that turns superconducting and a liquid that boils had nothing to do with one another.

Landau proposed describing them all with a single magnitude. It is zero in the disordered phase and begins to grow as soon as the critical point is crossed, and what the theory predicts is the shape of that growth, not the material.

What changes at the point is not the quantity of anything: it is the symmetry. Above, the system is the same in every direction; below, it has chosen one, and there is no way of undoing the choice from within.

With Ginzburg he added in 1950 the variation in space, and that version is still the working tool for calculating a real superconductor, with its critical fields and its vortices.

The same scheme reappeared later in particle physics. The mechanism that gives mass to the elementary particles is a symmetry breaking described with an order parameter.

Details