Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Geometric surprises in the Python's lunch conjecture

  Gurbir Arora, Matthew Headrick, Albion Lawrence, Martin Sasieta, Connor Wolfe

  SciPost Phys. 16, 152 (2024) · published 12 June 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  A bulge surface, on a time reflection-symmetric Cauchy slice of a holographic spacetime, is a non-minimal extremal surface that occurs between two locally minimal surfaces homologous to a given boundary region. According to the python's lunch conjecture of Brown et al., the bulge's area controls the complexity of bulk reconstruction, in the sense of the amount of post-selection that needs to be overcome for the reconstruction of the entanglement wedge beyond the outermost extremal surface. We study the geometry of bulges in a variety of classical spacetimes, and discover a number of surprising features that distinguish them from more familiar extremal surfaces such as Ryu-Takayanagi surfaces: they spontaneously break spatial isometries, both continuous and discrete; they are sensitive to the choice of boundary infrared regulator; they can self-intersect; and they probe entanglement shadows, orbifold singularities, and compact spaces such as the sphere in AdS$_p× S^q$. These features imply, according to the python's lunch conjecture, novel qualitative differences between complexity and entanglement in the holographic context. We also find, surprisingly, that extended black brane interiors have a non-extensive complexity; similarly, for multi-boundary wormhole states, the complexity pleateaus after a certain number of boundaries have been included.

  5 citations

• Renormalisation group effects in SMEFT for di-Higgs production

  Gudrun Heinrich, Jannis Lang

  SciPost Phys. 18, 113 (2025) · published 31 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the effects of renormalisation group running for the Wilson coefficients of dimension-6 operators contributing to Higgs boson pair production in gluon fusion within Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT). The running of these Wilson coefficients has been implemented in the NLO QCD code ggHH_SMEFT, which is publicly available within the Powheg-Box-V2 framework.

  5 citations

• Time-dependent variational Monte Carlo study of the dynamic response of bosons in an optical lattice

  Mathias Gartner, Ferran Mazzanti, Robert E. Zillich

  SciPost Phys. 13, 025 (2022) · published 18 August 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the dynamics of a one-dimensional Bose gas at unit filling in both shallow and deep optical lattices and obtain the dynamic structure factor ${S(k,\omega)}$ by monitoring the linear response to a weak probe pulse. We introduce a new procedure, based on the time-dependent variational Monte Carlo method (tVMC), which allows to evolve the system in real time, using as a variational model a Jastrow-Feenberg wave function that includes pair correlations. Comparison with exact diagonalization results of ${S(k,\omega)}$ obtained on a lattice in the Bose-Hubbard limit shows good agreement of the dispersion relation for sufficiently deep optical lattices, while for shallow lattices we observe the influence of higher Bloch bands. We also investigate non-linear response to strong pulses. From the power spectrum of the density fluctuations we obtain the excitation spectrum, albeit broadened, by higher harmonic generation after a strong pulse with a single low wave number. As a remarkable feature of our simulations we furthermore demonstrate that the full excitation spectrum can be retrieved from the power spectrum of the density fluctuations due to the stochastic noise inherent in any Monte Carlo method, without applying an actual perturbation.

  5 citations

• Nonlinearity of transparent SNS weak links decreases sharply with length

  Valla Fatemi, Pavel D. Kurilovich, Anton R. Akhmerov, Bernard van Heck

  SciPost Phys. 18, 091 (2025) · published 12 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Superconductor-normal material-superconductor (SNS) junctions are being integrated into microwave circuits for fundamental and applied research goals. The short junction limit is a common simplifying assumption for experiments with SNS junctions, but this limit constrains how small the nonlinearity of the microwave circuit can be. Here, we show that a finite length of the weak link strongly suppresses the nonlinearity compared to its zero-length limit -- the suppression can be up to a factor of ten even when the length remains shorter than the induced coherence length. We tie this behavior to the nonanalytic dependence of nonlinearity on length, which the critical current does not exhibit. Further, we identify additional experimentally observable consequences of nonzero length, and we conjecture that anharmonicity is bounded between zero and a maximally negative value for any non-interacting Josephson junction in the presence of time-reversal symmetry. We promote SNS junction length as a useful parameter for designing weakly nonlinear microwave circuits.

  5 citations

• Heat and charge transport in interacting nanoconductors driven by time-modulated temperatures

  Rosa López, Pascal Simon, Minchul Lee

  SciPost Phys. 16, 094 (2024) · published 5 April 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate the quantum transport of the heat and the charge through a quantum dot coupled to fermionic contacts under the influence of time modulation of temperatures. We derive, within the nonequilibrium Keldysh Green's function formalism, generic formulas for the charge and heat currents by extending the concept of gravitational field introduced by Luttinger to the dynamically driven system and by identifying the correct form of dynamical contact energy. In linear response regime our formalism is validated from satisfying the Onsager reciprocity relations and demonstrates its utility to reveal nontrivial dynamical effects of the Coulomb interaction on charge and energy relaxations.

  5 citations

• Boundary conditions for extremal black holes from 2d gravity

  Stephane Detournay, Thomas Smoes, Raphaela Wutte

  SciPost Phys. 16, 141 (2024) · published 30 May 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We devise new boundary conditions for the near-horizon geometries of extremal BTZ and Kerr black holes, as well as for the ultra-cold limit of the Kerr-de Sitter black hole. These boundary conditions are obtained as the higher-dimensional uplift of recently proposed boundary conditions in two-dimensional gravity. Their asymptotic symmetries consist in the semi-direct product of a Virasoro and a current algebra, of which we determine the central extensions.

  5 citations

• The complex Liouville string: The worldsheet

  Scott Collier, Lorenz Eberhardt, Beatrix Mühlmann, Victor A. Rodriguez

  SciPost Phys. 19, 033 (2025) · published 12 August 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We introduce a new two-dimensional string theory defined by coupling two copies of Liouville CFT with complex central charge $c=13± i \lambda$ on the worldsheet. This string theory defines a novel, consistent and controllable model of two-dimensional quantum gravity. We use the exact solution of the worldsheet theory to derive stringent constraints on the analytic structure of the string amplitudes as a function of the vertex operator momenta. Together with other worldsheet constraints, this allows us to completely pin down the string amplitudes without explicitly computing the moduli space integrals. We focus on the case of the sphere four-point amplitude and torus one-point amplitude as worked examples. This is the first in a series of papers on the complex Liouville string: three subsequent papers will elucidate the holographic duality with a two-matrix integral, discuss worldsheet boundaries and non-perturbative effects, and connect the theory to de Sitter quantum gravity.

  5 citations

• BRST invariant formulation of the Bell-CHSH inequality in gauge field theories

  David Dudal, Philipe De Fabritiis, Marcelo Santos Guimaraes, Giovani Peruzzo, Silvio Paolo Sorella

  SciPost Phys. 15, 201 (2023) · published 23 November 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  A study of the Bell-CHSH inequality in gauge field theories is presented. By using the Kugo-Ojima analysis of the BRST charge cohomology in Fock space, the Bell-CHSH inequality is formulated in a manifestly BRST invariant way. The examples of the free four-dimensional Maxwell theory and the Abelian Higgs model are scrutinized. The inequality is probed by using BRST invariant squeezed states, allowing for large Bell-CHSH inequality violations, close to Tsirelson's bound. An illustrative comparison with the entangled state of two $1/2$ spin particles in Quantum Mechanics is provided.

  5 citations

• Annealed averages in spin and matrix models

  Laura Foini, Jorge Kurchan

  SciPost Phys. 12, 080 (2022) · published 3 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  A disordered system is denominated 'annealed' when the interactions themselves may evolve and adjust their values to lower the free energy. The opposite ('quenched') situation when disorder is fixed, is the one relevant for physical spin-glasses, and has received vastly more attention. Other problems however are more natural in the annealed situation: in this work we discuss examples where annealed averages are interesting, in the context of matrix models. We first discuss how in practice, when system and disorder adapt together, annealed systems develop `planted' solutions spontaneously, as the ones found in the study of inference problems. In the second part, we study the probability distribution of elements of a matrix derived from a rotationally invariant (not necessarily Gaussian) ensemble, a problem that maps into the annealed average of a spin glass model.

  5 citations

• Investigating finite-size effects in random matrices by counting resonances

  Anton Kutlin, Carlo Vanoni

  SciPost Phys. 18, 090 (2025) · published 12 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Resonance counting is an intuitive and widely used tool in Random Matrix Theory and Anderson Localization. Its undoubted advantage is its simplicity: in principle, it is easily applicable to any random matrix ensemble. On the downside, the notion of resonance is ill-defined, and the "number of resonances" does not have a direct mapping to any commonly used physical observable like the participation entropy, the fractal dimensions, or the gap ratios (r-parameter), restricting the method's predictive power to the thermodynamic limit only where it can be used for locating the Anderson localization transition. In this work, we reevaluate the notion of resonances and relate it to measurable quantities, building a foundation for the future application of the method to finite-size systems. To access the HTML version of the paper & discuss it with the authors, visit https://enabla.com/pub/558.

  5 citations