Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Quantum tricriticality of incommensurate phase induced by quantum strings in frustrated Ising magnetism

  Zheng Zhou (周正), Changle Liu (刘长乐), Dong-Xu Liu (刘东旭), Zheng Yan (严正), Yan Chen (陈焱), Xue-Feng Zhang (张学锋)

  SciPost Phys. 14, 037 (2023) · published 16 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Incommensurability plays a critical role in many strongly correlated systems. In some cases, the origin of such exotic order can be theoretically understood in the framework of 1d line-like topological excitations known as "quantum strings". Here we study an extended transverse field Ising model on a triangular lattice. Using large-scale quantum Monte Carlo simulations, we find that the spatial anisotropy can stabilize an incommensurate phase out of the commensurate clock order. Our results for the structure factor and the string density exhibit a linear relationship between incommensurate ordering wave vector and the density of quantum strings, which is reminiscent of hole density in under-doped cuprate superconductors. When introducing the next-nearest-neighbor interaction, we observe a quantum tricritical point out of the incommensurate phase. After carefully analyzing the ground state energies within different string topological sectors, we conclude that this tricriticality is non-trivially caused by effective long-range inter-string interactions with two competing terms following different decaying behaviors.

  2 citations

• Microcanonical and canonical fluctuations in atomic Bose-Einstein condensates – Fock state sampling approach

  Maciej Bartłomiej Kruk, Dawid Hryniuk, Mick Kristensen, Toke Vibel, Krzysztof Pawłowski, Jan Arlt, Kazimierz Rzążewski

  SciPost Phys. 14, 036 (2023) · published 16 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The fluctuations of the atom number between a Bose-Einstein condensate and the surrounding thermal gas have been the subject of a long standing theoretical debate. This discussion is centered around the appropriate thermodynamic ensemble to be used for theoretical predictions and the effect of interactions on the observed fluctuations. Here we introduce the so-called Fock state sampling method to solve this classic problem of current experimental interest for weakly interacting gases. A suppression of the predicted peak fluctuations is observed when using a microcanonical with respect to a canonical ensemble. Moreover, interactions lead to a shift of the temperature of peak fluctuations for harmonically trapped gases. The absolute size of the fluctuations furthermore depends on the total number of atoms and the aspect ratio of the trapping potential. Due to the interplay of these effect, there is no universal suppression or enhancement of fluctuations.

  1 citation

• Lifshitz symmetry: Lie algebras, spacetimes and particles

  José Figueroa-O'Farrill, Ross Grassie, Stefan Prohazka

  SciPost Phys. 14, 035 (2023) · published 15 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study and classify Lie algebras, homogeneous spacetimes and coadjoint orbits (``particles'') of Lie groups generated by spatial rotations, temporal and spatial translations and an additional scalar generator. As a first step we classify Lie algebras of this type in arbitrary dimension. Among them is the prototypical Lifshitz algebra, which motivates this work and the name "Lifshitz Lie algebras". We classify homogeneous spacetimes of Lifshitz Lie groups. Depending on the interpretation of the additional scalar generator, these spacetimes fall into three classes: 1. ($d+2$)-dimensional Lifshitz spacetimes which have one additional holographic direction; 2. ($d+1$)-dimensional Lifshitz—Weyl spacetimes which can be seen as the boundary geometry of the spacetimes in (1) and where the scalar generator is interpreted as an anisotropic dilation; 3. and $(d+1)$-dimensional aristotelian spacetimes with one scalar charge, including exotic fracton-like symmetries that generalise multipole algebras. We also classify the possible central extensions of Lifshitz Lie algebras and we discuss the homogeneous symplectic manifolds of Lifshitz Lie groups in terms of coadjoint orbits.

  5 citations

• Rational $Q$-systems, Higgsing and mirror symmetry

  Jie Gu, Yunfeng Jiang, Marcus Sperling

  SciPost Phys. 14, 034 (2023) · published 15 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The rational $Q$-system is an efficient method to solve Bethe ansatz equations for quantum integrable spin chains. We construct the rational $Q$-systems for generic Bethe ansatz equations described by an $A_{\ell-1}$ quiver, which include models with multiple momentum carrying nodes, generic inhomogeneities, generic diagonal twists and $q$-deformation. The rational $Q$-system thus constructed is specified by two partitions. Under Bethe/Gauge correspondence, the rational $Q$-system is in a one-to-one correspondence with a 3d $\mathcal{N}=4$ quiver gauge theory of the type ${T}_{{\rho}}^{{\sigma}}[\mathrm{SU}(n)]$, which is also specified by the same partitions. This shows that the rational $Q$-system is a natural language for the Bethe/Gauge correspondence, because known features of the ${T}_{{\rho}}^{{\sigma}}[\mathrm{SU}(n)]$ theories readily translate. For instance, we show that the Higgs and Coulomb branch Higgsing correspond to modifying one of the partitions in the rational $Q$-system while keeping the other untouched. Similarly, mirror symmetry is realized in terms of the rational $Q$-system by simply swapping the two partitions - exactly as for ${T}_{{\rho}}^{{\sigma}}[\mathrm{SU}(n)]$. We exemplify the computational efficiency of the rational $Q$-system by evaluating topologically twisted indices for 3d $\mathcal{N}=4$ $\mathrm{U}(n)$ SQCD theories with $n=1,\ldots,5$.

  7 citations

• Hot and heavy dark matter from a weak scale phase transition

  Iason Baldes, Yann Gouttenoire, Filippo Sala

  SciPost Phys. 14, 033 (2023) · published 14 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We point out that dark matter which is produced non-adiabatically in a phase transition (PT) with fast bubble walls receives a boost in velocity which leads to long free-streaming lengths. We find that this could be observed via the suppressed matter power spectrum for dark matter masses around $\mathbf{ 10^8 - 10^9}$ GeV and energy scales of the PT around $\mathbf{ 10^{2} - 10^3}$ GeV. The PT should take place at the border of the supercooled regime, i.e. approximately when the Universe becomes vacuum dominated. This work offers novel physics goals for galaxy surveys, Lyman-$\alpha$, stellar stream, lensing, and 21-cm observations, and connects these to the gravitational waves from such phase transitions, and more speculatively to possible telescope signals of heavy dark matter decay.

  9 citations

• Learning a restricted Boltzmann machine using biased Monte Carlo sampling

  Nicolas Béreux, Aurélien Decelle, Cyril Furtlehner, Beatriz Seoane

  SciPost Phys. 14, 032 (2023) · published 14 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Restricted Boltzmann Machines are simple and powerful generative models that can encode any complex dataset. Despite all their advantages, in practice the trainings are often unstable and it is difficult to assess their quality because the dynamics are affected by extremely slow time dependencies. This situation becomes critical when dealing with low-dimensional clustered datasets, where the time required to sample ergodically the trained models becomes computationally prohibitive. In this work, we show that this divergence of Monte Carlo mixing times is related to a phenomenon of phase coexistence, similar to that which occurs in physics near a first-order phase transition. We show that sampling the equilibrium distribution using the Markov chain Monte Carlo method can be dramatically accelerated when using biased sampling techniques, in particular the Tethered Monte Carlo (TMC) method. This sampling technique efficiently solves the problem of evaluating the quality of a given trained model and generating new samples in a reasonable amount of time. Moreover, we show that this sampling technique can also be used to improve the computation of the log-likelihood gradient during training, leading to dramatic improvements in training RBMs with artificial clustered datasets. On real low-dimensional datasets, this new training method fits RBM models with significantly faster relaxation dynamics than those obtained with standard PCD recipes. We also show that TMC sampling can be used to recover the free-energy profile of the RBM. This proves to be extremely useful to compute the probability distribution of a given model and to improve the generation of new decorrelated samples in slow PCD-trained models. The main limitations of this method are, first, the restriction to effective low-dimensional datasets and, second, the fact that the Tethered MC method breaks the possibility of performing parallel alternative Monte Carlo updates, which limits the size of the systems we can consider in practice.

  4 citations

• Topological transitions in weakly monitored free fermions

  Graham Kells, Dganit Meidan, Alessandro Romito

  SciPost Phys. 14, 031 (2023) · published 13 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study a free fermion model where two sets of non-commuting non-projective measurements stabilize area-law entanglement scaling phases of distinct topological order. We show the presence of a topological phase transition that is of a different universality class than that observed in stroboscopic projective circuits. In the presence of unitary dynamics, the two topologically distinct phases are separated by a region with sub-volume scaling of the entanglement entropy. We find that this entanglement transition is well identified by a combination of the bipartite entanglement entropy and the topological entanglement entropy. We further show that the phase diagram is qualitatively captured by an analytically tractable non-Hermitian model obtained via post-selecting the measurement outcome. Finally we introduce a partial-post-selection continuous mapping, that uniquely associates topological indices of the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian to the distinct phases of the stochastic measurement-induced dynamics.

  23 citations

• Non-Hermitian quantum quenches in holography

  Sergio Morales-Tejera, Karl Landsteiner

  SciPost Phys. 14, 030 (2023) · published 10 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The notion of non-Hermitian $\mathcal{PT}$ symmetric quantum theory has recently been generalized to the gauge/gravity duality. We study the evolution of such non-Hermitian holographic field theories when the couplings are varied with time with particular emphasis on the question non-unitary time vs. unitary time evolution. We show that a non-unitary time evolution in the dual quantum theory corresponds to a violation of the Null Energy Condition (NEC) in the bulk of the asymptotically AdS spacetime. We find that upon varying the non-Hermitian coupling the horizon of a bulk AdS black hole shrinks. On the other hand varying the Hermitian coupling in the presence of a constant non-Hermitian coupling still violates the NEC but results in a growing horizon. We also show that by introducing a non-Hermitian gauge field the time evolution can be made unitary, e.g. the NEC in the bulk is obeyed and an exactly equivalent purely Hermitian description can be given.

  1 citation

• Hydrodynamics of higher-rank gauge theories

  Marvin Qi, Oliver Hart, Aaron J. Friedman, Rahul Nandkishore, Andrew Lucas

  SciPost Phys. 14, 029 (2023) · published 8 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We extend recent work on hydrodynamics with global multipolar symmetries — known as "fracton hydrodynamics" — to systems in which the multipolar symmetries are gauged. We refer to the latter as "fracton magnetohydrodynamics", in analogy to conventional magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), which governs systems with gauged charge conservation. We show that fracton MHD arises naturally from higher-rank Maxwell's equations and in systems with one-form symmetries obeying certain constraints; while we focus on "minimal" higher-rank generalizations of MHD that realize diffusion, our methods may also be used to identify other, more exotic hydrodynamic theories (e.g., with magnetic subdiffusion). In contrast to semi-microscopic derivations of MHD, our approach elucidates the origin of the hydrodynamic modes by identifying the corresponding higher-form symmetries. Being rooted in symmetries, the hydrodynamic modes may persist even when the semi-microscopic equations no longer provide an accurate description of the system.

  7 citations

• Seven-dimensional super Yang-Mills at negative coupling

  Joseph A. Minahan, Usman Naseer, Charles Thull

  SciPost Phys. 14, 028 (2023) · published 6 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We consider the partition function for Euclidean $SU(N)$ super Yang-Mills on a squashed seven-sphere. We show that the localization locus of the partition function has instanton membrane solutions wrapping the six ``fixed" three-spheres on the $\mathbb{S}^7$. The ADHM variables of these instantons are fields living on the membrane world volume. We compute their contribution by localizing the resulting three-dimensional supersymmetric field theory. In the round-sphere limit the individual instanton contributions are singular, but the singularities cancel when adding the contributions of all six three-spheres. The full partition function on the ${\mathbb S}^7$ is well-defined even when the square of the effective Yang-Mills coupling is negative. We show for an $SU(2)$ gauge theory in this regime that the bare negative tension of the instanton membranes is canceled off by contributions from the instanton partition function, indicating the existence of tensionless membranes. We provide evidence that this phase is distinct from the usual weakly coupled super Yang-Mills and, in fact, is gravitational.