Phonon superradiance and phonon laser effect in nanomagnets

We show that the theory of spin-phonon processes in paramagnetic solids must take into account the coherent generation of phonons by the magnetic centers. This effect should drastically enhance spin-phonon rates in nanoscale paramagnets and in crystals of molecular nanomagnets.Comment: 4 PR pages, 1 Figur

Monte Carlo study of the two-dimensional site-diluted dipolar Ising model

By tempered Monte Carlo simulations, we study 2D site-diluted dipolar Ising systems. Dipoles are randomly placed on a fraction x of all L^2 sites in a square lattice, and point along a common crystalline axis. For x_c< x<=1, where x_c = 0.79(5), we find an antiferromagnetic phase below a temperature which vanishes as x approaches x_c from above. At lower values of x, we study (i) distributions of the spin--glass (SG) overlap q, (ii) their relative mean square deviation Delta_q^2 and kurtosis and (iii) xi_L/L, where xi_L is a SG correlation length. From their variation with temperature and system size, we find that the paramagnetic phase covers the entire T>0 range. Our results enable us to obtain an estimate of the critical exponent associated to the correlation length at T=0, 1/nu=0.35(10).Comment: 10 LaTeX pages, 10 figures, 1 table

Conserved Growth on Vicinal Surfaces

A crystal surface which is miscut with respect to a high symmetry plane exhibits steps with a characteristic distance. It is argued that the continuum description of growth on such a surface, when desorption can be neglected, is given by the anisotropic version of the conserved KPZ equation (T. Sun, H. Guo, and M. Grant, Phys. Rev. A 40, 6763 (1989)) with non-conserved noise. A one--loop dynamical renormalization group calculation yields the values of the dynamical exponent and the roughness exponent which are shown to be the same as in the isotropic case. The results presented here should apply in particular to growth under conditions which are typical for molecular beam epitaxy.Comment: 10 pages, uses revte

Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization of spin Hamiltonians

The Bohr-Sommerfeld rule for a spin system is obtained, including the first quantum corrections. The rule applies to both integer and half-integer spin, and respects Kramers degeneracy for time-reversal invariant systems. It is tested for various models, in particular the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model, and found to agree very well with exact results.Comment: Revtex 4, no figures, 1 tabl

Ordering in a frustrated pyrochlore antiferromagnet proximate to a spin liquid

We perform a general study of spin ordering on the pyrochlore lattice with a 3:1 proportionality of two spin polarizations. Equivalently, this describes valence bond solid conformations of a quantum dimer model on the diamond lattice. We determine the set of likely low temperature ordered phases, on the assumption that the ordering is weak, i.e the system is close to a ``U(1)'' quantum spin liquid in which the 3:1 proportionality is maintained but the spins are strongly fluctuating. The nature of the 9 ordered states we find is determined by a ``projective symmetry'' analysis. All the phases exhibit translational and rotational symmetry breaking, with an enlarged unit cell containing 4 to 64 primitive cells of the underlying pyrochlore. The simplest of the 9 phases is the same ``R'' state found earlier in a theoretical study of the ordering on the magnetization plateau in the $S=3/2$ materials \cdaf and \hgaf. We suggest that the spin/dimer model proposed therein undergoes a direct transition from the spin liquid to the R state, and describe a field theory for the universal properties of this critical point, at zero and non-zero temperatures

Influence of lattice distortions in classical spin systems

We investigate a simple model of a frustrated classical spin chain coupled to adiabatic phonons under an external magnetic field. A thorough study of the magnetization properties is carried out both numerically and analytically. We show that already a moderate coupling with the lattice can stabilize a plateau at 1/3 of the saturation and discuss the deformation of the underlying lattice in this phase. We also study the transition to saturation where either a first or second order transition can occur, depending on the couplings strength.Comment: Submitted to Phys. Rev.

Floating Phase in 1D Transverse ANNNI Model

To study the ground state of ANNNI chain under transverse field as a function of frustration parameter $\kappa$ and field strength $\Gamma$, we present here two different perturbative analyses. In one, we consider the (known) ground state at $\kappa=0.5$ and $\Gamma=0$ as the unperturbed state and treat an increase of the field from 0 to $\Gamma$ coupled with an increase of $\kappa$ from 0.5 to $0.5+r\Gamma$ as perturbation. The first order perturbation correction to eigenvalue can be calculated exactly and we could conclude that there are only two phase transition lines emanating from the point $\kappa=0.5$, $\Gamma=0$. In the second perturbation scheme, we consider the number of domains of length 1 as the perturbation and obtain the zero-th order eigenfunction for the perturbed ground state. From the longitudinal spin-spin correlation, we conclude that floating phase exists for small values of transverse field over the entire region intermediate between the ferromagnetic phase and antiphase.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figure

Measurability of the tidal polarizability of neutron stars in late-inspiral gravitational-wave signals

The gravitational wave signal from a binary neutron star inspiral contains information on the nuclear equation of state. This information is contained in a combination of the tidal polarizability parameters of the two neutron stars and is clearest in the late inspiral, just before merger. We use the recently defined tidal extension of the effective one-body formalism to construct a controlled analytical description of the frequency-domain phasing of neutron star inspirals up to merger. Exploiting this analytical description we find that the tidal polarizability parameters of neutron stars can be measured by the advanced LIGO-Virgo detector network from gravitational wave signals having a reasonable signal-to-noise ratio of $\rho=16$. This measurability result seems to hold for all the nuclear equations of state leading to a maximum mass larger than $1.97M_\odot$. We also propose a promising new way of extracting information on the nuclear equation of state from a coherent analysis of an ensemble of gravitational wave observations of separate binary merger events.Comment: 28 pages, 6 figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev.

Growth of Patterned Surfaces

During epitaxial crystal growth a pattern that has initially been imprinted on a surface approximately reproduces itself after the deposition of an integer number of monolayers. Computer simulations of the one-dimensional case show that the quality of reproduction decays exponentially with a characteristic time which is linear in the activation energy of surface diffusion. We argue that this life time of a pattern is optimized, if the characteristic feature size of the pattern is larger than $(D/F)^{1/(d+2)}$, where $D$ is the surface diffusion constant, $F$ the deposition rate and $d$ the surface dimension.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, uses psfig; to appear in Phys. Rev. Let

A Spin Model for Investigating Chirality

Spin chirality has generated great interest recently both from possible applications to flux phases and intrinsically, as an example of a several-site magnetic order parameter that can be long-ranged even where simpler order parameters are not. Previous work (motivated by the flux phases) has focused on antiferromagnetic chiral order; we construct a model in which the chirality orders ferromagnetically and investigate the model's behavior as a function of spin. Enlisting the aid of exact diagonalization, spin-waves, perturbation theory, and mean fields, we conclude that the model likely has long-ranged chiral order for spins 1 and greater and no non-trivial chiral order for spin 1/2.Comment: uuencoded gzipped tarred plain tex fil