Phase transition

A phase transition is a natural physical process. It has the characteristic of taking a given medium with given properties and transforming some or all of that medium, into a new medium with new properties. Phase transitions occur frequently and are found everywhere in the natural world. Some engineering techniques exploit certain types of phase transition. In thermodynamics, a phase transition is the transformation of a thermodynamic system from one phase to another. At a phase transition point, physical properties may undergo abrupt change: for instance, the volume of the two phases may be vastly different as is illustrated by the boiling of liquid water to form steam. The term is most commonly used to describe transitions between solid, liquid and gaseous states of matter, in rare cases including plasma. One early attempt to describe phase transitions in some form of scientific 'law' resulted in Friederick Engels' famous 'law of the transformation of quantity into quality', described in his (circa 1883) work Dialectics of Nature, which provides some insight into early attempts to grapple with concepts now considered reasonably well understood. Examples of phase transitions include: The transitions between the solid, liquid, and gaseous phases of a single component, due to the effects of temperature and/or pressure.

A small piece of rapidly melting argon ice simultaneously shows the transitions from solid to liquid to gas.

Further information:

1. Стенли. Г. Фазовые переходы и критические явления. — М.: Мир, 1973. 
2. Паташинский А. З., Покровский В. Л. Флуктуационная теория фазовых переходов. — М.: Наука, 1981.
3. Гуфан Ю. М.. Термодинамическая теория фазовых переходов. — Ростов н/Д: Издательство Ростовского университета, 1982. — 172 с. 
4. Anderson, P.W., Basic Notions of Condensed Matter Physics, Perseus Publishing (1997). 
5. Goldenfeld, N., Lectures on Phase Transitions and the Renormalization Group, Perseus Publishing (1992). 
6. Yeomans J. M., "Statistical Mechanics of Phase Transitions", Oxford University Press, 1992.
7. Article Plasma etching  from Wikipedia, the Free Enciclopedia. Available under the license Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike.

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