Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Non-Hermitian quantum quenches in holography

  Sergio Morales-Tejera, Karl Landsteiner

  SciPost Phys. 14, 030 (2023) · published 10 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The notion of non-Hermitian $\mathcal{PT}$ symmetric quantum theory has recently been generalized to the gauge/gravity duality. We study the evolution of such non-Hermitian holographic field theories when the couplings are varied with time with particular emphasis on the question non-unitary time vs. unitary time evolution. We show that a non-unitary time evolution in the dual quantum theory corresponds to a violation of the Null Energy Condition (NEC) in the bulk of the asymptotically AdS spacetime. We find that upon varying the non-Hermitian coupling the horizon of a bulk AdS black hole shrinks. On the other hand varying the Hermitian coupling in the presence of a constant non-Hermitian coupling still violates the NEC but results in a growing horizon. We also show that by introducing a non-Hermitian gauge field the time evolution can be made unitary, e.g. the NEC in the bulk is obeyed and an exactly equivalent purely Hermitian description can be given.

  2 citations

• Electron currents from gradual heating in tilted Dirac cone materials

  Ahmadreza Moradpouri, Mahdi Torabian, Seyed Akbar Jafari

  SciPost Phys. Core 6, 010 (2023) · published 7 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Materials hosting tilted Dirac/Weyl fermions provide an emergent spacetime structure for the solid state physics. They admit a geometric description in terms of an effective spacetime metric. Using this metric that is rooted in the long-distance behavior of the underlying lattice, we formulate the hydrodynamic theory for tilted Dirac/Weyl materials in $2+1$ spacetime dimensions. We find that the mingling of space and time through the off-diagonal components of the metric gives rise to: (i) heat and electric currents proportional to the temporal gradient of temperature, $\partial_t T$ and (ii) a non-zero Hall-like conductance $\sigma^{ij}\propto \zeta^i\zeta^j$ where $\zeta^j$ parameterize the tilt in $j$'th space direction. The finding (i) above that can be demonstrated in the laboratory, implies that the non-trivial emergent spacetime geometry in these materials empowers them with a fascinating capability to harness naturally available sources of $\partial_t T$ of hot deserts to produce electric current. We further find a tilt-induced non-Drude contribution to conductivity which can be experimentally disentangled from the usual Drude pole.

  2 citations

• Rapidity distribution within the defocusing non-linear Schrödinger equation model

  Yasser Bezzaz, Léa Dubois, Isabelle Bouchoule

  SciPost Phys. Core 6, 064 (2023) · published 26 September 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We consider the classical field integrable system whose evolution equation is the nonlinear Schrödinger equation with defocusing non-linearities, which is the classical limit of the quantum Lieb-Liniger model. We propose a simple derivation of the relation between two sets of conserved quantities: on the one hand the trace of the monodromy matrix, parameterized by the spectral parameter and introduced in the inverse-scattering framework, and on the other hand the rapidity distribution, a concept imported from the Lieb-Liniger model. To do so we use the definition of the rapidity distribution as the asymptotic momentum distribution after a very large expansion. We propose two different ways to derive the result, each one using a thought experiment that implements an expansion.

  2 citations

• Emergent XY* transition driven by symmetry fractionalization and anyon condensation

  Michael Schuler, Louis-Paul Henry, Yuan-Ming Lu, Andreas M. Läuchli

  SciPost Phys. 14, 001 (2023) · published 11 January 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Anyons in a topologically ordered phase can carry fractional quantum numbers with respect to the symmetry group of the considered system, one example being the fractional charge of the quasiparticles and quasiholes in the fractional quantum Hall effect. When such symmetry-fractionalized anyons condense, the resulting phase must spontaneously break the symmetry and display a local order parameter. In this paper, we study the phase diagram and anyon condensation transitions of a $\mathbb{Z}_2$ topological order perturbed by Ising interactions in the Toric Code. The interplay between the global (``onsite'') Ising ($\mathbb{Z}_2$) symmetry and the lattice space group symmetries results in a non-trivial symmetry fractionalization class for the anyons, and is shown to lead to two characteristically different confined, symmetry-broken phases. To understand the anyon condensation transitions, we use the recently introduced critical torus energy spectrum technique to identify a line of emergent 2+1D XY* transitions ending at a fine-tuned (Ising$^2$)* critical point. We provide numerical evidence for the occurrence of two symmetry breaking patterns predicted by the specific symmetry fractionalization class of the condensed anyons in the explored phase diagram. In combination with large-scale quantum Monte Carlo simulations we measure unusually large critical exponents $\eta$ for the scaling of the correlation function at the continuous anyon condensation transitions, and we further identify lines of (weakly) first order transitions in the phase diagram. As an important additional result, we discuss the phase diagram of a resulting 2+1D Ashkin-Teller model, where we demonstrate that torus spectroscopy is capable of identifying emergent XY/O(2) critical behaviour, thereby solving some longstanding open questions in the domain of the 3D Ashkin-Teller models. To establish the generality of our results, we propose a field theoretical description capturing the transition from a $\mathbb{Z}_2$ topological order to either $\mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry broken phase, which is in excellent agreement with the numerical results.

  2 citations

• Pychastic: Precise Brownian dynamics using Taylor-Itō integrators in Python

  Radost Waszkiewicz, Maciej Bartczak, Kamil Kolasa, Maciej Lisicki

  SciPost Phys. Codebases 11 (2023) · published 3 April 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  In the last decade, Python-powered physics simulations ecosystem has been growing steadily, allowing greater interoperability, and becoming an important tool in numerical exploration of physical phenomena, particularly in soft matter systems. Driven by the need for fast and precise numerical integration in colloidal dynamics, here we formulate the problem of Brownian Dynamics (BD) in a mathematically consistent formalism of the Itō calculus, and develop a Python package to assist numerical computations. We show that, thanks to the automatic differentiation packages, the classical truncated Taylor-Itō integrators can be implemented without the burden of computing the derivatives of the coefficient functions beforehand. Furthermore, we show how to circumvent the difficulties of BD simulations such as calculations of the divergence of the mobility tensor in the diffusion equation and discontinuous trajectories encountered when working with dynamics on $S^2$ and $SO(3)$. The resulting Python package, Pychastic, is capable of performing BD simulations including hydrodynamic interactions at speeds comparable to dedicated implementations in lower-level programming languages, but with a much simpler end-user interface.

  2 citations

• Itinerant ferromagnetism in dilute SU(N) Fermi gases

  Jordi Pera, Joaquim Casulleras, Jordi Boronat

  SciPost Phys. 14, 038 (2023) · published 17 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We present exact analytic results for the energy of a SU(N) repulsive Fermi gas as a function of the spin-channel occupation at second order in the gas parameter. This is an extension of previous results that now incorporates the degree of polarization of the system. Therefore, the magnetic properties of the gas can be obtained, free from numerical uncertainties. For spin 1/2 we find that second-order corrections change the itinerant ferromagnetic transition from continuous to first-order. Instead, for spin larger than 1/2 the phase transition is always of first-order type. The transition critical density reduces when the spin increases, making the phase transition more accessible to experiments with ultracold dilute Fermi gases. Estimations for Fermi gases of Yb and Sr with spin 5/2 and 9/2, respectively, are reported.

  2 citations

• Chaos in the vicinity of a singularity in the three-body problem: The equilateral triangle experiment in the zero angular momentum limit

  Hugo D. Parischewsky, Alessandro A. Trani, Nathan W. C. Leigh

  SciPost Phys. Core 6, 016 (2023) · published 21 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We present numerical simulations of the gravitational three-body problem, in which three particles lie at rest close to the vertices of an equilateral triangle. In the unperturbed problem, the three particles fall towards the center of mass of the system to form a three-body collision, or singularity, where the particles overlap in space and time. By perturbing the initial positions of the particles, we are able to study chaos in the vicinity of the singularity. Here we cover both the singular region close to the unperturbed configuration and the binary-single scattering regime where one side of the triangle is very short compared to the other two. We make phase space plots to study the regular and ergodic subsets of our simulations and compare them with the outcomes expected from the statistical escape theory of the three-body problem. We further provide fits to the ergodic subset to characterize the properties of the left-over binaries. We identify the discrepancy between the statistical theory and the simulations in the regular subset of interactions, which only exhibits weak chaos. As we decrease the scale of the perturbations in the initial positions, the phase space becomes entirely dominated by regular interactions, according to our metric for chaos. Finally, we show the effect of general relativity corrections by simulating the same scenario with the inclusion of post-Newtonian corrections to the equations of motion.

  2 citations

• Topological quantum phase transition of nickelocene on Cu(100)

  Germán G. Blesio, Rok Žitko, Luis O. Manuel, Armando A. Aligia

  SciPost Phys. 14, 042 (2023) · published 21 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Local quantum phase transitions driven by Kondo correlations have been theoretically proposed in several magnetic nanosystems; however, clear experimental signatures are scant. Modeling a nickelocene molecule on a Cu(100) substrate as a two-orbital Anderson impurity with single-ion anisotropy coupled to two conduction bands, we find that recent scanning tunneling spectra reveal the existence of a topological quantum phase transition from the usual local Fermi liquid with high zero-bias conductance to a non-Landau Fermi liquid, characterized by a non-trivial quantized Luttinger integral, with a small conductance. The effects of intermediate valence, finite temperature, and structural relaxation of the molecule position allow us to explain the different observed behaviors.

  2 citations

• Critical properties of a comb lattice

  Natalia Chepiga, Steven R. White

  SciPost Phys. 9, 013 (2020) · published 27 July 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  In this paper we study the critical properties of the Heisenberg spin-1/2 model on a comb lattice -- a 1D backbone decorated with finite 1D chains -- the teeth. We address the problem numerically by a comb tensor network that duplicates the geometry of a lattice. We observe a fundamental difference between the states on a comb with even and odd number of sites per tooth, which resembles an even-odd effect in spin-1/2 ladders. The comb with odd teeth is always critical, not only along the teeth, but also along the backbone, which leads to a competition between two critical regimes in orthogonal directions. In addition, we show that in a weak-backbone limit the excitation energy scales as $1/(NL)$, and not as $1/N$ or $1/L$ typical for 1D systems. For even teeth in the weak backbone limit the system corresponds to a collection of decoupled critical chains of length $L$, while in the strong backbone limit, one spin from each tooth forms the backbone, so the effective length of a critical tooth is one site shorter, $L-1$. Surprisingly, these two regimes are connected via a state where a critical chain spans over two nearest neighbor teeth, with an effective length $2L$.

  2 citations

• High-dimensional and permutation invariant anomaly detection

  Vinicius Mikuni, Benjamin Nachman

  SciPost Phys. 16, 062 (2024) · published 29 February 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Methods for anomaly detection of new physics processes are often limited to low-dimensional spaces due to the difficulty of learning high-dimensional probability densities. Particularly at the constituent level, incorporating desirable properties such as permutation invariance and variable-length inputs becomes difficult within popular density estimation methods. In this work, we introduce a permutation-invariant density estimator for particle physics data based on diffusion models, specifically designed to handle variable-length inputs. We demonstrate the efficacy of our methodology by utilizing the learned density as a permutation-invariant anomaly detection score, effectively identifying jets with low likelihood under the background-only hypothesis. To validate our density estimation method, we investigate the ratio of learned densities and compare to those obtained by a supervised classification algorithm.

  2 citations