Sorting out landscapes by mesoscopic noise

✍ Scribed by M.B. Weissman

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 642 KB
• Volume: 107
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0167-2789
• DOI: 10.1016/s0167-2789(97)00110-3

✦ Synopsis

Although complex landscape models have been proposed for many disordered systems, insufficient attention has been paid to experimental methods of distinguishing among different landscape types. The very broad distribution of relaxation rates often cited as being a useful diagnostic is actually far too generic. We present experimental results on two spin-glass materials showing that non-Gaussian fluctuation statistics provide sensitive discrimination between different spin-glass models, and allow surprisingly detailed determination of parameters of the state space. Related experiments on highly non-equilibrium systems, such as vortex dynamics in superconductors, will be briefly mentioned.