title: Supercritical
text: # Supercritical
  
  Supercritical may refer to:
  
  ## Physics and technology
  
  ### Condensed matter physics
  
  * Critical temperature, $T_C,$ a temperature above which distinct liquid and gas phases do not exist for a given material
     * Supercritical drying, a process used to remove liquid in a precisely controlled way, similar to freeze drying
     * Supercritical fluid, a substance at a temperature and pressure above its thermodynamic critical point:
        * Supercritical carbon dioxide:
           * Supercritical fluid chromatography, a form of liquid chromatography using supercritical carbon dioxide as the mobile phase
        * Supercritical water:
           * Supercritical steam generator, a steam generator operating above the critical point of water, hence having no water–steam separation
           * Supercritical water oxidation or SCWO, a process that occurs in water at temperatures and pressures above a mixture's thermodynamic critical point
           * Supercritical water reactor (SCWR), a Generation IV nuclear reactor concept that uses supercritical water as the working fluid
  
  ### Flows
  
  * Supercritical flow, where flow velocity is larger than wave velocity
     * Supercritical airfoil, an airfoil designed to delay the onset of wave drag in the transonic speed regime
  
  ### Nuclear physics
  
  * Supercritical mass, an amount of fissile material that will undergo a sustained nuclear chain reaction at an increasing rate
  
  ## Mathematics
  
  * Hopf bifurcation, in mathematics, a local bifurcation; when the first Lyapunov coefficient is negative, the bifurcation is called supercritical
  * Pitchfork bifurcation, in mathematics, similar to Hopf bifurcation
  
  ## Other uses
  
  * Super Critical, an album by British pop/rock group The Ting Tings
  