Systems with symmetry breaking and restoration (Q2446119)

The paper is devoted to the further development of the method of weighted Hilbert spaces, formulating it in the most general form and applying it to derive a general model of a heterophase ferroelectric. The systems are addressed, exhibiting phase transitions between thermodynamic phases with different symmetry, in which spontaneous symmetry breaking can be accompanied by local spontaneous symmetry restoration caused by the appearance of heterophase fluctuations. First, the main features of a single-phase system are discussed briefly. The paper describes the situation, when inside the considered system the regions appear with different types of symmetry. A general method of symmetry breaking is developed, which could be used not only for equilibrium systems but also for quasiequilibrium, metastable and arbitrary non-equilibrium systems. The general approach for treating the considered heterophase systems is developed on the base of weighted Hilbert spaces. The scheme, based on weighted Hilbert spaces, includes as a particular case the selection of phases by means of the quasiaveraging method since the latter also chooses the states typical for the desired phase, but provided that the phase corresponds to a stable equilibrium system. The real-space distribution of the phases is described by means of manifold characteristic functions (manifold indicators). The developed constructions describe the situation, when the system is separated into several regions filled by different phases and these regions are randomly distributed in space. The averaging over random phase configurations reduce the problem to the consideration of an effective renormalized Hamiltonian composed of the phase-replica Hamiltonian representing the phases of different symmetry. The idea of the averaging procedure reminds of the method of averaging and the scale separation approach used for nonlinear equations in dynamical theory. The main difference is connected with that the author averages slow heterophase fluctuations compared to the fast microscopic motion of particles, while in dynamic theory one usually averages out fast fluctuations, leading at the end to the slow motion of guiding centers. Then, the discussed stability conditions define the geometric phase probabilities in a self-consistent way. The method is illustrated by an application to heterophase ferroelectrics which are the typical materials demonstrating such heterophase fluctuations near their phase transition points between the paraelectric and ferroelectric phases. Numerical calculations show that the occurrence of such fluctuations leads to the noticeable decrease of the sound velocity and the Debye-Waller factor at the transition point. The relative values of this decrease only weakly depend on the material parameters.