Crystallography on Curved Surfaces

We study static and dynamical properties that distinguish two dimensional crystals constrained to lie on a curved substrate from their flat space counterparts. A generic mechanism of dislocation unbinding in the presence of varying Gaussian curvature is presented in the context of a model surface amenable to full analytical treatment. We find that glide diffusion of isolated dislocations is suppressed by a binding potential of purely geometrical origin. Finally, the energetics and biased diffusion dynamics of point defects such as vacancies and interstitials is explained in terms of their geometric potential.Comment: 12 Pages, 8 Figure

The Complexity of Translationally Invariant Problems Beyond Ground State Energies

The physically motivated quantum generalisation of k-SAT, the k-Local Hamiltonian (k-LH) problem, is well-known to be QMA-complete ("quantum NP"-complete). What is surprising, however, is that while the former is easy on 1D Boolean formulae, the latter remains hard on 1D local Hamiltonians, even if all constraints are identical [Gottesman, Irani, FOCS 2009]. Such "translation-invariant" systems are much closer in structure to what one might see in Nature. Moving beyond k-LH, what is often more physically interesting is the computation of properties of the ground space (i.e. "solution space") itself. In this work, we focus on two such recent problems: Simulating local measurements on the ground space (APX-SIM, analogous to computing properties of optimal solutions to MAX-SAT formulae) [Ambainis, CCC 2014], and deciding if the low energy space has an energy barrier (GSCON, analogous to classical reconfiguration problems) [Gharibian, Sikora, ICALP 2015]. These problems are known to be P^{QMA[log]}- and QCMA-complete, respectively, in the general case. Yet, to date, it is not known whether they remain hard in such simple 1D translationally invariant systems. In this work, we show that the 1D translationally invariant versions of both APX-SIM and GSCON are intractable, namely are P^{QMA_{EXP}}- and QCMA^{EXP}-complete ("quantum P^{NEXP}" and "quantum NEXP"), respectively. Each of these results is attained by giving a respective generic "lifting theorem". For APX-SIM we give a framework for lifting any abstract local circuit-to-Hamiltonian mapping H satisfying mild assumptions to hardness of APX-SIM on the family of Hamiltonians produced by H, while preserving the structural properties of H (e.g. translation invariance, geometry, locality, etc). Each result also leverages counterintuitive properties of our constructions: for APX-SIM, we compress the answers to polynomially many parallel queries to a QMA oracle into a single qubit. For GSCON, we show strong robustness, i.e. soundness even against adversaries acting on all but a single qudit in the system

Microrheology, stress fluctuations and active behavior of living cells

We report the first measurements of the intrinsic strain fluctuations of living cells using a recently-developed tracer correlation technique along with a theoretical framework for interpreting such data in heterogeneous media with non-thermal driving. The fluctuations' spatial and temporal correlations indicate that the cytoskeleton can be treated as a course-grained continuum with power-law rheology, driven by a spatially random stress tensor field. Combined with recent cell rheology results, our data imply that intracellular stress fluctuations have a nearly $1/\omega^2$ power spectrum, as expected for a continuum with a slowly evolving internal prestress.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. Let

Grain Boundary Scars and Spherical Crystallography

We describe experimental investigations of the structure of two-dimensional spherical crystals. The crystals, formed by beads self-assembled on water droplets in oil, serve as model systems for exploring very general theories about the minimum energy configurations of particles with arbitrary repulsive interactions on curved surfaces. Above a critical system size we find that crystals develop distinctive high-angle grain boundaries, or scars, not found in planar crystals. The number of excess defects in a scar is shown to grow linearly with the dimensionless system size. The observed slope is expected to be universal, independent of the microscopic potential.Comment: 4 pages, 3 eps figs (high quality images available from Mark Bowick

Uncomputability of phase diagrams.

The phase diagram of a material is of central importance in describing the properties and behaviour of a condensed matter system. In this work, we prove that the task of determining the phase diagram of a many-body Hamiltonian is in general uncomputable, by explicitly constructing a continuous one-parameter family of Hamiltonians H(φ), where [Formula: see text], for which this is the case. The H(φ) are translationally-invariant, with nearest-neighbour couplings on a 2D spin lattice. As well as implying uncomputablity of phase diagrams, our result also proves that undecidability can hold for a set of positive measure of a Hamiltonian's parameter space, whereas previous results only implied undecidability on a zero measure set. This brings the spectral gap undecidability results a step closer to standard condensed matter problems, where one typically studies phase diagrams of many-body models as a function of one or more continuously varying real parameters, such as magnetic field strength or pressure

Response Of Irrigated Corn To Nitrogen Fertility Level Within Two Tillage Systems

Irrigated farmers generally utilize intensive tillage to manage crop residues and prepare a seedbed for com. Nitrogen fertilizer management practices have been developed for conventional-till (CT) irrigated com production. Little information is available for no-till (NT) and reduced-till (RT) irrigated com production systems. This paper compares the response of irrigated continuous com to N fertility level under CT and NT or RT production systems on a Fort Collins clay loam soil from 1999 through 2001. Grain yields increased similarly with increasing available N level [soil NO3-N (0-3 ft) plus fertilizer N added] in 1999,2000, and 2001 for both tillage systems. The CT com yields were greater than the RT or NT com yields in 1999 and 2001, respectively. Based on the results from this study, similar N levels were required. for optimum com yields in all tillage systems. Additional years of data are needed to determine if NT will require a higher level of N fertilizer input than CT to optimize com grain yields. Current N fertilizer recommendations for CT irrigated com production would appear to be adequate for irrigated NT com production

Undecidability of the Spectral Gap in One Dimension

The spectral gap problem—determining whether the energy spectrum of a system has an energy gap above ground state, or if there is a continuous range of low-energy excitations—pervades quantum many-body physics. Recently, this important problem was shown to be undecidable for quantum-spin systems in two (or more) spatial dimensions: There exists no algorithm that determines in general whether a system is gapped or gapless, a result which has many unexpected consequences for the physics of such systems. However, there are many indications that one-dimensional spin systems are simpler than their higher-dimensional counterparts: For example, they cannot have thermal phase transitions or topological order, and there exist highly effective numerical algorithms such as the density matrix renormalization group—and even provably polynomial-time ones—for gapped 1D systems, exploiting the fact that such systems obey an entropy area law. Furthermore, the spectral gap undecidability construction crucially relied on aperiodic tilings, which are not possible in 1D. So does the spectral gap problem become decidable in 1D? In this paper, we prove this is not the case by constructing a family of 1D spin chains with translationally invariant nearest-neighbor interactions for which no algorithm can determine the presence of a spectral gap. This not only proves that the spectral gap of 1D systems is just as intractable as in higher dimensions, but it also predicts the existence of qualitatively new types of complex physics in 1D spin chains. In particular, it implies there are 1D systems with a constant spectral gap and nondegenerate classical ground state for all systems sizes up to an uncomputably large size, whereupon they switch to a gapless behavior with dense spectrum

Microrheology probes length scale dependent rheology

We exploit the power of microrheology to measure the viscoelasticity of entangled F-actin solutions at different length scales from 1 to 100 mu m over a wide frequency range. We compare the behavior of single probe-particle motion to that of the correlated motion of two particles. By varying the average length of the filaments, we identify fluctuations that dissipate diffusively over the filament length. These provide an important relaxation mechanism of the elasticity between 0.1 and 30 rad/sec

Gravity of Monopole and String and Gravitational Constant in 3He-A

We discuss the effective metric produced in superfluid 3He-A by such topological objects as radial disgyration and monopole. In relativistic theories these metrics are similar to that of the local string and global monopole correspondingly. But in 3He-A they have the negative angle deficit, which corresponds to the negative mass of the topological objects. The effective gravitational constant G in superfluid 3He-A, derived from the comparison with relativistic theories, is inversely proportional to the square of the gap amplitude Delta, which plays the part of the Planck energy cut-off. G depends on temperature and increases with T, which corresponds to the vacuum screening of the Newton's constant.Comment: Latex file, 10 pages, no figure