The Kibble-Zurek (KZ) mechanism has been applied to a variety of systems ranging from low-temperature Bose-Einstein condensations to grand unification scales in particle physics and cosmology and from classical phase transitions to quantum phase transitions. Here, we show that finite-time scaling (FTS) provides a detailed improved understanding of the mechanism. In particular, the finite time scale, which is introduced by the external driving (or quenching) and results in FTS, is the origin of the division of the adiabatic regimes from the impulse regime in the KZ mechanism. The origin of the KZ scaling for the defect density, generated during the driving through a critical point, is not that the correlation length ceases growing in the nonadiabatic impulse regime, but rather, is that it is taken over by the effective finite length scale corresponding to the finite time scale. We also show that FTS accounts well for and improves the scaling ansatz proposed recently by Liu, Polkovnikov, and Sandvik, [Phys. Rev. B 89, 054307 (2014)]. Further, we show that their universal power-law scaling form applies only to some observables in cooling but not to heating. Even in cooling, it is invalid either when an appropriate external field is present. However, this finite-time-finite-size scaling calls for caution in application of FTS. Detailed scaling behaviors of the FTS and finite-size scaling, along with their crossover, are explicitly demonstrated, with the dynamic critical exponent
z being estimated for two- and three-dimensional Ising models under the usual Metropolis dynamics. These values of
z are found to give rise to better data collapses than the extant values do in most cases but take on different values in heating and cooling in both two- and three-dimensional spaces.
Finite-size scaling (FSS) for a critical phase transition (
t=0) states that within a window of size
∣t∣∼L−1/ν, the scaling behavior of any observable
Q in a system of linear size
L asymptotically follows a scaling form as
Q(t,L)=LYQQ~(tL1/ν), where
ν is the correlation-length exponent,
YQ is an FSS exponent and
Q~(x) is a function of the scaled distance-to-criticality
x≡tL1/ν. We systematically study the asymptotic scaling behavior of
Q~(∣x∣→∞) for a broad variety of observables by requiring that the FSS and infinite-system critical behaviors match with each other in the crossover critical regime with
t→0 and
∣x∣→∞. This crossover FSS theory predicts that when the criticality is approached at a slower speed as
∣t∣∼L−λ with
λ<1/ν, the FSS becomes
λ-dependent and the exponent can be derived. As applications, explosive percolation and high-dimensional percolation are considered. For the former, it is shown that the widely observed anomalous phenomena at the infinite-system criticality
t=0 can be attributed to the mixing effects of the standard FSS behaviors around the pseudocritical point in an event-based ensemble. For the latter, FSS exponents are found to be different at the infinite-system critical and the pseudocritical point if free boundary conditions are used, and they are related to each other by using the crossover FSS theory. From these observations, the FSS of percolation systems falls into three classifications. Extensive simulations are carried out to affirm these predictions.
Calculations on finite (or partially finite) systems, such as Monte-Carlo simulations or the diagonalization of a finite transfer matrix, are often extrapolated to the thermodynamic limit by the use of scaling assumptions involving the finite sizes L of the system. It is shown here that these finite size scaling laws follow from the fact that : i) in the renormalization group flow equations the length L is not renormalized ; ii) there is no singularity at the fixed point. This second property fails in four (and above four) dimensions and finite size scaling does not hold there. An illustration of these points is presented, with detailed calculations of the large N limit of the N- vector model. As a consequence, the ε-expansion of finite size scaling properties is singular.