No Arabic abstract
The statistical mechanics of a two-state Ising spin-glass model with finite random connectivity, in which each site is connected to a finite number of other sites, is extended in this work within the replica technique to study the phase transitions in the three-state Ghatak-Sherrington (or random Blume-Capel) model of a spin glass with a crystal field term. The replica symmetry ansatz for the order function is expressed in terms of a two-dimensional effective-field distribution which is determined numerically by means of a population dynamics procedure. Phase diagrams are obtained exhibiting phase boundaries which have a reentrance with both a continuous and a genuine first-order transition with a discontinuity in the entropy. This may be seen as inverse freezing, which has been studied extensively lately, as a process either with or without exchange of latent heat.
The Ising model, with short-range interactions between constituents, is a basic mathematical model in statistical mechanics. It has been widely used to describe collective phenomena such as order-disorder phase transitions in various physical, biological, economical, and social systems. However, it was proven that spontaneous phase transitions do not exist in the one-dimensional Ising models. Besides low dimensionality, frustration is the other well-known suppressor of phase transitions. Here I show that surprisingly, a strongly frustrated one-dimensional two-leg ladder Ising model can exhibit a marginal finite-temperature phase transition. It features a large latent heat, a sharp peak in specific heat, and unconventional order parameters, which classify the transition as involving an entropy-favored intermediate-temperature ordered state and further unveil a crossover to an exotic normal state in which frustration effectively decouples the two strongly interacted legs in a counterintuitive non-mean-field way. These exact results expose a mathematical structure that has not appeared before in phase-transition problems, and shed new light on our understanding of phase transitions and the dynamical actions of frustration. Applications of this model and its mechanisms to various systems with extensions to consider higher dimensions, quantum characters, or external fields, etc. are anticipated and briefly discussed---with insights into the puzzling phenomena of strange strong frustration and intermediate-temperature orders such as the Bozin-Billinge orbital-degeneracy-lifting recently discovered in real materials.
The continuous ferromagnetic-paramagnetic phase transition in the two-dimensional Ising model has already been excessively studied by conventional canonical statistical analysis in the past. We use the recently developed generalized microcanonical inflection-point analysis method to investigate the least-sensitive inflection points of the microcanonical entropy and its derivatives to identify transition signals. Surprisingly, this method reveals that there are potentially two additional transitions for the Ising system besides the critical transition.
We perform numerical simulations, including parallel tempering, on the Potts glass model with binary random quenched couplings using the JANUS application-oriented computer. We find and characterize a glassy transition, estimating the location of the transition and the value of the critical exponents. We show that there is no ferromagnetic transition in a large temperature range around the glassy critical temperature. We also compare our results with those obtained recently on the random permutation Potts glass.
Using tempered Monte Carlo simulations, we study the the spin-glass phase of dense packings of Ising dipoles pointing along random axes. We consider systems of L^3 dipoles (a) placed on the sites of a simple cubic lattice with lattice constant $d$, (b) placed at the center of randomly closed packed spheres of diameter d that occupy a 64% of the volume. For both cases we find an equilibrium spin-glass phase below a temperature T_sg. We compute the spin-glass overlap parameter q and their associated correlation length xi_L. From the variation of xi_L with T and L we determine T_sg for both systems. In the spin-glass phase, we find (a) <q> decreases algebraically with L, and (b) xi_L/L does not diverge as L increases. At very low temperatures we find comb-like distributions of q that are sample-dependent. We find that the fraction of samples with cross-overlap spikes higher than a certain value as well as the average width of the spikes are size independent quantities. All these results are consistent with a quasi-long-range order in the spin-glass phase, as found previously for very diluted dipolar systems.
Using Monte Carlo simulations, finite-size effects of interfacial properties in the rough phase of the Ising on a cubic lattice with $Ltimes Ltimes R$ sites are studied. In particular, magnetization profiles perpendicular to the flat interface of size L$times$R are studied, with $L$ being considerably larger than $R$, in the (pre)critical temperature range. The resulting $R$-dependences are compared with predictions of the standard capillary-wave theory, in the Gaussian approximation, and with a field theory based on effective string actions, for $L$=$infty$.