Hierarchical Self-Organization in Fixed-Magnetization Particle Systems

Shunhao Oh, Jacob Calvert, Dana Randall

Published 2024-11-06Version 1

Hierarchical sorting is a fundamental task for programmable matter, inspired by the spontaneous formation of interfaces and membranes in nature. The task entails particles of different types, present in fixed densities, sorting into corresponding regions of a space that are themselves organized. By analyzing the Gibbs distribution of a general fixed-magnetization model of equilibrium statistical mechanics, we prove that particles moving stochastically according to local affinities solve the hierarchical sorting task. The analysis of fixed-magnetization models is notoriously difficult, and approaches that have led to recent breakthroughs in sampling the low-temperature regime only work in the variable-magnetization setting by default. To overcome this barrier, we introduce a new approach for comparing the partition functions of fixed- and variable-magnetization models. The core technique identifies a special class of configurations that contribute comparably to the two partition functions, which then serves as a bridge between the fixed- and variable-magnetization settings. Our main result is an estimate of the Gibbs distribution that unifies existing and new results for models at fixed magnetization, including the Ising, Potts, and Blume--Capel models, and leads to stochastic distributed algorithms for hierarchical sorting and other self-organizing tasks, like compression and separation.