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Matteo Palassini

Publications and source records attributed to Matteo Palassini.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2023

The effect of stochastic resettings on the counting of level crossings for inertial random processes

We study the counting of level crossings for inertial random processes exposed to stochastic resetting events. We develop the general approach of stochastic resetting for inertial processes with sudden changes in the state characterized by position and velocity. We obtain the level-crossing intensity in terms of that of underlying reset-free process, for resetting events with Poissonian statistics. We apply this result to the random acceleration process and the inertial Brownian motion. In both cases, we show that there is an optimal resetting rate that maximizes the crossing intensity, and we obtain the asymptotic behavior of the crossing intensity for large and small resetting rates. Finally, we discuss the stationary distribution and the mean first-arrival time in the presence of resetting.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗
arXiv2023

Excluded Volume Induces Buckling in Optically Driven Colloidal Rings

In our combined experimental, theoretical and numerical work, we study the out of equilibrium deformations in a shrinking ring of optically trapped, interacting colloidal particles. Steerable optical tweezers are used to confine dielectric microparticles along a circle of discrete harmonic potential wells, and to reduce the ring radius at a controlled quench speed. We show that excluded-volume interactions are enough to induce particle sliding from their equilibrium positions and nonequilibrium zigzag roughening of the colloidal structure. Our work unveils the underlying mechanism of interfacial deformation in radially driven microscopic discrete rings.

cond-mat.soft↗
arXiv2023

Counting of level crossings for inertial random processes: Generalization of the Rice formula

We address the counting of level crossings for inertial stochastic processes. We review Rice's approach to the problem and generalize the classical Rice formula to include all Gaussian processes in their most general form. We apply the results to some second-order (i.e., inertial) processes of physical interest, such as Brownian motion, random acceleration and noisy harmonic oscillators. For all models we obtain the exact crossing intensities and discuss their long- and short-time dependence. We illustrate these results with numerical simulations.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗
arXiv2022

Equilibrium and dynamics of a three-state opinion model

We introduce a three-state model to study the effects of a neutral party on opinion spreading, in which the tendency of agents to agree with their neighbors can be tuned to favor either the neutral party or two oppositely polarized parties, and can be disrupted by social agitation mimicked as temperature. We study the equilibrium phase diagram and the non-equilibrium stochastic dynamics of the model with various analytical approaches and with Monte Carlo simulations on different substrates: the fully-connected (FC) graph, the one-dimensional (1D) chain, and Erd\"os-R\'enyi (ER) random graphs. We show that, in the mean-field approximation, the phase boundary between the disordered and polarized phases is characterized by a tricritical point. On the FC graph, in the absence of social agitation, kinetic barriers prevent the system from reaching optimal consensus. On the 1D chain, the main result is that the dynamics is governed by the growth of opinion clusters. Finally, for the ER ensemble a phase transition analogous to that of the FC graph takes place, but now the system is able to reach optimal consensus at low temperatures, except when the average connectivity is low, in which case dynamical traps arise from local frozen configurations.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗
arXiv2018

Avalanches in the Relaxation Dynamics of Electron Glasses

We study the zero-temperature relaxation dynamics of an electron glass model with single-electron hops. We find numerically that in the charge rearrangements (avalanches) triggered by displacing an electron, the number of electron hops has a scale-free, power-law distribution up to a cutoff diverging with the system size $N$, independently of the disorder strength and provided hops of arbitrary length are allowed. In avalanches triggered by the injection of an extra electron, the distribution does not have a power-law limit, but its mean diverges non-trivially with $N$. In both cases, the avalanche statistics is well reproduced by a branching process model that assumes independent hops. Qualitative differences with avalanches in infinite-range spin glasses and related systems are discussed.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗
arXiv2014

Parallel kinetic Monte Carlo simulation of Coulomb glasses

We develop a parallel rejection algorithm to tackle the problem of low acceptance in Monte Carlo methods, and apply it to the simulation of the hopping conduction in Coulomb glasses using Graphics Processing Units, for which we also parallelize the update of local energies. In two dimensions, our parallel code achieves speedups of up to two orders of magnitude in computing time over an equivalent serial code. We find numerical evidence of a scaling relation for the relaxation of the conductivity at different temperatures.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗
arXiv2011

Improving free-energy estimates from unidirectional work measurements: theory and experiment

We derive analytical expressions for the bias of the Jarzynski free-energy estimator from N nonequilibrium work measurements, for a generic work distribution. To achieve this, we map the estimator onto the Random Energy Model in a suitable scaling limit parametrized by (log N)/m, where m measures the width of the lower tail of the work distribution, and then compute the finite-N corrections to this limit with different approaches for different regimes of (log N)/m. We show that these expressions describe accurately the bias for a wide class of work distributions, and exploit them to build an improved free-energy estimator from unidirectional work measurements. We apply the method to optical tweezers unfolding/refolding experiments on DNA hairpins of varying loop size and dissipation, displaying both near-Gaussian and non-Gaussian work distributions.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗
arXiv2009

Phase diagram, correlation gap, and critical properties of the Coulomb glass

We investigate the lattice Coulomb glass model in three dimensions via Monte Carlo simulations. No evidence for an equilibrium glass phase is found down to very low temperatures, although the correlation length increases rapidly near T=0. A charge-ordered phase (COP) exists at low disorder. The transition to this phase is consistent with the Random Field Ising universality class, which shows that the interaction is effectively screened at moderate temperature. For large disorder, the single-particle density of states near the Coulomb gap satisfies the scaling relation g(e,T)=T^δf(|e|/T) with δ= 2.01 +/- 0.05 in agreement with the prediction of Efros and Shklovskii. For decreasing disorder, a crossover to a larger effective exponent occurs due to the proximity of the COP.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗
arXiv2005

Landscape of solutions in constraint satisfaction problems

We present a theoretical framework for characterizing the geometrical properties of the space of solutions in constraint satisfaction problems, together with practical algorithms for studying this structure on particular instances. We apply our method to the coloring problem, for which we obtain the total number of solutions and analyze in detail the distribution of distances between solutions.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗
arXiv2003

Cooperativity in two-state protein folding kinetics

We present a solvable model that predicts the folding kinetics of two-state proteins from their native structures. The model is based on conditional chain entropies. It assumes that folding processes are dominated by small-loop closure events that can be inferred from native structures. For CI2, the src SH3 domain, TNfn3, and protein L, the model reproduces two-state kinetics, and it predicts well the average Phi-values for secondary structures. The barrier to folding is the formation of predominantly local structures such as helices and hairpins, which are needed to bring nonlocal pairs of amino acids into contact.

q-bio.BM↗
arXiv2003

Ground-state energy fluctuations in the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model

The probability distribution function (PDF) of the ground-state energy in the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick spin-glass model is numerically determined by collecting a large statistical sample of ground states, computed using a genetic algorithm. It is shown that the standard deviation of the ground-state energy per spin scales with the number of spins, N, as N^{-ρ} with ρ\simeq 0.765, but the value ρ=3/4 is also compatible with the data, while the previously proposed value ρ=5/6 is ruled out. The PDF satisfies finite-size scaling with a non-Gaussian asymptotic PDF, which can be fitted remarkably well by the Gumbel distribution for the m-th smallest element in a set of random variables, with m \simeq 6.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗
arXiv2003

Order-parameter fluctuations in Ising spin glasses at low temperatures

We present a numerical study of the order-parameter fluctuations for Ising spin glasses in three and four dimensions at very low temperatures and without an external field. Accurate measurements of two previously introduced parameters, A and G, show that the order parameter is not self-averaging, consistent with a zero-temperature thermal exponent value θ' \simeq 0, and confirm the validity of the relation G=1/3 in the thermodynamic limit in the whole low-temperature phase, as predicted by stochastic stability arguments.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗
arXiv2003

Ground state of the Bethe-lattice spin glass and running time of an exact optimization algorithm

We study the Ising spin glass on random graphs with fixed connectivity z and with a Gaussian distribution of the couplings, with mean μand unit variance. We compute exact ground states by using a sophisticated branch-and-cut method for z=4,6 and system sizes up to N=1280 for different values of μ. We locate the spin-glass/ferromagnet phase transition at μ= 0.77 +/- 0.02 (z=4) and μ= 0.56 +/- 0.02 (z=6). We also compute the energy and magnetization in the Bethe-Peierls approximation with a stochastic method, and estimate the magnitude of replica symmetry breaking corrections. Near the phase transition, we observe a sharp change of the median running time of our implementation of the algorithm, consistent with a change from a polynomial dependence on the system size, deep in the ferromagnetic phase, to slower than polynomial in the spin-glass phase.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗
arXiv2003

Low Energy Excitations in Spin Glasses from Exact Ground States

We investigate the nature of the low-energy, large-scale excitations in the three-dimensional Edwards-Anderson Ising spin glass with Gaussian couplings and free boundary conditions, by studying the response of the ground state to a coupling-dependent perturbation introduced previously. The ground states are determined exactly for system sizes up to 12^3 spins using a branch and cut algorithm. The data are consistent with a picture where the surface of the excitations is not space-filling, such as the droplet or the ``TNT'' picture, with only minimal corrections to scaling. When allowing for very large corrections to scaling, the data are also consistent with a picture with space-filling surfaces, such as replica symmetry breaking. The energy of the excitations scales with their size with a small exponent θ', which is compatible with zero if we allow moderate corrections to scaling. We compare the results with data for periodic boundary conditions obtained with a genetic algorithm, and discuss the effects of different boundary conditions on corrections to scaling. Finally, we analyze the performance of our branch and cut algorithm, finding that it is correlated with the existence of large-scale,low-energy excitations.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗
arXiv2001

State Hierarchy Induced by Correlated Spin Domains in short range spin glasses

We generate equilibrium configurations for the three and four dimensional Ising spin glass with Gaussian distributed couplings at temperatures well below the transition temperature T_c. These states are analyzed by a recently proposed method using clustering. The analysis reveals a hierarchical state space structure. At each level of the hierarchy states are labeled by the orientations of a set of correlated macroscopic spin domains. Our picture of the low temperature phase of short range spin glasses is that of a State Hierarchy Induced by Correlated Spin domains (SHICS). The complexity of the low temperature phase is manifest in the fact that the composition of such a spin domain (i.e. its constituent spins), as well as its identifying label, are defined and determined by the ``location'' in the state hierarchy at which it appears. Mapping out the phase space structure by means of the orientations assumed by these domains enhances our ability to investigate the overlap distribution, which we find to be non-trivial. Evidence is also presented that these states may have a non-ultrametric structure.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗
arXiv2001

Monte Carlo Simulations of Spin Glasses at Low Temperatures

We report the results of Monte Carlo simulations on several spin glass models at low temperatures. By using the parallel tempering (Exchange Monte Carlo) technique we are able to equilibrate down to low temperatures, for moderate sizes, and hence the data should not be affected by critical fluctuations. Our results for short range models are consistent with a picture proposed earlier that there are large scale excitations which cost only a finite energy in the thermodynamic limit, and these excitations have a surface whose fractal dimension is less than the space dimension. For the infinite range Viana-Bray model, our results obtained for a similar number of spins are consistent with standard replica symmetry breaking.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗
arXiv2001

The +/-J Spin Glass: Effects of Ground State Degeneracy

We perform Monte Carlo simulations of the Ising spin glass at low temperature in three dimensions with a +/-J distribution of couplings. Our results display crossover scaling between T=0 behavior, where the order parameter distribution P(q) becomes trivial for L -> $\infty$, and finite-T behavior, where the non-trivial part of P(q) has a much weaker dependence on the size L, and is possibly size independent.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗