No Arabic abstract
The gauge glass model offers an interesting example of a randomly frustrated system with a continuous O(2) symmetry. In two dimensions, the existence of a glass phase at low temperatures has long been disputed among numerical studies. To resolve this controversy, we examine the behavior of vortices whose movement generates phase slips that destroy phase rigidity at large distances. Detailed analytical and numerical studies of the corresponding Coulomb gas problem in a random potential establish that the ground state, with a finite density of vortices, is polarizable with a scale-dependent dielectric susceptibility. Screening by vortex/antivortex pairs of arbitrarily large size is present to eliminate the logarithmic divergence of the Coulomb energy of a single vortex. The observed power-law decay of the Coulomb interaction between vortices with distance in the ground state leads to a power-law divergence of the glass correlation length with temperature $T$. It is argued that free vortices possess a bound excitation energy and a nonzero diffusion constant at any $T>0$.
The zero-temperature critical state of the two-dimensional gauge glass model is investigated. It is found that low-energy vortex configurations afford a simple description in terms of gapless, weakly interacting vortex-antivortex pair excitations. A linear dielectric screening calculation is presented in a renormalization group setting that yields a power-law decay of spin-wave stiffness with distance. These properties are in agreement with low-temperature specific heat and spin-glass susceptibility data obtained in large-scale multi-canonical Monte Carlo simulations.
We investigate the dielectric response in the glass-electret state of two dipolar glass-forming materials. This unusual polar glassy state of matter is produced when a dipolar liquid is supercooled under the influence of a high electric dc field, which leads to partial orientational order of the molecules carrying a dipole moment. Investigation of the prepared glass-electrets by using low-field dielectric spectroscopy reveals a clear modification of their dielectric response in the regime of the Johari-Goldstein beta-relaxation, pointing to a small but significant increase of its relaxation strength compared to the normal glass. We discuss the implications of this finding for the still controversial microscopic interpretation of the Johari-Goldstein relaxation, an inherent property of glassy matter.
The statics-dynamics correspondence in spin glasses relate non-equilibrium results on large samples (the experimental realm) with equilibrium quantities computed on small systems (the typical arena for theoretical computations). Here we employ statics-dynamics equivalence to study the Ising spin-glass critical behavior in three dimensions. By means of Monte Carlo simulation, we follow the growth of the coherence length (the size of the glassy domains), on lattices too large to be thermalized. Thanks to the large coherence lengths we reach, we are able to obtain accurate results in excellent agreement with the best available equilibrium computations. To do so, we need to clarify the several physical meanings of the dynamic exponent close to the critical temperature.
As a guideline for experimental tests of the ideal glass transition (Random Pinning Glass Transition, RPGT) that shall be induced in a system by randomly pinning particles, we performed first-principle computations within the Hypernetted chain approximation and numerical simulations of a Hard Sphere model of glass-former. We obtain confirmation of the expected enhancement of glassy behaviour under the procedure of random pinning, which consists in freezing a fraction $c$ of randomly chosen particles in the positions they have in an equilibrium configuration. We present the analytical phase diagram as a function of $c$ and of the packing fraction $phi$, showing a line of RPGT ending in a critical point. We also obtain first microscopic results on cooperative length-scales characterizing medium-range amorphous order in Hard Spere glasses and indirect quantitative information on a key thermodynamic quantity defined in proximity of ideal glass transitions, the amorphous surface tension. Finally, we present numerical results of pair correlation functions able to differentiate the liquid and the glass phases, as predicted by the analytic computations.
We carry out a detailed deuterium NMR study of local nematic ordering in polydomain nematic elastomers. This system has a close analogy to the random-anisotropy spin glass. We find that, in spite of the quadrupolar nematic symmetry in 3-dimensions requiring a first-order transition, the order parameter in the quenched ``nematic glass emerges via a continuous phase transition. In addition, by a careful analysis of the NMR line shape, we deduce that the local director fluctuations grow in a critical manner around the transition point. This could be the experimental evidence for the Aizenman-Wehr theorem about the quenched impurities changing the order of discontinuous transition.