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🧊 The Kibble-Zurek Mechanism

Explore why rapidly cooling a system through a phase transition inevitably leaves behind topological defects, from cosmic strings to vortices in superfluid helium.

Physics & Mechanics3DModerate60 FPS

The simulator shows a two-dimensional field crossing a symmetry-breaking phase transition as it is cooled at an adjustable rate, visualizing how independent domains nucleate, grow, and collide, trapping topological defects at their boundaries, and it plots the resulting defect density against quench rate to reveal the Kibble-Zurek power-law scaling directly.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

🎮 How to Use

Set the quench rate using the slider, then start the quench and watch colored domains representing different chosen symmetry-broken states spread outward from random nucleation points across the grid. Pause at any time to inspect where domains have collided and defects have become trapped, and run the quench at several different rates to compare the resulting defect counts and see how they trace out the predicted scaling curve.

💡 Did You Know?

The same mathematics that describes vortices trapped in a cup of superfluid helium as it is cooled in a laboratory is, in principle, the same mathematics Tom Kibble used to argue that cosmic strings might have been frozen into the structure of space itself within the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

⚙ Under the hood

Explore why rapidly cooling a system through a phase transition inevitably leaves behind topological defects, from cosmic strings to vortices in superfluid helium.

phase transitionstopological defectscosmologycondensed mattersymmetry breakingcold atomssuperfluiditycritical phenomena

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install