Multicanonical Study of the 3D Ising Spin Glass

We simulated the Edwards-Anderson Ising spin glass model in three dimensions via the recently proposed multicanonical ensemble. Physical quantities such as energy density, specific heat and entropy are evaluated at all temperatures. We studied their finite size scaling, as well as the zero temperature limit to explore the ground state properties.Comment: FSU-SCRI-92-121; 7 pages; sorry, no figures include

Exchange Monte Carlo Method and Application to Spin Glass Simulations

We propose an efficient Monte Carlo algorithm for simulating a ``hardly-relaxing" system, in which many replicas with different temperatures are simultaneously simulated and a virtual process exchanging configurations of these replica is introduced. This exchange process is expected to let the system at low temperatures escape from a local minimum. By using this algorithm the three-dimensional $\pm J$ Ising spin glass model is studied. The ergodicity time in this method is found much smaller than that of the multi-canonical method. In particular the time correlation function almost follows an exponential decay whose relaxation time is comparable to the ergodicity time at low temperatures. It suggests that the system relaxes very rapidly through the exchange process even in the low temperature phase.Comment: 10 pages + uuencoded 5 Postscript figures, REVTe

A New Approach to Spin Glass Simulations

We present a recursive procedure to calculate the parameters of the recently introduced multicanonical ensemble and explore the approach for spin glasses. Temperature dependence of the energy, the entropy and other physical quantities are easily calculable and we report results for the zero temperature limit. Our data provide evidence that the large $L$ increase of the ergodicity time is greatly improved. The multicanonical ensemble seems to open new horizons for simulations of spin glasses and other systems which have to cope with conflicting constraints

AGRESTE project: Agricultural resources investigations in northern Italy and southern France

The author has identified the following significant results. Recognition of rice varieties at the flowering stage by using airborne scanner data at low altitude (1500 m) seems to be feasible. The accuracies obtained on a reduced test area (3 sq km) range from 65% to 83%. Variations of a single cultural factor, such as nitrogen fertilization, induce variations of the total rice biomass at harvest, which can be correlated closely to the values of the reflectance ratio at earing. When grain production is correlated to total biomass, prediction of yield can be achieved based on reflectance data measured two months before harvest

Current at a distance and resonant transparency in Weyl semimetals

Surface Fermi arcs are the most prominent manifestation of the topological nature of Weyl semimetals. In the presence of a static magnetic field oriented perpendicular to the sample surface, their existence leads to unique inter-surface cyclotron orbits. We propose two experiments which directly probe the Fermi arcs: a magnetic field dependent non-local DC voltage and sharp resonances in the transmission of electromagnetic waves at frequencies controlled by the field. We show that these experiments do not rely on quantum mechanical phase coherence, which renders them far more robust and experimentally accessible than quantum effects. We also comment on the applicability of these ideas to Dirac semimetals.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure

Scientific, institutional and personal rivalries among Soviet geographers in the late Stalin era

Scientific, institutional and personal rivalries between three key centres of geographical research and scholarship (the Academy of Sciences Institute of Geography and the Faculties of Geography at Moscow and Leningrad State Universities) are surveyed for the period from 1945 to the early 1950s. It is argued that the debates and rivalries between members of the three institutions appear to have been motivated by a variety of scientific, ideological, institutional and personal factors, but that genuine scientific disagreements were at least as important as political and ideological factors in influencing the course of the debates and in determining their final outcome