Competing Boundary Interactions in a Josephson Junction Network with an Impurity

We analyze a perturbation of the boundary Sine-Gordon model where two boundary terms of different periodicities and scaling dimensions are coupled to a Kondo-like spin degree of freedom. We show that, by pertinently engineering the coupling with the spin degree of freedom, a competition between the two boundary interactions may be induced, and that this gives rise to nonpertubative phenomena, such as the emergence of novel quantum phases: indeed, we demonstrate that the strongly coupled fixed point may become unstable as a result of the "deconfinement" of a new set of phase-slip operators -the short instantons- associated with the less relevant boundary operator. We point out that a Josephson junction network with a pertinent impurity located at its center provides a physical realization of this boundary double Sine-Gordon model. For this Josephson junction network, we prove that the competition between the two boundary interactions stabilizes a robust finite coupling fixed point and, at a pertinent scale, allows for the onset of $4e$ superconductivity.Comment: 43 pages, 12 figure

A fingerprint based metric for measuring similarities of crystalline structures

Measuring similarities/dissimilarities between atomic structures is important for the exploration of potential energy landscapes. However, the cell vectors together with the coordinates of the atoms, which are generally used to describe periodic systems, are quantities not suitable as fingerprints to distinguish structures. Based on a characterization of the local environment of all atoms in a cell we introduce crystal fingerprints that can be calculated easily and allow to define configurational distances between crystalline structures that satisfy the mathematical properties of a metric. This distance between two configurations is a measure of their similarity/dissimilarity and it allows in particular to distinguish structures. The new method is an useful tool within various energy landscape exploration schemes, such as minima hopping, random search, swarm intelligence algorithms and high-throughput screenings

From propagators to glueballs in the Gribov-Zwanziger framework

Over the last years, lattice calculations in pure Yang-Mills gauge theory seem to have come more or less to a consensus. The ghost propagator is not enhanced and the gluon propagator is positivity violating, infrared suppressed and non-vanishing at zero momentum. From an analytical point of view, several groups are agreeing with these results. Among them, the refined Gribov-Zwanziger (RGZ) framework also accommodates for these results. The question which rises next is, if our models hold the right form for the propagators, how to extract information on the real physical observables, i.e. the glueballs? How do the operators which represent glueballs look like? We review the current status of this matter within the RGZ framework.Comment: 3 pages, Conference contribution for Confinement IX, Madrid 2010 (30/08-03/09), to appear in American Institute of Physics (AIP