Biomedical subjects

Massimo Boninsegni

Publications and source records attributed to Massimo Boninsegni.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Superfluidity and quantum melting of p-H2 clusters.

Structural and superfluid properties of p-H2 clusters of size up to N=40 molecules, are studied at low temperature (0.5 K<or=T<or=4 K) by path integral Monte Carlo simulations. The superfluid fraction rhoS(T) displays an interesting, nonmonotonic behavior for 22<or=N<or=30. We interpret this dependence in terms of variations with N of the cluster structure. Superfluidity is observed at low T in clusters of as many as 27 molecules; in the temperature range considered here, quantum melting is observed in some clusters, which are seen to freeze at high temperature.

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PubMed2006

Superglass phase of 4He.

We study different solid phases of 4He, by means of path integral Monte Carlo simulations based on a recently developed worm algorithm. Our study includes simulations that start off from a high- gas phase, which is then "quenched" down to T = 0.2 K. The low-T properties of the system crucially depend on the initial state. While an ideal hcp crystal is a clear-cut insulator, the disordered system freezes into a superglass, i.e., a metastable amorphous solid featuring off-diagonal long-range order and superfluidity.

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PubMed2006

Worm algorithm for continuous-space path integral monte carlo simulations.

We present a new approach to path integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) simulations based on the worm algorithm, originally developed for lattice models and extended here to continuous-space many-body systems. The scheme allows for efficient computation of thermodynamic properties, including winding numbers and off-diagonal correlations, for systems of much greater size than that accessible to conventional PIMC simulations. As an illustrative application of the method, we simulate the superfluid transition of 4He in two dimensions.

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PubMed2005

Supersolid phase of hard-core bosons on a triangular lattice.

We study properties of the supersolid phase observed for hard-core bosons on the triangular lattice near half-integer filling factor, and the phase diagram of the system at finite temperature. We find that the solid order is always of the (2m, -m, -m) with m changing discontinuously from positive to negative values at half filling, in contrast with phases observed for Ising spins in a transverse magnetic field. At finite temperature we find two intersecting second-order transition lines: one in the 3-state Potts universality class and the other of the Kosterlitz-Thouless type.

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PubMed2005

Path integral ground state with a fourth-order propagator: application to condensed helium.

Ground state properties of condensed helium are calculated using the path integral ground state (PIGS) method. A fourth-order approximation is used as short (imaginary) time propagator. We compare our results with those obtained with other quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) techniques and different propagators. For this particular application, we find that the fourth-order propagator performs comparably to the pair product approximation, and is far superior to the primitive approximation. Results obtained for the equation of state of condensed helium show that PIGS compares favorably to other QMC methods traditionally utilized for this type of calculation.

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