The identification of metastable states of a molecule plays an important role in the interpretation of molecular simulation data because the free-energy surface, the relative populations in this landscape, and ultimately also the dynamics of the molecule under study can be described in terms of these states. We compare the results of three different geometric cluster algorithms (neighbor algori...

We discuss the physical basis of the statistical mechanics of self-gravitating systems. We show the correspondance between statistical mechanics methods based on the evaluation of the density of states and partition function and thermodynamical methods based on the maximization of a thermodynamical potential (entropy or free energy). We address the question of the thermodynamic limit of self-gr...

The mechanism of appearance of exponentially large number of metastable states in magnetic phases of disordered Ising magnets with short-range random exchange is suggested. It is based on the assumption that transitions into inhomogeneous magnetic phases results from the condensation of macroscopically large number of sparse delocalized modes near the localization threshold. The properties of m...

Recent experimental progress with Alkaline-Earth atoms has opened the door to quantum computing schemes in which qubits are encoded in long-lived nuclear spin states, and the metastable electronic states of these species are used for manipulation and readout of the qubits. Here we discuss a variant of these schemes, in which gate operations are performed in nuclear-spin-dependent optical lattic...

We used a beam of noble gas atoms in a metast i ib le xci ted state to expose a th in (1.5 nm) self-assembled monolayer esist applied over a gold-coated sil icon waf'er. We determined exposure damage as a function of dose of metastable atoms by processing the samples in a wet-chemical etch to remove the -cold from unprotected regions and then measuring the reflectir ity with a laser and observi...