Definition
Phase transitions occur at a certain temperature, called the critical temperature . We want to describe the behaviour of a physical quantity in terms of a power law around the critical temperature. So we introduce the reduced temperature, which is zero at the phase transition, and define the critical exponent .
This results in the power law we were looking for.
It is important to remember that this represents the asymptotic behavior of the function as .
More generally one might expect
Read more about this topic: Critical Exponent
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