Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Scaling laws of shrinkage induced fragmentation phenomena

  Roland Szatmári, Akio Nakahara, So Kitsunezaki, Ferenc Kun

  SciPost Phys. 19, 142 (2025) · published 1 December 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate the shrinkage induced breakup of thin layers of heterogeneous materials attached to a substrate, a ubiquitous natural phenomenon with a wide range of potential applications. Focusing on the evolution of the fragment ensemble, we demonstrate that the system has two distinct phases: damage phase, where the layer is cracked, however, a dominant piece persists retaining the structural integrity of the layer, and a fragmentation phase, where the layer disintegrates into numerous small pieces. Based on finite size scaling we show that the transition between the two phases occurs at a critical damage analogous to continuous phase transitions. At the critical point a fully connected crack network emerges whose structure is controlled by the strength of adhesion to the substrate. In the strong adhesion limit, damage arises from random microcrack nucleation, resembling bond percolation, while weak adhesion facilitates stress concentration and the growth of cracks to large extensions. The critical exponents of the damage to fragmentation transition agree to a reasonable accuracy with those of two-dimensional bond percolation. Our findings provide a novel insights into the mechanism of shrinkage-induced cracking revealing generic scaling laws of the phenomenon.

• Dipolar magnetostirring protocol for three-well atomtronic circuits

  Héctor Briongos-Merino, Felipe Isaule, Montserrat Guilleumas, Bruno Juliá-Díaz

  SciPost Phys. 19, 059 (2025) · published 27 August 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We propose a magnetostirring protocol to create persistent currents on an annular system. Under this protocol, polar bosons confined in a three-well ring circuit reach a state with high average circulation. We model the system with an extended Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian and show that the protocol can create circulation in an atomtronic circuit for a range of tunable parameters. The performance and robustness of this scheme are examined, in particular considering different interaction regimes. We also present a method for predicting the optimal protocol parameters, which improves protocol's scalability and enables its application to systems with large numbers of bosons. This overcomes computational limitations and paves the way for exploring macroscopic quantum phenomena.

• Gaussian state approximation of quantum many-body scars

  Wouter Buijsman, Yevgeny Bar Lev

  SciPost Phys. 17, 055 (2024) · published 15 August 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Quantum many-body scars are atypical, highly nonthermal eigenstates embedded in a sea of thermal eigenstates that have been observed in, for example, kinetically constrained quantum many-body models. These special eigenstates are characterized by a bipartite entanglement entropy that scales as most logarithmically with the subsystem size. We use numerical optimization techniques to investigate if quantum many-body scars of the experimentally relevant PXP model can be well approximated by Gaussian states. Gaussian states are described by a number of parameters that scales quadratically with system size, thereby having a much lower complexity than generic quantum many-body states, for which this number scales exponentially. We find that while quantum many-body scars can typically be well approximated by (symmetrized) Gaussian states, this is not the case for ergodic (thermal) eigenstates. This observation suggests that the non-ergodic part of the PXP Hamiltonian is related to certain quadratic parent Hamiltonians, thereby hinting on the origin of the quantum many-body scars.

• Photon TMDs from uPDFevolv

  Hannes Jung, Sara Taheri Monfared, Thomas Wening

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 8, 132 (2022) · published 13 July 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We present photon TMDs generated using the Parton Branching Method with QED evolution. We discuss the TMD’s properties and compare it to the gluon TMD. Two sets of TMDs differing in their initial evolution scale and the choice of the renormalisation scale are defined and compared to each other.

• Electronic structure of liquid xenon in the context of light dark matter direct detection

  Riccardo Catena, Luca Marin, Marek Matas, Nicola A. Spaldin, Einar Urdshals

  SciPost Phys. 19, 064 (2025) · published 3 September 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We present a description of the electronic structure of xenon within the density-functional theory formalism with the goal of accurately modeling dark-matter-induced ionisation in liquid xenon detectors. We compare the calculated electronic structures of the atomic, liquid and crystalline solid phases, and find that the electronic charge density and its derivatives in momentum space are similar in the atom and the liquid, consistent with the weak interatomic van der Waals bonding. The only notable difference is a band broadening of the highest occupied $5p$ levels, reflected in the densities of states of the condensed phases, as a result of the inter-atomic interactions. We therefore use the calculated density of states of the liquid phase, combined with the standard literature approach for the isolated atom, to recompute ionisation rates and exclusion limit curves for the XENON10 and XENON1T experiments. We find that the broadening of the 5$p$ levels induced by the liquid phase is relevant only for dark matter masses below 6 MeV, where it increases the ionisation rate relative to that of the isolated atom. For most of the explored mass range, the energies of the discrete 4$d$ and 5$s$ levels have the strongest effect on the rate. Our findings suggest a simple scheme for calculating dark matter-electron scattering rates in liquid noble gas detectors, using the calculated values for the atom weighted by the density of states of the condensed phase.

• Theoretical modeling of QCD radiation in off-shell Higgs production through gluon fusion

  Rafael Coelho Lopes de Sá, Martina Javurkova, Matteo Lazzeretti, Raoul Röntsch

  SciPost Phys. Comm. Rep. 12 (2025) · published 4 September 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The measurement of the Higgs boson width is a critical test of the Standard Model, with significant implications for understanding electroweak symmetry breaking. Direct measurements are limited by detector resolution, but it can be measured with greater precision through a combined analysis of on-shell and off-shell Higgs boson production. While results for on-shell production have been computed to a very high accuracy, theoretical predictions for off-shell Higgs boson production are not as well controlled due to the breakdown of the heavy-top approximation and the large interference with non-resonant amplitudes. Seeking to understand and improve the theoretical control, we compare leading-order and next-to-leading-order plus parton shower differential cross-sections for signal, background, and full physical processes in off-shell Higgs boson production at the Large Hadron Collider, using Powheg, MadGraph, and Sherpa. We analyze the impact of higher-order quantum chromodynamics effects and theoretical uncertainties, highlighting differences between predictions using jet merging with parton showers, and those from next-to-leading order computations matched to parton showers. The results provide insights for improving theoretical predictions and their application to experimental measurements in the future.

• Feedback cooling of fermionic atoms in optical lattices

  Wenhua Zhao, Ling-Na Wu, Francesco Petiziol, André Eckardt

  SciPost Phys. 19, 073 (2025) · published 25 September 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We discuss the preparation of topological insulator states with fermionic ultracold atoms in optical lattices by means of measurement-based Markovian feedback control. The designed measurement and feedback operators induce an effective dissipative channel that stabilizes the desired insulator state, either in an exact way or approximately in the case where additional experimental constraints are assumed. Successful state preparation is demonstrated in one-dimensional insulators as well as for Haldane's Chern insulator, by calculating the fidelity between the target ground state and the steady state of the feedback-modified master equation. The fidelity is obtained numerically through exact diagonalization or via time evolution of the system with moderate sizes. For larger 2D systems, we compare the mean occupation of the single-particle eigenstates for the ground and steady state computed through mean-field kinetic equations.

• Berry curvature and quantum oscillation from multi-orbital coadjoint-orbit bosonization

  Mengxing Ye, Yuxuan Wang

  SciPost Phys. 19, 078 (2025) · published 26 September 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We develop an effective field theory for a multi-orbital fermionic system using the method of coadjoint orbits for higher-dimensional bosonization. The dynamical bosonic fields are single-particle distribution functions defined on the phase space. We show that when projecting to a single band, Berry curvature effects naturally emerge. In particular, we consider the de Haas-van Alphen effect of a 2d Fermi surface, and show that the oscillation of orbital magnetization in an external field is offset by the Berry phase accumulated by the cyclotron around the Fermi surface. Beyond previously known results, we show that this phase shift holds even for interacting systems, in which the single-particle Berry phase is replaced by the static anomalous Hall conductance. Furthermore, we obtain the correction to the amplitudes of de Haas-van Alphen oscillations due to Berry curvature effects.

• $\Lambda$ Polarizing Fragmentation Function from Belle $e^+ e^-$ data

  Umberto D'Alesio, Francesco Murgia, Marco Zaccheddu

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 8, 131 (2022) · published 13 July 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Experimental data from Belle Collaboration for the transverse polarization of $\Lambda$'s measured in $e^+ e^-$ annihilation processes are used to extract the polarizing fragmentation function (FF) within a TMD approach. We consider both associated and inclusive $\Lambda$ production, showing a quite consistent scenario. Good separation in flavor is obtained, leading to four independent FFs. Predictions for SIDIS processes at the EIC, crucial for understanding their universality and evolution properties, are also presented.

• A correspondence between the Rabi model and an Ising model with long-range interactions

  Bruno Scheihing-Hitschfeld, Néstor Sepúlveda

  SciPost Phys. 19, 153 (2025) · published 15 December 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  By means of Trotter's formula, we show that transition amplitudes between a class of generalized coherent states in the Rabi model can be understood in terms of a certain Ising model featuring long-range interactions beyond nearest neighbors in its thermodynamic limit. Specifically, we relate the transition amplitudes in the Rabi model to a sum over binary variables of the form of a partition function of an Ising model with a number of spin sites equal to the number of steps in Trotter's formula applied to the real-time evolution of the Rabi model. From this, we show that a perturbative expansion in the energy splitting of the two-level subsystem in the Rabi model is equivalent to an expansion in the number of spin domains in the Ising model. We conclude by discussing how calculations in one model give nontrivial information about the other model, and vice versa, as well as applications and generalizations this correspondence may find.