No Arabic abstract
The process of relaxation of a system of particles interacting with long-range forces is relevant to many areas of Physics. For obvious reasons, in Stellar Dynamics much attention has been paid to the case of 1/r^2 force law. However, recently the interest in alternative gravities emerged, and significant differences with respect to Newtonian gravity have been found in relaxation phenomena. Here we begin to explore this matter further, by using a numerical model of spherical shells interacting with an 1/r^alpha force law obeying the superposition principle. We find that the virialization and phase-mixing times depend on the exponent alpha, with small values of alpha corresponding to longer relaxation times, similarly to what happens when comparing for N-body simulations in classical gravity and in Modified Newtonian Dynamics.
10,000 simulations of 1000-particle realisations of the same cluster are computed by direct force summation. Over three crossing times the original Poisson noise is amplified more than tenfold by self-gravity. The clusters fundamental dipole mode is strongly excited by Poisson noise, and this mode makes a major contribution to driving diffusion of stars in energy. The diffusive flow through action space is computed for the simulations and compared with the predictions of both local-scattering theory and the Balescu-Lenard (BL) equation. The predictions of local-scattering theory are qualitatively wrong because the latter neglects self-gravity. These results imply that local-scattering theory is of little value. Future work on cluster evolution should employ either N-body simulation or the BL equation. However, significant code development will be required to make use of the BL equation practicable.
The study of critical properties of systems with long-range interactions has attracted in the last decades a continuing interest and motivated the development of several analytical and numerical techniques, in particular in connection with spin models. From the point of view of the investigation of their criticality, a special role is played by systems in which the interactions are long-range enough that their universality class is different from the short-range case and, nevertheless, they maintain the extensivity of thermodynamical quantities. Such interactions are often called weak long-range. In this paper we focus on the study of the critical behaviour of spin systems with weak-long range couplings using renormalization group, and we review their remarkable properties. For the sake of clarity and self-consistency, we start from the classical $O(N)$ spin models and we then move to quantum spin systems.
We study two dimensional stripe forming systems with competing repulsive interactions decaying as $r^{-alpha}$. We derive an effective Hamiltonian with a short range part and a generalized dipolar interaction which depends on the exponent $alpha$. An approximate map of this model to a known XY model with dipolar interactions allows us to conclude that, for $alpha <2$ long range orientational order of stripes can exist in two dimensions, and establish the universality class of the models. When $alpha geq 2$ no long-range order is possible, but a phase transition in the KT universality class is still present. These two different critical scenarios should be observed in experimentally relevant two dimensional systems like electronic liquids ($alpha=1$) and dipolar magnetic films ($alpha=3$). Results from Langevin simulations of Coulomb and dipolar systems give support to the theoretical results.
For a model long-range interacting system of classical Heisenberg spins, we study how fluctuations, such as those arising from having a finite system size or through interaction with the environment, affect the dynamical process of relaxation to Boltzmann-Gibbs equilibrium. Under deterministic spin precessional dynamics, we unveil the full range of quasistationary behavior observed during relaxation to equilibrium, whereby the system is trapped in nonequilibrium states for times that diverge with the system size. The corresponding stochastic dynamics, modeling interaction with the environment and constructed in the spirit of the stochastic Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation, however shows a fast relaxation to equilibrium on a size-independent timescale and no signature of quasistationarity, provided the noise is strong enough. Similar fast relaxation is also seen in Glauber Monte Carlo dynamics of the model, thus establishing the ubiquity of what has been reported earlier in particle dynamics (hence distinct from the spin dynamics considered here) of long-range interacting systems, that quasistationarity observed in deterministic dynamics is washed away by fluctuations induced through contact with the environment.
Using state of the art Hybrid-Monte-Carlo (HMC) simulations we carry out an unbiased study of the competition between spin-density wave (SDW) and charge-density wave (CDW) order in suspended graphene. We determine that the realistic inter-electron potential of graphene must be scaled up by a factor of roughly 1.6 to induce a semimetal-SDW phase transition and find no evidence for CDW order. A study of critical properties suggests that the universality class of the three-dimensional chiral Heisenberg Gross-Neveu model with two fermion flavors, predicted by renormalization group studies and strong-coupling expansion, is unlikely to apply to this transition. We propose that our results instead favor an interpretation in terms of a conformal phase transition. In addition, we describe a variant of the HMC algorithm which uses exact fermionic forces during molecular dynamics trajectories and avoids the use of pseudofermions. Compared to standard HMC this allows for a substantial increase of the integrator stepsize while achieving comparable Metropolis acceptance rates and leads to a sizable performance improvement.