Order and disorder
material property
In physics, the terms order and disorder designate the presence or absence of some symmetry or correlation in a many-particle system.
In condensed matter physics, systems typically are ordered at low temperatures; upon heating, they undergo one or several phase transitions into less ordered states.
Examples for such an order-disorder transition are:
the melting of ice: solid–liquid transition, loss of crystalline order;
the demagnetization of iron by heating above the Curie temperature: ferromagnetic–paramagnetic transition, loss of magnetic order.
The degree of freedom that is ordered or disordered can be translational (crystalline ordering), rotational (ferroelectric ordering), or a spin state (magnetic ordering).
The order can consist either in a full crystalline space group symmetry, or in a correlation. Depending on how the correlations decay with distance, one speaks of long range order or short range order.
If a disordered state is not in thermodynamic equilibrium, one speaks of quenched disorder. For instance, a glass is obtained by quenching (supercooling) a liquid. By extension, other quenched states are called spin glass, orientational glass. In some contexts, the opposite of quenched disorder is annealed disorder.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Order and disorder” is material property. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Order, disorder and material, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Order and disorder” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.