Theory of electron-phonon interaction in a nonequilibrium open electronic system

We study the effects of time-independent nonequilibrium drive on an open 2D electron gas system coupled to 2D longitudinal acoustic phonons using the Keldysh path integral method. The layer electron-phonon system is defined at the two-dimensional interface between a pair of three-dimensional Fermi liquid leads, which act both as a particle pump and an infinite bath. The nonequilibrium steady state is achieved in the layer by assuming the leads to be thermally equilibrated at two different chemical potentials. This subjects the layer to an out-of-plane voltage $V$ and drives a steady-state charge current perpendicular to the system. We compute the effects of small voltages (V\ll\w_D) on the in-plane electron-phonon scattering rate and the electron effective mass at zero temperature. We also find that the obtained onequilibrium modification to the acoustic phonon velocity and the Thomas-Fermi screening length reveal the possibility of tuning these quantities with the external voltage.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

The Effects of the Massless O(alpha_s^2), O(\alpha\alpha_s), O(\alpha^2) QCD and QED Corrections and of the Massive Contributions to Gamma(H^0\rightarrow b\overline{b})

We consider in detail various theoretical uncertainties of the perturbative predictions for the decay width of $H^0\rightarrow b\overline{b}$ process in the region $50\ GeV< M_H\leq 2M_W$. We calculate the order $O(\alpha_s^2)$-contributions to the expression for $\Gamma_{Hb\overline{b}}$ through the pole quark mass and demonstrate that they are important for the elimination of the numerical difference between the corresponding expression and the one through the running $b$-quark mass. The order $O(\alpha\alpha_s)$ and $O(\alpha^2)$ massless and order $O(m_b^2/M_H^2)$ massive corrections to $\Gamma_{Hb\overline{b}}$ are also calculated. The importance of the latter contributions for modeling of the threshold effects is demonstrated. The troubles with identifying of the 4 recent L3 events $e^+e^-\rightarrow l^+l^-\gamma\gamma$ with the decay of a Standard Higgs boson are discussed.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures (can be optained by mail after the request from the authers, e-mails: [email protected]; [email protected]); LATEX, modified version of ENSLAPP.-A.-407/92 preprin

Interfering directed paths and the sign phase transition

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.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

A criterion for the nature of the superconducting transition in strongly interacting field theories : Holographic approach

It is beyond the present techniques based on perturbation theory to reveal the nature of phase transitions in strongly interacting field theories. Recently, the holographic approach has provided us with an effective dual description, mapping strongly coupled conformal field theories to classical gravity theories. Resorting to the holographic superconductor model, we propose a general criterion for the nature of the superconducting phase transition based on effective interactions between vortices. We find "tricritical" points in terms of the chemical potential for U(1) charges and an effective Ginzburg-Landau parameter, where vortices do not interact to separate the second order (repulsive) from the first order (attractive) transitions. We interpret the first order transition as the Coleman-Weinberg mechanism, arguing that it is relevant to superconducting instabilities around quantum criticality.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figure

Thermal stability of metastable magnetic skyrmions: Entropic narrowing and significance of internal eigenmodes

We compute annihilation rates of metastable magnetic skyrmions using a form of Langer's theory in the intermediate-to-high damping (IHD) regime. For a N\'eel skyrmion, a Bloch skyrmion, and an antiskyrmion, we look at two possible paths to annihilation: collapse and escape through a boundary. We also study the effects of a curved vs. a flat boundary, a second skyrmion and a non-magnetic defect. We find that the skyrmion's internal modes play a dominant role in the thermally activated transitions compared to the spin-wave excitations and that the relative contribution of internal modes depends on the nature of the transition process. Our calculations for a small skyrmion stabilized at zero-field show that collapse on a defect is the most probable path. In the absence of a defect, the annihilation is largely dominated by escape mechanisms, even though in this case the activation energy is higher than that of collapse processes. Escape through a flat boundary is found more probable than through a curved boundary. The potential source of stability of metastable skyrmions is therefore found not to lie in high activation energies, nor in the dynamics at the transition state, but comes from entropic narrowing in the saddle point region which leads to lowered attempt frequencies. This narrowing effect is found to be primarily associated with the skyrmion's internal modes.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figure

The BFKL Pomeron within Physical Renormalization Schemes and Scales

In this lecture the next-to-leading order (NLO) corrections to the QCD Pomeron intercept obtained from the Balitsky-Fadin-Kuraev-Lipatov (BFKL) equation are discussed. It is shown that the BFKL Pomeron intercept when evaluated in non-Abelian physical renormalization schemes with Brodsky-Lepage-Mackenzie (BLM) optimal scale setting does not exhibit the serious problems encountered in the modified minimal subtraction (bar{MS}) scheme. The results obtained provide an opportunity for applications of the NLO BFKL resummation to high-energy phenomenology. One of such applications for virtual gamma-gamma total cross section shows a good agreement with preliminary data at CERN LEP.Comment: Presented at XXXXV PNPI Winter School, Repino, St.Petersburg, Russia, 19-25 Feb., 2001; Latex, 16 pages, 5 figure

Diamagnetic response of Aharonov-Bohm rings: Impurity backward scatterings

We report a theoretical calculation on the persistent currents of disordered normal-metal rings. It is shown that the diamagnetic responses of the rings in the vicinity of the zero magnetic field are attributed to multiple backward scatterings off the impurities. We observe the transition from the paramagnetic response to the diamagnetic one as the strength of disorder grows using both the analytic calculation and the numerical exact diagonalization.Comment: final versio

Path sampling for lifetimes of metastable magnetic skyrmions and direct comparison with Kramers' method

We perform a direct comparison between Kramers' method in many dimensions -- i.e., Langer's theory -- adapted to magnetic spin systems, and a path sampling method in the form of forward flux sampling, as a means to compute collapse rates of metastable magnetic skyrmions. We show that a good agreement is obtained between the two methods. We report variations of the attempt frequency associated with skyrmion collapse by three to four orders of magnitude when varying the applied magnetic field by 5$\%$ of the exchange strength, which confirms the existence of a strong entropic contribution to the lifetime of skyrmions. This demonstrates that in complex systems, the knowledge of the rate prefactor, in addition to the internal energy barrier, is essential in order to properly estimate a lifetime.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures (main text), 8 pages including supplemental materia