Publications

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• Estimating time in quantum chaotic systems and black holes

  Haifeng Tang, Shreya Vardhan, Jinzhao Wang

  SciPost Phys. 19, 095 (2025) · published 13 October 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We characterize new universal features of the dynamics of chaotic quantum many-body systems, by considering a hypothetical task of "time estimation". Most macroscopic observables in a chaotic system equilibrate to nearly constant late-time values. Intuitively, it should become increasingly difficult to estimate the precise value of time by making measurements on the state. We use a quantity called the Fisher information from quantum metrology to quantify the minimum uncertainty in estimating time. Due to unitarity, the uncertainty in the time estimate does not grow with time if we have access to optimal measurements on the full system. Restricting the measurements to act on a small subsystem or to have low computational complexity leads to results expected from equilibration, where the time uncertainty becomes large at late times. With optimal measurements on a subsystem larger than half of the system, we regain the ability to estimate the time very precisely, even at late times. Hawking's calculation for the reduced density matrix of the black hole radiation in semiclassical gravity contradicts our general predictions for unitary quantum chaotic systems. Hawking's state always has a large uncertainty for attempts to estimate the time using the radiation, whereas our general results imply that the uncertainty should become small after the Page time. This gives a new version of the black hole information loss paradox in terms of the time estimation task. By restricting to simple measurements on the radiation, the time uncertainty becomes large. This indicates from a new perspective that the observations of computationally bounded agents are consistent with the semiclassical effective description of gravity.

  1 citation

• Molecular sorting on a fluctuating membrane

  Damiano Andreghetti, Luca Dall'Asta, Andrea Gamba, Igor Kolokolov, Vladimir Lebedev

  SciPost Phys. 18, 099 (2025) · published 18 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Molecular sorting in biological membranes is essential for proper cellular function. It also plays a crucial role in the budding of enveloped viruses from host cells. We recently proposed that this process is driven by phase separation, where the formation and growth of sorting domains depend primarily on direct intermolecular interactions. In addition to these, Casimir-like forces—arising from entropic effects in fluctuating membranes —may also play a significant role in the molecular distillation process. Here, using a combination of theoretical analysis and numerical simulations, we explore how Casimir-like forces between rigid membrane inclusions contribute to sorting, particularly in the biologically relevant regime where direct intermolecular interactions are weak. Our results show that these forces enhance molecular distillation by reducing the critical radius for the formation of new sorting domains and facilitating the capture of molecules within these domains. We identify the relative rigidity of the membrane and supermolecular domains as a key parameter controlling molecular sorting efficiency, offering new insights into the physical principles underlying molecular sorting in biological systems.

  1 citation

• Acceleration-induced transport of quantum vortices in joined atomtronic circuits

  Andrii Chaika, Artem O. Oliinyk, Ihor V. Yatsuta, Nick P. Proukakis, Mark Edwards, Alexander I. Yakimenko, Thomas Bland

  SciPost Phys. 19, 005 (2025) · published 2 July 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Persistent currents–inviscid quantized flow around an atomic circuit–are a crucial building block of atomtronic devices. We investigate how acceleration influences the transfer of persistent currents between two density-connected, ring-shaped atomic Bose-Einstein condensates, joined by a tunable weak link that controls system topology. We find that the acceleration of this system modifies both the density and phase dynamics between the rings, leading to a bias in the periodic vortex oscillations studied in T. Bland et al., Phys. Rev. Research 4, 043171 (2022). Accounting for dissipation suppressing such vortex oscillations, the acceleration facilitates a unilateral vortex transfer to the leading ring. We analyze how this transfer depends on the weak-link amplitude, the initial persistent current configuration, and the acceleration strength and direction. Characterization of the sensitivity to these parameters paves the way for a new platform for acceleration measurements, for which we outline a proof-of-concept ultracold double-ring accelerometer.

  1 citation

• Space-time first-order correlations of an open Bose Hubbard model with incoherent pump and loss

  Martina Zündel, Leonardo Mazza, Léonie Canet, Anna Minguzzi

  SciPost Phys. 18, 095 (2025) · published 17 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate the correlation properties in the steady state of driven-dissipative interacting bosonic systems in the quantum regime, as for example non-linear photonic cavities. Specifically, we consider the Bose-Hubbard model on a periodic chain and with spatially homogeneous one-body loss and pump within the Markovian approximation. The steady state is non-thermal and is formally equivalent to an infinite-temperature state with finite chemical potential set by the dissipative parameters. While there is no effect of interactions on the steady state, we observe a nontrivial behaviour of the space-time two-point correlation function, obtained by exact diagonalisation. In particular, we find that the decay width of the propagator is not only renormalised at increasing interactions, as it is the case of a single non-linear resonator, but also at increasing hopping strength. Furthermore, we numerically predict at large interactions a plateau value of the decay rate which goes beyond perturbative results in the interaction strength. We then compute the full spectral function, finding that it contains both a dispersive free-particle like dispersion at low energy and a doublon branch at energy corresponding to the on-site interactions. We compare with the corresponding calculation for the ground state of a closed quantum system and show that the driven-dissipative nature – determining both the steady state and the dynamical evolution – changes the low-lying part of the spectrum, where noticeably, the dispersion is quadratic instead of linear at small wavevectors. Finally, we compare to a high temperature grand-canonical equilibrium state and show the difference with respect to the open system stemming from the additional degree of freedom of the dissipation that allows one to vary the width of the dispersion lines.

  1 citation

• Stress correlations in near-crystalline packings

  Roshan Maharana, Kabir Ramola

  SciPost Phys. 17, 012 (2024) · published 15 July 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We derive exact results for stress correlations in near-crystalline systems in two and three dimensions. We study energy minimized configurations of particles interacting through Harmonic as well as Lennard-Jones potentials, for varying degrees of microscopic disorder and quenched forces on grains. Our findings demonstrate that the macroscopic elastic properties of such near-crystalline packings remain unchanged within a certain disorder threshold, yet they can be influenced by various factors, including packing density, pressure, and the strength of inter-particle interactions. We show that the stress correlations in such systems display anisotropic behavior at large lengthscales and are significantly influenced by the pre-stress of the system. The anisotropic nature of these correlations remains unaffected as we increase the strength of the disorder. Additionally, we derive the large lengthscale behavior for the change in the local stress components that shows a $1/r^d$ radial decay for the case of particle size disorder and a $1/r^{d-1}$ behavior for quenched forces introduced into a crystalline network. Finally, we verify our theoretical results numerically using energy-minimised static particle configurations.

  1 citation

• Heavy-light $N+1$ clusters of two-dimensional fermions

  Jules Givois, Andrea Tononi, Dmitry S. Petrov

  SciPost Phys. 17, 050 (2024) · published 13 August 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study binding of $N$ identical heavy fermions by a light atom in two dimensions assuming zero-range attractive heavy-light interactions. By using the mean-field theory valid for large $N$ we show that the $N+1$ cluster is bound when the mass ratio exceeds $1.074N^2$. The mean-field theory, being scale invariant in two dimensions, predicts only the shapes of the clusters leaving their sizes and energies undefined. By taking into account beyond-mean-field effects we find closed-form expressions for these quantities. We also discuss differences between the Thomas-Fermi and Hartree-Fock approaches for treating the heavy fermions.

  1 citation

• Exploring superconformal Yang-Mills theories through matrix Bessel kernels

  Zoltan Bajnok, Bercel Boldis, Gregory P. Korchemsky

  SciPost Phys. 19, 004 (2025) · published 2 July 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  A broad class of observables in four-dimensional $\mathcal{N}=2$ and $\mathcal{N}=4$ superconformal Yang-Mills theories can be exactly computed in the planar limit for arbitrary 't Hooft coupling as Fredholm determinants of integrable Bessel operators. These observables admit a unifying description through a one-parameter generating function, which possesses a determinant representation involving a matrix generalization of the Bessel operator. We analyze this generating function over a wide range of parameter values and finite 't Hooft coupling. We demonstrate that it has a well-behaved weak-coupling expansion with a finite radius of convergence. In contrast, the strong-coupling expansion exhibits factorially growing coefficients, necessitating the inclusion of non-perturbative corrections that are exponentially suppressed at strong coupling. We compute these non-perturbative corrections and observe a striking resemblance between the resulting trans-series expansion of the generating function and the partition function of a strongly coupled theory expanded in powers of a mass gap.

  1 citation

• Radiation statistics of a degenerate parametric oscillator at threshold

  Fabian Hassler, Steven Kim, Lisa Arndt

  SciPost Phys. 14, 156 (2023) · published 15 June 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  As a function of the driving strength, a degenerate parametric oscillator exhibits an instability at which spontaneous oscillations occur. Close to threshold, both the nonlinearity as well as fluctuations are vital to the accurate description of the dynamics. We study the statistics of the adiation that is emitted by the degenerate parametric oscillator at threshold. For a weak nonlinearity, we can employ a quasiclassical description. We identify a universal Liouvillian that captures the relevant long-time dynamics for large photon-numbers. We find that the cumulants obey a universal power-law scaling as a function of the nonlinearity. The Fano factor shows a maximum close, but not coinciding, with the threshold. Moreover, we predict a certain ratio of the first three cumulants to be independent of the microscopic details of the system and connect the results to experimental platforms.

  1 citation

• Universal aspects of high-temperature relaxation dynamics in random spin models

  Tian-Gang Zhou, Wei Zheng, Pengfei Zhang

  SciPost Phys. 18, 120 (2025) · published 8 April 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Universality is a crucial concept in modern physics, allowing us to capture the essential features of a system's behavior using a small set of parameters. In this work, we unveil universal spin relaxation dynamics in anisotropic random Heisenberg models with infinite-range interactions at high temperatures. Starting from a polarized state, the total magnetization can relax monotonically or decay with long-lived oscillations, determined by the sign of a universal single function $A=-\xi_1^2+\xi_2^2-4\xi_2\xi_3+\xi_3^2$. Here $(\xi_1,\xi_3,\xi_3)$ characterizes the anisotropy of the Heisenberg interaction. Furthermore, the oscillation shows up only for $A>0$, with frequency $\Omega \propto \sqrt{A}$. This result is derived from the Kadanoff-Baym equation under the melon diagram approximation, which is consistent with numerical solutions. Furthermore, we verify our theory and approximation using exact diagonalization, albeit for a small system size of $N=8$. Our study sheds light on the universal aspect of quantum many-body dynamics beyond low energy limit.

  1 citation

• Boundary overlap in the open XXZ spin chain

  Charbel Abetian, Nikolai Kitanine, Veronique Terras

  SciPost Phys. 18, 026 (2025) · published 21 January 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  In this paper we compute the overlaps of the ground states for the open spin chains after a change of one of the boundary magnetic fields. It can be considered as the first step toward the study of the boundary quench problem: behaviour of an open spin chain after an abrupt change of one boundary magnetic field.

  1 citation