Boundary Energies and the Geometry of Phase Separation in Double--Exchange Magnets

We calculate the energy of a boundary between ferro- and antiferromagnetic regions in a phase separated double-exchange magnet in two and three dimensions. The orientation dependence of this energy can significantly affect the geometry of the phase-separated state in two dimensions, changing the droplet shape and possibly stabilizing a striped arrangement within a certain range of the model parameters. A similar effect, albeit weaker, is also present in three dimensions. As a result, a phase-separated system near the percolation threshold is expected to possess intrinsic hysteretic transport properties, relevant in the context of recent experimental findings.Comment: 6 pages, including 4 figures; expanded versio

Quantum oscillations in graphene in the presence of disorder and interactions

Quantum oscillations in graphene is discussed. The effect of interactions are addressed by Kohn's theorem regarding de Haas-van Alphen oscillations, which states that electron-electron interactions cannot affect the oscillation frequencies as long as disorder is neglected and the system is sufficiently screened, which should be valid for chemical potentials not very close to the Dirac point. We determine the positions of Landau levels in the presence of potential disorder from exact transfer matrix and finite size diagonalization calculations. The positions are shown to be unshifted even for moderate disorder; stronger disorder, can, however, lead to shifts, but this also appears minimal even for disorder width as large as one-half of the bare hopping matrix element on the graphene lattice. Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations of the conductivity are calculated analytically within a self-consistent Born approximation of impurity scattering. The oscillatory part of the conductivity follows the widely invoked Lifshitz-Kosevich form when certain mass and frequency parameters are properly interpreted.Comment: Appendix A was removed, as the content of it is already contained in Ref. 17. Thanks to M. A. H. Vozmedian

Intrinsic optical bistability of thin films of linear molecular aggregates: The one-exciton approximation

We perform a theoretical study of the nonlinear optical response of an ultrathin film consisting of oriented linear aggregates. A single aggregate is described by a Frenkel exciton Hamiltonian with uncorrelated on-site disorder. The exciton wave functions and energies are found exactly by numerically diagonalizing the Hamiltonian. The principal restriction we impose is that only the optical transitions between the ground state and optically dominant states of the one-exciton manifold are considered, whereas transitions to other states, including those of higher exciton manifolds, are neglected. The optical dynamics of the system is treated within the framework of truncated optical Maxwell-Bloch equations in which the electric polarization is calculated by using a joint distribution of the transition frequency and the transition dipole moment of the optically dominant states. This function contains all the statistical information about these two quantities that govern the optical response, and is obtained numerically by sampling many disorder realizations. We derive a steady-state equation that establishes a relationship between the output and input intensities of the electric field and show that within a certain range of the parameter space this equation exhibits a three-valued solution for the output field. A time-domain analysis is employed to investigate the stability of different branches of the three-valued solutions and to get insight into switching times. We discuss the possibility to experimentally verify the bistable behavior.Comment: 13 two-column pages, 8 figures, accepted to the Journal of Chemical Physic

Critical density of a soliton gas

We quantify the notion of a dense soliton gas by establishing an upper bound for the integrated density of states of the quantum-mechanical Schr\"odinger operator associated with the KdV soliton gas dynamics. As a by-product of our derivation we find the speed of sound in the soliton gas with Gaussian spectral distribution function.Comment: 7 page

Non-monotonic magnetoresistance of two-dimensional electron systems in the ballistic regime

We report experimental observations of a novel magnetoresistance (MR) behavior of two-dimensional electron systems in perpendicular magnetic field in the ballistic regime, for k_BT\tau/\hbar>1. The MR grows with field and exhibits a maximum at fields B>1/\mu, where \mu is the electron mobility. As temperature increases the magnitude of the maximum grows and its position moves to higher fields. This effect is universal: it is observed in various Si- and GaAs- based two-dimensional electron systems. We compared our data with recent theory based on the Kohn anomaly modification in magnetic field, and found qualitative similarities and discrepancies.Comment: 4 pages 3 figure

Optical conductivity of a quasi-one-dimensional system with fluctuating order

We describe a formally exact method to calculate the optical conductivity of a one-dimensional system with fluctuating order. For classical phase fluctuations we explicitly determine the optical conductivity by solving two coupled Fokker-Planck equations numerically. Our results differ considerably from perturbation theory and in contrast to Gaussian order parameter fluctuations show a strong dependence on the correlation length.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure

Conversion of hole states by acoustic solitons

The hole states in the valence band of a large class of semiconductors are degenerate in the projections of angular momentum. Here we show that the switching of a hole between the states can efficiently be realized by acoustic solitons. The microscopic mechanism of such a state conversion is related to the valence band splitting by local elastic strain. The conversion is studied here for heavy holes localized at shallow and deep acceptors in silicon quantum wells.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Underbarrier nucleation kinetics in a metastable quantum liquid near the spinodal

We develop a theory in order to describe the effect of relaxation in a condensed medium upon the quantum decay of a metastable liquid near the spinodal at low temperatures. We find that both the regime and the rate of quantum nucleation strongly depend on the relaxation time and its temperature behavior. The quantum nucleation rate slows down with the decrease of the relaxation time. We also discuss the low temperature experiments on cavitation in normal $^3$He and superfluid $^4$He at negative pressures. It is the sharp distinctions in the high frequency sound mode and in the temperature behavior of the relaxation time that make the quantum cavitation kinetics in $^3$He and $^4$He completely different in kind.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure

A Theory of Magnets with Competing Double Exchange and Superexchange Interactions

We study the competition between ferromagnetic double exchange (DE) and nearest-neighbour antiferromagnetic exchange in CMR materials. Towards this end, a single site mean field theory is proposed which emphasizes the hopping-mediated nature of the DE contribution. We find that the competition between these two exchange interactions leads to ferro- or antiferromagnetic order with incomplete saturation of the (sub)lattice magnetization. This conclusion is in contrast to previous results in the literature which find a canted spin arrangement under similar circumstances. We attribute this difference to the highly anisotropic exchange interactions used elsewhere. The associated experimental implications are discussed.Comment: 4 pages, Latex-Revtex, 3 PostScript figures. Please see report cond-mat/980523

Electron Clusters in Inert Gases

The paper addresses counterintuitive behavior of electrons injected into dense cryogenic media with negative scattering length $a_0$. Instead of expected polaronic effect (formation of density enhancement clusters) which should substantially reduce the electron mobility, an opposite picture is observed: with increasing $|a_0|$ (the trend taking place for inert gases with the growth of atomic number) and the medium density, the electrons remain practically free. An explanation of this behaviour is provided based on consistent accounting for the non-linearity of electron interaction with the gaseous medium in the gas atom number density