No Arabic abstract
We study pressurised self-avoiding ring polymers in two dimensions using Monte Carlo simulations, scaling arguments and Flory-type theories, through models which generalise the model of Leibler, Singh and Fisher [Phys. Rev. Lett. Vol. 59, 1989 (1987)]. We demonstrate the existence of a thermodynamic phase transition at a non-zero scaled pressure $tilde{p}$, where $tilde{p} = Np/4pi$, with the number of monomers $N rightarrow infty$ and the pressure $p rightarrow 0$, keeping $tilde{p}$ constant, in a class of such models. This transition is driven by bond energetics and can be either continuous or discontinuous. It can be interpreted as a shape transition in which the ring polymer takes the shape, above the critical pressure, of a regular N-gon whose sides scale smoothly with pressure, while staying unfaceted below this critical pressure. In the general case, we argue that the transition is replaced by a sharp crossover. The area, however, scales with $N^2$ for all positive $p$ in all such models, consistent with earlier scaling theories.
Active matter has been intensely studied for its wealth of intriguing properties such as collective motion, motility-induced phase separation (MIPS), and giant fluctuations away from criticality. However, the precise connection of active materials with their equilibrium counterparts has remained unclear. For two-dimensional (2D) systems, this is also because the experimental and theoretical understanding of the liquid, hexatic, and solid equilibrium phases and their phase transitions is very recent. Here, we use self-propelled particles with inverse-power-law repulsions (but without alignment interactions) as a minimal model for 2D active materials. A kinetic Monte Carlo (MC) algorithm allows us to map out the complete quantitative phase diagram. We demonstrate that the active system preserves all equilibrium phases, and that phase transitions are shifted to higher densities as a function of activity. The two-step melting scenario is maintained. At high activity, a critical point opens up a gas-liquid MIPS region. We expect that the independent appearance of two-step melting and of MIPS is generic for a large class of two-dimensional active systems.
The density crossover scaling of various thermodynamic properties of solutions and melts of self-avoiding and highly flexible polymer chains without chain intersections confined to strictly two dimensions is investigated by means of molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations of a standard coarse-grained bead-spring model. In the semidilute regime we confirm over an order of magnitude of the monomer density rho the expected power-law scaling for the interaction energy between different chains e_intersimrho^(21/8), the total pressure Psimrho^3 and the dimensionless compressibility gT=lim(q->0)(S(q)sim1/rho^2). Various elastic contributions associated to the affine and non-affine response to an infinitesimal strain are analyzed as functions of density and sampling time. We show how the size xi(rho) of the semidilute blob may be determined experimentally from the total monomer structure factor S(q) characterizing the compressibility of the solution at a given wavevector q. We comment briefly on finite persistence length effects.
We examine the dispersion of Brownian particles in a symmetric two dimensional channel, this classical problem has been widely studied in the literature using the so called Fick-Jacobs approximation and its various improvements. Most studies rely on the reduction to an effective one dimensional diffusion equation, here we drive an explicit formula for the diffusion constant which avoids this reduction. Using this formula the effective diffusion constant can be evaluated numerically without resorting to Brownian simulations. In addition a perturbation theory can be developed in $varepsilon = h_0/L$ where $h_0$ is the characteristic channel height and $L$ the period. This perturbation theory confirms the results of Kalinay and Percus (Phys. Rev. E 74, 041203 (2006)), based on the reduction, to one dimensional diffusion are exact at least to ${cal O}(varepsilon^6)$. Furthermore, we show how the Kalinay and Percus pseudo-linear approximation can be straightforwardly recovered. The approach proposed here can also be exploited to yield exact results an appropriate limit $varepsilon to infty$, we show that here the diffusion constant remains finite and show how the result can be obtained with a simple physical argument. Moreover we show that the correction to the effective diffusion constant is of order $1/varepsilon$ and remarkably has a some universal characteristics. Numerically we compare the analytical results obtained with exact numerical calculations for a number of interesting channel geometries.
The classical Heisenberg model in two spatial dimensions constitutes one of the most paradigmatic spin models, taking an important role in statistical and condensed matter physics to understand magnetism. Still, despite its paradigmatic character and the widely accepted ban of a (continuous) spontaneous symmetry breaking, controversies remain whether the model exhibits a phase transition at finite temperature. Importantly, the model can be interpreted as a lattice discretization of the $O(3)$ non-linear sigma model in $1+1$ dimensions, one of the simplest quantum field theories encompassing crucial features of celebrated higher-dimensional ones (like quantum chromodynamics in $3+1$ dimensions), namely the phenomenon of asymptotic freedom. This should also exclude finite-temperature transitions, but lattice effects might play a significant role in correcting the mainstream picture. In this work, we make use of state-of-the-art tensor network approaches, representing the classical partition function in the thermodynamic limit over a large range of temperatures, to comprehensively explore the correlation structure for Gibbs states. By implementing an $SU(2)$ symmetry in our two-dimensional tensor network contraction scheme, we are able to handle very large effective bond dimensions of the environment up to $chi_E^text{eff} sim 1500$, a feature that is crucial in detecting phase transitions. With decreasing temperatures, we find a rapidly diverging correlation length, whose behaviour is apparently compatible with the two main contradictory hypotheses known in the literature, namely a finite-$T$ transition and asymptotic freedom, though with a slight preference for the second.
The phase diagram of the prototypical two-dimensional Lennard-Jones system, while extensively investigated, is still debated. In particular, there are controversial results in the literature as concern the existence of the hexatic phase and the melting scenario. Here, we study the phase behaviour of 2D LJ particles via large-scale numerical simulations. We demonstrate that at high temperature, when the attraction in the potential plays a minor role, melting occurs via a continuous solid-hexatic transition followed by a first-order hexatic-fluid transition. As the temperature decreases, the density range where the hexatic phase occurs shrinks so that at low-temperature melting occurs via a first-order liquid-solid transition. The temperature where the hexatic phase disappears is well above the liquid-gas critical temperature. The evolution of the density of topological defects confirms this scenario.