We study AC demagnetization in frustrated arrays of single-domain ferromagnetic islands, exhaustively resolving every (Ising-like) magnetic degree of freedom in the systems. Although the net moment of the arrays is brought near zero by a protocol with sufficiently small step size, the final magnetostatic energy of the demagnetized array continues to decrease for finer-stepped protocols and does not extrapolate to the ground state energy. The resulting complex disordered magnetic state can be described by a maximum-entropy ensemble constrained to satisfy just nearest-neighbor correlations.
We report a study of demagnetization protocols for frustrated arrays of interacting single domain permalloy nanomagnets by rotating the arrays in a changing magnetic field. The most effective demagnetization is achieved by not only stepping the field strength down while the sample is rotating, but by combining each field step with an alternation in the field direction. By contrast, linearly decreasing the field strength or stepping the field down without alternating the field direction leaves the arrays with a larger remanent magnetic moment. These results suggest that non-monotonic variations in field magnitude around and below the coercive field are important for the demagnetization process.
We use the cell model to justify the use of a lattice model to study the ideal glass transition. Based on empirical evidence and several previous exact calculations, we hypothesize that there exists an energy gap between the lowest possible energy of a glass (the ideal glass IG) and the crystal (CR). The gap is due to the presence of strongly correlated excitations with respect to the ideal CR; thus, one can treat IG as a highly defective crystal. We argue that an excitation in IG requires energy that increases logarithmically with the size of the system; as a consequence, we prove that IG must emerge at a positive temperature T_{K}. We propose an antiferromagnetic Ising model on a lattice to model liquid-crystal transition in a simple fluid or a binary mixture, which is then solved exactly on a recursive (Husimi) lattice to investigate the ideal glass transition, the nature of defects in the supercooled liquid and CR analytically, and the effects of competing interactions on the glass transition. The calculation establishes the gap. The lattice entropy of the supercooled liquid vanishes at a positive temperature T_{K}>0, where IG emerges but where CR has a positive entropy. The macrostate IG is in a particular and unique disordered microstate at T_{K}, just as the ideal CR is in a perfectly ordered microstate at absolute zero. This explains why it is possible for CR to have a higher entropy at T_{K} than IG. The demonstration here of an entropy crisis in monatomic systems along with previously known results strongly suggests that the entropy crisis first noted by Kauzmann and demonstrated by Gibbs and DiMarzio in long polymers appears to be ubiquitous in all supercooled liquids.
Formation energy of the sigma-phase in the Fe-V alloy system, Delta E, was computed in the full compositional range of its occurrence (34 < x < 60) using the electronic band structure calculations by means of the KKR method. Delta E-values were found to strongly depend on the Fe concentration, also its variation with different site occupancies was characteristic of a given lattice site. Calculated magnetic and configuration entropy contributions were used to determine sublattice occupancies for various compositions and temperatures. The results agree well with those obtained from neutron diffraction measurements.
A major challenge in the modeling of ionically conducting glasses is to understand how the large variety of possible chemical compositions and specific structural properties influence ionic transport quantities. Here we revisit and extend a theoretical approach for alkali borophosphate glasses, where changes of conductivity activation energies with the borate to phosphate mixing ratio are related to modifications of the ionic site energy landscape. The landscape modifications are caused by varying amounts of different units forming the glassy network, which lead to spatial redistributions of the counter-charges of the mobile alkali ions. Theoretical approaches are presented to calculate variations of both network former unit concentrations and activation energies with the glass composition. Applications to several alkali borophosphate glasses show good agreement with experimental data.
Structure factors for Cax/2AlxSi1-xO2 glasses (x=0,0.25,0.5,0.67) extended to a wave vector of magnitude Q= 40 1/A have been obtained by high-energy x-ray diffraction. For the first time, it is possible to resolve the contributions of Si-O, Al-O and Ca-O coordination polyhedra to the experimental atomic pair distribution functions (PDF). It has been found that both Si and Al are four-fold coordinated and so participate in a continuous tetrahedral network at low values of x. The number of network breaking defects in the form of non-bridging oxygens (NBOs) increases slowly with x until x=0.5 (NBOs ~ 10% at x=0.5). By x=0.67 the network breaking defects become significant as evidenced by the significant drop in the average coordination number of Si. By contrast, Al-O tetrahedra remain free of NBOs and fully integrated in the Al/Si-O network for all values of x. Calcium maintains a rather uniform coordination sphere of approximately 5 oxygen atoms for all values of x. The results suggest that not only Si/Al-O tetrahedra but Ca-O polyhedra, too, play a role in determining the glassy structure.