This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A team led by University at Buffalo physicists has found a mathematical solution that shows how a frustrated quantum magnet can transition from ultraslow behavior to ultrafast, highly entangled behavior resembling that of a black hole. Their solution connects spin glasses—states of matter in which atomic magnets point in disordered directions and become effectively frozen in place—to the fast, entangled states of matter described by the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model that's been used to study black hole physics, quantum chaos and other exotic phenomena.
"We've essentially found the math that describes how matter can go from among the slowest states in quantum dynamics to among the fastest," says Jamir Marino, Ph.D., assistant professor of physics in the UB College of Arts and Sciences and senior author of the team's study, which was published Sept. 17 in Physical Review Letters. Marino collaborated with Subir Sachdev, Ph.D., Herchel Smith Professor of Physics at Harvard University, who first proposed the SYK model along with Jinwu Ye. The first author is Hossein Hosseinabadi, Ph.D., a former graduate student in Marino's lab who is now an independent distinguished postdoctoral scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Germany.
In a spin glass, disordered magnetic spins respond to disturbances extremely slowly, allowing information to remain trapped for long periods. This makes spin glasses relevant for technologies where information needs to be preserved, as well as for solving complex optimization problems that arise in artificial intelligence. SYK behavior sits at the other extreme.
Particles become so strongly entangled that information rapidly spreads, or scrambles, among them—similar to how information is scrambled in a black hole. Marino and his team were trying to better understand what happens to a spin glass as quantum fluctuations become stronger, particularly at extremely low temperatures where its behavior has been difficult to describe mathematically. Using quantum field theory techniques based on an unconventional way of representing spins, they were able to probe what happens as the temperature drops.
To their surprise, they found that rather than simply becoming more firmly frozen, the spin glass could give way to the highly entangled, fast dynamics described by the SYK model. The fluctuations disrupt the locked arrangement of spins, eventually causing particles to become so highly entangled that they lose their individual identities. "You normally think that lowering the temperature will freeze something even more," Marino says.
"But here, the quantum effects can essentially melt the spin glass and take you from extremely slow dynamics to extremely fast dynamics." "Understanding this transition—and all the states in between—could ultimately help better control the storage and spread of information in quantum technologies," he adds. Hossein Hosseinabadi et al, Crossover to Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev Criticality in an Infinite-Range Quantum Heisenberg Spin Glass, Physical Review Letters (2026). On arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2603.11263 Journal information: Physical Review Letters , arXiv Bachelor's in mathematical biology, Master's in creative writing.
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