Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Background independent tensor networks

  Chris Akers, Annie Y. Wei

  SciPost Phys. 17, 090 (2024) · published 25 September 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Conventional holographic tensor networks can be described as toy holographic maps constructed from many small linear maps acting in a spatially local way, all connected together with "background entanglement", i.e. links of a fixed state, often the maximally entangled state. However, these constructions fall short of modeling real holographic maps. One reason is that their "areas" are trivial, taking the same value for all states, unlike in gravity where the geometry is dynamical. Recently, new constructions have ameliorated this issue by adding degrees of freedom that "live on the links". This makes areas non-trivial, equal to the background entanglement piece plus a new positive piece that depends on the state of the link degrees of freedom. Nevertheless, this still has the downside that there is background entanglement, and hence it only models relatively limited code subspaces in which every area has a definite minimum value. In this note, we simply point out that a version of these constructions goes one step further: they can be background independent, with no background entanglement in the holographic map. This is advantageous because it allows tensor networks to model holographic maps for larger code subspaces. In addition to pointing this out, we address some subtleties involved in making it work.

  2 citations

• The role of atomic interactions in cavity-induced continuous time crystals

  Christian Høj Johansen, Johannes Lang, Francesco Piazza

  SciPost Phys. 17, 089 (2024) · published 24 September 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We consider continuous time-crystalline phases in dissipative many-body systems of atoms in cavities, focusing on the role of short-range interatomic interactions. First, we show that the latter can alter the nature of the time crystal by changing the type of the underlying critical bifurcation. Second, we characterize the heating mechanism and dynamics resulting from the short-range interactions and demonstrate that they make the time crystal inherently metastable. We argue this is generic for the broader class of dissipative time crystals in atom-cavity systems whenever the cavity loss rate is comparable to the atomic recoil energy. We observe that such a scenario for heating has several similarities to the one proposed for preheating in the early universe, where the oscillating coherent inflation field decays into a cascade of exponentially growing fluctuations. By extending approaches for dissipative dynamical systems to our many-body problem, we obtain analytical predictions for the parameters describing the phase transition and the heating rate inside the time-crystalline phase. We underpin and extend the analytical predictions of the heating rates with numerical simulations, which also show that the metastable regime exists when the inherent stochastic nature is taken into account.

• Internal Levin-Wen models

  Vincentas Mulevičius, Ingo Runkel, Thomas Voß

  SciPost Phys. 17, 088 (2024) · published 24 September 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Levin--Wen models are a class of two-dimensional lattice spin models with a Hamiltonian that is a sum of commuting projectors, which describe topological phases of matter related to Drinfeld centres. We generalise this construction to lattice systems internal to a topological phase described by an arbitrary modular fusion category $\mathcal{C}$. The lattice system is defined in terms of an orbifold datum $\mathbb{A}$ in $\mathcal{C}$, from which we construct a state space and a commuting-projector Hamiltonian $H_{\mathbb{A}}$ acting on it. The topological phase of the degenerate ground states of $H_{\mathbb{A}}$ is characterised by a modular fusion category $\mathcal{C}_\mathbb{A}$ defined directly in terms of $\mathbb{A}$. By choosing different $\mathbb{A}$'s for a fixed $\mathcal{C}$, one obtains precisely all phases which are Witt-equivalent to $\mathcal{C}$. As special cases we recover the Kitaev and the Levin--Wen lattice models from instances of orbifold data in the trivial modular fusion category of vector spaces, as well as phases obtained by anyon condensation in a given phase $\mathcal{C}$.

• Brick wall quantum circuits with global fermionic symmetry

  Pietro Richelli, Kareljan Schoutens, Alberto Zorzato

  SciPost Phys. 17, 087 (2024) · published 23 September 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study brick wall quantum circuits enjoying a global fermionic symmetry. The constituent 2-qubit gate, and its fermionic symmetry, derive from a 2-particle scattering matrix in integrable, supersymmetric quantum field theory in 1+1 dimensions. Our 2-qubit gate, as a function of three free parameters, is of so-called free fermionic or matchgate form, allowing us to derive the spectral structure of both the brick wall unitary $U_F$ and its, non-trivial, Hamiltonian limit $H_{\gamma}$ in closed form. We find that the fermionic symmetry pins $H_{\gamma}$ to a surface of critical points, whereas breaking that symmetry leads to non-trivial topological phases. We briefly explore quench dynamics for this class of circuits.

• Real-space approach for the Euler class and fragile topology in quasicrystals and amorphous lattices

  Dexin Li, Citian Wang, Huaqing Huang

  SciPost Phys. 17, 086 (2024) · published 20 September 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We propose a real-space formalism of the topological Euler class, which characterizes the fragile topology of two-dimensional systems with real wave functions. This real-space description is characterized by local Euler markers whose macroscopic average coincides with the Euler number, and it applies equally well to periodic and open boundary conditions for both crystals and noncrystalline systems. We validate this by diagnosing topological phase transitions in clean and disordered crystalline systems with the reality endowed by the space-time inversion symmetry $\mathcal{I}_{ST}$. Furthermore, we demonstrated the topological Euler phases in quasicrystals and even in amorphous lattices lacking any spatial symmetries. Our work not only provides a local characterization of the fragile topology but also significantly extends its territory beyond $\mathcal{I}_{ST}$-symmetric crystalline materials.

• Higher-form symmetry and chiral transport in real-time Abelian lattice gauge theory

  Arpit Das, Adrien Florio, Nabil Iqbal, Napat Poovuttikul

  SciPost Phys. 17, 085 (2024) · published 19 September 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study classical lattice simulations of theories of electrodynamics coupled to charged matter at finite temperature, interpreting them using the higher-form symmetry formulation of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). We compute transport coefficients using classical Kubo formulas on the lattice and show that the properties of the simulated plasma are in complete agreement with the predictions from effective field theories. In particular, the higher-form formulation allows us to understand from hydrodynamic considerations the relaxation rate of axial charge in the chiral plasma observed in previous simulations. A key point is that the resistivity of the plasma – defined in terms of Kubo formulas for the electric field in the 1-form formulation of MHD – remains a well-defined and predictive quantity at strong electromagnetic coupling. However, the Kubo formulas used to define the conventional conductivity vanish at low frequencies due to electrodynamic fluctuations, and thus the concept of the conductivity of a gauged electric current must be interpreted with care.

• Two infinite families of facets of the holographic entropy cone

  Bartlomiej Czech, Yu Liu, Bo Yu

  SciPost Phys. 17, 084 (2024) · published 19 September 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We verify that the recently proven infinite families of holographic entropy inequalities are maximally tight, i.e. they are facets of the holographic entropy cone. The proof is technical but it offers some heuristic insight. On star graphs, both families of inequalities quantify how concentrated/spread information is with respect to a dihedral symmetry acting on subsystems. In addition, toric inequalities viewed in the K-basis show an interesting interplay between four-party and six-party perfect tensors.

  1 citation

• General quantum-classical dynamics as measurement based feedback

  Antoine Tilloy

  SciPost Phys. 17, 083 (2024) · published 18 September 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  This note derives the stochastic differential equations and partial differential equation of general hybrid quantum--classical dynamics from the theory of continuous measurement and general (non-Markovian) feedback. The advantage of this approach is an explicit parameterization, without additional positivity constraints. The construction also neatly separates the different effects: how the quantum influences the classical and how the classical influences the quantum. This modular presentation gives a better intuition of what to expect from hybrid dynamics, especially when used to construct possibly fundamental theories.

  1 citation

• Riemannian optimization of photonic quantum circuits in phase and Fock space

  Yuan Yao, Filippo Miatto, Nicolás Quesada

  SciPost Phys. 17, 082 (2024) · published 18 September 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We propose a framework to design and optimize generic photonic quantum circuits composed of Gaussian objects (pure and mixed Gaussian states, Gaussian unitaries, Gaussian channels, Gaussian measurements) as well as non-Gaussian effects such as photon-number-resolving measurements. In this framework, we parametrize a phase space representation of Gaussian objects using elements of the symplectic group (or the unitary or orthogonal group in special cases), and then we transform it into the Fock representation using a single linear recurrence relation that computes the Fock amplitudes of any Gaussian object recursively. We also compute the gradient of the Fock amplitudes with respect to phase space parameters by differentiating through the recurrence relation. We can then use Riemannian optimization on the symplectic group to optimize $M$-mode Gaussian objects, avoiding the need to commit to particular realizations in terms of fundamental gates. This allows us to "mod out" all the different gate-level implementations of the same circuit, which now can be chosen after the optimization has completed. This can be especially useful when looking to answer general questions, such as bounding the value of a property over a class of states or transformations, or when one would like to worry about hardware constraints separately from the circuit optimization step. Finally, we make our framework extendable to non-Gaussian objects that can be written as linear combinations of Gaussian ones, by explicitly computing the change in global phase when states undergo Gaussian transformations. We implemented all of these methods in the freely available open-source library MrMustard, which we use in three examples to optimize the 216-mode interferometer in Borealis, and 2- and 3-modes circuits (with Fock measurements) to produce cat states and cubic phase states.

  4 citations

• A portable parton-level event generator for the high-luminosity LHC

  Enrico Bothmann, Taylor Childers, Walter Giele, Stefan Höche, Joshua Isaacson, Max Knobbe

  SciPost Phys. 17, 081 (2024) · published 16 September 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The rapid deployment of computing hardware different from the traditional CPU+RAM model in data centers around the world mandates a change in the design of event generators for the Large Hadron Collider, in order to provide economically and ecologically sustainable simulations for the high-luminosity era of the LHC. Parton-level event generation is one of the most computationally demanding parts of the simulation and is therefore a prime target for improvements. We present a production-ready leading-order parton-level event generation framework capable of utilizing most modern hardware and discuss its performance in the standard candle processes of vector boson and top-quark pair production with up to five additional jets.

  1 citation