The LiHoxY1-xF4 magnetic material in a transverse magnetic field Bx x perpendicular to the Ising spin direction has long been used to study tunable quantum phase transitions in a random disordered system. We show that the Bx-induced magnetization along the x direction, combined with the local random dilution-induced destruction of crystalline symmetries, generates, via the predominant dipolar interactions between Ho3+ ions, random fields along the Ising z direction. This identifies LiHoxY1-xF4 in Bx as a new random field Ising system. The random fields explain the rapid decrease of the critical temperature in the diluted ferromagnetic regime and the smearing of the nonlinear susceptibility at the spin-glass transition with increasing Bx and render the Bx-induced quantum criticality in LiHoxY1-xF4 likely inaccessible.

This study examines the numerical accuracy, computational cost, and memory requirements of self-consistent field theory (SCFT) calculations when the diffusion equations are solved with various pseudo-spectral methods and the mean-field equations are iterated with Anderson mixing. The different methods are tested on the triply periodic gyroid and spherical phases of a diblock-copolymer melt over a range of intermediate segregations. Anderson mixing is found to be somewhat less effective than when combined with the full-spectral method, but it nevertheless functions admirably well provided that a large number of histories is used. Of the different pseudo-spectral algorithms, the 4th-order one of Ranjan, Qin and Morse performs best, although not quite as efficiently as the full-spectral method.

Monte Carlo field-theoretic simulations (MC-FTS) are performed on melts of symmetric diblock copolymer for invariant polymerization indexes extending down to experimentally relevant values of N̅ ∼ 10 4 . The simulations are performed with a fluctuating composition field, W − (r), and a pressure field, W + (r), that follows the saddle-point approximation. Our study focuses on the disordered-state structure function, S(k), and the order−disorder transition (ODT). Although shortwavelength fluctuations cause an ultraviolet (UV) divergence in three dimensions, this is readily compensated for with the use of an effective Flory−Huggins interaction parameter, χ e . The resulting S(k) matches the predictions of renormalized one-loop (ROL) calculations over the full range of χ e N and N̅ examined in our study, and agrees well with Fredrickson−Helfand (F−H) theory near the ODT. Consistent with the F−H theory, the ODT is discontinuous for finite N̅ and the shift in (χ e N) ODT follows the predicted N̅ −1/3 scaling over our range of N̅ .

We investigate the properties of the XY pyrochlore antiferromagnet with infinite local 111 planar anisotropy. We identify the ground states and show that the configurational ground state entropy is subextensive. By computing the free energy due to harmonic fluctuations and by carrying out Monte Carlo simulations, we find that the model exhibits thermal order-by-disorder leading to low-temperature long-range order consisting of discrete magnetic domains. In doing so, we set aside doubts that order-by-disorder survives in the thermodynamic limit in this model. We compute the spin wave spectrum and show that thermal and quantum fluctuations select the same magnetic structure. With a previously unreported finite-size scaling analysis of Monte Carlo data, we confirm that the transition is first order for the XY model. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we find that the state selected by thermal fluctuations in this XY pyrochlore antiferromagnet can survive the addition of sufficiently weak nearest-neighbor pseudo-dipolar interactions or long-range dipolar interactions to the spin Hamiltonian. Quite interestingly, the resulting state selected by thermal order-by-disorder is metastable below some temperature. We discuss our results in relation to the Er 2 Ti 2 O 7 and Er 2 Sn 2 O 7 pyrochlore antiferromagnets.