2015/07/09 by Charlotte Rulquin, Pierfrancesco Urbani, Rulquin, Charlotte +7 · 2 citations
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #FOS: Physical sciences #Material Dynamics and Properties #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) #Theoretical and Computational Physics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1507.02498
openalex publication_date 2015/07/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Slow dynamics in glassy systems is often interpreted as due to thermally\nactivated events between "metastable" states. This emphasizes the role of\nnonperturbative fluctuations, which is especially dramatic when these\nfluctuations destroy a putative phase transition predicted at the mean-field\nlevel. To gain insight into such hard problems, we consider the implementation\nof a generic back-and-forth process, between microscopic theory and observable\nbehavior via effective theories, in a toy model that is simple enough to allow\nfor a thorough investigation: the one-dimensional \φ4 theory at low\ntemperature. We consider two ways of restricting the extent of the\nfluctuations, which both lead to a nonconvex effective potential (or free\nenergy) : either through a finite-size system or by means of a running infrared\ncutoff within the nonperturbative Renormalization Group formalism. We discuss\nthe physical insight one can get and the ways to treat strongly nonperturbative\nfluctuations in this context.\n