Dr. David Landau is hosting Dr. Joao Plascak of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais this week. His talk is entitled, "Multicriticality in Magnetic and Non-magnetic Systems: a Simulational View."

Critical and multicritical phenomena will be discussed in terms of general thermodynamics. It will be shown that different systems, some as simple as the liquid-gas transition and some as complicated as He4-He3 mixtures, can be described by convenient magnetic Hamiltonians. Some magnetic models will then be revisited, with special emphasis on the Ising model, the Blume-Emmery-Griffiths model, the XY model, the Heisenberg model, among others. A simulational point of view will be presented. The technical approaches employed to obtain the thermodynamics of the model include Monte Carlo simulations and spin dynamics simulations.