User:Amirboomboom/sandbox

The Kibble-Zurek scenario in statistical mechanics is named after Tom W. B. Kibble and Wojciech H. Zurek and describes a situation where a physical system is driven away from thermal equilibrium by approaching a thermodynamic critical point of a phase transition. Imagine a system with a tuning parameter, eg. temperature or magnetic field, which is slowly changed with time to bring the system arbitrarily close to a second (or higher) order phase transition. As the system approaches the critical point, the correlation length diverges and with it the correlation time, which defines the typical time-scale it takes the system to respond to changes. Accordingly, the system's dynamics become sluggish and at some point, called the Kibble time, it can no longer respond quickly enough to the quench and consequently falls out of equilibrium.

The action of changing the parameter (say temperature) is usually called "quenching", named after, but not to be confused with rapid quenching in materials science. The way the parameter changes (eg. the explicit time dependence of the temperature) is called the "quench protocol".