Some aspects of the thermodynamic behaviour of ferroelastic and co-elastic phase transitions

Abstract

Ferroelastic phase transitions and phase transitions involving coupling between the driving order parameter and elastic degrees of freedom (i.e. co-elastic phase transitions) follow empirically a Landau-type mean field behaviour over large temperature intervals. At temperatures close to the transition point the upper critical dimension is reduced to three if fluctuations are sufficiently constrained in reciprocal space. At low temperatures, the observed temperature independence of the order parameter in the saturation regime (S-regime) is correlated with the quantum limit of the dissipation-fluctuation theorem. The good agreement between experimental observations and the predictions of a Landau-type treatment of the excess Gibbs free energy even for large values of the order parameter leads to the conclusion that the convergency of the polynomial form of the Gibbs free energy is due to small energy coefficients rather than due to the order parameter being small.