No Arabic abstract
We discovered in simulations of sliding coaxial nanotubes an unanticipated example of dynamical symmetry breaking taking place at the nanoscale. While both nanotubes are perfectly left-right symmetric and nonchiral, a nonzero angular momentum of phonon origin appears spontaneously at a series of critical sliding velocities, in correspondence with large peaks of the sliding friction. The non-linear equations governing this phenomenon resemble the rotational instability of a forced string. However, several new elements, exquisitely nano appear here, with the crucial involvement of Umklapp and of sliding nanofriction.
The Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) in magnetic systems stabilizes spin textures with preferred chirality, applicable to next-generation memory and computing architectures. In perpendicularly magnetized heavy-metal/ferromagnet films, the interfacial DMI originating from structural inversion asymmetry and strong spin-orbit coupling favors chiral Neel-type domain walls (DWs) whose energetics and mobility remain at issue. Here, we characterize a new effect in which domains expand unidirectionally in response to a combination of out-of-plane and in-plane magnetic fields, with the growth direction controlled by the in-plane field strength. These growth directionalities and symmetries with applied fields cannot be understood from static treatments alone. We theoretically demonstrate that perpendicular field torques stabilize steady-state magnetization profiles highly asymmetric in elastic energy, resulting in a dynamic symmetry breaking consistent with the experimental findings. This phenomenon sheds light on the mechanisms governing the dynamics of Neel-type DWs and expands the utility of field-driven DW motion to probe and control chiral DWs.
We report on the linear optical properties of the chiral magnet Cu2OSeO3, specifically associated with the absence of inversion symmetry, the chiral crystallographic structure, and magnetic order. Through spectroscopic ellipsometry, we observe local crystal-field excitations below the charge-transfer gap. These crystal-field excitations are optically allowed due to the lack of inversion symmetry at the Cu sites. Optical polarization rotation measurements were used to study the structural chirality and magnetic order. The temperature dependence of the natural optical rotation, originating in the chiral crystal structure, provides evidence for a finite magneto-electric effect in the helimagnetic phase. We find a large magneto-optical susceptibility on the order of V(540nm)~10^4 rad/(T*m) in the helimagnetic phase and a maximum Faraday rotation of ~165deg/mm in the ferrimagnetic phase. The large value of V can be explained by considering spin cluster formation and the relative ease of domain reorientation in this metamagnetic material. The magneto-optical activity allows us to map the magnetic phase diagram, including the skyrmion lattice phase. In addition to this, we probe and discuss the nature of the various magnetic phase transitions in Cu2OSeO3.
In this paper we study how dynamical chiral symmetry breaking is affected by nonzero chiral chemical potential in Dirac semimetals. To perform this study we applied lattice quantum Monte Carlo simulations of Dirac semimetals. Within lattice simulation we calculated the chiral condensate for various fermion masses, the chiral chemical potentials and effective coupling constants. For all parameters under consideration we have found that the chiral condensate is enhanced by chiral chemical potential. Thus our results confirms that in Dirac semimetals the chiral chemical potential plays a role of the catalyst of the dynamical chiral symmetry breaking.
We establish that QED3 can possess a critical number of flavours, N_f^c, associated with dynamical chiral symmetry breaking if, and only if, the fermion wave function renormalisation and photon vacuum polarisation are homogeneous functions at infrared momenta when the fermion mass function vanishes. The Ward identity entails that the fermion-photon vertex possesses the same property and ensures a simple relationship between the homogeneity degrees of each of these functions. Simple models for the photon vacuum polarisation and fermion-photon vertex are used to illustrate these observations. The existence and value of N_f^c are contingent upon the precise form of the vertex but any discussion of gauge dependence is moot. We introduce an order parameter for confinement. Chiral symmetry restoration and deconfinement are coincident owing to an abrupt change in the analytic properties of the fermion propagator when a nonzero scalar self-energy becomes insupportable.
We have discovered that the influence of the surrounding nanotubes in a bundle is similar to that of a liquid having surface tension equal to the surface energy of the nanotubes. This surprising behaviour is confirmed by the calculation of the self-collapse diameters of nanotubes in a bundle. Other systems, such as peapods, fullerites, are similarly treated, including the effect of the presence of a solvent. Finally, we have evaluated the strength and toughness of the nanotube bundle, with or without collapsed nanotubes, assuming a sliding failure.