Condensed Matter Theory

Abstract:

Self-organisation is the spontaneous emergence of spatio-temporal structures and patterns from the interaction of smaller individual units. Examples are found across many scales in very different systems and scientific disciplines, from physics, materials science and robotics to biology, geophysics and astronomy. Recent research has highlighted how self-organisation can be both mediated and controlled by confinement. Confinement is an action over a system that limits its units’ translational and rotational degrees of freedom, thus also influencing the system's phase space probability density; it can function as either a catalyst or inhibitor of self-organisation. Confinement can then become a means to actively steer the emergence or suppression of collective phenomena in space and time. Here, to provide a common framework and perspective for future research, we examine the role of confinement in the self-organisation of soft-matter systems and identify overarching scientific challenges that need to be addressed to harness its full scientific and technological potential in soft matter and related fields. By drawing analogies with other disciplines, this framework will accelerate a common deeper understanding of self-organisation and trigger the development of innovative strategies to steer it using confinement, with impact on, e.g., the design of smarter materials, tissue engineering for biomedicine and in guiding active matter.

Abstract:

We analyze the thermodynamic properties of the random-bond Ising model (RBIM) on closed hyperbolic surfaces using Monte Carlo and high-temperature series expansion techniques. We also analyze the dual-RBIM, that is, the model that in the absence of disorder is related to the RBIM via the Kramers-Wannier duality. Even on self-dual lattices this model is different from the RBIM, unlike in the Euclidean case. We explain this anomaly by a careful rederivation of the Kramers-Wannier duality. For the (dual-)RBIM, we compute the paramagnet-to-ferromagnet phase transition as a function of both temperature T and the fraction of antiferromagnetic bonds p. We find that as temperature is decreased in the RBIM, the paramagnet gives way to either a ferromagnet or a spin-glass phase via a second-order transition compatible with mean-field behavior. In contrast, the dual-RBIM undergoes a strongly first-order transition from the paramagnet to the ferromagnet both in the absence of disorder and along the Nishimori line. We study both transitions for a variety of hyperbolic tessellations and comment on the role of coordination number and curvature. The extent of the ferromagnetic phase in the dual-RBIM corresponds to the correctable phase of hyperbolic surface codes under independent bit- and phase-flip noise.