Density of States for a specified correlation function and the energy landscape

Phys Rev Lett. 2012 Feb 24;108(8):080601. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.080601. Epub 2012 Feb 22.

Abstract

The degeneracy of two-phase disordered microstructures consistent with a specified correlation function is analyzed by mapping it to a ground-state degeneracy. We determine for the first time the associated density of states via a Monte Carlo algorithm. Our results are explained in terms of the roughness of an energy landscape, defined on a hypercubic configuration space. The use of a Hamming distance in this space enables us to define a roughness metric, which is calculated from the correlation function alone and related quantitatively to the structural degeneracy. This relation is validated for a wide variety of disordered structures.