I’m thrilled to announce that my first single-author paper has just been published in Physical Review E:

Field-induced freezing in the unfrustrated Ising antiferromagnet
Adam Iaizzi,
Physical Review E 102, 032112 (2020) [paywall] 
[free PDF] [arXiv]

This paper is a continuation of the theme of my research career, which could be loosely described: “try adding a magnetic field to an antiferromagnet and see if something interesting happens.” In this case, I added a magnetic field to the classical 2D Ising antiferromagnet and studied it with the simplest implementation of Monte Carlo: the Metropolis(-Rosenbluth-Teller) algorithm. At low temperatures I found that simulations never reached the ground state. Instead, they get trapped in local energy minima from which they never escape: frozen states with finite magnetization. There are so many of these frozen states available that you are effectively guaranteed to cross one before you can reach the correct ground state. These frozen states can be described by simple rules based on stable local configurations.

Continue reading →