No Arabic abstract
We carry out a detailed deuterium NMR study of local nematic ordering in polydomain nematic elastomers. This system has a close analogy to the random-anisotropy spin glass. We find that, in spite of the quadrupolar nematic symmetry in 3-dimensions requiring a first-order transition, the order parameter in the quenched ``nematic glass emerges via a continuous phase transition. In addition, by a careful analysis of the NMR line shape, we deduce that the local director fluctuations grow in a critical manner around the transition point. This could be the experimental evidence for the Aizenman-Wehr theorem about the quenched impurities changing the order of discontinuous transition.
As a guideline for experimental tests of the ideal glass transition (Random Pinning Glass Transition, RPGT) that shall be induced in a system by randomly pinning particles, we performed first-principle computations within the Hypernetted chain approximation and numerical simulations of a Hard Sphere model of glass-former. We obtain confirmation of the expected enhancement of glassy behaviour under the procedure of random pinning, which consists in freezing a fraction $c$ of randomly chosen particles in the positions they have in an equilibrium configuration. We present the analytical phase diagram as a function of $c$ and of the packing fraction $phi$, showing a line of RPGT ending in a critical point. We also obtain first microscopic results on cooperative length-scales characterizing medium-range amorphous order in Hard Spere glasses and indirect quantitative information on a key thermodynamic quantity defined in proximity of ideal glass transitions, the amorphous surface tension. Finally, we present numerical results of pair correlation functions able to differentiate the liquid and the glass phases, as predicted by the analytic computations.
We test a hypothesis for the origin of dynamical heterogeneity in slowly relaxing systems, namely that it emerges from soft (Goldstone) modes associated with a broken continuous symmetry under time reparametrizations. We do this by constructing coarse grained observables and decomposing the fluctuations of these observables into transverse components, which are associated with the postulated time-fluctuation soft modes, and a longitudinal component, which represents the rest of the fluctuations. Our test is performed on data obtained in simulations of four models of structural glasses. As the hypothesis predicts, we find that the time reparametrization fluctuations become increasingly dominant as temperature is lowered and timescales are increased. More specifically, the ratio between the strengths of the transverse fluctuations and the longitudinal fluctuations grows as a function of the dynamical susceptibility, chi 4, which represents the strength of the dynamical heterogeneity; and the correlation volumes for the transverse fluctuations are approximately proportional to those for the dynamical heterogeneity, while the correlation volumes for the longitudinal fluctuations remain small and approximately constant.
Quantum criticality in iron pnictides involves both the nematic and antiferromagnetic degrees of freedom, but the relationship between the two types of fluctuations has yet to be clarified. Here we study this problem in the presence of a small external uniaxial potential, which breaks the $C_4$-symmetry in the B$_{1g}$ sector. We establish an identity that connects the spin excitation anisotropy, which is the difference of the dynamical spin susceptibilities at $vec{Q}_1=left(pi,0right)$ and $vec{Q}_2=left(0,piright)$, with the dynamical magnetic susceptibility and static nematic susceptibility. Using this identity, we introduce a scaling procedure to determine the dynamical nematic susceptibility in the quantum critical regime, and illustrate the procedure for the case of the optimally Ni-doped BaFe$_2$As$_2$[Y. Song textit{et al.}, Phys. Rev. B 92, 180504 (2015)]. The implications of our results for the overall physics of the iron-based superconductors are discussed.
We reconsider the problem of the critical behavior of a three-dimensional $O(m)$ symmetric magnetic system in the presence of random anisotropy disorder with a generic trimodal random axis distribution. By introducing $n$ replicas to average over disorder it can be coarse-grained to a $phi^{4}$-theory with $m times n$ component order parameter and five coupling constants taken in the limit of $n to 0$. Using a field theory approach we renormalize the model to two-loop order and calculate the $beta$-functions within the $varepsilon$ expansion and directly in three dimensions. We analyze the corresponding renormalization group flows with the help of the Pade-Borel resummation technique. We show that there is no stable fixed point accessible from physical initial conditions whose existence was argued in the previous studies. This may indicate an absence of a long-range ordered phase in the presence of random anisotropy disorder with a generic random axis distribution.
We present a full description of the nonergodic properties of wavefunctions on random graphs without boundary in the localized and critical regimes of the Anderson transition. We find that they are characterized by two critical localization lengths: the largest one describes localization along rare branches and diverges with a critical exponent $ u_parallel=1$ at the transition. The second length, which describes localization along typical branches, reaches at the transition a finite universal value (which depends only on the connectivity of the graph), with a singularity controlled by a new critical exponent $ u_perp=1/2$. We show numerically that these two localization lengths control the finite-size scaling properties of key observables: wavefunction moments, correlation functions and spectral statistics. Our results are identical to the theoretical predictions for the typical localization length in the many-body localization transition, with the same critical exponent. This strongly suggests that the two transitions are in the same universality class and that our techniques could be directly applied in this context.