Third year CMP compulsory experiment/Locating the Curie temperature

This is the eighth (and final) section of the third year CMP experiment. You can return to the previous page, Determining the heat capacity, or go back to the Introduction.

You should have seen in the previous section that the heat capacity becomes strongly peaked in the vicinity of the critical temperature. You should have seen the heat capacity becomes increasingly sharply peaked as the system size was increased — in fact, Onsager proved that in an infinite system the heat capacity should diverge at $T = T_C$. The fact that our finite systems do not exhibit this divergence is evidence of a finite size effect.

This is the eighth (and final) section of the third year CMP experiment. You can return to the previous page, Determining the heat capacity, or go back to the Introduction.