Liquid-gas phase transition at and below the critical point

TL;DR

This paper provides a first-principles theoretical description of liquid-gas phase transitions at and below the critical point, including phase behavior, transition dynamics, and equilibrium conditions.

Contribution

It extends previous work by analyzing the system at the critical point and below, deriving the grand canonical partition function in functional integral form with an Ising-like structure.

Findings

Describes phase transition behavior at the critical point and below

Derives phase equilibrium conditions for liquid-gas systems

Identifies a first-order phase transition with latent heat exchange

Abstract

This article is a continuation of our previous works (see Yukhnovskii I.R. et al., J. Stat. Phys, 1995, 80, 405 and references therein), where we have described the behavior of a simple system of interacting particles in the region of temperatures at and about the critical point, T \geqslant T_{c}. Now we present a description of the behavior of the system at the critical point (T_{c}, \eta_{c}) and in the region below the critical point. The calculation is carried out from the first principles. The expression for the grand canonical partition function is brought to the functional integrals defined on the set of collective variables. The Ising-like form is singled out. Below T_{c}, when a gas-liquid system undergoes a phase transition of the first order, i.e., boiling, a "jump" occurs from the "extreme" high probability gas state to the "extreme" high probability liquid state, releasing or absorbing the latent heat of the transition. The phase equilibria conditions are also derived.