The crossover between quasiequilibrium and nonequilibrium spin-glass dynamics has been studied in Monte Carlo simulations of two- and three-dimensional short-range Ising spin-glass systems. The spin system was quenched in zero field to a low temperature T. After equilibrating for a time
tw, a weak magnetic field was applied and the time dependence of the magnetization M(t) and the spin autocorrelation function q(t) was studied. Our results show that the relaxation rate S(t)=\ensuremath{\partial}M(t)/\ensuremath{\partial}
log10(t) exhibits a maximum at t\ensuremath{\approxeq}
tw. If the temperature is lowered or raised, immediately prior to the field application, the apparent age (
ta) of the system, as defined by the maximum in relaxation rate, is shifted to longer or shorter time scales, respectively. No significant differences between the aging behavior in two and three dimensions are found. The relation \ensuremath{\chi}(t)=[1-q(t)]/T holds only for short time scales (t\ensuremath{\ll}
tw), clear deviations are found at longer time scales (t>
tw). Since this relation should according to the fluctuation-dissipation theorem hold for a system in equilibrium, this result is interpreted as an indication of a crossover between equilibrium and nonequilibrium dynamics. Our results are qualitatively in agreement with experiments as well as with theoretical models for the nonequilibrium spin-glass dynamics.
Using Sherrington-Kirkpatric （SK） model we investigated the nonequilibrum properties of spin glass by dynamical Monte Carlo simulation. Our results revealed that the susceptibility in the weak field shows a cusp near the glass transition, while the specific heat shows a more broad transition. The aging and zero-field colding memory effect is also reproduced in our simulation, and the phenomena can be explained by energy relaxation. Our simulation also reveals that homogeneous SK model can not reproduce the exchange bias effect observed in the experiment.
Spin glass behavior was first seen in metallic alloys with magnetic impurities dispersed randomly in the main non-magnetic component. Due to the simultaneous presence of quenched disorder and competing ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic interactions, the nonequilibrium behaviors of spin glasses are intricate and difficult to understand. Experimental research on spin glass materials indicate extremely slow dynamics, suggesting that the direct numerical simulation using local spin flips will take impractical time scales to replicate the nonequilibrium behaviors. This thesis introduces efficient algorithms and heuristics for the numerical simulation of simple models for spin glasses and discusses significant simulation results. The results provide insights into understanding the nonequilibrium behaviors, especially aging and memory, through studying microscopic constituent configurations. The methodology and conclusion presented in this thesis can be potentially extended to address general questions about disordered materials at nonequilibrium. Chapter 1 provides a thorough overview of spin glasses. A detailed introduction on complex nonequilibrium behaviors, including slow dynamics and memory effects, seen in typical experiments of spin glass materials, is presented. A general discussion about the characterization and categorization of memory effects found in many out-of-equilibrium systems is highlighted. Two prevalent theoretical models on spin glasses, the droplet and replica symmetry breaking theory, are described. Lastly, algorithm development and simulation techniques used to study spin glasses are covered. In Chapter 2, a patchwork heuristic is applied to accelerate the relaxation of spin glass models in dimensions
d=1 and
d=2 with the goal of investigating the dynamics of loss and recovery of spin configurations. A well-designed simulation protocol, consists of a aging and recovery stage, is used to mimic the temperature cycling experiment, where the temperature variations are replaced by the variations of the spin coupling realization. Eventual recovery of memory upon coarsening is seen in two-dimensional Ising spin glasses and one-dimensional clock models, while one-dimensional Ising spin systems do not exhibit configuration memory. A central result is that the coarsening recovery length scale
sc grows faster than the aging length scale
ℓ as a power law relation
sc∼ℓ2.58. In Chapter 3, the microscopic dependence of spin glass equilibration on sample history, i.e., the initial configuration and the specific noise history of stochastic dynamics, is examined. The patchwork dynamics is used to simulate the glassy dynamics over a wide range of length scales. The dependence of the nearest-neighbor spin correlations at long time on initial spin configurations and on noise histories are compared. Most of the local spin correlations are independent of the details of evolution, due to the formation of rigid domains. The correlations on a fractal set of domain walls are found to have distinct dependence on the noise history and the initial state. The initial ``nature'' of the state is retained in the domain walls under coarsening more than the ``nurture'' of the noise, while the location of the domain walls at each scale is determined by the frozen disorder (``environment''). We also provide evidence that coarsening with local dynamics at finite temperature gives persistence of overlaps roughly consistent with coarsening at zero temperature, at least over short distances, supporting the use of zero-temperature heuristics to address finite-temperature dynamics and memory.
Among the many non-equilibrium processes encountered in nature we deal with two different but related aspects. One is the non-equilibrium relaxation process that is at the origin of \'aging phenomena••, and the other one is a non-equilibrium phase transition, called ••dynamic phase transition••. One of the main purposes of our research is to explore more realistic situations than studied previously. Indeed, in the study of aging phenomena certain kinds of disorder effects are considered, and we introduce the ••surface•• as a spatial boundary to the system undergoing the dynamic phase transition. In order to observe these processes as clearly as possible, we study in both cases simple spin systems. Using Monte Carlo simulations we first investigate aging in three-dimensional Ising spin glasses as well as in two-dimensional Ising models with disorder quenched to low temperatures. The time-dependent dynamical correlation length L(t) is determined numerically and the scaling behavior of various two-time quantities as a function of L(t)/L(s) is discussed where t and s are two different times. For disordered Ising models deviations of L(t) from algebraic growth law show up. The generalized scaling forms as a function of L(t)/L(s) reveal a generic simple aging scenario for Ising spin glasses as well as for disordered Ising ferromagnets. We also study the local critical phenomena at a dynamic phase transition by means of numerical simulations of kinetic Ising models with surfaces subjected to a periodic oscillating field. We examine layer-dependent quantities, such as the period-averaged magnetization per layer Q(z) and the layer susceptibility ¥ö(z), and determine local critical exponents through finite size scaling. Both for two and three dimensions, we find that the values of the surface exponents differ from those of the equilibrium critical surface. It is revealed that the surface phase diagram of the non-equilibrium system is not identical to that of the equilibrium system in three dimensions.
Aging phenomena have been studied in very different materials like polymers, supercooled liquids or disordered orientational crystals. We recall here the main features of aging in spin glasses, and use this example of magnetic systems as a guideline for the description of the others. A particular attention is put on the sensitivity of aging to the cooling rate and to temperature variations. This allows us to point out differences between temperature specific processes, yielding ``rejuvenation and memory effects'' as known in spin glasses, and domain growth processes, giving cumulative contributions at different temperatures. The relevance of wall depinning processes to rejuvenation and memory effects is discussed at the light of recent results on disordered ferromagnets.
A spin-glass transition has been investigated for a long time but we have not reached a conclusion yet due to difficulties in the simulation studies. They are slow dynamics, strong finite-size effects, and sample-to-sample dependencies. We found that a size of the spin-glass order reaches a lattice boundary within a very short Monte Carlo step. A competition between the spin-glass order and a boundary condition causes these difficulties. Once the boundary effect was removed, physical quantities exhibited quite normal behaviors. They became self-averaging in a limit of large replica numbers. These findings suggest that the nonequilibrium relaxation method is a good choice for solving the difficulties if a lattice size and a replica number are set sufficiently large. A dynamic scaling analysis on nonequilibrium relaxation functions gave a result that the spin-glass transition and the chiral-glass transition occurs at the same temperature in the Heisenberg model in three dimensions. The estimated critical exponent ν agrees with the experimental result.