Plate Nº 81 · recorded October 10, 2026
PhysicsReported finding
Physicists bridge ultraslow spin glasses and ultrafast black-hole math
A University at Buffalo team has shown mathematically how a 'frozen' quantum magnet can melt into the fast, scrambled dynamics used to model black holes, bridging two extremes of matter.
By Elena Vasquez3 min read575 words
In brief
- Published September 17, 2026 in Physical Review Letters (DOI: 10.1103/81qf-zd3y)
- First author Hossein Hosseinabadi completed the work as a graduate student at Buffalo and now works at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Germany
- The study connects spin-glass physics, where atomic magnets freeze in random directions, to the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model used in black-hole research
- Senior author Jamir Marino is an assistant professor of physics at the University at Buffalo
- Collaborator Subir Sachdev of Harvard originally proposed the SYK model alongside Jinwu Ye
A team of University at Buffalo physicists has solved a mathematical puzzle that links two extremes of quantum behavior. Published September 17, 2026 in Physical Review Letters, the work shows how a 'frozen' disordered magnet can melt into the fast, scrambled dynamics used to model black holes.
The team was led by Jamir Marino, an assistant professor of physics at Buffalo. First author Hossein Hosseinabadi is now a postdoctoral scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Germany.
Hosseinabadi completed the work as a graduate student in Marino's lab. The collaboration also included Subir Sachdev of Harvard, who originally proposed the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model alongside Jinwu Ye.
What is a spin glass?
A spin glass is a material in which the magnetic 'spins' of atoms—the tiny internal magnets each atom carries—point in random, frozen directions. The arrangement barely changes over time, even when researchers push on it.
That stubborn stillness makes spin glasses useful for two very different jobs:
- Preserving information for long periods in quantum technologies
- Tackling hard optimization problems, the kind found inside artificial-intelligence algorithms
What is the SYK model?
Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev is a theoretical model describing particles so strongly entangled that information dumped into the system scrambles almost instantly. Physicists use it to study black holes, quantum chaos, and related phenomena.
Marino's team wanted to know what happens deep in the quantum regime, where temperatures approach absolute zero and equations often grow intractable. Using quantum field theory built on an unconventional spin representation, they pushed a spin glass toward that limit.
Why does cold melt the disorder?
Conventional intuition says colder means slower. 'You normally think that lowering the temperature will freeze something even more,' Marino says. But the team's math showed the opposite.
Strong quantum fluctuations at very low temperatures disrupted the locked spin arrangement. Particles grew so entangled that they lost their individual identities, and the spin glass gave way to the ultrafast, scrambling dynamics of the SYK model.
'We've essentially found the math that describes how matter can go from among the slowest states in quantum dynamics to among the fastest,' Marino says.
What could this enable?
The researchers describe the crossover as a continuous spectrum, not a single jump. Mapping every state along that spectrum could help scientists tune how quantum systems store and release information.
'Understanding this transition—and all the states in between—could ultimately help better control the storage and spread of information in quantum technologies,' Marino says.
How solid is the result?
The findings come from a single theoretical paper. No laboratory has yet built a material that crosses from spin-glass behavior to SYK behavior, and the team has not claimed one. Physicists usually treat such predictions as maps to be tested, not finished descriptions of nature.
The math, though, fits a long-standing question. Spin glasses had served as a standard laboratory for disorder. The SYK model has become a standard laboratory for chaos and holography, the idea that a lower-dimensional system can encode the physics of a higher-dimensional one. Linking them suggests a single set of equations can describe both.
Where to read it?
The full paper, 'Crossover to Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev Criticality in an Infinite-Range Quantum Heisenberg Spin Glass,' appears in Physical Review Letters. Its DOI is 10.1103/81qf-zd3y. A preprint sits on arXiv at arxiv.org/abs/2603.11263.
via Phys.org Physics (Source)
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