NANOGrav results and dark first order phase transitions

The recent NANOGrav evidence of a common-source stochastic background provides a hint to gravitational waves(GW)radiation from the Early Universe.We show that this result can be interpreted as a GW spectrum produced from first order phase transitions(FOPTs)around a temperature in the keV-MeV window.Such a class of FOPTs at temperatures much below the electroweak scale can be naturally envisaged in several warm dark matter models such as Majoron dark matter.

Magnetic properties and magnetocaloric effect in compound PrFe_(12)B_6

Magnetic properties and magnetocaloric effect of compound PrFe12B6 are investigated. The coexistence of hard phase PrFe12B6 and soft phase α-Fe causes interesting phenomena on the curves for the temperature dependence of magnetization. PrFe12B6 experiences a first order phase transition at the Curie temperature 206 K, accompanied by an obvious lattice contraction, which in turn results in a large magnetic entropy change. The Maxwell relation fails to give the correct information about magnetic entropy change due to the first order phase transition nature. The large magnetic entropy changes of PrFe12.3B4.7 obtained from heat capacity method are 11.7 and 16.2 J/kg.K for magnetic field changes of 0-2 T and 0-5 T respectively.

New Kinetics Equation for Stress Relaxation of Semi-crystalline Polymers below Glass Transition Temperature

The stress relaxation of semi-crystalline nylon 1010 cannot be fitted by the Kohlrausch-Williams-Watts formula when the experiments were performed at pre-yielding regime below the glass transition temperature.We study this problem and identify the two-step mechanism of stress relaxation.At short time scale,relaxation is fast,dominated by stress biased thermal fluctuation with a fixed short-range length scale(activation volume).At long time scale,relaxation is slow due to the emergence of a cooperative long-range length scale determined by the stress fluctuation.The cooperative length scale is proportional to the reciprocal of stress and the amplitude of stress fluctuation is the product of stress and activation volume.Based on this two-step mechanism,we propose a new kinetics equation to capture the stress relaxation effectively,where the short time relaxation is described by an Eyring-like local activation and the long-time relaxation is captured by a cooperative excitation process resorting to an extension from the random first order transition theory.Our equation fits the experimental data well and can serve as a model to guide the related experiments of relaxation processes in crystalline solids.

Phase transitions of two spin-1/2 Baxter–Wu layers coupled with Ising-type interactions

Using a Monte Carlo simulation and the single histogram reweighting technique,we study the critical behaviors and phase transitions of the Baxter-Wu(BW)model on a two-layer triangular lattice with Ising-type interlayer couplings.Via the finite-size analysis,we obtain the transition temperatures and critical exponents at repulsive and attractive interlayer couplings.The data for the repulsive interlayer coupling suggest continuous transitions,and the critical behaviors are the same as those of the 2D BW model,belonging to the four-state Potts universality class.The reduced energy cumulants and the histograms reveal that attractive coupling leads to weak firstorder phase transitions.The pseudocritical exponents with the existence of the interlayer couplings indicate that the first-order transition is very close to the critical point of the 2D standard BW model.

Charged pion condensation in anti-parallel electromagnetic fields and nonzero isospin density

The formation of charged pion condensate in anti-parallel electromagnetic fields and in the presence of the isospin chemical potential is studied in the two-flavor Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model.The method of Schwinger proper time is extended to explore the quantities in the off-diagonal flavor space,i.e.the charged pion.In this framework,π^± are treated as bound states of quarks and not as point-like charged particles.The isospin chemical potential plays the role of a trigger for charged pion condensation.We obtain the associated effective potential as a function of the strength of the electromagnetic fields and find that it contains a sextic term which possibly induces a weak first order phase transition.The dependence of pion condensation on model parameters is investigated.