No Arabic abstract
We study AKLT models on locally tree-like lattices of fixed connectivity and find that they exhibit a variety of ground states depending upon the spin, coordination and global (graph) topology. We find a) quantum paramagnetic or valence bond solid ground states, b) critical and ordered Neel states on bipartite infinite Cayley trees and c) critical and ordered quantum vector spin glass states on random graphs of fixed connectivity. We argue, in consonance with a previous analysis, that all phases are characterized by gaps to local excitations. The spin glass states we report arise from random long ranged loops which frustrate Neel ordering despite the lack of randomness in the coupling strengths.
Across many scientific and engineering disciplines, it is important to consider how much the output of a given system changes due to perturbations of the input. Here, we study the robustness of the ground states of $pm J$ spin glasses on random graphs to flips of the interactions. For a sparse graph, a dense graph, and the fully connected Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model, we find relatively large sets of interactions that generate the same ground state. These sets can themselves be analyzed as sub-graphs of the interaction domain, and we compute many of their topological properties. In particular, we find that the robustness of these sub-graphs is much higher than one would expect from a random model. Most notably, it scales in the same logarithmic way with the size of the sub-graph as has been found in genotype-phenotype maps for RNA secondary structure folding, protein quaternary structure, gene regulatory networks, as well as for models for genetic programming. The similarity between these disparate systems suggests that this scaling may have a more universal origin.
We study the phase ordering dynamics of a two dimensional model colloidal solid using molecular dynamics simulations. The colloid particles interact with each other with a Hamaker potential modified by the presence of equatorial patches of attractive and negative regions. The total interaction potential between two such colloids is, therefore, strongly directional and has three-fold symmetry. Working in the canonical ensemble, we determine the tentative phase diagram in the density-temperature plane which features three distinct crystalline ground states viz, a low density honeycomb solid followed by a rectangular solid at higher density, which eventually transforms to a close packed triangular structure as the density is increased further. We show that when cooled rapidly from the liquid phase along isochores, the system undergoes a transition to a strong glass while slow cooling gives rise to crystalline phases. We claim that geometrical frustration arising from the presence of many crystalline ground states causes glassy ordering and dynamics in this solid. Our results may be easily confirmed by suitable experiments on patchy colloids.
The classical simulation of quantum systems typically requires exponential resources. Recently, the introduction of a machine learning-based wavefunction ansatz has led to the ability to solve the quantum many-body problem in regimes that had previously been intractable for existing exact numerical methods. Here, we demonstrate the utility of the variational representation of quantum states based on artificial neural networks for performing quantum optimization. We show empirically that this methodology achieves high approximation ratio solutions with polynomial classical computing resources for a range of instances of the Maximum Cut (MaxCut) problem whose solutions have been encoded into the ground state of quantum many-body systems up to and including 256 qubits.
The ground-state energy E_0 of a spin glass is an example of an extreme statistic. We consider the large deviations of this energy for a variety of models when the number of spins N goes to infinity. In most cases, the behavior can be understood qualitatively, in particular with the help of semi-analytical results for hierarchical lattices. Particular attention is paid to the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model; after comparing to the Tracy-Widom distribution which follows from the spherical approximation, we find that the large deviations give rise to non-trivial scaling laws with N.
We investigate the spin-glass transition in the strongly frustrated well-known compound $Fe_2TiO_5$. A remarkable feature of this transition, widely discussed in the literature, is its anisotropic properties: the transition manifests itself in the magnetic susceptibly only along one axis, despite $Fe^{3+}$ $d^5$ spins having no orbital component. We demonstrate, using neutron scattering, that below the transition temperature $T_g = 55 K$, $Fe_2TiO_5$ develops nanoscale surfboard shaped antiferromagnetic regions in which the $Fe^{3+}$ spins are aligned perpendicular to the axis which exhibits freezing. We show that the glass transition may result from the freezing of transverse fluctuations of the magnetization of these regions and we develop a mean-field replica theory of such a transition, revealing a type of magnetic van der Waals effect.