arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to N. Read.
It was recently argued by Kemp et al. that HALEU (high-assay low-enriched uranium, or uranium enriched up to 19.75\%) can conceivably be used to produce a nuclear weapon and on this basis civilian enrichment limits should be lowered to 10% or 12%. We find their argument unconvincing in several respects.
We consider short-range classical spin glasses, or other disordered systems, consisting of Ising spins. For a low-temperature Gibbs state in infinite size in such a system, for given random bonds, it is controversial whether its decomposition into pure states will be trivial or non-trivial. We undertake a general study of the overall structure of this problem, based on metastates, which are essential to prove the existence of a thermodynamic limit. A metastate is a probability distribution on Gibbs states, for given disorder, that satisfies certain covariance properties. First, we prove that any metastate can be decomposed as a mixture of indecomposable metastates, and that all Gibbs states drawn from an indecomposable metastate are alike macroscopically. Next, we consider stochastic stability of a metastate under random perturbations of the disorder, and prove that any metastate is stochastically stable. Using related methods and older results, we prove that if the pure-state decomposition of any Gibbs states drawn from an indecomposable metastate is countably infinite, then the weights in the decomposition follow a Poisson-Dirichlet distribution with a fixed value of the single parameter describing such distributions, and also that if the overlap takes a finite number of values, then the pure states are organized as an ultrametric space, as in $k$-RSB. Dynamically-frozen states play a role in the analysis of Gibbs states drawn from a metastate, either as states or as parts of states. Using a mapping into real Hilbert space, we prove further results about Gibbs states, and classify them into six types. Metastate-average states are studied, and can be related to states arising dynamically at long times after a quench from high temperature, under some conditions.
We consider short-range Ising spin glasses in equilibrium at infinite system size, and prove that, for fixed bond realization and a given Gibbs state drawn from a suitable metastate, each translation- and locally-invariant function (for example, self-overlaps) of a single pure state in the decomposition of the Gibbs state takes the same value for all the pure states in that Gibbs state. We describe several significant applications to spin glasses.
In this review we define and discuss metastates, mathematical tools with general applicability to thermodynamic systems which are particularly useful when working with disordered or inhomogeneous short-range systems. In an infinite such system there may be many competing thermodynamic states, which can lead to the absence of a straightforward thermodynamic limit of local correlation functions. A metastate is a probability measure on the infinite-volume thermodynamic states that restores the connection between those states and the Gibbs states observed in finite volumes. After introducing the basic metastates and discussing their properties, we present possible scenarios for the spin-glass phase and discuss what the metastate approach reveals about how replica symmetry breaking would manifest itself in finite-dimensional short-range spin glasses.
In classical finite-range spin systems, especially those with disorder such as spin glasses, a low-temperature Gibbs state may be a mixture of a number of pure or ordered states; the complexity of the Gibbs state has been defined in the past roughly as the logarithm of this number, assuming the question is meaningful in a finite system. As non-trivial mixtures of pure states do not occur in finite size, in a recent paper [Phys. Rev. E 101, 042114 (2020)] H\"oller and the author introduced a definition of the complexity of an infinite-size Gibbs state as the mutual information between the pure state and the spin configuration in a finite region, and applied this also within a metastate construction. (A metastate is a probability distribution on Gibbs states.) They found an upper bound on the complexity for models of Ising spins in which each spin interacts with only a finite number of others, in terms of the surface area of the region, for all $T\geq 0$. In the present paper, the complexity of a metastate is defined likewise in terms of the mutual information between the Gibbs state and the spin configuration. Upper bounds are found for each of these complexities for general finite-range (i.e. short- or long-range, in a sense we define) mixed $p$-spin interactions of discrete or continuous spins (such as $m$-vector models), but only for $T>0$. For short-range models, the bound reduces to the surface area. For long-range interactions, the definition of a Gibbs state has to be modified, and for these models we also prove that the states obtained within the metastate constructions are Gibbs states under the modified definition. All results are valid for a large class of disorder distributions.
Understanding the low-temperature pure state structure of spin glasses remains an open problem in the field of statistical mechanics of disordered systems. Here we study Monte Carlo dynamics, performing simulations of the growth of correlations following a quench from infinite temperature to a temperature well below the spin-glass transition temperature $T_c$ for a one-dimensional Ising spin glass model with diluted long-range interactions. In this model, the probability $P_{ij}$ that an edge $\{i,j\}$ has nonvanishing interaction falls as a power-law with chord distance, $P_{ij}\propto1/R_{ij}^{2\sigma}$, and we study a range of values of $\sigma$ with $1/2<\sigma<1$. We consider a correlation function $C_{4}(r,t)$. A dynamic correlation length that shows power-law growth with time $\xi(t)\propto t^{1/z}$ can be identified in the data and, for large time $t$, $C_{4}(r,t)$ decays as a power law $r^{-\alpha_d}$ with distance $r$ when $r\ll \xi(t)$. The calculation can be interpreted in terms of the maturation metastate averaged Gibbs state, or MMAS, and the decay exponent $\alpha_d$ differentiates between a trivial MMAS ($\alpha_d=0$), as expected in the droplet picture of spin glasses, and a nontrivial MMAS ($\alpha_d\ne 0$), as in the replica-symmetry-breaking (RSB) or chaotic pairs pictures. We find nonzero $\alpha_d$ even in the regime $\sigma >2/3$ which corresponds to short-range systems below six dimensions. For $\sigma < 2/3$, the decay exponent $\alpha_d$ follows the RSB prediction for the decay exponent $\alpha_s = 3 - 4 \sigma$ of the static metastate, consistent with a conjectured statics-dynamics relation, while it approaches $\alpha_d=1-\sigma$ in the regime $2/3<\sigma<1$; however, it deviates from both lines in the vicinity of $\sigma=2/3$.
The de Almeida-Thouless (AT) line is the phase boundary in the temperature--magnetic field plane of an Ising spin glass at which a continuous (i.e. second-order) transition from a paramagnet to a replica-symmetry-breaking (RSB) phase occurs, according to mean-field theory. Here, using field-theoretic perturbative renormalization group methods on the Bray-Roberts reduced Landau-Ginzburg-type theory for a short-range Ising spin glass in space of dimension $d$, we show that at nonzero magnetic field the nature of the corresponding transition is modified as follows: a) for $d-6$ small and positive, with increasing field on the AT line first, the ordered phase just below the transition becomes the so-called one-step RSB, instead of the full RSB that occurs in mean-field theory; the transition on the AT line remains continuous with a diverging correlation length. Then at a higher field, a tricritical point separates the latter transition from a quasi-first-order one, that is one at which the correlation length does not diverge, and there is a jump in part of the order parameter, but no latent heat. The location of the tricritical point tends to zero as $d\to6^+$; b) for $d\leq 6$, we argue that the quasi-first-order transition could persist down to arbitrarily small nonzero fields, with a transition to full RSB still expected at lower temperature. Whenever the quasi-first-order transition occurs, it is at a higher temperature than the AT transition would be for the same field, preempting it as the temperature is lowered. We also draw attention to the similarity of the "dynamically-frozen" state, which occurs at temperatures just above the quasi-first-order transition, and the "metastate-average state" of the one-step RSB phase, and discuss the issue of the number of pure states in either.
We consider the space of $n \times n$ non-Hermitian Hamiltonians ($n=2$, $3$, . . .) that are equivalent to a single $n\times n$ Jordan block. We focus on adiabatic transport around a closed path (i.e. a loop) within this space, in the limit as the time-scale $T=1/\varepsilon$ taken to traverse the loop tends to infinity. We show that, for a certain class of loops and a choice of initial state, the state returns to itself and acquires a complex phase that is $\varepsilon^{-1}$ times an expansion in powers of $\varepsilon^{1/n}$. The exponential of the term of $n$th order (which is equivalent to the "geometric" or Berry phase modulo $2\pi$), is thus independent of $\varepsilon$ as $\varepsilon\to0$; it depends only on the homotopy class of the loop and is an integer power of $e^{2\pi i/n}$. One of the conditions under which these results hold is that the state being transported is, for all points on the loop, that of slowest decay.
The de Almeida-Thouless (AT) line in Ising spin glasses is the phase boundary in the temperature $T$ and magnetic field $h$ plane below which replica symmetry is broken. Using perturbative renormalization group (RG) methods, we show that when the dimension $d$ of space is just above $6$ there is a multicritical point (MCP) on the AT line, which separates a low-field regime, in which the critical exponents have mean-field values, from a high-field regime where the RG flows run away to infinite coupling strength; as $d$ approaches $6$ from above, the location of the MCP approaches the zero-field critical point exponentially in $1/(d-6)$. Thus on the AT line perturbation theory for the critical properties breaks down at sufficiently large magnetic field even above $6$ dimensions, as well as for all non-zero fields when $d\leq 6$ as was known previously. We calculate the exponents at the MCP to first order in $\varepsilon=d-6>0$. The fate of the MCP as $d$ increases from just above 6 to infinity is not known.
We consider the one-dimensional model of a spin glass with independent Gaussian-distributed random interactions, that have mean zero and variance $1/|i-j|^{2\sigma}$, between the spins at sites $i$ and $j$ for all $i\neq j$. It is known that, for $\sigma>1$, there is no phase transition at any non-zero temperature in this model. We prove rigorously that, for $\sigma>3/2$, any Newman-Stein metastate for the ground states (i.e.\ the frequencies with which distinct ground states are observed in finite size samples in the limit of infinite size, for given disorder) is trivial and unique. In other words, for given disorder and asymptotically at large sizes, the same ground state, or its global spin flip, is obtained (almost) always. The proof consists of two parts: one is a theorem (based on one by Newman and Stein for short-range two-dimensional models), valid for all $\sigma>1$, that establishes triviality under a convergence hypothesis on something similar to the energies of domain walls, and the other (based on older results for the one-dimensional model) establishes that the hypothesis is true for $\sigma>3/2$. In addition, we derive heuristic scaling arguments and rigorous exponent inequalities which tend to support the validity of the hypothesis under broader conditions. The constructions of various metastates are extended to all values $\sigma>1/2$. Triviality of the metastate in bond-diluted power-law models for $\sigma>1$ is proved directly.
In a tight-binding lattice model with $n$ orbitals (single-particle states) per site, Wannier functions are $n$-component vector functions of position that fall off rapidly away from some location, and such that a set of them in some sense span all states in a given energy band or set of bands; compactly-supported Wannier functions are such functions that vanish outside a bounded region. They arise not only in band theory, but also in connection with tensor-network states for non-interacting fermion systems, and for flat-band Hamiltonians with strictly short-range hopping matrix elements. In earlier work, it was proved that for general complex band structures (vector bundles) or general complex Hamiltonians---that is, class A in the ten-fold classification of Hamiltonians and band structures---a set of compactly-supported Wannier functions can span the vector bundle only if the bundle is topologically trivial, in any dimension $d$ of space, even when use of an overcomplete set of such functions is permitted. This implied that, for a free-fermion tensor network state with a non-trivial bundle in class A, any strictly short-range parent Hamiltonian must be gapless. Here, this result is extended to all ten symmetry classes of band structures without additional crystallographic symmetries, with the result that in general the non-trivial bundles that can arise from compactly-supported Wannier-type functions are those that may possess, in each of $d$ directions, the non-trivial winding that can occur in the same symmetry class in one dimension, but nothing else. The results are obtained from a very natural usage of algebraic $K$-theory, based on a ring of polynomials in $e^{\pm ik_x}$, $e^{\pm ik_y}$, . . . , which occur as entries in the Fourier-transformed Wannier functions.
In a recent paper by S. Moroz, C. Hoyos, and L. Radzihovsky [Phys. Rev. B 91, 195409 (2015)], it is claimed that the conductivity at low frequency $\omega$ and small wavevector $q$ along the edge of a quantum Hall (QH) system (that possesses Galilean invariance along the edge) contains a universal contribution of order $q^2$ that is determined by the orbital spin per particle in the bulk of the system, or alternatively by the shift of the ground state. (These quantities are known to be related to the Hall viscosity of the bulk.) In this Comment we calculate the real part of the conductivity, integrated over $\omega$, in this regime for the edge of a system of non-interacting electrons filling either the lowest, or the lowest $\nu$ ($\nu=1$, $2$, . . .), Landau level(s), and show that the $q^2$ term is non-universal and depends on details of the confining potential at the edge. In the special case of a linear potential, a form similar to the prediction is obtained, it is possible that this corrected form of the prediction may also hold for fractional QH states in systems with special forms of interactions between electrons.
Even if a noninteracting system has zero Berry curvature everywhere in the Brillouin zone, it is possible to introduce interactions that stabilise a fractional Chern insulator. These interactions necessarily break time-reversal symmetry (either spontaneously or explicitly) and have the effect of altering the underlying band structure. We outline a number of ways in which this may be achieved, and show how similar interactions may also be used to create a (time-reversal symmetric) fractional topological insulator. While our approach is rigorous in the limit of long range interactions, we show numerically that even for short range interactions a fractional Chern insulator can be stabilised in a band with zero Berry curvature.
We show that the topological central charge of a topological phase can be directly accessed from the ground-state wavefunctions for a system on a surface as a Berry curvature produced by adiabatic variation of the metric on the surface, at least up to addition of another topological invariant that arises in some cases. For trial wavefunctions that are given by conformal blocks (chiral correlation functions) in a conformal field theory (CFT), we carry out this calculation analytically, using the hypothesis of generalized screening. The topological central charge is found to be that of the underlying CFT used in the construction, as expected. The calculation makes use of the gravitational anomaly in the chiral CFT. It is also shown that the Hall conductivity can be obtained in an analogous way from the U($1$) gauge anomaly.
The periodic sl(2|1) alternating spin chain encodes (some of) the properties of hulls of percolation clusters, and is described in the continuum limit by a logarithmic conformal field theory (LCFT) at central charge c=0. This theory corresponds to the strong coupling regime of a sigma model on the complex projective superspace $\mathbb{CP}^{1|1} = \mathrm{U}(2|1) / (\mathrm{U}(1) \times \mathrm{U}(1|1))$, and the spectrum of critical exponents can be obtained exactly. In this paper we push the analysis further, and determine the main representation theoretic (logarithmic) features of this continuum limit by extending to the periodic case the approach of [N. Read and H. Saleur, Nucl. Phys. B 777 316 (2007)]. We first focus on determining the representation theory of the finite size spin chain with respect to the algebra of local energy densities provided by a representation of the affine Temperley-Lieb algebra at fugacity one. We then analyze how these algebraic properties carry over to the continuum limit to deduce the structure of the space of states as a representation over the product of left and right Virasoro algebras. Our main result is the full structure of the vacuum module of the theory, which exhibits Jordan cells of arbitrary rank for the Hamiltonian.
Parisi's formal replica-symmetry--breaking (RSB) scheme for mean-field spin glasses has long been interpreted in terms of many pure states organized ultrametrically. However, the early version of this interpretation, as applied to the short-range Edwards-Anderson model, runs into problems because as shown by Newman and Stein (NS) it does not allow for chaotic size dependence, and predicts non-self-averaging that cannot occur. NS proposed the concept of the metastate (a probability distribution over infinite-size Gibbs states in a given sample that captures the effects of chaotic size dependence) and a non-standard interpretation of the RSB results in which the metastate is non-trivial and is responsible for what was called non-self-averaging. Here we use the effective field theory of RSB, in conjunction with the rigorous definitions of pure states and the metastate in infinite-size systems, to show that the non-standard picture follows directly from the RSB mean-field theory. In addition, the metastate-averaged state possesses power-law correlations throughout the low temperature phase; the corresponding exponent $\zeta$ takes the value $4$ according to the field theory in high dimensions $d$, and describes the effective fractal dimension of clusters of spins. Further, the logarithm of the number of pure states in the decomposition of the metastate-averaged state that can be distinguished if only correlations in a window of size $W$ can be observed is of order $W^{d-\zeta}$. These results extend the non-standard picture quantitatively; we show that arguments against this scenario are inconclusive.
We construct a low-energy effective action for a two-dimensional non-relativistic topological (i.e.\ gapped) phase of matter in a continuum, which completely describes all of its bulk electrical, thermal, and stress-related properties in the limit of low frequencies, long distances, and zero temperature, without assuming either Lorentz or Galilean invariance. This is done by generalizing Luttinger's approach to thermoelectric phenomena, via the introduction of a background vielbein (i.e.\ gravitational) field and spin connection a la Cartan, in addition to the electromagnetic vector potential, in the action for the microscopic degrees of freedom (the matter fields). Crucially, the geometry of spacetime is allowed to have timelike and spacelike torsion. These background fields make all natural invariances--- under U(1) gauge transformations, translations in both space and time, and spatial rotations---appear locally, and corresponding conserved currents and the stress tensor can be obtained, which obey natural continuity equations. On integrating out the matter fields, we derive the most general form of a local bulk induced action to first order in derivatives of the background fields, from which thermodynamic and transport properties can be obtained. We show that the gapped bulk cannot contribute to low-temperature thermoelectric transport other than the ordinary Hall conductivity; the other thermoelectric effects (if they occur) are thus purely edge effects. The coupling to "reduced" spacelike torsion is found to be absent in minimally-coupled models, and using a generalized Belinfante stress tensor, the stress response to time-dependent vielbeins (i.e.\ strains) is the Hall viscosity, which is robust against perturbations and related to the spin current as in earlier work.
In a recent paper by Neupert, Santos, Chamon, and Mudry [Phys. Rev. B 86, 165133 (2012)] it is claimed that there is an elementary formula for the Hall conductivity of fractional Chern insulators. We show that the proposed formula cannot generally be correct, and we suggest one possible source of the error. Our reasoning can be generalized to show no quantity (such as Hall conductivity) expected to be constant throughout an entire phase of matter can possibly be given as the expectation of any time independent short ranged operator.