No Arabic abstract
It is generally believed that, in the thermodynamic limit, the microcanonical description as a function of energy coincides with the canonical description as a function of temperature. However, various examples of systems for which the microcanonical and canonical ensembles are not equivalent have been identified. A complete theory of this intriguing phenomenon is still missing. Here we show that ensemble nonequivalence can manifest itself also in random graphs with topological constraints. We find that, while graphs with a given number of links are ensemble-equivalent, graphs with a given degree sequence are not. This result holds irrespective of whether the energy is nonadditive (as in unipartite graphs) or additive (as in bipartite graphs). In contrast with previous expectations, our results show that: (1) physically, nonequivalence can be induced by an extensive number of local constraints, and not necessarily by long-range interactions or nonadditivity; (2) mathematically, nonquivalence is determined by a different large-deviation behaviour of microcanonical and canonical probabilities for a single microstate, and not necessarily for almost all microstates. The latter criterion, which is entirely local, is not restricted to networks and holds in general.
The asymptotic (non)equivalence of canonical and microcanonical ensembles, describing systems with soft and hard constraints respectively, is a central concept in statistical physics. Traditionally, the breakdown of ensemble equivalence (EE) has been associated with nonvanishing relative canonical fluctuations of the constraints in the thermodynamic limit. Recently, it has been reformulated in terms of a nonvanishing relative entropy density between microcanonical and canonical probabilities. The earliest observations of EE violation required phase transitions or long-range interactions. More recent research on binary networks found that an extensive number of local constraints can also break EE, even in absence of phase transitions. Here we study for the first time ensemble nonequivalence in weighted networks with local constraints. Unlike their binary counterparts, these networks can undergo a form of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) producing a core-periphery structure where a finite fraction of the link weights concentrates in the core. This phenomenon creates a unique setting where local constraints coexist with a phase transition. We find surviving relative fluctuations only in the condensed phase, as in more traditional BEC settings. However, we also find a non-vanishing relative entropy density for all temperatures, signalling a breakdown of EE due to the presence of an extensive number of constraints, irrespective of BEC. Therefore, in presence of extensively many local constraints, vanishing relative fluctuations no longer guarantee EE.
Extending recent work on stress fluctuations in complex fluids and amorphous solids we describe in general terms the ensemble average $v(Delta t)$ and the standard deviation $delta v(Delta t)$ of the variance $v[mathbf{x}]$ of time series $mathbf{x}$ of a stochastic process $x(t)$ measured over a finite sampling time $Delta t$. Assuming a stationary, Gaussian and ergodic process, $delta v$ is given by a functional $delta v_G[h]$ of the autocorrelation function $h(t)$. $delta v(Delta t)$ is shown to become large and similar to $v(Delta t)$ if $Delta t$ corresponds to a fast relaxation process. Albeit $delta v = delta v_G[h]$ does not hold in general for non-ergodic systems, the deviations for common systems with many microstates are merely finite-size corrections. Various issues are illustrated for shear-stress fluctuations in simple coarse-grained model systems.
We investigate the general property of the energy fluctuation for the canonical ensemble in Tsallis statistics and the ensemble equivalence. By taking the ideal gas and the non-interacting harmonic oscillators as examples, we show that, when the particle number N is large enough, the relative fluctuation of the energy is proportional to 1/N in the new statistics, instead of square root of 1/N in Boltzmann-Gibbs statistics. Thus the equivalence between the microcanonical and the canonical ensemble still holds in Tsallis statistics.
We present a framework in which the transition between a many-body localised (MBL) phase and an ergodic one is symmetry breaking. We consider random Floquet spin chains, expressing their averaged spectral form factor (SFF) as a function of time in terms of a transfer matrix that acts in the space direction. The SFF is determined by the leading eigenvalues of this transfer matrix. In the MBL phase the leading eigenvalue is unique, as in a symmetry-unbroken phase, while in the ergodic phase and at late times the leading eigenvalues are asymptotically degenerate, as in a system with degenerate symmetry-breaking phases. We identify the broken symmetry of the transfer matrix, introduce a local order parameter for the transition, and show that the associated correlation functions are long-ranged only in the ergodic phase.
It is suggested that many-body quantum chaos appears as spontaneous symmetry breaking of unitarity in interacting quantum many-body systems. It has been shown that many-body level statistics, probed by the spectral form factor (SFF) defined as $K(beta,t)=langle|{rm Tr}, exp(-beta H + itH)|^2rangle$, is dominated by a diffusion-type mode in a field theory analysis. The key finding of this paper is that the unitary $beta=0$ case is different from the $beta to 0^+$ limit, with the latter leading to a finite mass of these modes due to interactions. This mass suppresses a rapid exponential ramp in the SFF, which is responsible for the fast emergence of Poisson statistics in the non-interacting case, and gives rise to a non-trivial random matrix structure of many-body levels. The interaction-induced mass in the SFF shares similarities with the dephasing rate in the theory of weak localization and the Lyapunov exponent of the out-of-time-ordered correlators.