Grand potential

Abstract: The grand potential of a system of interacting electrons is considered as a stationary point of a self-energy functional. It is shown that a rigorous evaluation of the functional is possible for self-energies that are representable within a certain reference system. The variational scheme allows to construct new non-perturbative and thermodynamically consistent approximations. Numerical results illustrate the practicability of the method.

Abstract: In the literature, two quite different phase-field formulations for the problem of alloy solidification can be found. In the first, the material in the diffuse interfaces is assumed to be in an intermediate state between solid and liquid, with a unique local composition. In the second, the interface is seen as a mixture of two phases that each retain their macroscopic properties, and a separate concentration field for each phase is introduced. It is shown here that both types of models can be obtained by the standard variational procedure if a grand-potential functional is used as a starting point instead of a free energy functional. The dynamical variable is then the chemical potential instead of the composition. In this framework, a complete analogy with phase-field models for the solidification of a pure substance can be established. This analogy is then exploited to formulate quantitative phase-field models for alloys with arbitrary phase diagrams. The precision of the method is illustrated by numerical simulations with varying interface thickness.

Abstract: We study the instanton effects of the ABJM partition function using the Fermi gas formalism. We compute the exact values of the partition function at the Chern-Simons levels k = 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 up to N = 44, 20, 18, 16, 14 respectively, and extract non-perturbative corrections from these exact results. Fitting the resulting non-perturbative corrections by their expected forms from the Fermi gas, we determine unknown parameters in them. After separating the oscillating behavior of the grand potential, which originates in the periodicity of the grand partition function, and the worldsheet instanton contribution, which is computed from the topological string theory, we succeed in proposing an analytical expression for the leading D2-instanton correction. Just as the perturbative result, the instanton corrections to the partition function are expressed in terms of the Airy function.

Abstract: In this paper, we describe the derivation of a model for the simulation of phase transformations in multicomponent real alloys starting from a grand-potential functional. We first point out the limitations of a phase-field model when evolution equations for the concentration and the phase-field variables are derived from a free energy functional. These limitations are mainly attributed to the contribution of the grand-chemical-potential excess to the interface energy. For a range of applications, the magnitude of this excess becomes large and its influence on interface profiles and dynamics is not negligible. The related constraint regarding the choice of the interface thickness limits the size of the domain that can be simulated and, hence, the effect of larger scales on microstructure evolution can not be observed. We propose a modification to the model in order to decouple the bulk and interface contributions. Following this, we perform the thin-interface asymptotic analysis of the phase-field model. Through this, we determine the thin-interface kinetic coefficient and the antitrapping current to remove the chemical potential jump at the interface. We limit our analysis to the Stefan condition at lowest order in $\ensuremath{\epsilon}$ (parameter related to the interface width) and apply results from previous literature that the corrections to the Stefan condition (surface diffusion and interface stretching) at higher orders are removed when antisymmetric interpolation functions are used for interpolating the grand-potential densities and the diffusion mobilities.