At the boundary between order and chaos, physicists at the University at Buffalo have uncovered a mathematical bridge connecting two of physics' most distant phenomena: the frozen stillness of quantum spin glasses and the frenetic information-scrambling of black holes. Published in Physical Review Letters, the discovery reveals that as quantum fluctuations intensify near absolute zero, a disordered magnet locked in apparent permanence can dissolve into a state of radical entanglement — not by heating up, but by going deeper into the quantum realm. It is a reminder that nature's extremes are of
Physicists Discover Mathematical Bridge Between Quantum Magnets and Black-Hole Physics
Quantum effects can melt the spin glass and take you from extremely slow to extremely fast
Mark
So they found that spin glasses can turn into something that behaves like black hole physics? How does that even make sense?
Mimi
It's about what happens to information. In a spin glass, information gets trapped and moves slowly. In the SYK model used for black hole studies, information scrambles and spreads fast. The team showed mathematically that one can transform into the other.
Luke
But this is a theoretical prediction, right? Has anyone observed this transition in an actual spin glass system?
Mimi
The paper presents the mathematical framework. The experimental verification would be the next step, which is typical for this kind of theoretical physics work.
Mark
What makes this discovery useful beyond the theory itself?
Mimi
If you can control how information spreads or gets preserved in quantum systems, that matters for quantum computers and AI. You'd have better tools to manage information behavior.
Luke
The paper was published in Physical Review Letters — that's peer-reviewed, which is good. But I'd want to know: how confident are physicists that this transition actually occurs in real materials, not just in the math?
Mimi
That's the honest answer — the math shows it's possible. Whether nature actually does this is what experiments need to test.
Mark
How does lowering temperature usually affect magnets?
Mimi
Normally it freezes them more. What's strange here is that quantum effects at low temperature can actually unlock the system and speed it up dramatically.
Luke
And the team includes Subir Sachdev, who helped create the SYK model in the first place. That's a strong credential, but it also means this is coming from the people invested in the model's relevance.
Mimi
Fair point. But the collaboration with Marino's independent work at Buffalo suggests they're testing the model's reach, not just promoting it.
Le Pouls
- Two seemingly irreconcilable worlds of physics — the ultraslow information-trapping of spin glasses and the ultrafast information-scrambling of black hole models — have been shown to be connected by a single mathematical thread.
- The tension lies in a profound paradox: lowering temperature, which should freeze a quantum magnet more solidly, can instead trigger a kind of quantum melting that propels the system from the slowest possible dynamics to the fastest.
- Researchers at the University at Buffalo, collaborating with Harvard's Subir Sachdev — co-developer of the very black hole model at the heart of the discovery — traced this transformation using quantum field theory and unconventional spin representations.
- The system's tipping point is quantum fluctuation: as it intensifies, particles become so entangled they lose individual identity, shifting from a state where information sits trapped to one where it spreads almost instantaneously.
- The findings are now landing in the domain of practical technology — offering a potential roadmap for controlling how quantum systems store or release information, with consequences for quantum computing and AI optimization.
At the boundary between order and chaos, physicists at the University at Buffalo have uncovered a mathematical bridge connecting two of physics' most distant phenomena: the frozen stillness of quantum spin glasses and the frenetic information-scrambling of black holes. Published in Physical Review Letters, the discovery reveals that as quantum fluctuations intensify near absolute zero, a disordered magnet locked in apparent permanence can dissolve into a state of radical entanglement — not by heating up, but by going deeper into the quantum realm. It is a reminder that nature's extremes are often secretly neighbors, and that the boundary between forgetting nothing and forgetting everything may be thinner than we imagined.
At the University at Buffalo, a team of physicists has solved a mathematical puzzle that connects two of the most extreme behaviors in quantum physics: the glacial stillness of spin glasses and the frenzied information-scrambling associated with black holes. The findings, published in Physical Review Letters, reveal that these seemingly opposite states are not merely analogous — they are linked by a continuous transformation.
A spin glass is a disordered magnetic state in which atomic magnets become locked in conflicting orientations, trapping information for long periods. This makes spin glasses potentially useful for reliable information storage and for solving the complex optimization problems that AI systems encounter. At the other extreme sits the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model, which describes particles so intensely entangled that information spreads through them almost instantaneously — mirroring the behavior of matter falling into a black hole.
Led by assistant professor Jamir Marino, the team investigated what happens to a spin glass as quantum fluctuations grow stronger near absolute zero — a regime that had resisted clear mathematical description. Rather than freezing more rigidly, as intuition would suggest, the spin glass underwent a kind of quantum melting: fluctuations destabilized its locked disorder, and the system transitioned into the rapid, deeply entangled dynamics of the SYK model. Particles lost their individual identities, and information shifted from being trapped to spreading almost instantaneously.
The collaboration included Subir Sachdev of Harvard, who co-developed the SYK model, and Hossein Hosseinabadi, now a postdoctoral scholar at the Max Planck Institute. Beyond its theoretical elegance, the work opens a practical horizon — understanding the full spectrum between these extremes could give engineers new tools to control information storage and flow in quantum computing and artificial intelligence systems.
At the University at Buffalo, a team of physicists has worked out the mathematics behind a strange transformation: how a quantum magnet frozen in disorder can suddenly spring into a state of rapid, deeply entangled behavior that mirrors the physics of black holes. The discovery, published in Physical Review Letters on September 17, bridges two seemingly distant corners of physics — the slow, information-preserving world of spin glasses and the fast, information-scrambling dynamics described by the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model, which physicists have used to study black holes and quantum chaos.
A spin glass is a state of matter in which atomic magnets point in random, conflicting directions and become effectively locked in place. When disturbed, these systems respond with glacial slowness, trapping information for extended periods. This property makes them potentially valuable for technologies that need to store information reliably, and for tackling the kinds of complex optimization problems that artificial intelligence systems face. The opposite extreme is the behavior predicted by the SYK model: particles become so intensely entangled that information spreads rapidly through the system, scrambled beyond recovery — much like information that falls into a black hole.
Jamir Marino, an assistant professor of physics at the University at Buffalo and senior author of the study, led the team in investigating what happens to a spin glass as quantum fluctuations grow stronger, especially at temperatures approaching absolute zero, where the system's behavior has resisted clear mathematical description. Using quantum field theory techniques and an unconventional way of representing spins, the researchers traced the system's evolution as temperature dropped. They expected the spin glass to become even more rigidly frozen. Instead, they found something unexpected: the quantum fluctuations could actually disrupt the locked arrangement, eventually pushing the system into the highly entangled, rapid-fire dynamics of the SYK model.
The mechanism works through a kind of quantum melting. As fluctuations intensify, they destabilize the ordered disorder of the spin glass. Particles become so thoroughly entangled with one another that they lose their individual identities, transitioning from a state where information sits trapped to one where it spreads almost instantaneously. Marino notes the counterintuitive nature of the result: lowering temperature typically freezes systems more solidly, yet here quantum effects can essentially thaw the spin glass and propel it from among the slowest possible quantum dynamics to among the fastest.
The work involved collaboration with Subir Sachdev, the Herchel Smith Professor of Physics at Harvard University, who co-developed the SYK model, and Hossein Hosseinabadi, a former graduate student in Marino's lab now working as a distinguished postdoctoral scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Germany. The implications extend beyond pure theory. Understanding how matter transitions between these extremes — and what happens in the states between them — could eventually allow physicists and engineers to better manage how information is stored and spread in quantum technologies, a capability that could reshape quantum computing and artificial intelligence applications.
Citations marquantes
We've essentially found the math that describes how matter can go from among the slowest states in quantum dynamics to among the fastest— Jamir Marino, assistant professor of physics, University at Buffalo
Understanding this transition could ultimately help better control the storage and spread of information in quantum technologies— Jamir Marino
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