Biomedical subjects

S N Coppersmith

Publications and source records attributed to S N Coppersmith.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2004

Performance limitations of flat-histogram methods.

We determine the optimal scaling of local-update flat-histogram methods with system size by using a perfect flat-histogram scheme based upon the exact density of states of 2D Ising models. The typical tunneling time needed to sample the entire bandwidth does not scale with the number of spins N as the minimal N2 of an unbiased random walk in energy space. While the scaling is power law for the ferromagnetic and fully frustrated Ising model, for the +/-J nearest-neighbor spin glass the distribution of tunneling times is governed by a fat-tailed Fréchet extremal value distribution that obeys exponential scaling. Furthermore, the shape parameters of these distributions indicate that statistical sample means become ill defined already for moderate system sizes within these complex energy landscapes.

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PubMed2003

Entangled quantum state of magnetic dipoles.

Free magnetic moments usually manifest themselves in Curie laws, where weak external magnetic fields produce magnetizations that vary as the reciprocal of the temperature (1/T). For a variety of materials that do not display static magnetism, including doped semiconductors and certain rare-earth intermetallics, the 1/T law is replaced by a power law T(-alpha) with alpha < 1. Here we show that a much simpler material system-namely, the insulating magnetic salt LiHo(x)Y(1-x)F(4)-can also display such a power law. Moreover, by comparing the results of numerical simulations of this system with susceptibility and specific-heat data, we show that both energy-level splitting and quantum entanglement are crucial to describing its behaviour. The second of these quantum mechanical effects-entanglement, where the wavefunction of a system with several degrees of freedom cannot be written as a product of wavefunctions for each degree of freedom-becomes visible for remarkably small tunnelling terms, and is activated well before tunnelling has visible effects on the spectrum. This finding is significant because it shows that entanglement, rather than energy-level redistribution, can underlie the magnetic behaviour of a simple insulating quantum spin system.

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PubMed1999

Noise stabilization of self-organized memories.

We investigate a nonlinear dynamical system which "remembers" preselected values of a system parameter. The deterministic version of the system can encode many parameter values during a transient period, but in the limit of long times, almost all of them are forgotten. Here we show that a certain type of stochastic noise can stabilize multiple memories, enabling many parameter values to be encoded permanently. We present analytic results that provide insight both into the memory formation and into the noise-induced memory stabilization. The relevance of our results to experiments on the charge-density wave material NbSe3 is discussed.

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PubMed1999

Properties of layer-by-layer vector stochastic models of force fluctuations in granular materials.

We attempt to describe the stress distributions of granular packings using lattice-based layer-by-layer stochastic models that satisfy the constraints of force and torque balance and nontensile forces at each site. The inherent asymmetry in the layer-by-layer approach appears to lead to an asymmetric force distribution, in disagreement with both experiments and general symmetry considerations. The vertical force component probability distribution is robust and in agreement with predictions of the scalar q model of Liu et al. [Science 269, 513 (1995)] and Coppersmith et al. [Phys. Rev. E 53, 4673 (1996)] while the distribution of horizontal force components is qualitatively different and depends on the details of implementation.

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