English

Interfering directed paths and the sign phase transition

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks 2011-03-15 v1 Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

We revisit the question of the "sign phase transition" for interfering directed paths with real amplitudes in a random medium. The sign of the total amplitude of the paths to a given point may be viewed as an Ising order parameter, so we suggest that a coarse-grained theory for system is a dynamic Ising model coupled to a Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) model. It appears that when the KPZ model is in its strong-coupling ("pinned") phase, the Ising model does not have a stable ferromagnetic phase, so there is no sign phase transition. We investigate this numerically for the case of {\ss}1+1 dimensions, demonstrating the instability of the Ising ordered phase there.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1010.0053,
  title  = {Interfering directed paths and the sign phase transition},
  author = {Hyungwon Kim and David A. Huse},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1010.0053},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

4 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T16:22:08.544Z