A numerical study of planar arrays of correlated spin islands

We present our analysis of a system of interacting islands of XY spins on a triangular lattice that has been introduced a few years ago by Eley et al. to account for the phenomenology in experiments on tunable arrays of proximity coupled long superconductor-normal metal-superconductor junctions. The main features of the model are the separation of a local and a global interaction energy scale and the mesoscopic character of the spin islands. Upon lowering the temperature the model undergoes two crossovers corresponding to an increasing phase coherence on a single island and to the onset of global coherence across the array; the latter is a thermodynamical phase transition in the Ising universality class. The dependence of the second transition on the island edge-to-edge spacing is related to the proximity-effect of the coupling constant.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in EPJ

Off-Equilibrium Dynamics at Very Low Temperatures in 3d Spin Glasses

We present a high statistic systematic study of the overlap correlation function well below the critical temperature in the three dimensional Gaussian spin glass. The off-equilibrium correlation function has been studied confirming the power law behavior for the dynamical correlation length. In particular we have computed the dynamical critical exponent $z$ in a wide range of temperatures, $0.35 \le T \le 0.9$, obtaining a dependence $z(T)=6.2/T$ in a very good agreement with recent experiments. Moreover, we report a study of the violation of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem for very low temperatures $T=0.5$ and $T=0.35$. All our numerical results avoid a droplet model interpretation even when $T$ is as low as $T=0.35$.Comment: LaTeX, 14 pages and 5 figures. A minor arithmetic error corrected and references update

Resonant X-ray diffraction studies on the charge ordering in magnetite

Here we show that the low temperature phase of magnetite is associated with an effective, although fractional, ordering of the charge. Evidence and a quantitative evaluation of the atomic charges are achieved by using resonant x-ray diffraction (RXD) experiments whose results are further analyzed with the help of ab initio calculations of the scattering factors involved. By confirming the results obtained from X-ray crystallography we have shown that RXD is able to probe quantitatively the electronic structure in very complex oxides, whose importance covers a wide domain of applications.Comment: 4 pages 4 figures, accepted for publication in PR

The out-equilibrium 2D Ising spin glass: almost, but not quite, a free-field theory

We consider the spatial correlation function of the two-dimensional Ising spin glass under out-equilibrium conditions. We pay special attention to the scaling limit reached upon approaching zero temperature. The field-theory of a non-interacting field makes a surprisingly good job at describing the spatial shape of the correlation function of the out-equilibrium Edwards-Anderson Ising model in two dimensions.Comment: 20 pages + 5 Figure