No Arabic abstract
We observed asymmetric critical slowing down and asymmetric dynamical scaling exponent in the superheating and supercooling kinetic processes during the thermally-induced metal-insulator transition of MnNiSn based heusler alloy. During the transition to the insulator phase, the critical-like features get enhanced compared to the transition back to the metal phase. These experimental findings suggest that the metastable phase in the cooling branch of hysteresis has approached close to the spinodal instability. On the other hand, the extended disorder, generated over and above the intrinsic crystal defects during heating, triggers the excess heterogeneous nucleation before reaching the spinodal point. Zero temperature random field Ising model (ZTRFIM) simulation, inscribed for the athermal martensitic transitions, support the argument that the disorder smears the spinodal instabilities as the correlation length is bounded by the average distance between the disorder points.
We study the dynamical aspects of a statistical-mechanical model for fracture of heterogeneous media: the fiber bundle model with various interaction range. Although the model does not include any thermal activation process, the system exhibits creep-like behaviors under a constant load being slightly above the critical value. These creep-like behaviors comprise three stages: in the primary and tertiary stages, the strain rate exhibits power-law behaviors with time, which are well described by the Omori-Utsu and the inverse Omori laws, respectively, although the exponents are larger than those typically observed in experiments. A characteristic time that defines the onset of power-law behavior in the Omori-Utsu law is found to decrease with the strength of disorder in the system. The analytical solution, which agrees with the above numerical results, is obtained for the mean-field limit. Beyond the mean-field limit, the exponent for the Omori-Utsu law tends to be even larger but decreases with the disorder in the system. Increasing the spatial range of interactions, this exponent is found to be independent of disorder and to converge to the mean-field value. In contrast, the inverse Omori law remains independent of the spatial range of interaction and the disorder strength.
We introduce a perturbation expansion for athermal systems that allows an exact determination of displacement fields away from the crystalline state as a response to disorder. We show that the displacement fields in energy minimized configurations of particles interacting through central potentials with microscopic disorder, can be obtained as a series expansion in the strength of the disorder. We introduce a hierarchy of force balance equations that allows an order-by-order determination of the displacement fields, with the solutions at lower orders providing sources for the higher order solutions. This allows the simultaneous force balance equations to be solved, within a hierarchical perturbation expansion to arbitrary accuracy. We present exact results for an isotropic defect introduced into the crystalline ground state at linear order and second order in our expansion. We show that the displacement fields produced by the defect display interesting self-similar properties at every order. We derive a $|delta r| sim 1/r$ and $|delta f| sim 1/r^2$ decay for the displacement fields and excess forces at large distances $r$ away from the defect. Finally we derive non-linear corrections introduced by the interactions between defects at second order in our expansion. We verify our exact results with displacement fields obtained from energy minimized configurations of soft disks.
A phase diagram for a one dimensional fiber bundle model is constructed with a continuous variation in two parameters guiding dynamics of the model: strength of disorder and system size. We monitor the successive events of fiber rupture in order to understand the spatial correlation associated with it. We observe three distinct regions with increasing disorder strength. (I) Nucleation - a crack propagates from a particular nucleus with very high spatial correlation and causes global failure; (II) Avalanche - the rupture events show precursors activities with a number of bursts. (III) Percolation - the rupture events are spatially uncorrelated like a percolation process. As the size of the bundle is increased, it favors the nucleating failure. In the thermodynamic limit, we only observe a nucleating failure unless the disorder strength is infinitely high.
We study numerically the roughening properties of an interface in a two-dimensional Ising model with either random bonds or random fields, which are representative of universality classes where disorder acts only on the interface or also away from it, in the bulk. The dynamical structure factor shows a rich crossover pattern from the form of a pure system at large wavevectors $k$, to a different behavior, typical of the kind of disorder, at smaller $k$s. For the random field model a second crossover is observed from the typical behavior of a system where disorder is only effective on the surface, as the random bond model, to the truly large scale behavior, where bulk-disorder is important, that is observed at the smallest wavevectors.
We consider a system of spins on the sites of a three-dimensional pyrochlore lattice of corner-sharing tetrahedra interacting with a predominant effective $xy$ exchange. In particular, we investigate the selection of a long-range ordered state with broken discrete symmetry induced by thermal fluctuations near the critical region. At the standard mean-field theory (s-MFT) level, in a region of the parameter space of this Hamiltonian that we refer to as $Gamma_5$ region, the ordered state possesses an accidental $U(1)$ degeneracy. In this paper, we show that fluctuations beyond s-MFT lift this degeneracy by selecting one of two states (so-called $psi_2$ and $psi_3$) from the degenerate manifold, thus exposing a certain form of order-by-disorder (ObD). We analytically explore this selection at the microscopic level and close to criticality by elaborating upon and using an extension of the so-called TAP method, originally developed by Thouless, Anderson and Palmer to study the effect of fluctuations in spin glasses. We also use a single-tetrahedron cluster-mean-field theory (c-MFT) to explore over what minimal length scale fluctuations can lift the degeneracy. We find the phase diagrams obtained by these two methods to be somewhat different since c-MFT only includes the shortest-range fluctuations. General symmetry arguments used to construct a Ginzburg-Landau theory to lowest order in the order parameters predict that a weak magnetic moment, $m_z$, along the local $langle 111 rangle$ (${hat z}$) direction is generically induced for a system ordering into a $psi_2$ state, but not so for $psi_3$ ordering. Both E-TAP and c-MFT calculations confirm this weak fluctuation-induced $m_z$ moment. Using a Ginzburg-Landau theory, we discuss the phenomenology of multiple phase transitions below the paramagnetic phase transition and within the $Gamma_5$ long-range ordered phase.