Information-entropic signature of the critical point

We investigate the critical behavior of continuous (second-order) phase transitions in the context of (2 + 1)-dimensional Ginzburg-Landau models with a double-well effective potential. In particular, we show that the recently-proposed configurational entropy (CE)-a measure of the spatial complexity of the order parameter in momentum space based on its Fourier-mode decomposition-can be used to identify the critical point. We compute the CE for different temperatures and show that large spatial fluctuations near the critical point (T-c)-characterized by a divergent correlation length-lead to a sharp decrease in the associated configurational entropy. We further show that the CE density goes from a scale-free to an approximate scaling behavior vertical bar k vertical bar(-5/3) as the critical point is approached. We reproduce the behavior of the CE at criticality with a percolating many-bubble model. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license