Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Phases of cold holographic QCD: Baryons, pions and rho mesons

  Nicolas Kovensky, Aaron Poole, Andreas Schmitt

  SciPost Phys. 15, 162 (2023) · published 13 October 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We improve the holographic description of isospin-asymmetric baryonic matter within the Witten-Sakai-Sugimoto model by accounting for a realistic pion mass, computing the pion condensate dynamically, and including rho meson condensation by allowing the gauge field in the bulk to be anisotropic. This description takes into account the coexistence of baryonic matter with pion and rho meson condensates. Our main result is the zero-temperature phase diagram in the plane of baryon and isospin chemical potentials. We find that the effective pion mass in the baryonic medium increases with baryon density and that, as a consequence, there is no pion condensation in neutron-star matter. Our improved description also predicts that baryons are disfavored at low baryon chemical potentials even for arbitrarily large isospin chemical potential. Instead, rho meson condensation sets in on top of the pion condensate at an isospin chemical potential of about $9.4 m_\pi$. We further observe a highly non-monotonic phase boundary regarding the disappearance of pion condensation.

  3 citations

• Exceptional points in the Baxter-Fendley free parafermion model

  Robert A. Henry, Murray T. Batchelor

  SciPost Phys. 15, 016 (2023) · published 19 July 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Certain spin chains, such as the quantum Ising chain, have free fermion spectra which can be expressed as the sum of decoupled two-level fermionic systems. Free parafermions are a generalisation of this idea to $\mathbb{Z}_N$-symmetric clock models. In 1989 Baxter discovered a non-Hermitian but $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric model directly generalising the Ising chain, which was later described by Fendley as a free parafermion spectrum. By extending the model's magnetic field parameter to the complex plane, it is shown that a series of exceptional points emerges, where the quasienergies defining the free spectrum become degenerate. An analytic expression for the locations of these points is derived, and various numerical investigations are performed. These exceptional points also exist in the Ising chain with a complex transverse field. Although the model is not in general $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric at these exceptional points, their proximity can have a profound impact on the model on the $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric real line. Furthermore, in certain cases an exceptional point may appear on the real line (with negative field).

  3 citations

• Quasi-localized vibrational modes, boson peak and sound attenuation in model mass-spring networks

  Shivam Mahajan, Massimo Pica Ciamarra

  SciPost Phys. 15, 069 (2023) · published 23 August 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We introduce an algorithm that constructs disordered mass-spring networks whose elastic properties mimic that of glasses by tuning the fluctuations of the local elastic properties, keeping fixed connectivity and controlling the prestress. In two dimensions, the algorithm reproduces the dependence of glasses' vibrational properties, such as quasi-localised vibrational modes and Boson peak, on the degree of stability. The sound attenuation displays Rayleigh scattering and disorder-broadening regimes at different frequencies, and the attenuation rate decreases with increased stability. Our results establish a strong connection between the vibrational features of disordered solids and the fluctuations of the local elastic properties and provide a new approach to investigating glasses' vibrational anomalies.

  3 citations

• Hydrodynamics with triangular point group

  Aaron J. Friedman, Caleb Q. Cook, Andrew Lucas

  SciPost Phys. 14, 137 (2023) · published 31 May 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  When continuous rotational invariance of a two-dimensional fluid is broken to the discrete, dihedral subgroup $D_6$ - the point group of an equilateral triangle - the resulting anisotropic hydrodynamics breaks both spatial-inversion and time-reversal symmetries, while preserving their combination. In this work, we present the hydrodynamics of such $D_6$-symmetric fluids, identifying new symmetry-allowed dissipative terms in the hydrodynamic equations of motion. We propose two experiments - both involving high-purity solid-state materials with $D_6$-invariant Fermi surfaces - that are sensitive to these new coefficients in a $D_6$-invariant electron fluid. In particular, we propose a local current imaging experiment (which is present-day realizable with nitrogen vacancy center magnetometry) in a hexagonal device, whose $D_6$-exploiting boundary conditions enable the unambiguous detection of these novel transport coefficients.

  3 citations

• Topological and quantum critical properties of the interacting Majorana chain model

  Natalia Chepiga, Nicolas Laflorencie

  SciPost Phys. 14, 152 (2023) · published 13 June 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study Majorana chain with the shortest possible interaction term and in the presence of hopping alternation. When formulated in terms of spins the model corresponds to the transverse field Ising model with nearest-neighbor transverse and next-nearest-neighbor longitudinal repulsion. The phase diagram obtained with extensive DMRG simulations is very rich and contains six phases. Four gapped phases include paramagnetic, period-2 with broken translation symmetry, $\mathbb{Z}_2$ with broken parity symmetry and the period-2-$\mathbb{Z}_2$ phase with both symmetries broken. In addition there are two floating phases: gapless and critical Luttinger liquid with incommensurate correlations, and with an additional spontaneously broken $\mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry in one of them. By analyzing an extended phase diagram we demonstrate that, in contrast with a common belief, the Luttinger liquid phase along the self-dual critical line terminates at a weaker interaction strength than the end point of the Ising critical line that we find to be in the tri-critical Ising universality class. We also show that none of these two points is a Lifshitz point terminating the incommensurability. In addition, we analyzed topological properties through Majorana zero modes emergent in the two topological phases, with and without incommensurability. In the weak interaction regime, a self-consistent mean-field treatment provides a remarkable accuracy for the description of the spectral pairing and the parity switches induced by the interaction.

  3 citations

• Systematic analysis of crystalline phases in bosonic lattice models with algebraically decaying density-density interactions

  Jan A. Koziol, Antonia Duft, Giovanna Morigi, Kai P. Schmidt

  SciPost Phys. 14, 136 (2023) · published 30 May 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We propose a general approach to analyse diagonal ordering patterns in bosonic lattice models with algebraically decaying density-density interactions on arbitrary lattices. The key idea is a systematic search for the energetically best order on all unit cells of the lattice up to a given extent. Using resummed couplings we evaluate the energy of the ordering patterns in the thermodynamic limit using finite unit cells. We apply the proposed approach to the atomic limit of the extended Bose-Hubbard model on the triangular lattice at fillings $f=1/2$ and $f=1$. We investigate the ground-state properties of the antiferromagnetic long-range Ising model on the triangular lattice and determine a six-fold degenerate plain-stripe phase to be the ground state for finite decay exponents. We also probe the classical limit of the Fendley-Sengupta-Sachdev model describing Rydberg atom arrays. We focus on arrangements where the atoms are placed on the sites or links of the Kagome lattice. Our method provides a general framework to treat cristalline structures resulting from long-range interactions.

  3 citations

• Density matrices in integrable face models

  Holger Frahm, Daniel Westerfeld

  SciPost Phys. 11, 057 (2021) · published 14 September 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Using the properties of the local Boltzmann weights of integrable interaction-round-a-face (IRF or face) models we express local operators in terms of generalized transfer matrices. This allows for the derivation of discrete functional equations for the reduced density matrices in inhomogeneous generalizations of these models. We apply these equations to study the density matrices for IRF models of various solid-on-solid type and quantum chains of non-Abelian ${SU(2)_3}$ or Fibonacci anyons. Similar as in the six vertex model we find that reduced density matrices for a sequence of consecutive sites can be 'factorized', i.e.\ expressed in terms of nearest-neighbour correlators with coefficients which are independent of the model parameters. Explicit expressions are provided for correlation functions on up to three neighbouring sites.

  3 citations

• On the size of the space spanned by a nonequilibrium state in a quantum spin lattice system

  Maurizio Fagotti

  SciPost Phys. 6, 059 (2019) · published 15 May 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We consider the time evolution of a state in an isolated quantum spin lattice system with energy cumulants proportional to the number of the sites $L^d$. We compute the distribution of the eigenvalues of the time averaged state over a time window $[t_0,t_0+t]$ in the limit of large $L$. This allows us to infer the size of a subspace that captures time evolution in $[t_0,t_0+t]$ with an accuracy $1-\epsilon$. We estimate the size to be $ \frac{\sqrt{2\mathfrak{e}_2}}{\pi}\mathrm{erf}^{-1}(1-\epsilon) L^{\frac{d}{2}}t$, where $\mathfrak{e}_2$ is the energy variance per site, and $\mathrm{erf}^{-1}$ is the inverse error function.

  3 citations

• Learning Coulomb Diamonds in Large Quantum Dot Arrays

  Oswin Krause, Anasua Chatterjee, Ferdinand Kuemmeth, Evert van Nieuwenburg

  SciPost Phys. 13, 084 (2022) · published 5 October 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We introduce an algorithm that is able to find the facets of Coulomb diamonds in quantum dot arrays. We simulate these arrays using the constant-interaction model, and rely only on one-dimensional raster scans (rays) to learn a model of the device using regularized maximum likelihood estimation. This allows us to determine, for a given charge state of the device, which transitions exist and what the compensated gate voltages for these are. For smaller devices the simulator can also be used to compute the exact boundaries of the Coulomb diamonds, which we use to assess that our algorithm correctly finds the vast majority of transitions with high precision.

  3 citations

• Gravitational wave induced baryon acoustic oscillations

  Christian Döring, Salvador Centelles Chuliá, Manfred Lindner, Bjoern Malte Schaefer, Matthias Bartelmann

  SciPost Phys. 12, 114 (2022) · published 31 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the impact of gravitational waves originating from a first order phase transition on structure formation. To do so, we perform a second order perturbation analysis in the $1+3$ covariant framework and derive a wave equation in which second order, adiabatic density perturbations of the photon-baryon fluid are sourced by the gravitational wave energy density during radiation domination and on sub-horizon scales. The scale on which such waves affect the energy density perturbation spectrum is found to be proportional to the horizon size at the time of the phase transition times its inverse duration. Consequently, structure of the size of galaxies and bigger can only be affected in this way by relatively late phase transitions at $\ge 10^{6}\,\text{s}$. Using cosmic variance as a bound we derive limits on the strength $\alpha$ and the relative duration $(\beta/H_*)^{-1}$ of phase transitions as functions of the time of their occurrence which results in a new exclusion region for the energy density in gravitational waves today. We find that the cosmic variance bound forbids only relative long lasting phase transitions, e.g. $\beta/H_*\lesssim 6.8$ for $t_*\approx 5\times10^{11}\,\text{s}$, which exhibit a substantial amount of supercooling $\alpha>20$ to affect the matter power spectrum.

  3 citations