No Arabic abstract
In this report we present a systematic study of the magnonic modes in the disordered Fe$_{0.5}$Co$_{0.5}$ alloy based on the Heisenberg Hamiltonian using two complementary approaches. In order to account for substitutional disorder, on the one hand we directly average the transverse magnetic susceptibility in real space over different disorder configurations and on the other hand we use the coherent potential approximation (CPA). While the method of direct averaging is numerically exact, it is computationally expensive and limited by the maximal size of the supercell which can be simulated on a computer. On the contrary the CPA does not suffer from this drawback and yields a cheap numerical scheme. Therefore, we additionally compare the results of these two approaches and show that the CPA gives very good results for most of the magnetic properties, including the magnon energies and the spatial shape of the eigenmodes. However, it turns out that while reproducing the general trend, the CPA systematically underestimates the disorder induced damping of the magnons. This provides evidence that the physics of impurity scattering in this system is governed by non-local effects missing in the CPA. Finally, we study the real space eigenmodes of the system, including their spatial shapes, and analyze their temperature dependence within the random phase approximation.
We study theoretically the influence of the temperature and disorder on the spin wave spectrum of the magnonic crystal Fe$_{1-c}$Co$_{c}$. Our formalism is based on the analysis of a Heisenberg Hamiltonian by means of the wave vector and frequency dependent transverse magnetic susceptibility. The exchange integrals entering the model are obtained from the emph{ab initio} magnetic force theorem. The coherent potential approximation is employed to treat the disorder and random phase approximation in order to account for the softening of the magnon spectrum at finite temperatures. The alloy turns out to exhibit many advantageous properties for spintronic applications. Apart from high Curie temperature, its magnonic bandgap remains stable at elevated temperatures and is largely unaffected by the disorder. We pay particular attention to the attenuation of magnons introduced by the alloying. The damping turns out to be a non-monotonic function of the impurity concentration due to the non-trivial evolution of the value of exchange integrals with the Co concentration. The disorder induced damping of magnons is estimated to be much smaller than their Landau damping.
Crystal structure prediction is a central problem of theoretical crystallography and materials science, which until mid-2000s was considered intractable. Several methods, based on either energy landscape exploration$^{1,2}$ or, more commonly, global optimization$^{3-8}$, largely solved this problem and enabled fully non-empirical computational materials discovery$^{9,10}$. A major shortcoming is that, to avoid expensive calculations of the entropy, crystal structure prediction was done at zero Kelvin and searched for the global minimum of the enthalpy, rather than free energy. As a consequence, high-temperature phases (especially those which are not quenchable to zero temperature) could be missed. Here we develop an accurate and affordable solution, enabling crystal structure prediction at finite temperatures. Structure relaxation and fully anharmonic free energy calculations are done by molecular dynamics with a force field (which can be anything from a parametric force field for simpler cases to a trained on-the-fly machine learning interatomic potential), the errors of which are corrected using thermodynamic perturbation theory to yield accurate ab initio results. We test the accuracy of this method on metals (probing the P-T phase diagram of Al and Fe), a refractory intermetallide (WB), and a significantly ionic ceramic compound (Earth-forming silicate MgSiO3 at pressures and temperatures of the Earths lower mantle). We find that the hcp-phase of aluminum has a wider stability field than previously thought, and the temperature-induced transition $alpha$-$beta$ in WB occurs at 2789 K. It is also found that iron has hcp structure at conditions of the Earths inner core, and the much debated (and important for constraining Earths thermal structure) Clapeyron slope of the post-perovskite phase transition in MgSiO3 is 5.88 MPa/K.
We have measured directly the thermal conductance between electrons and phonons in ultra-thin Hf and Ti films at millikelvin temperatures. The experimental data indicate that electron-phonon coupling in these films is significantly suppressed by disorder. The electron cooling time $tau_epsilon$ follows the $T^{-4}$-dependence with a record-long value $tau_epsilon=25ms$ at $T=0.04K$. The hot-electron detectors of far-infrared radiation, fabricated from such films, are expected to have a very high sensitivity. The noise equivalent power of a detector with the area $1mum^2$ would be $(2-3)10^{-20}W/Hz^{1/2}$, which is two orders of magnitude smaller than that of the state-of-the-art bolometers.
We demonstrate that a weak disorder in atomic positions introduces spatially localized optical modes in a dense three-dimensional ensemble of immobile two-level atoms arranged in a diamond lattice and coupled by the electromagnetic field. The frequencies of the localized modes concentrate near band edges of the unperturbed lattice. Finite-size scaling analysis of the percentiles of Thouless conductance reveals two mobility edges and yields an estimation $ u = 0.8$--1.1 for the critical exponent of the localization length. The localized modes disappear when the disorder becomes too strong and the system starts to resemble a fully disordered one where all modes are extended.
We study phase transitions in a two dimensional weakly interacting Bose gas in a random potential at finite temperatures. We identify superfluid, normal fluid, and insulator phases and construct the phase diagram. At T=0 one has a tricritical point where the three phases coexist. The truncation of the energy distribution at the trap barrier, which is a generic phenomenon in cold atom systems, limits the growth of the localization length and in contrast to the thermodynamic limit the insulator phase is present at any temperature.