The Ehrenfest classification of phase transitions: Introduction and evolution (Q1389835)

The discovery of the so-called lambda transition in liquid helium in 1932 led Paul Ehrenfest to introduce a classification of phase transitions on the basis of jumps in derivatives of the free energy function. The author of this paper gives a detailed history of the slow and adaptive evolution of Ehrenfest's classification until about 1970. First introduced in 1933, Ehrenfest's classification scheme was in the subsequent decades extended to other transition phenomena like liquid-gas, order-disorder, paramagnetic-ferromagnetic and normal-superconducting phase transitions. In the evolution of the Ehrenfest scheme, three periods can be distinguished. At the end of the first period (about 1950), the classification was assumed sufficient to cope with all observed phase transitions. During the fifties, the scheme was extended and reinterpretated, in order to accommodate phase transitions that lie outside its original taxonomy. During the third period, that took place from 1960 onwards, the earlier schemes were replaced by a radically simplified binary classification of phase transitions into ``first-order'' and ``continuous'' transitions.