Related papers: Decay of Metastable States: Sharp Transition from …
Quantum mechanics makes the otherwise stable vacua of a theory metastable through the nucleation of bubbles of the new vacuum. This in turn causes a first order phase transition. These cosmological phase transitions may have played an…
Using the mapping of the Fokker-Planck description of classical stochastic dynamics onto a quantum Hamiltonian, we argue that a dynamical glass transition in the former must have a precise definition in terms of a quantum phase transition…
Relaxation phenomena in glasses can be related to jump processes between different minima of the potential energy in the configuration space. These transitions play a key role in the low temperature regime, giving rise to tunneling systems…
The correlations of the free-energy landscape of mean-field spin glasses at different temperatures are investigated, concentrating on models with a first order freezing transition. Using a ``potential function'' we follow the metastable…
We develop an instantonic calculus to derive an analytical expression for the thermally-assisted tunneling decay rate of a metastable state in a fully connected quantum spin model. The tunneling decay problem can be mapped onto the Kramers…
We consider two different collective spin systems subjected to strong dissipation -- on the same scale as interaction strengths and external fields -- and show that either continuous or discontinuous dissipative quantum phase transitions…
Simple classical thermodynamic approach to the general description of metastable states is presented. It makes possible to calculate the explicit dependence of the Gibbs free energy on temperature, to calculate the heat capacity, the…
A quantum system can undergo a continuous phase transition at the absolute zero of temperature as some parameter entering its Hamiltonian is varied. These transitions are particularly interesting for, in contrast to their classical finite…
We generalize the string method, originally designed for the study of thermally activated rare events, to the calculation of quantum tunneling rates. This generalization is based on the analogy between quantum mechanics and statistical…
Adiabatic approximations break down classically when a constant-energy contour splits into separate contours, forcing the system to choose which daughter contour to follow; the choices often represent qualitatively different behavior, so…
We investigate how temperature affects transport through large networks of nonlinear conductances with distributed thresholds. In monolayers of weakly-coupled gold nanocrystals, quenched charge disorder produces a range of local thresholds…
A spatially extended classical system with metastable states subject to weak spatiotemporal noise can exhibit a transition in its activation behavior when one or more external parameters are varied. Depending on the potential, the…
Metastability in open system dynamics describes the phenomena of initial relaxation to longlived metastable states before decaying to the asymptotic stable states. It has been predicted in continuous-time stochastic dynamics of both…
Breaking of an atomic chain under stress is a collective many-particle tunneling phenomenon. We study classical dynamics in imaginary time by using conformal mapping technique, and derive an analytic formula for the probability of breaking.…
Decay of metastable states in molecular magnets (MM) leads to energy release that results in temperature increase that, in turn, positively affects the decay rate. This is the mechanism of recently discovered magnetic deflagration that is…
We report Hall sensor measurements of the magnetic relaxation of Mn$_{12}$ acetate as a function of magnetic field applied along the easy axis of magnetization. Data taken at a series of closely-spaced temperatures between 0.24 K and 1.4 K…
An extension of the relativistic density functional approach to the equation of state for strongly interacting matter is suggested which generalizes a recently developed modified excluded-volume mechanism to the case of temperature and…
We examine metastable and transient effects both above and below the first-order decoupling line in a 3D simulation of magnetically interacting pancake vortices. We observe pronounced transient and history effects as well as supercooling…
We investigate the decay of current on a superconducting cosmic string through quantum tunneling. We construct the instanton describing tunneling in a simple bosonic string model, and estimate the decay rate. The tunneling rate vanishes in…
We analyze the unitary time evolution of a conduction electron, described by a two-level system, interacting with two-level systems (spins) through a spin-spin interaction and prove that coherent spin states of the conduction electron are…