arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to M. A. Moore.
For an Ising spin glass on a hierarchical lattice, we show that the energy barrier to be overcome during the flip of a domain of size L scales as L to the power d-1 for all dimensions d. We do this by investigating appropriate lower bounds to the barrier energy, which can be evaluated using an algorithm that remains fast for large system sizes and dimensions. The asymptotic limit of infinite dimensions is evaluated analytically.
It is proposed to understand finite dimensional spin glasses using a $1/m$ expansion, where $m$ is the number of spin components. It is shown that this approach predicts a replica symmetric state in finite dimensions. The point about which the expansion is made, the infinite-$m$ limit, has been studied in the mean-field limit in detail and has a very unusual phase transition, rather similar to a Bose-Einstein phase transition but with $N^{2/5}$ macroscopically occupied low-lying states.
We study the behavior of droplets for two dimensional Ising spin glasses with Gaussian interactions. We use an exact matching algorithm which enables study of systems with linear dimension L up to 240, which is larger than is possible with other approaches. But the method only allows certain classes of droplets to be generated. We study single-bond, cross and a category of fixed volume droplets as well as first excitations. By comparison with similar or equivalent droplets generated in previous works, the advantages but also the limitations of this approach are revealed. In particular we have studied the scaling behavior of the droplet energies and droplet sizes. In most cases, a crossover of the data can be observed such that for large sizes the behavior is compatible with the one-exponent scenario of the droplet theory. Only for the case of first excitations, no clear conclusion can be reached, probably because even with the matching approach the accessible system sizes are still too small.
We compute the complexity (logarithm of the number of TAP states) associated with minima and index-one saddle points of the TAP free energy. Higher-index saddles have smaller complexities. The two leading complexities are equal, consistent with the Morse theorem on the total number of turning points, and have the value given in [A. J. Bray and M. A. Moore, J. Phys. C 13, L469 (1980)]. In the thermodynamic limit, TAP states of all free energies become marginally stable.
This paper has been replaced by cond-mat/0309113
The replica method has been used to calculate the interface free energy associated with the change from periodic to anti-periodic boundary conditions in finite-dimensional spin glasses. At mean-field level the interface free energy vanishes but after allowing for fluctuation effects, a non-zero interface free energy is obtained which is significantly different from numerical expectations.
Finite-size scaling (FSS) is a standard technique for measuring scaling exponents in spin glasses. Here we present a critique of this approach, emphasizing the need for all length scales to be large compared to microscopic scales. In particular we show that the replacement, in FSS analyses, of the correlation length by its asymptotic scaling form can lead to apparently good scaling collapses with the wrong values of the scaling exponents.
The sample-to-sample fluctuations of the free energy in finite-dimensional Ising spin glasses are calculated, using the replica method, from higher order terms in the replica number $n$. It is shown that the Parisi symmetry breaking scheme does not give the correct answers for these higher order terms. A modified symmetry breaking scheme with the same stability is shown to resolve the problem.
The energy of a droplet of linear extent l in the droplet theory of spin glasses goes as l^θ for large l. It is shown by numerical studies of large droplets in two-dimensional systems that this formula needs to be modified by the addition of a scaling correction l^{-ω} in order to accurately describe droplet energies at the length scales currently probed in numerical simulations. Using this simple modification it is now possible to explain many results with the droplet model which have been found in simulations of three-dimensional Ising spin glasses.
We study the scaling behavior of domain-wall energies in two-dimensional Ising spin glasses with Gaussian and bimodal distributions of the interactions and different types of boundary conditions. The domain walls are generated by changing the boundary conditions at T=0 in one direction. The ground states of the original and perturbed system are calculated numerically by applying an efficient matching algorithm. Systems of size LxM with different aspect-ratios 1/8 <= L/M <= 64 are considered. For Gaussian interactions, using the aspect-ratio scaling approach, we find a stiffness exponent theta=-0.287(4), which is independent of the boundary conditions in contrast to earlier results. Furthermore, we find a scaling behavior of the domain-wall energy as predicted by the aspect-ratio approach. Finally, we show that this approach does not work for the bimodal distribution of interactions.
The overlap length of a three-dimensional Ising spin glass on a cubic lattice with Gaussian interactions has been estimated numerically by transfer matrix methods and within a Migdal-Kadanoff renormalization group scheme. We find that the overlap length is large, explaining why it has been difficult to observe spin glass chaos in numerical simulations and experiment.
The energy of a droplet of linear extent L in the ``droplet theory'' of spin glasses goes as $L^θ$ for large L. It is argued that this formula needs to be modified by the addition of a scaling correction $L^{-ω}$ in order to accurately describe droplet energies at the length scales currently probed in numerical simulations. With this simple modification all equilibrium numerical data on Ising spin glasses in two, three and four dimensions becomes compatible with the droplet model.
The p-spin spin-glass model has been studied extensively at mean-field level because of the insights which it provides into the mode-coupling approach to structural glasses and the nature of the glass transition. We demonstrate explicitly that the finite dimensional version of the p-spin model is in the same universality class as an Ising spin glass in a magnetic field. Assuming that the droplet picture of Ising spin glasses is valid we discuss how this universality may provide insights into why structural glasses are either "fragile" or "strong".
We introduce the technique of aspect-ratio scaling to study the scale-dependence of interfacial energies in Ising spin glasses, and we show how one can use it to determine the stiffness exponent $θ$ in a clean way, with results that are independent of the domain-wall-forcing boundary conditions imposed on the system. In space dimension d=2 we obtain $θ= -0.282(3)$ for a Gaussian distribution of exchange interactions.
We have studied the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation in the strong coupling regime in the mode-coupling approximation. We solved numerically in dimension d=1 for the correlation function at wavevector k. At large times t we found the predicted stretched exponential decay consistent with our previous saddle point analysis in [Phys. Rev. E {\bf 63}, 057103 (2001)], but we also observed that the decay to zero occurred in an unexpected oscillatory way. We have compared the results from mode-coupling for the scaling functions with the recent exact results from Praehofer and Spohn [cond-mat/0101200] for d=1 who also find an oscillatory decay to zero.
We study the thermodynamics of a model of pancake vortices in layered superconductors. The model is based on the effective pair potential for the pancake vortices derived from the London approximation of a version of the Lawrence-Doniach model which is valid for extreme type-II superconductors. Using the hypernetted-chain (HNC) approximation, we find that there is a temperature below which multiple solutions to the HNC equations exist. By explicitly evaluating the free energy for each solution we find that the system undergoes a first-order transition between two vortex liquid phases. The low-temperature phase has larger correlations along the field direction than the high-temperature phase. We discuss the possible relation of this phase transition to the liquid-to-liquid phase transition recently observed in Y-Ba-Cu-O superconductors in high magnetic fields in the presence of disorder.
We study the low-temperature phase of the three-dimensional $\pm J$ Ising spin glass in Migdal-Kadanoff approximation. At zero temperature, T=0, the properties of the spin glass result from the ground-state degeneracy and can be elucidated using scaling arguments based on entropy. The approach to the asymptotic scaling regime is very slow, and the correct exponents are only visible beyond system sizes around 64. At T>0, a crossover from the zero-temperature behaviour to the behaviour expected from the droplet picture occurs at length scales proportional to $T^{-d_s/2}$ where $d_s$ is the fractal dimension of a domain wall. Canonical droplet behaviour is not visible at any temperature for systems whose linear dimension is smaller than 16 lattice spacings, because the data are either affected by the zero-temperature behaviour or the critical point behaviour.
We calculate various thermodynamic quantities of vortex liquids in a layered superconductor by using the nonperturbative parquet approximation method, which was previously used to study the effect of thermal fluctuations in two-dimensional vortex systems. We find there is a first-order transition between two vortex liquid phases which differ in the magnitude of their correlation lengths. As the coupling between the layers increases,the first-order transition line ends at a critical point. We discuss the possible relation between this critical end-point and the disappearance of the first-order transition which is observed in experiments on high temperature superconductors at low magnetic fields.