Density-correlator signatures of the vulcanization transition

Certain density correlators, measurable via various experimental techniques, are studied in the context of the vulcanization transition. It is shown that these correlators contain essential information about both the vulcanization transition and the emergent amorphous solid state. Contact is made with various physical ingredients that have featured in experimental studies of amorphous colloidal and gel systems and in theoretical studies of the glassy state.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figur

Measuring effective temperatures in out-of-equilibrium driven systems

We introduce and solve a model of a thermometric measurement on a driven glassy system in a stationary state. We show that a thermometer with a sufficiently slow response measures a temperature higher than that of the environment, but that the measured temperature does not usually coincide with the effective temperature related to the violation of the Fluctuation-Dissipation Theorem.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, LaTeX, Springer Journal class (included

Density-correlator signatures of the vulcanization transition

Certain density correlators, measurable via various experimental techniques, are studied in the context of the vulcanization transition. It is shown that these correlators contain essential information about both the vulcanization transition and the emergent amorphous solid state. Contact is made with various physical ingredients that have featured in experimental studies of amorphous colloidal and gel systems and in theoretical studies of the glassy state.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figur

Modelling Collective Opinion Formation by Means of Active Brownian Particles

The concept of active Brownian particles is used to model a collective opinion formation process. It is assumed that individuals in community create a two-component communication field that influences the change of opinions of other persons and/or can induce their migration. The communication field is described by a reaction-diffusion equation, the opinion change of the individuals is given by a master equation, while the migration is described by a set of Langevin equations, coupled by the communication field. In the mean-field limit holding for fast communication we derive a critical population size, above which the community separates into a majority and a minority with opposite opinions. The existence of external support (e.g. from mass media) changes the ratio between minority and majority, until above a critical external support the supported subpopulation exists always as a majority. Spatial effects lead to two critical ``social'' temperatures, between which the community exists in a metastable state, thus fluctuations below a certain critical wave number may result in a spatial opinion separation. The range of metastability is particularly determined by a parameter characterizing the individual response to the communication field. In our discussion, we draw analogies to phase transitions in physical systems.Comment: Revised text version. Accepted for publication in European Physics Journal B. For related work see http://summa.physik.hu-berlin.de/~frank/active.html and http://www.if.pw.edu.pl/~jholys

A generalized spin model of financial markets

We reformulate the Cont-Bouchaud model of financial markets in terms of classical "super-spins" where the spin value is a measure of the number of individual traders represented by a portfolio manager of an investment agency. We then extend this simplified model by switching on interactions among the super-spins to model the tendency of agencies getting influenced by the opinion of other managers. We also introduce a fictitious temperature (to model other random influences), and time-dependent local fields to model slowly changing optimistic or pessimistic bias of traders. We point out close similarities between the price variations in our model with $N$ super-spins and total displacements in an $N$-step Levy flight. We demonstrate the phenomena of natural and artificially created bubbles and subsequent crashes as well as the occurrence of "fat tails" in the distributions of stock price variations.Comment: 11 pages LATEX, 7 postscript figures; longer text with theoretical analysis, more accurate numerical data, better terminology, additional references. Accepted for publication in European Physical Journal

The ±J\pm J spin glass in Migdal-Kadanoff approximation

We study the low-temperature phase of the three-dimensional $\pm J$ Ising spin glass in Migdal-Kadanoff approximation. At zero temperature, T=0, the properties of the spin glass result from the ground-state degeneracy and can be elucidated using scaling arguments based on entropy. The approach to the asymptotic scaling regime is very slow, and the correct exponents are only visible beyond system sizes around 64. At T>0, a crossover from the zero-temperature behaviour to the behaviour expected from the droplet picture occurs at length scales proportional to $T^{-d_s/2}$ where $d_s$ is the fractal dimension of a domain wall. Canonical droplet behaviour is not visible at any temperature for systems whose linear dimension is smaller than 16 lattice spacings, because the data are either affected by the zero-temperature behaviour or the critical point behaviour.Comment: 6 pages RevTex, 6 postscript figure

Ground states versus low-temperature equilibria in random field Ising chains

We discuss with the aid of random walk arguments and exact numerical computations the magnetization properties of one-dimensional random field chains. The ground state structure is explained in terms of absorbing and non-absorbing random walk excursions. At low temperatures, the magnetization profiles follow those of the ground states except at regions where a local random field fluctuation makes thermal excitations feasible. This follows also from the non-absorbing random walks, and implies that the magnetization length scale is a product of these two scales. It is not simply given by the Imry-Ma-like ground state domain size nor by the scale of the thermal excitations.Comment: 7 pages LaTeX, 8 eps-figures include

Crowd-Anticrowd Theory of Multi-Agent Market Games

We present a dynamical theory of a multi-agent market game, the so-called Minority Game (MG), based on crowds and anticrowds. The time-averaged version of the dynamical equations provides a quantitatively accurate, yet intuitively simple, explanation for the variation of the standard deviation (`volatility') in MG-like games. We demonstrate this for the basic MG, and the MG with stochastic strategies. The time-dependent equations themselves reproduce the essential dynamics of the MG.Comment: Presented at APFA2 (Liege) July 2000. Proceedings: Eur.Phys.J. B [email protected]

Random quantum magnets with broad disorder distribution

We study the critical behavior of Ising quantum magnets with broadly distributed random couplings (J), such that $P(\ln J) \sim |\ln J|^{-1-\alpha}$, $\alpha>1$, for large $|\ln J|$ (L\'evy flight statistics). For sufficiently broad distributions, $\alpha<\alpha_c$, the critical behavior is controlled by a line of fixed points, where the critical exponents vary with the L\'evy index, $\alpha$. In one dimension, with $\alpha_c=2$, we obtaind several exact results through a mapping to surviving Riemann walks. In two dimensions the varying critical exponents have been calculated by a numerical implementation of the Ma-Dasgupta-Hu renormalization group method leading to $\alpha_c \approx 4.5$. Thus in the region $2<\alpha<\alpha_c$, where the central limit theorem holds for $|\ln J|$ the broadness of the distribution is relevant for the 2d quantum Ising model.Comment: 10pages, 13figures, final for

Room temperature stable single-photon source

We report on the realization of a stable solid state room temperature source for single photons. It is based on the fluorescence of a single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) color center in a diamond nanocrystal. Antibunching has been observed in the fluorescence light under both continuous and pulsed excitation. Our source delivers 2*10^4 single-photon pulses per second at an excitation repetition rate of 10 MHz. The number of two-photon pulses is reduced by a factor of five compared to strongly attenuated coherent sources.Comment: 7 pages, 10 figures, accepted to the special issue of the European Physical Journal D on "Quantum interference and cryptographic keys: novel physics and advancing technologies", proceedings of the conference QUICK 200