No Arabic abstract
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.
We study the one-dimensional sine-Gordon model as a prototype of roughening phenomena. In spite of the fact that it has been recently proven that this model can not have any phase transition [J. A. Cuesta and A. Sanchez, J. Phys. A 35, 2373 (2002)], Langevin as well as Monte Carlo simulations strongly suggest the existence of a finite temperature separating a flat from a rough phase. We explain this result by means of the transfer operator formalism and show as a consequence that sine-Gordon lattices of any practically achievable size will exhibit this apparent phase transition at unexpectedly large temperatures.
We revisit the slow-bond (SB) problem of the one-dimensional (1D) totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP) with modified hopping rates. In the original SB problem, it turns out that a local defect is always relevant to the system as jamming, so that phase separation occurs in the 1D TASEP. However, crossover scaling behaviors are also observed as finite-size effects. In order to check if the SB can be irrelevant to the system with particle interaction, we employ the condensation concept in the zero-range process. The hopping rate in the modified TASEP depends on the interaction parameter and the distance up to the nearest particle in the moving direction, besides the SB factor. In particular, we focus on the interplay of jamming and condensation in the current-density relation of 1D driven flow. Based on mean-field calculations, we present the fundamental diagram and the phase diagram of the modified SB problem, which are numerically checked. Finally, we discuss how the condensation of holes suppresses the jamming of particles and vice versa, where the partially-condensed phase is the most interesting, compared to that in the original SB problem.
In the two-dimensional Ising model weak random surface field is predicted to be a marginally irrelevant perturbation at the critical point. We study this question by extensive Monte Carlo simulations for various strength of disorder. The calculated effective (temperature or size dependent) critical exponents fit with the field-theoretical results and can be interpreted in terms of the predicted logarithmic corrections to the pure systems critical behaviour.
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.
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.