The Achievements of Trooper Mulloy

In the summer of 1900 Lorne Mulloy, a wounded Canadian soldier serving with the second Canadian contingent in South Africa, wrote from a military hospital in Johannesburg to his family about serious wounds to his eyes received in battle: “I have not experienced even the faintest sensation of light since that shot was fired. My left eye is totally destroyed and my right one is so badly injured that it is like a man halting between life and death undecided to advance or retreat.” Although totally blind because of these wounds Mulloy went on to obtain three university degrees, and became a respected professor and speaker on political issues in Canada and Britain and a prominent figure in his local community. His life is a remarkable story of achievement in the face of adversity

Comment on "Kinetic theory for a mobile impurity in a degenerate Tonks-Girardeau gas"

In a recent paper, arxiv:1402.6362, Gamayun, Lychkovskiy, and Cheianov studied the dynamics of a mobile impurity embedded into a one-dimensional Tonks-Girardeau gas of strongly interacting bosons. Employing the Boltzmann equation approach, they arrived at the following main conclusions: (i) a light impurity, being accelerated by a constant force does not exhibit Bloch oscillations; (ii) a heavy impurity does undergo Bloch oscillations, accompanied by a drift with the velocity proportional to the square root of force. In this comment we argue that the result (i) is an artifact of the classical Boltzmann approximation, which misses the formation of the (quasi) bound-state between the impurity and a hole. Result (ii), while not valid at asymptotically small force, indeed reflects an interesting intermediate-force behavior. Here we clarify its limits of applicability and extend beyond the Tonks-Girardeau limit.Comment: 2 pages, 1 figur

Forming doublons by a quantum quench

Repulsive interactions between particles on a lattice may lead to bound states, so called doublons. Such states may be created by dynamically tuning the interaction strength, e.g. using a Feshbach resonance, from attraction to repulsion. We study the doublon production efficiency as a function of the tuning rate at which the on-site interaction is varied. An expectation based on the Landau- Zener law suggests that exponentially few doublons are created in the adiabatic limit. Contrary to such an expectation, we found that the number of produced doublons scales as a power law of the tuning rate with the exponent dependent on the dimensionality of the lattice. The physical reason for this anomaly is the effective decoupling of doublons from the two-particle continuum for center of mass momenta close to the corners of the Brillouin zone. The study of doublon production may be a sensitive tool to extract detailed information about the band structure.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Interplay between Magnetic and Vestigial Nematic Orders in the Layered J1J_1-J2J_2 Classical Heisenberg Model

We study the layered $J_1$-$J_2$ classical Heisenberg model on the square lattice using a self-consistent bond theory. We derive the phase diagram for fixed $J_1$ as a function of temperature $T$, $J_2$ and interplane coupling $J_z$. Broad regions of (anti)ferromagnetic and stripe order are found, and are separated by a first-order transition near $J_2\approx 0.5$ (in units of $|J_1|$). Within the stripe phase the magnetic and vestigial nematic transitions occur simultaneously in first-order fashion for strong $J_z$. For weaker $J_z$ there is in addition, for $J_2^*<J_2 < J_2^{**}$, an intermediate regime of split transitions implying a finite temperature region with nematic order but no long-range stripe magnetic order. In this split regime, the order of the transitions depends sensitively on the deviation from $J_2^*$ and $J_2^{**}$, with split second-order transitions predominating for $J_2^* \ll J_2 \ll J_2^{**}$. We find that the value of $J_2^*$ depends weakly on the interplane coupling and is just slightly larger than $0.5$ for $|J_z| \lesssim 0.01$. In contrast the value of $J_2^{**}$ increases quickly from $J_2^*$ at $|J_z| \lesssim 0.01$ as the interplane coupling is further reduced. In addition, the magnetic correlation length is shown to directly depend on the nematic order parameter and thus exhibits a sharp increase (or jump) upon entering the nematic phase. Our results are broadly consistent with predictions based on itinerant electron models of the iron-based superconductors in the normal-state, and thus help substantiate a classical spin framework for providing a phenomenological description of their magnetic properties.Comment: 13 pages, 20 figure

Nematic Bond Theory of Heisenberg Helimagnets

We study classical two-dimensional frustrated Heisenberg models with generically incommensurate groundstates. A new theory for the spin-nematic "order by disorder" transition is developed based on the self-consistent determination of the effective exchange coupling bonds. In our approach, fluctuations of the constraint field imposing conservation of the local magnetic moment drive nematicity at low temperatures. The critical temperature is found to be highly sensitive to the peak helimagnetic wavevector, and vanishes continuously when approaching rotation symmetric Lifshitz points. Transitions between symmetry distinct nematic orders may occur by tuning the exchange parameters, leading to lines of bicritical points.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure