No Arabic abstract
The disordered microphases that develop in the high-temperature phase of systems with competing short-range attractive and long-range repulsive (SALR) interactions result in a rich array of distinct morphologies, such as cluster, void cluster and percolated (gel-like) fluids. These different structural regimes exhibit complex relaxation dynamics with significant relaxation heterogeneity and slowdown. The overall relationship between structure and configurational sampling schemes, however, remains largely uncharted. In this article, the disordered microphases of a schematic SALR model are thoroughly characterized, and structural relaxation functions adapted to each regime are devised. The sampling efficiency of various advanced Monte Carlo (MC) sampling schemes--Virtual-Move (VMMC), Aggregation-Volume-Bias (AVBMC) and Event-Chain (ECMC)--is then assessed. A combination of VMMC and AVBMC is found to be computationally most efficient for cluster fluids and ECMC to become relatively more efficient as density increases. These results offer a complete description of the equilibrium disordered phase of a simple microphase former as well as dynamical benchmarks for other sampling schemes.
Differentiable programming has emerged as a key programming paradigm empowering rapid developments of deep learning while its applications to important computational methods such as Monte Carlo remain largely unexplored. Here we present the general theory enabling infinite-order automatic differentiation on expectations computed by Monte Carlo with unnormalized probability distributions, which we call automatic differentiable Monte Carlo (ADMC). By implementing ADMC algorithms on computational graphs, one can also leverage state-of-the-art machine learning frameworks and techniques to traditional Monte Carlo applications in statistics and physics. We illustrate the versatility of ADMC by showing some applications: fast search of phase transitions and accurately finding ground states of interacting many-body models in two dimensions. ADMC paves a promising way to innovate Monte Carlo in various aspects to achieve higher accuracy and efficiency, e.g. easing or solving the sign problem of quantum many-body models through ADMC.
Disordered biopolymer gels have striking mechanical properties including strong nonlinearities. In the case of athermal gels (such as collagen-I) the nonlinearity has long been associated with a crossover from a bending dominated to a stretching dominated regime of elasticity. The physics of this crossover is related to the existence of a central-force isostatic point and to the fact that for most gels the bending modulus is small. This crossover induces scaling behavior for the elastic moduli. In particular, for linear elasticity such a scaling law has been demonstrated [Broedersz et al. Nature Physics, 2011 7, 983]. In this work we generalize the scaling to the nonlinear regime with a two-parameter scaling law involving three critical exponents. We test the scaling law numerically for two disordered lattice models, and find a good scaling collapse for the shear modulus in both the linear and nonlinear regimes. We compute all the critical exponents for the two lattice models and discuss the applicability of our results to real systems.
We propose a minimal generalization of the celebrated Markov-Chain Monte Carlo algorithm which allows for an arbitrary number of configurations to be visited at every Monte Carlo step. This is advantageous when a parallel computing machine is available, or when many biased configurations can be evaluated at little additional computational cost. As an example of the former case, we report a significant reduction of the thermalization time for the paradigmatic Sherrington-Kirkpatrick spin-glass model. For the latter case, we show that, by leveraging on the exponential number of biased configurations automatically computed by Diagrammatic Monte Carlo, we can speed up computations in the Fermi-Hubbard model by two orders of magnitude.
We investigate the quantum phase transitions of a disordered nanowire from superconducting to metallic behavior by employing extensive Monte Carlo simulations. To this end, we map the quantum action onto a (1+1)-dimensional classical XY model with long-range interactions in imaginary time. We then analyze the finite-size scaling behavior of the order parameter susceptibility, the correlation time, the superfluid density, and the compressibility. We find strong numerical evidence for the critical behavior to be of infinite-randomness type and to belong to the random transverse-field Ising universality class, as predicted by a recent strong disorder renormalization group calculation.
Due to their unique structural and mechanical properties, randomly-crosslinked polymer networks play an important role in many different fields, ranging from cellular biology to industrial processes. In order to elucidate how these properties are controlled by the physical details of the network (textit{e.g.} chain-length and end-to-end distributions), we generate disordered phantom networks with different crosslinker concentrations $C$ and initial density $rho_{rm init}$ and evaluate their elastic properties. We find that the shear modulus computed at the same strand concentration for networks with the same $C$, which determines the number of chains and the chain-length distribution, depends strongly on the preparation protocol of the network, here controlled by $rho_{rm init}$. We rationalise this dependence by employing a generic stress-strain relation for polymer networks that does not rely on the specific form of the polymer end-to-end distance distribution. We find that the shear modulus of the networks is a non-monotonic function of the density of elastically-active strands, and that this behaviour has a purely entropic origin. Our results show that if short chains are abundant, as it is always the case for randomly-crosslinked polymer networks, the knowledge of the exact chain conformation distribution is essential for predicting correctly the elastic properties. Finally, we apply our theoretical approach to published experimental data, qualitatively confirming our interpretations.