We have performed depth dependent muon spin rotation/relaxation studies of the dynamics of single layer films of {it Au}Fe and {it Cu}Mn spin glasses as a function of thickness and of its behavior as a function of distance from the vacuum interface (5-70 nm). A significant reduction in the muon spin relaxation rate as a function of temperature with respect to the bulk material is observed when the muons are stopped near (5-10 nm) the surface of the sample. A similar reduction is observed for the whole sample if the thickness is reduced to e.g. 20 nm and less. This reflects an increased impurity spin dynamics (incomplete freezing) close to the surface although the freezing temperature is only modestly affected by the dimensional reduction.
Spin glasses and many-body localization (MBL) are prime examples of ergodicity breaking, yet their physical origin is quite different: the former phase arises due to rugged classical energy landscape, while the latter is a quantum-interference effect. Here we study quantum dynamics of an isolated 1d spin-glass under application of a transverse field. At high energy densities, the system is ergodic, relaxing via resonance avalanche mechanism, that is also responsible for the destruction of MBL in non-glassy systems with power-law interactions. At low energy densities, the interaction-induced fields obtain a power-law soft gap, making the resonance avalanche mechanism inefficient. This leads to the persistence of the spin-glass order, as demonstrated by resonance analysis and by numerical studies. A small fraction of resonant spins forms a thermalizing system with long-range entanglement, making this regime distinct from the conventional MBL. The model considered can be realized in systems of trapped ions, opening the door to investigating slow quantum dynamics induced by glassiness.
Point contact tunneling (PCT) and low energy muon spin rotation (LE-muSR) are used to probe, on the same samples, the surface superconducting properties of micrometer thick niobium films deposited onto copper substrates using different sputtereing techniques: diode, dc magnetron (dcMS) and HIPIMS. The combined results are compared to radio-frequency tests performances of RF cavities made with the same processes. Degraded surface superconducting properties are found to yield lower quality factors and stronger Q slope. In addition, both techniques find evidence for surface paramagnetism on all samples and particularly on Nb films prepared by HIPIMS.
Numerical simulations on Ising Spin Glasses show that spin glass transitions do not obey the usual universality rules which hold at canonical second order transitions. On the other hand the dynamics at the approach to the transition appear to take up a universal form for all spin glasses. The implications for the fundamental physics of transitions in complex systems are addressed.
Spin Glasses (SG) are paradigmatic models for physical, computer science, biological and social systems. The problem of studying the dynamics for SG models is NP hard, i.e., no algorithm solves it in polynomial time. Here we implement the optical simulation of a SG, exploiting the N segments of a wavefront shaping device to play the role of the spin variables, combining the interference at downstream of a scattering material to implement the random couplings between the spins (the J ij matrix) and measuring the light intensity on a number P of targets to retrieve the energy of the system. By implementing a plain Metropolis algorithm, we are able to simulate the spin model dynamics, while the degree of complexity of the potential energy landscape and the region of phase diagram explored is user-defined acting on the ratio the P/N = alpha. We study experimentally, numerically and analytically this peculiar system displaying a paramagnetic, a ferromagnetic and a SG phase, and we demonstrate that the transition temperature T g to the glassy phase from the paramagnetic phase grows with alpha. With respect to standard in silico approach, in the optical SG interaction terms are realized simultaneously when the independent light rays interferes at the target screen, enabling inherently parallel measurements of the energy, rather than computations scaling with N as in purely in silico simulations.
The spin glass behavior near zero temperature is a complicated matter. To get an easier access to the spin glass order parameter $Q(x)$ and, at the same time, keep track of $Q_{ab}$, its matrix aspect, and hence of the Hessian controlling stability, we investigate an expansion of the replicated free energy functional around its ``spherical approximation. This expansion is obtained by introducing a constraint-field and a (double) Legendre Transform expressed in terms of spin correlators and constraint-field correlators. The spherical approximation has the spin fluctuations treated with a global constraint and the expansion of the Legendre Transformed functional brings them closer and closer to the Ising local constraint. In this paper we examine the first contribution of the systematic corrections to the spherical starting point.