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We study the effective dynamics of ferromagnetic spin chains in presence of long-range interactions. We consider the Heisenberg Hamiltonian in one dimension for which the spins are coupled through power-law long-range exchange interactions with exponent $\alpha$. We add to the Hamiltonian an anisotropy in the $z$-direction. In the framework of a semiclassical approach, we use the Holstein-Primakoff transformation to derive an effective long-range discrete nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation. We then perform the continuum limit and we obtain a fractional nonlinear Schr\"odinger-like equation. Finally, we study the modulational instability of plane-waves in the continuum limit and we prove that, at variance with the short-range case, plane waves are modulationally unstable for $\alpha < 3$. We also study the dependence of the modulation instability growth rate and critical wave-number on the parameters of the Hamiltonian and on the exponent $\alpha$.

We calculate the thermodynamic entropy of the mean-field $\phi^4$ spin model in the microcanonical ensemble as a function of the energy and magnetization of the model. The entropy and its derivative are obtained from the theory of large deviations, as well as from Rugh's microcanonical formalism, which is implemented by computing averages of suitable observables in microcanonical molecular dynamics simulations. Our main finding is that the entropy is a concave function of the energy for all values of the magnetization, but is nonconcave as a function of the magnetization for some values of the energy. This last property implies that the magnetic susceptibility of the model can be negative when calculated microcanonically for fixed values of the energy and magnetization. This provides a magnetization analog of negative heat capacities, which are well-known to be associated in general with the nonequivalence of the microcanonical and canonical ensembles. Here, the two ensembles that are nonequivalent are the microcanonical ensemble in which the energy and magnetization are held fixed and the canonical ensemble in which the energy and magnetization are fixed only on average by fixing the temperature and magnetic field., Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, 2 appendices, REVTeX4

We derive the self-consistent harmonic approximation for the 2D XY model with non-local interactions. The resulting equation for the variational couplings holds for any form of the spin-spin coupling as well as for any dimension. Our analysis is then specialized to power-law couplings decaying with the distance r as in order to investigate the robustness, at finite σ, of the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) transition, which occurs in the short-range limit . We propose an ansatz for the functional form of the variational couplings and show that for any 2$ ?> the BKT mechanism occurs. The present investigation provides an upper bound for the critical threshold above which the traditional BKT transition persists in spite of the non-local nature of the couplings.

We study the statistics of energy fluctuations in a three-level quantum system subject to a sequence of projective quantum measurements. We check that, as expected, the quantum Jarzynski equality holds provided that the initial state is thermal. The latter condition is trivially satisfied for two-level systems, while this is generally no longer true for N-level systems, with N &gt, 2 . Focusing on three-level systems, we discuss the occurrence of a unique energy scale factor &beta, eff that formally plays the role of an effective inverse temperature in the Jarzynski equality. To this aim, we introduce a suitable parametrization of the initial state in terms of a thermal and a non-thermal component. We determine the value of &beta, eff for a large number of measurements and study its dependence on the initial state. Our predictions could be checked experimentally in quantum optics.

We study analytical solutions of the Fractional Boussinesq Equation (FBE), which is an effective model for the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam (FPU) one-dimensional lattice with long-range couplings. The couplings decay as a power-law with exponent s, with 1 < s < 3, so that the energy density is finite, but s is small enough to observe genuine long-range effects. The analytic solutions are obtained by introducing an ansatz for the dependence of the field on space and time. This allows to reduce the FBE to an ordinary differential equation, which can be explicitly solved. The solutions are initially localized and they delocalize progressively as time evolves. Depending on the value of s the solution is either a pulse (meaning a bump) or an anti-pulse (i.e., a hole) on a constant field for 1 < s < 2 and 2 < s < 3, respectively., 10 pages, 2 figures. The paper is accepted in JSTAT, the special issue "New Trends in Nonequilibrium Statistical Mechanics: Classical and Quantum Systems (nesmcq18)"

The study of critical properties of systems with long-range interactions has attracted in the last decades a continuing interest and motivated the development of several analytical and numerical techniques, in particular in connection with spin models. From the point of view of the investigation of their criticality, a special role is played by systems in which the interactions are long-range enough that their universality class is different from the short-range case and, nevertheless, they maintain the extensivity of thermodynamical quantities. Such interactions are often called weak long-range. In this paper we focus on the study of the critical behaviour of spin systems with weak-long range couplings using renormalization group, and we review their remarkable properties. For the sake of clarity and self-consistency, we start from the classical $O(N)$ spin models and we then move to quantum spin systems., Comment: 24 pages, 5 figures, Submitted to the special issue of J. Phys. A on 'Long-range Interactions and Synchronization'

The distribution of resistance fluctuations of conducting thin films with granular structure near electrical breakdown is studied by numerical simulations. The film is modeled as a resistor network in a steady state determined by the competition between two biased processes, breaking and recovery. Systems of different sizes and with different levels of internal disorder are considered. Sharp deviations from a Gaussian distribution are found near breakdown and the effect increases with the degree of internal disorder. However, we show that in general this non-Gaussianity is related to the finite size of the system and vanishes in the large size limit. Nevertheless, near the critical point of the conductor-insulator transition, deviations from Gaussianity persist when the size is increased and the distribution of resistance fluctuations is well fitted by the universal Bramwell-Holdsworth-Pinton distribution., 8 pages, 6 figures; accepted for publication on Physica A