Search results for " statistical mechanics"
showing 10 items of 557 documents
Solid-solid phase transition in hard ellipsoids
2009
We present a computer simulation study of the crystalline phases of hard ellipsoids of revolution. A previous study [P. Pfleiderer and T. Schilling, Phys. Rev. E 75, 020402 (2007)]. showed that for aspect ratios a/bor=3 the previously suggested stretched-fcc phase [D. Frenkel and B. Mulder, Mol. Phys. 55, 1171 (1985)] is unstable with respect to a simple monoclinic phase with two ellipsoids of different orientations per unit cell (SM2). In order to study the stability of these crystalline phases at different aspect ratios and as a function of density we have calculated their free energies by thermodynamic integration. The integration path was sampled by an expanded ensemble method in which …
Thermalization of Levy flights: Path-wise picture in 2D
2013
We analyze two-dimensional (2D) random systems driven by a symmetric L\'{e}vy stable noise which, under the sole influence of external (force) potentials $\Phi (x) $, asymptotically set down at Boltzmann-type thermal equilibria. Such behavior is excluded within standard ramifications of the Langevin approach to L\'{e}vy flights. In the present paper we address the response of L\'{e}vy noise not to an external conservative force field, but directly to its potential $\Phi (x)$. We prescribe a priori the target pdf $\rho_*$ in the Boltzmann form $\sim \exp[- \Phi (x)]$ and next select the L\'evy noise of interest. Given suitable initial data, this allows to infer a reliable path-wise approxima…
Percolation and Schramm–Loewner evolution in the 2D random-field Ising model
2011
Abstract The presence of random fields is well known to destroy ferromagnetic order in Ising systems in two dimensions. When the system is placed in a sufficiently strong external field, however, the size of clusters of like spins diverges. There is evidence that this percolation transition is in the universality class of standard site percolation. It has been claimed that, for small disorder, a similar percolation phenomenon also occurs in zero external field. Using exact algorithms, we study ground states of large samples and find little evidence for a transition at zero external field. Nevertheless, for sufficiently small random-field strengths, there is an extended region of the phase d…
Topological effects in ring polymers. II. Influence of persistence length
1999
The interplay of topological constraints and persistence length of ring polymers in their own melt is investigated by means of dynamical Monte Carlo simulations of a three dimensional lattice model. We ask if the results are consistent with an asymptotically regime where the rings behave like (compact) {\em lattice animals} in a self-consistent network of topological constraints imposed by neighbouring rings. Tuning the persistence length provides an efficient route to increase the ring overlap required for this mean-field picture to hold: The {\em effective} Flory exponent for the ring size decreases down to $\nu \stackrel{<}{\sim} 1/3$ with increasing persistence length. Evidence is provi…
Breather dynamics in a stochastic sine-Gordon equation: evidence of noise-enhanced stability
2023
The dynamics of sine-Gordon breathers is studied in the presence of dissipative and stochastic perturbations. Taking a stationary breather with a random phase value as the initial state, the performed simulations demonstrate that a spatially-homogeneous noisy source can make the oscillatory excitation more stable, i.e., it enables the latter to last significantly longer than it would in a noise-free scenario. Both the frequency domain and the localization of energy are examined to document the effectiveness of the noise-enhanced stability phenomenon, which emerges as a nonmonotonic behavior of an average characteristic time for the breather as a function of the noise intensity. The influenc…
Critical and tricritical singularities of the three-dimensional random-bond Potts model for large $q$
2005
We study the effect of varying strength, $\delta$, of bond randomness on the phase transition of the three-dimensional Potts model for large $q$. The cooperative behavior of the system is determined by large correlated domains in which the spins points into the same direction. These domains have a finite extent in the disordered phase. In the ordered phase there is a percolating cluster of correlated spins. For a sufficiently large disorder $\delta>\delta_t$ this percolating cluster coexists with a percolating cluster of non-correlated spins. Such a co-existence is only possible in more than two dimensions. We argue and check numerically that $\delta_t$ is the tricritical disorder, which se…
Two-state protein-like folding of a homopolymer chain
2010
Many small proteins fold via a first-order "all-or-none" transition directly from an expanded coil to a compact native state. Here we study an analogous direct freezing transition from an expanded coil to a compact crystallite for a simple flexible homopolymer. Wang-Landau sampling is used to construct the 1D density of states for square-well chains of length 128. Analysis within both the micro-canonical and canonical ensembles shows that, for a chain with sufficiently short-range interactions, the usual polymer collapse transition is preempted by a direct freezing or "folding" transition. A 2D free-energy landscape, built via subsequent multi-canonical sampling, reveals a dominant folding …
Capillary condensation in cylindrical pores: Monte Carlo study of the interplay of surface and finite size effects.
2010
When a fluid that undergoes a vapor to liquid transition in the bulk is confined to a long cylindrical pore, the phase transition is shifted (mostly due to surface effects at the walls of the pore) and rounded (due to finite size effects). The nature of the phase coexistence at the transition depends on the length of the pore: For very long pores the system is axially homogeneous at low temperatures. At the chemical potential where the transition takes place fluctuations occur between vapor-like and liquid-like states of the cylinder as a whole. At somewhat higher temperatures (but still far below bulk criticality) the system at phase coexistence is in an axially inhomogeneous multi-domain …
Generalized-ensemble simulations and cluster algorithms
2010
The importance-sampling Monte Carlo algorithm appears to be the universally optimal solution to the problem of sampling the state space of statistical mechanical systems according to the relative importance of configurations for the partition function or thermal averages of interest. While this is true in terms of its simplicity and universal applicability, the resulting approach suffers from the presence of temporal correlations of successive samples naturally implied by the Markov chain underlying the importance-sampling simulation. In many situations, these autocorrelations are moderate and can be easily accounted for by an appropriately adapted analysis of simulation data. They turn out…
Crystal nuclei in melts: A Monte Carlo simulation of a model for attractive colloids
2015
As a model for a suspension of hard-sphere like colloidal particles where small nonadsorbing dissolved polymers create a depletion attraction, we introduce an effective colloid-colloid potential closely related to the Asakura-Oosawa model but that does not have any discontinuities. In simulations, this model straightforwardly allows the calculation of the pressure from the Virial formula, and the phase transition in the bulk from the liquid to crystalline solid can be accurately located from a study where a stable coexistence of a crystalline slab with a surrounding liquid phase occurs. For this model, crystalline nuclei surrounded by fluid are studied both by identifying the crystal-fluid …