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A Topological Glass

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Abstract

We propose and study a model with glassy behavior. The state space of the model is given by all triangulations of a sphere with n nodes, half of which are red and half are blue. Red nodes want to have 5 neighbors while blue ones want 7. Energies of nodes with other numbers of neighbors are supposed to be positive. The dynamics is that of flipping the diagonal of two adjacent triangles, with a temperature dependent probability. We show that this system has an approach to a steady state which is exponentially slow, and show that the stationary state is unordered. We also study the local energy landscape and show that it has the hierarchical structure known from spin glasses. Finally, we show that the evolution can be described as that of a rarefied gas with spontaneous generation of particles and annihilating collisions.

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  1. Département de Physique Théorique et Section de Mathématiques, Université de Genève, 1211, Genève 4, Switzerland

    Jean-Pierre Eckmann

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  1. Jean-Pierre Eckmann
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Correspondence to Jean-Pierre Eckmann.

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Eckmann, JP. A Topological Glass. J Stat Phys 129, 289–309 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10955-007-9387-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10955-007-9387-9

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