Earlier this year David Campbell nominated my dissertation for a Springer Thesis Award. I’m proud to say that my dissertation won and it is now available from Springer. My dissertation covers almost all of the research I did during my PhD, focusing on magnetic field effects on quantum antiferromagnets, specifically metamagnetism and deconfined quantum criticality. I’m especially proud of my introduction (Ch. 1), which I tried to make accessible to a relatively broad audience, and my methods chapter (Ch. 5), a detailed pedagogical guide to the numerical methods I used in my work.

In Chapter 1 I describe the historical and scientific context for both the study I have undertaken and the methods I have used to do it. In doing so, I tell the story of Dr. Arianna Wright Rosenbluth, the woman physicist who wrote the first-ever modern Monte Carlo algorithm in 1953. To my knowledge this is the most complete account of her life ever published.

Chapter 2 is a lightly edited version of my 2017 Phys. Rev. B paper on metamagnetism and zero-scale-factor universality in the 1D J-Q model. In Chapter 3 I discuss these same features in the 2D J-Q model. Most of Chapter 3 has been published in my 2018 Phys. Rev. B paper, but the Springer version includes an additional analysis where we look at an alternative form of the logarithmic corrections to the zero-scale-factor universality based on the 4D Ising universality.

In Chapter 4 I study the deconfined quantum critical point separating the Néel and VBS phases in the 2D J-Q model. Using a field, I force a nonzero density of magnetic excitations and show that their thermodynamic behavior is consistent with deconfined spinons (the fractional excitations predicted by deconfined quantum criticality). I also discuss a field-induced BKT transition and non-monotonic temperature dependence of magnetization, a little-known feature of this type of transition.

Finally, in Chapter 5  I provide a detailed pedagogical description of my methods focusing on stochastic series expansion quantum Monte Carlo and extensions thereof. Little in this chapter is my invention, but many of the details of these techniques have not been described in detail anywhere else in the literature (another resource is Sandvik’s excellent review article).

If you’re interested in using my dissertation, please let me know and I can send you a PDF!