Inverse design of disordered stealthy hyperuniform spin chains

Abstract

Positioned between crystalline solids and liquids, disordered many-particle systems which are stealthy and hyperuniform represent new states of matter that are endowed with novel physical and thermodynamic properties. Such stealthy and hyperuniform states are unique in that they are transparent to radiation for a range of wave numbers around the origin. In this work, we employ recently developed inverse statistical-mechanical methods, which seek to obtain the optimal set of interactions that will spontaneously produce a targeted structure or configuration as a unique ground state, to investigate the spin-spin interaction potentials required to stabilize disordered stealthy hyperuniform one-dimensional (1D) Ising-type spin chains. By performing an exhaustive search over the spin configurations that can be enumerated on periodic 1D integer lattices containing N = 2 , 3 , ... , 36 sites, we were able to identify and structurally characterize all stealthy hyperuniform spin chains in this range of system sizes. Within this pool of stealthy hyperuniform spin configurations, we then utilized such inverse optimization techniques to demonstrate that stealthy hyperuniform spin chains can be realized as either unique or degenerate disordered ground states of radial long-ranged (relative to the spin-chain length) spin-spin interactions. Such exotic ground states appear to be distinctly different from spin glasses in both their inherent structural properties and the nature of the spin-spin interactions required to stabilize them. As such, the implications and significance of the existence of these disordered stealthy hyperuniform ground-state spin systems warrants further study, including whether their bulk physical properties and excited states, like their many-particle system counterparts, are singularly remarkable, and can be experimentally realized.