Emergent collective behavior in quantum amorphous materials

Characterize the emergent collective behavior of amorphous materials in the quantum regime by determining their phases, critical phenomena, and excitation properties in the absence of long-range order, with particular attention to regimes beyond the reach of current classical numerical simulations.

Background

The paper motivates studying amorphous systems, which possess short-range order but lack long-range translational and orientational order, because their quantum many-body behavior is hard to access with classical methods. The absence of crystalline symmetry prevents straightforward use of powerful numerical techniques that rely on unit cells or translational invariance.

To address this, the authors propose exploring amorphous quantum magnets using neutral-atom Rydberg arrays and provide semiclassical analyses (mean-field and linear spin-wave theory) as a first step. However, they stress that the broader task of fully understanding emergent quantum collective behavior in amorphous materials remains unresolved and is particularly challenging for classical computation.