Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Using machine learning to disentangle LHC signatures of Dark Matter candidates

  Charanjit Kaur Khosa, Veronica Sanz, Michael Soughton

  SciPost Phys. 10, 151 (2021) · published 22 June 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the prospects of characterising Dark Matter at colliders using Machine Learning (ML) techniques. We focus on the monojet and missing transverse energy (MET) channel and propose a set of benchmark models for the study: a typical WIMP Dark Matter candidate in the form of a SUSY neutralino, a pseudo-Goldstone impostor in the shape of an Axion-Like Particle, and a light Dark Matter impostor whose interactions are mediated by a heavy particle. All these benchmarks are tensioned against each other, and against the main SM background ($Z$+jets). Our analysis uses both the leading-order kinematic features as well as the information of an additional hard jet. We explore different representations of the data, from a simple event data sample with values of kinematic variables fed into a Logistic Regression algorithm or a Fully Connected Neural Network, to a transformation of the data into images related to probability distributions, fed to Deep and Convolutional Neural Networks. We also study the robustness of our method against including detector effects, dropping kinematic variables, or changing the number of events per image. In the case of signals with more combinatorial possibilities (events with more than one hard jet), the most crucial data features are selected by performing a Principal Component Analysis. We compare the performance of all these methods, and find that using the 2D images of the combined information of multiple events significantly improves the discrimination performance.

  15 citations

• Ownerless island and partial entanglement entropy in island phases

  Debarshi Basu, Jiong Lin, Yizhou Lu, Qiang Wen

  SciPost Phys. 15, 227 (2023) · published 6 December 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  In the context of partial entanglement entropy (PEE), we study the entanglement structure of the island phases realized in several 2-dimensional holographic set-ups. From a pure quantum information perspective, the entanglement islands emerge from the self-encoding property of the system, which gives us new insights on the construction of the PEE and the physical interpretation of two-point functions of twist operators in island phases. With the contributions from the entanglement islands properly taken into account, we give a generalized prescription to construct PEE and balanced partial entanglement entropy (BPE). Here the ownerless island region, which lies inside the island $\text{Is}(AB)$ of $A\cup B$ but outside $\text{Is}(A)\cup \text{Is}(B)$, plays a crucial role. Remarkably, we find that under different assignments for the ownerless island, we get different BPEs, which exactly correspond to different saddles of the entanglement wedge cross-section (EWCS) in the entanglement wedge of $A\cup B$. The assignments can be settled by choosing the one that minimizes the BPE. Furthermore, under this assignment we study the PEE and give a geometric picture for the PEE in holography, which is consistent with the geometric picture in the no-island phases.

  15 citations

• CFTs with $\mathbf{U(m)\times U(n)}$ global symmetry in 3D and the chiral phase transition of QCD

  Stefanos R. Kousvos, Andreas Stergiou

  SciPost Phys. 15, 075 (2023) · published 31 August 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Conformal field theories (CFTs) with $U(m)\times U(n)$ global symmetry in $d=3$ dimensions have been studied for years due to their potential relevance to the chiral phase transition of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). In this work such CFTs are analyzed in $d=4-\varepsilon$ and $d=3$. This includes perturbative computations in the $\varepsilon$ and large-$n$ expansions as well as non-perturbative ones with the numerical conformal bootstrap. New perturbative results are presented and a variety of non-perturbative bootstrap bounds are obtained in $d=3$. Various features of the bounds obtained for large values of $n$ disappear for low values of $n$ (keeping $m<n$ fixed), a phenomenon which is attributed to a transition of the corresponding fixed points to the non-unitary regime. Numerous bootstrap bounds are found that are saturated by large-$n$ results, even in the absence of any features in the bounds. A double scaling limit is also observed, for $m$ and $n$ large with $m/n$ fixed, both in perturbation theory as well as in the numerical bootstrap. For the case of two-flavor massless QCD existing bootstrap evidence is reproduced that the chiral phase transition may be second order, albeit associated to a universality class unrelated to the one usually discussed in the $\varepsilon$ expansion. Similar evidence is found for the case of three-flavor massless QCD, where we observe a pronounced kink.

  15 citations

• CaloDREAM – Detector response emulation via attentive flow matching

  Luigi Favaro, Ayodele Ore, Sofia Palacios Schweitzer, Tilman Plehn

  SciPost Phys. 18, 088 (2025) · published 11 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Detector simulations are an exciting application of modern generative networks. Their sparse high-dimensional data combined with the required precision poses a serious challenge. We show how combining Conditional Flow Matching with transformer elements allows us to simulate the detector phase space reliably. Namely, we use an autoregressive transformer to simulate the energy of each layer, and a vision transformer for the high-dimensional voxel distributions. We show how dimension reduction via latent diffusion allows us to train more efficiently and how diffusion networks can be evaluated faster with bespoke solvers. We showcase our framework, CaloDREAM, on datasets 2 and 3 of the CaloChallenge.

  15 citations

• A general algorithm for computing bound states in infinite tight-binding systems

  M. Istas, C. Groth, A. R. Akhmerov, M. Wimmer, X. Waintal

  SciPost Phys. 4, 026 (2018) · published 23 May 2018 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We propose a robust and efficient algorithm for computing bound states of infinite tight-binding systems that are made up of a finite scattering region connected to semi-infinite leads. Our method uses wave matching in close analogy to the approaches used to obtain propagating states and scattering matrices. We show that our algorithm is robust in presence of slowly decaying bound states where a diagonalization of a finite system would fail. It also allows to calculate the bound states that can be present in the middle of a continuous spectrum. We apply our technique to quantum billiards and the following topological materials: Majorana states in 1D superconducting nanowires, edge states in the 2D quantum spin Hall phase, and Fermi arcs in 3D Weyl semimetals.

  15 citations

• How many particles make up a chaotic many-body quantum system?

  Guy Zisling, Lea F. Santos, Yevgeny Bar Lev

  SciPost Phys. 10, 088 (2021) · published 23 April 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We numerically investigate the minimum number of interacting particles, which is required for the onset of strong chaos in quantum systems on a one-dimensional lattice with short-range and long-range interactions. We consider multiple system sizes which are at least three times larger than the number of particles and find that robust signatures of quantum chaos emerge for as few as 4 particles in the case of short-range interactions and as few as 3 particles for long-range interactions, and without any apparent dependence on the size of the system.

  15 citations

• Long-term memory magnetic correlations in the Hubbard model: A dynamical mean-field theory analysis

  Clemens Watzenböck, Martina Fellinger, Karsten Held, Alessandro Toschi

  SciPost Phys. 12, 184 (2022) · published 7 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate the onset of a not-decaying asymptotic behavior of temporal magnetic correlations in the Hubbard model in infinite dimensions. This long-term memory feature of dynamical spin correlations can be precisely quantified by computing the difference between the zero-frequency limit of the Kubo susceptibility and the corresponding static isothermal one. Here, we present a procedure for reliably evaluating this difference starting from imaginary time-axis data, and apply it to the testbed case of the Mott-Hubbard metal-insulator transition (MIT). At low temperatures, we find long-term memory effects in the entire Mott regime, abruptly ending at the first order MIT. This directly reflects the underlying local moment physics and the associated degeneracy in the many-electron spectrum. At higher temperatures, a more gradual onset of an infinitely-long time-decay of magnetic correlations occurs in the crossover regime, not too far from the Widom line emerging from the critical point of the MIT. Our work has relevant algorithmic implications for the analytical continuation of dynamical susceptibilities in strongly correlated regimes and offers a new perspective for unveiling fundamental properties of the many-particle spectrum of the problem under scrutiny.

  15 citations

• BPS chaos

  Yiming Chen, Henry W. Lin, Stephen H. Shenker

  SciPost Phys. 18, 072 (2025) · published 27 February 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Black holes are chaotic quantum systems that are expected to exhibit random matrix statistics in their finite energy spectrum. Lin, Maldacena, Rozenberg and Shan (LMRS) have proposed a related characterization of chaos for the ground states of BPS black holes with finite area horizons. On a separate front, the "fuzzball program" has uncovered large families of horizon-free geometries that account for the entropy of holographic BPS systems, but only in situations with sufficient supersymmetry to exclude finite area horizons. The highly structured, non-random nature of these solutions seems in tension with strong chaos. We verify this intuition by performing analytic and numerical calculations of the LMRS diagnostic in the corresponding boundary quantum system. In particular we examine the 1/2 and 1/4-BPS sectors of $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM, and the two charge sector of the D1-D5 CFT. We find evidence that these systems are only weakly chaotic, with a Thouless time determining the onset of chaos that grows as a power of $N$. In contrast, finite horizon area BPS black holes should be strongly chaotic, with a Thouless time of order one. In this case, finite energy chaotic states become BPS as $N$ is decreased through the recently discovered "fortuity" mechanism. Hence they can plausibly retain their strongly chaotic character.

  15 citations

• Nonexistence of motility induced phase separation transition in one dimension

  Indranil Mukherjee, Adarsh Raghu, Pradeep Kumar Mohanty

  SciPost Phys. 14, 165 (2023) · published 21 June 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We introduce and study a model of hardcore particles obeying run-and-tumble dynamics on a one-dimensional lattice, where particles run in either $+$ve or $-$ve $x$-direction with an effective speed $v$ and tumble (change their direction of motion) with a constant rate $\omega$ when assisted by another particle from right. We show that the coarse-grained dynamics of the system can be mapped to a beads-in-urn model called misanthrope process where particles are identified as urns and vacancies as beads that hop to a neighbouring urn situated in the direction opposite to the current. The hop rate is same as the magnitude of the particle current; we calculate it analytically for a two-particle system and show that it does not satisfy the criteria required for a phase separation transition. Nonexistence of phase separation in this model, where tumbling dynamics is rather restricted, necessarily imply that motility induced phase separation transition can not occur in other models in one dimension with unconditional tumbling.

  15 citations

• Semiconductor electron-phonon equations: A rung above Boltzmann in the many-body ladder

  Gianluca Stefanucci, Enrico Perfetto

  SciPost Phys. 16, 073 (2024) · published 13 March 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Starting from the ab initio many-body theory of electrons and phonons, we go through a series of well defined simplifications to derive a set of coupled equations of motion for the electronic occupations and polarizations, nuclear displacements as well as phononic occupations and coherences. These are the semiconductor electron-phonon equations (SEPE), sharing the same scaling with system size and propagation time as the Boltzmann equations. At the core of the SEPE is the mirrored Generalized Kadanoff-Baym Ansatz (GKBA) for the Green's functions, an alternative to the standard GKBA which we show to lead to unstable equilibrium states. The SEPE treat coherent and incoherent degrees of freedom on equal footing, widen the scope of the semiconductor Bloch equations and Boltzmann equations, and reduce to them under additional simplifications. The new features of the SEPE pave the way for first-principles studies of phonon squeezed states and coherence effects in time-resolved absorption and diffraction experiments.

  15 citations