Properties of Higher-Order Phase Transitions

Experimental evidence for the existence of strictly higher-order phase transitions (of order three or above in the Ehrenfest sense) is tenuous at best. However, there is no known physical reason why such transitions should not exist in nature. Here, higher-order transitions characterized by both discontinuities and divergences are analysed through the medium of partition function zeros. Properties of the distributions of zeros are derived, certain scaling relations are recovered, and new ones are presented.