Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Interfacially adsorbed bubbles determine the shape of droplets

  Alessio Squarcini, Antonio Tinti

  SciPost Phys. 15, 164 (2023) · published 16 October 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The characterization of density correlations in the presence of strongly fluctuating interfaces has always been considered a difficult problem in statistical mechanics. Here we study - by using recently developed exact field-theoretical techniques - density correlations for an interface with endpoints on a wall forming a droplet in 2D. Our framework applies to interfaces entropically repelled by a hard wall as well as to wetting transitions. In the former case bubbles adsorbed on the interface are taken into account by the theory which yields a systematic treatment of finite-size corrections to one- and two-point functions and show how these are related to Brownian excursions. Our analytical predictions are confirmed by Monte Carlo simulations without free parameters. We also determine one- and two-point functions at wetting by using integrable boundary field theory. We show that correlations are long ranged for entropic repulsion and at wetting. For both regimes we investigate correlations in momentum space by generalizing the notion of interface structure factor to semi-confined systems. Distinctive signatures of the two regimes manifest in the structure factor through a term that we identify on top of the capillary-wave one.

  1 citation

• Entropy-driven phase behavior of associative polymer networks

  Lorenzo Rovigatti, Francesco Sciortino

  SciPost Phys. 15, 163 (2023) · published 16 October 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Polymer chains decorated with a fraction of monomers capable of forming reversible bonds form transient polymer networks that are important in soft and biological systems. If chains are flexible and the attractive monomers are all of the same species, the network formation occurs continuously as density increases. By contrast, it has been recently shown [Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 047801 (2022)] that, if the attractive monomers are of two different and alternating types, the entropic gain of swapping intra-molecular bonds for inter-molecular connections induces a first order phase transition in the fully-bonded (i.e. low-temperature or, equivalently, large monomer-monomer attraction strength) limit and the network forms abruptly on increasing density. Here we use simulations to show that this phenomenon is robust with respect to thermal fluctuations, disorder and change in the polymer architecture, demonstrating its generality and likely relevance for the wide class of materials that can be modelled as associative (transient) polymer networks.

• 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.

  4 citations

• Skyrmion crystals in the triangular Kondo lattice model

  Zhentao Wang, Cristian D. Batista

  SciPost Phys. 15, 161 (2023) · published 13 October 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We present a systematic study of the formation of skyrmion crystals in a triangular Kondo Lattice model for generic electron filling fractions. Our results indicate that the four-sublattice chiral antiferromagnetic ordering that was reported more than one decade ago can be understood as the dense limit of a sequence of skyrmion crystals whose lattice parameter is dictated by the Fermi wave-vector. This observation has important implications for the ongoing search of skyrmion crystals in metallic materials with localized magnetic moments.

  5 citations

• Non-invertible symmetry webs

  Lakshya Bhardwaj, Lea E. Bottini, Sakura Schäfer-Nameki, Apoorv Tiwari

  SciPost Phys. 15, 160 (2023) · published 13 October 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Non-invertible symmetries have by now seen numerous constructions in higher dimensional Quantum Field Theories (QFT). In this paper we provide an in depth study of gauging 0-form symmetries in the presence of non-invertible symmetries. The starting point of our analysis is a theory with $G$ 0-form symmetry, and we propose a description of sequential partial gaugings of sub-symmetries. The gauging implements the theta-symmetry defects of the companion paper [SciPost Phys. 15, 122 (2023)]. The resulting network of symmetry structures related by this gauging will be called a non-invertible symmetry web. Our formulation makes direct contact with fusion 2-categories, and we uncover numerous interesting structures such as symmetry fractionalization in this categorical setting. The complete symmetry web is derived for several groups $G$, and we propose extensions to higher dimensions. The highlight of this analysis is the complete categorical symmetry web, including non-invertible symmetries, for 3d pure gauge theories with orthogonal gauge groups and its extension to arbitrary dimensions.

  22 citations

• Adiabatic deformations of quantum Hall droplets

  Blagoje Oblak, Benoit Estienne

  SciPost Phys. 15, 159 (2023) · published 13 October 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We consider area-preserving deformations of the plane, acting on electronic wave functions through "quantomorphisms" that change both the underlying metric and the confining potential. We show that adiabatic sequences of such transformations produce Berry phases that can be written in closed form in terms of the many-body current and density, even in the presence of interactions. For a large class of deformations that generalize squeezing and shearing, the leading piece of the phase is a super-extensive Aharonov-Bohm term ($\propto N^2$ for $N$ electrons) in the thermodynamic limit. Its gauge-invariant subleading partner only measures the current, whose dominant contribution to the phase stems from a jump at the edge in the limit of strong magnetic fields. This results in a finite Berry curvature per unit area, reminiscent of the Hall viscosity. We show that the latter is in fact included in our formalism, bypassing its standard derivation on a torus and suggesting realistic experimental setups for its observation in quantum simulators.

  1 citation

• Tensor network variational optimizations for real-time dynamics: Application to the time-evolution of spin liquids

  Ravi Teja Ponnaganti, Matthieu Mambrini, Didier Poilblanc

  SciPost Phys. 15, 158 (2023) · published 12 October 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Within the Projected Entangled Pair State (PEPS) tensor network formalism, a simple update (SU) method has been used to investigate the time evolution of a two-dimensional U(1) critical spin-1/2 spin liquid under Hamiltonian quench [Phys. Rev. B 106, 195132 (2022)]. Here we introduce two different variational frameworks to describe the time dynamics of SU(2)-symmetric translationally-invariant PEPS, aiming to improve the accuracy. In one approach, after using a Trotter-Suzuki decomposition of the time evolution operator in term of two-site elementary gates, one considers a single bond embedded in an environment approximated by a Corner Transfer Matrix Renormalization Group (CTMRG). A variational update of the two tensors on the bond is performed under the application of the elementary gate and then, after symmetrization of the site tensors, the environment is updated. In the second approach, a cluster optimization is performed on a finite (periodic) cluster, maximizing the overlap of the exact time-evolved state with a symmetric finite-size PEPS ansatz. Observables are then computed on the infinite lattice contracting the infinite-PEPS (iPEPS) by CTMRG. We show that the variational schemes outperform the SU method and remain accurate over a significant time interval before hitting the entanglement barrier. Studying the spectrum of the transfer matrix, we find that the asymptotic correlations are very well preserved under time evolution, including the critical nature of the singlet correlations, as expected from the Lieb-Robinson (LR) bound theorem. Consistently, the system (asymptotic) boundary is found to be described by the same Conformal Field Theory of central charge $c = 1$ during time evolution. We also compute the time-evolution of the short distance spin-spin correlations and estimate the LR velocity.

  2 citations

• Two-loop QCD corrections for three-photon production at hadron colliders

  Samuel Abreu, Giuseppe De Laurentis, Harald Ita, Maximillian Klinkert, Ben Page, Vasily Sotnikov

  SciPost Phys. 15, 157 (2023) · published 12 October 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We complete the computation of the two-loop helicity amplitudes for the production of three photons at hadron colliders, including all contributions beyond the leading-color approximation. We reconstruct the analytic form of the amplitudes from numerical finite-field samples obtained with the numerical unitarity method. This method requires as input surface terms for all relevant five-point non-planar integral topologies, which we obtain by solving the associated syzygy problem in embedding space. The numerical samples are used to constrain compact spinor-helicity ansätze, which are optimized by taking advantage of the known one-loop analytic structure. We make our analytic results available in a public C++ library, which is suitable for immediate phenomenological applications. We estimate that the inclusion of the subleading-color contributions will decrease the size of the two-loop corrections by about 30% to 50%, and the NNLO cross sections by a few percent, compared to the results in the leading-color approximation.

  8 citations

• Dualities and loops on squashed $S^3$

  Charles Thull

  SciPost Phys. 15, 156 (2023) · published 12 October 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We consider $\mathcal{N}=4$ supersymmetric gauge theories on the squashed three-sphere with six preserved supercharges. We first discuss how Wilson and vortex loops preserve up to four of the supercharges and we find squashing independence for the expectation values of these 2/3-BPS loops. We then show how the additional supersymmetries facilitate the analytic matching of partition functions and loop operator expectation values to those in the mirror dual theory, allowing one to lift all the results that were previously established on the round sphere to the squashed sphere. Additionally, on the squashed sphere with four preserved supercharges, we numerically evaluate the partition functions of ABJM and its dual super-Yang-Mills at low ranks of the gauge group. We find matching values of their partition functions, prompting us to conjecture the general equality on the squashed sphere. From the numerics we also observe the squashing dependence of the Lee-Yang zeros and of the non-perturbative corrections to the all order large $N$ expression for the ABJM partition function.

  1 citation

• Subsystem non-invertible symmetry operators and defects

  Weiguang Cao, Linhao Li, Masahito Yamazaki, Yunqin Zheng

  SciPost Phys. 15, 155 (2023) · published 12 October 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We explore non-invertible symmetries in two-dimensional lattice models with subsystem $\mathbb Z_2$ symmetry. We introduce a subsystem $\mathbb Z_2$-gauging procedure, called the subsystem Kramers-Wannier transformation, which generalizes the ordinary Kramers-Wannier transformation. The corresponding duality operators and defects are constructed by gaugings on the whole or half of the Hilbert space. By gauging twice, we derive fusion rules of duality operators and defects, which enriches ordinary Ising fusion rules with subsystem features. Subsystem Kramers-Wannier duality defects are mobile in both spatial directions, unlike the defects of invertible subsystem symmetries. We finally comment on the anomaly of the subsystem Kramers-Wannier duality symmetry, and discuss its subtleties.

  17 citations