No Arabic abstract
We study crystal melting in two-dimensional antiferromagnets, by analyzing the statistical mechanics of the six-state clock model on a lattice in which defects (dislocations and disclinations) are allowed to appear. We show that the elementary dislocations bind to fractional magnetic vortices. We compute the phase diagram by mapping the system into a Coulomb gas model. Surprisingly, we find that in the limit of dominant magnetic interactions, antiferromagnetism can survive even in the hexatic and liquid phases. The ensuing molten antiferromagnets are topologically ordered and are characterized by spontaneous symmetry breaking of a non-local order parameter.
We study colloidal particles with chemically inhomogeneous surfaces suspended in a critical binary liquid mixture. The inhomogeneous particle surface is composed of patches with alternating adsorption preferences for the two components of the binary solvent. By describing the binary liquid mixture emph{at} its consolute point in terms of the critical Ising model we exploit its conformal invariance in two spatial dimension. This allows us to determine exactly the universal profiles of the order parameter, the energy density, and the stress tensor as well as some of their correlation functions around a single particle for various shapes and configurations of the surface patches. The formalism encompasses several interesting configurations, including Janus particles of circular and needle shapes with dipolar symmetry and a circular particle with quadrupolar symmetry. From these single-particle properties we construct the so-called small particle operator expansion (SPOE), which enables us to obtain asymptotically exact expressions for the position- and orientation-dependent critical Casimir interactions of the particles with distant objects, such as another particle or the confining walls of a half plane, strip, or wedge, with various boundary conditions for the order parameter. In several cases we compare the interactions at large distances with the ones at close distance (but still large on the molecular scale). We also compare our analytical results for two Janus particles with recent simulation data.
Constructing systems that exhibit time-scales much longer than those of the underlying components, as well as emergent dynamical and collective behavior, is a key goal in fields such as synthetic biology and materials self-assembly. Inspiration often comes from living systems, in which robust global behavior prevails despite the stochasticity of the underlying processes. Here, we present two-dimensional stochastic networks that consist of minimal motifs representing out-of-equilibrium cycles at the molecular scale and support chiral edge currents in configuration space. These currents arise in the topological phase due to the bulk-boundary correspondence and dominate the system dynamics in the steady-state, further proving robust to defects or blockages. We demonstrate the topological properties of these networks and their uniquely non-Hermitian features such as exceptional points and vorticity, while characterizing the edge state localization. As these emergent edge currents are associated to macroscopic timescales and length scales, simply tuning a small number of parameters enables varied dynamical phenomena including a global clock, dynamical growth and shrinkage, and synchronization. Our construction provides a novel topological formalism for stochastic systems and fresh insights into non-Hermitian physics, paving the way for the prediction of robust dynamical states in new classical and quantum platforms.
We study the hopping transport of a quantum particle through finite, randomly diluted percolation clusters in two dimensions. We investigate how the transmission coefficient T behaves as a function of the energy E of the particle, the occupation concentration p of the disordered cluster, the size of the underlying lattice, and the type of connection chosen between the cluster and the input and output leads. We investigate both the point-to-point contacts and the busbar type of connection. For highly diluted clusters we find the behavior of the transmission to be independent of the type of connection. As the amount of dilution is decreased we find sharp variations in transmission. These variations are the remnants of the resonances at the ordered, zero-dilution, limit. For particles with energies within 0.25 <= E <= 1.75 (relative to the hopping integral) and with underlying square lattices of size 20x20, the configurations begin transmitting near p_a = 0.60 with T against p curves following a common pattern as the amount of dilution is decreased. Near p_b = 0.90 this pattern is broken and the transmission begins to vary with the energy. In the asymptotic limit of very large clusters we find the systems to be totally reflecting except when the amount of dilution is very low and when the particle has energy close to a resonance value at the ordered limit or when the particle has energy at the middle of the band.
Valleytronics is rapidly emerging as an exciting area of basic and applied research. In two dimensional systems, valley polarisation can dramatically modify physical properties through electron-electron interactions as demonstrated by such phenomena as the fractional quantum Hall effect and the metal-insulator transition. Here, we address the electrons spin alignment in a magnetic field in silicon-on-insulator quantum wells under valley polarisation. In stark contrast to expectations from a non-interacting model, we show experimentally that less magnetic field can be required to fully spin polarise a valley-polarised system than a valley-degenerate one. Furthermore, we show that these observations are quantitatively described by parameter free ab initio quantum Monte Carlo simulations. We interpret the results as a manifestation of the greater stability of the spin and valley degenerate system against ferromagnetic instability and Wigner crystalisation which in turn suggests the existence of a new strongly correlated electron liquid at low electron densities.
We consider the phase diagram of self-avoiding walks (SAW) on the simple cubic lattice subject to surface and bulk interactions, modeling an adsorbing surface and variable solvent quality for a polymer in dilute solution, respectively. We simulate SAWs at specific interaction strengths to focus on locating certain transitions and their critical behavior. By collating these new results with previous results we sketch the complete phase diagram and show how the adsorption transition is affected by changing the bulk interaction strength. This expands on recent work considering how adsorption is affected by solvent quality. We demonstrate that changes in the adsorption crossover exponent coincide with phase boundaries.