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arXiv:cond-mat/0508604 · Physical Review Letters

Breaking of Ergodicity and Long Relaxation Times in Systems with Long-Range Interactions

David Mukamel, Stefano Ruffo, Nir Schreiber

Published Dec 9, 2005• 199 citations
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Abstract

The thermodynamic and dynamical properties of an Ising model with both short-range and long-range, mean-field-like, interactions are studied within the microcanonical ensemble. It is found that the relaxation time of thermodynamically unstable states diverges logarithmically with system size. This is in contrast with the case of short-range interactions where this time is finite. Moreover, at sufficiently low energies, gaps in the magnetization interval may develop to which no microscopic configuration corresponds. As a result, in local microcanonical dynamics the system cannot move across the gap, leading to breaking of ergodicity even in finite systems. These are general features of systems with long-range interactions and are expected to be valid even when the interaction is slowly decaying with distance.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.95.240604

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The thermodynamic and dynamical properties of an Ising model with both short-range and long-range, mean-field-like, interactions are studied within the microcanonical ensemble. It is found that the relaxation time of thermodynamically unstable states diverges logarithmically with system size. This is in contrast with the case of short-range interactions where this time is finite. Moreover, at sufficiently low energies, gaps in the magnetization interval may develop to which no microscopic configuration corresponds. As a result, in local microcanonical dynamics the system cannot move across the gap, leading to breaking of ergodicity even in finite systems. These are general features of systems with long-range interactions and are expected to be valid even when the interaction is slowly decaying with distance.
We study a generalized isotropic XY model which includes both two- and four-spin mean-field interactions. This model can be solved in the microcanonical ensemble. It is shown that in certain parameter regions the model exhibits gaps in the magnetization at fixed energy, resulting in ergodicity breaking. This phenomenon has previously been reported in anisotropic and discrete spin models. The entropy of the model is calculated and the microcanonical phase diagram is derived, showing the existence of first-order phase transitions from the ferromagnetic to a paramagnetic disordered phase. It is found that ergodicity breaking takes place in both the ferromagnetic and paramagnetic phases. As a consequence, the system can exhibit a stable ferromagnetic phase within the paramagnetic region, and conversely a disordered phase within the magnetically ordered region.
Quantum thermalization of closed systems -- i.e. the relaxation of local properties to their thermodynamic value along the Hamiltonian evolution -- is generically expected in non-integrable systems at finite energy density. In this work we show that quantum spin systems with at least one spin component coupled through long-range ferromagnetic interactions, and a second spin component coupled to a field, cannot in general thermalize to a paramagnetic state whenever they have a finite, negative energy per spin. The long-range interactions we consider decay as a power law of the distance, ∼r−α\sim r^{-α}∼r−α with α<dα< dα<d, where ddd is the number of spatial dimensions of the system. The lack of thermalization is generic to an infinite family of Hamiltonians, and it is not associated to any form of integrability. It can instead be understood by the anomalous features of the thermodynamics of the system in the paramagnetic phase, which cannot be reflected in the properties of the eigenstates. This leads to a breakdown of eigenstate typicality and of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. Interestingly, the non-thermal states emerging at long times in the dynamics display long-range multipartite entanglement, elevating the breakdown of thermalization to a resource.
Recently, it has been found that an effective long-range interaction is realized among local bistable variables (spins) in systems where the elastic interaction causes ordering of the spins. In such systems, we generally expect both long-range and short-range interactions to exist. In the short-range Ising model, the correlation length diverges at the critical point. In contrast, in the long-range interacting model the spin configuration is always uniform and the correlation length is zero. As long as a system has nonzero long-range interactions, it shows criticality in the mean-field universality class, and the spin configuration is uniform beyond a certain scale. Here we study the crossover from the pure short-range interacting model to the long-range interacting model. We investigate the infinite-range model (Husimi-Temperley model) as a prototype of this competition, and we study how the critical temperature changes as a function of the strength of the long-range interaction. This model can also be interpreted as an approximation for the Ising model on a small-world network. We derive a formula for the critical temperature as a function of the strength of the long-range interaction. We also propose a finite-size scaling form for the spin correlation length at the critical point, which is finite as long as the long-range interaction is included, though it diverges in the limit of the pure short-range model. These properties are confirmed by extensive Monte Carlo simulations.
We study the low-energy properties of the long-range random transverse-field Ising chain with ferromagnetic interactions decaying as a power of the distance. Using variants of the strong-disorder renormalization group method, the critical behavior is found to be controlled by a strong-disorder fixed point with a finite dynamical exponent . Approaching the critical point, the correlation length diverges exponentially. In the critical point, the magnetization shows an -independent logarithmic finite-size scaling and the entanglement entropy satisfies the area law. These observations are argued to hold for other systems with long-range interactions, even in higher dimensions.
We analyze the equilibrium properties of a chain of ferromagnetically coupled rotators which interact through a force that decays as ${r}^{\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\alpha}}$ where rrr is the interparticle distance and $\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{\ge}0$. By integrating the equations of motion we obtain the microcanonical time averages of both the magnetization and the kinetic energy. We detect three different regimes depending on whether $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ belongs to the intervals [0,1)[0,1)[0,1), (1,2)(1,2)(1,2), or $(2,\ensuremath{\infty})$. For $0<\ensuremath{\alpha}<1$, the microcanonical averages agree, after a scaling, with those obtained in the canonical ensemble for the mean-field case $(\ensuremath{\alpha}\phantom{\rule{0ex}{0ex}}=\phantom{\rule{0ex}{0ex}}0)$. This correspondence offers a mathematically tractable way of dealing with systems governed by slowly decaying long-range interactions.
We have studied needle shaped three-dimensional classical spin systems with purely dipolar interactions in the microcanonical ensemble, using both numerical simulations and analytical approximations. We have observed spontaneous magnetization for different finite cubic lattices. The transition from the paramagnetic to the ferromagnetic phase is shown to be first-order. For two lattice types we have observed magnetization flips in the phase transition region. In some cases, gaps in the accessible values of magnetization appear, a signature of the ergodicity breaking found for systems with long-range interactions. We analytically explain these effects by performing a nontrivial mapping of the model Hamiltonian onto a one-dimensional Ising model with competing antiferromagnetic nearest-neighbor and ferromagnetic mean-field interactions. These results hint at performing experiments on isolated dipolar needles in order to verify some of the exotic properties of systems with long-range interactions in the microcanonical ensemble.