Breather lattices as pseudospin glasses

TL;DR

This paper models discrete breathers in nonlinear oscillator lattices as pseudospin glasses, revealing a phase transition to a glassy state with slow correlations and short-range order.

Contribution

It introduces an effective Ising pseudospin model for discrete breathers and demonstrates a glass transition using replica analysis and susceptibility measurements.

Findings

Identifies a phase transition at a specific temperature.

Shows the high-temperature phase exhibits glassy properties.

Demonstrates the presence of short-range order in the glassy phase.

Abstract

We study the thermodynamics of discrete breathers by transforming a lattice of weakly coupled nonlinear oscillators into an effective Ising pseudospin model. We introduce a replica ensemble and investigate the effective system susceptibilities through the replica overlap distribution. We find that a transition occurs at a given temperature to a new phase characterized by a slow decay of the relevant correlation functions. Comparison of long time pseudospin correlation functions to maximal replica overlap demonstrates that the high temperature phase has glassy-like properties induced by short range order found in the system.