Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Measurement of the dynamic charge response of materials using low-energy, momentum-resolved electron energy-loss spectroscopy (M-EELS)

  Sean Vig, Anshul Kogar, Matteo Mitrano, Ali A. Husain, Vivek Mishra, Melinda S. Rak, Luc Venema, Peter D. Johnson, Genda D. Gu, Eduardo Fradkin, Michael R. Norman, Peter Abbamonte

  SciPost Phys. 3, 026 (2017) · published 6 October 2017 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  One of the most fundamental properties of an interacting electron system is its frequency- and wave-vector-dependent density response function, $\chi({\bf q},\omega)$. The imaginary part, $\chi''({\bf q},\omega)$, defines the fundamental bosonic charge excitations of the system, exhibiting peaks wherever collective modes are present. $\chi$ quantifies the electronic compressibility of a material, its response to external fields, its ability to screen charge, and its tendency to form charge density waves. Unfortunately, there has never been a fully momentum-resolved means to measure $\chi({\bf q},\omega)$ at the meV energy scale relevant to modern electronic materials. Here, we demonstrate a way to measure $\chi$ with quantitative momentum resolution by applying alignment techniques from x-ray and neutron scattering to surface high-resolution electron energy-loss spectroscopy (HR-EELS). This approach, which we refer to here as ``M-EELS" allows direct measurement of $\chi''({\bf q},\omega)$ with meV resolution while controlling the momentum with an accuracy better than a percent of a typical Brillouin zone. We apply this technique to finite-{\bf q} excitations in the optimally-doped high temperature superconductor, Bi$_2$Sr$_2$CaCu$_2$O$_{8+x}$ (Bi2212), which exhibits several phonons potentially relevant to dispersion anomalies observed in ARPES and STM experiments. Our study defines a path to studying the long-sought collective charge modes in quantum materials at the meV scale and with full momentum control.

  49 citations

• Bad Metals from Fluctuating Density Waves

  Luca V. Delacrétaz, Blaise Goutéraux, Sean A. Hartnoll, Anna Karlsson

  SciPost Phys. 3, 025 (2017) · published 29 September 2017 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Bad metals have a large resistivity without being strongly disordered. In many bad metals the Drude peak moves away from zero frequency as the resistivity becomes large at increasing temperatures. We catalogue the position and width of the `displaced Drude peak' in the observed optical conductivity of several families of bad metals, showing that $\omega_\text{peak} \sim \Delta \omega \sim k_BT/\hbar$. This is the same quantum critical timescale that underpins the $T$-linear dc resistivity of many of these materials. We provide a unified theoretical description of the optical and dc transport properties of bad metals in terms of the hydrodynamics of short range quantum critical fluctuations of incommensurate density wave order. Within hydrodynamics, pinned translational order is essential to obtain the nonzero frequency peak.

  71 citations

• The Infrared Physics of Bad Theories

  Benjamin Assel, Stefano Cremonesi

  SciPost Phys. 3, 024 (2017) · published 28 September 2017 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the complete moduli space of vacua of 3d $\mathcal{N}=4$ $U(N)$ SQCD theories with $N_f$ fundamentals, building on the algebraic description of the Coulomb branch, and deduce the low energy physics in any vacuum from the local geometry of the moduli space. We confirm previous claims for good and ugly SQCD theories, and show that bad theories flow to the same interacting fixed points as good theories with additional free twisted hypermultiplets. A Seiberg-like duality proposed for bad theories with $N \le N_f \le 2N-2$ is ruled out: the spaces of vacua of the putative dual theories are different. However such bad theories have a distinguished vacuum, which preserves all the global symmetries, whose infrared physics is that of the proposed dual. We finally explain previous results on sphere partition functions and elucidate the relation between the UV and IR $R$-symmetry in this symmetric vacuum.

  37 citations

• Probing non-thermal density fluctuations in the one-dimensional Bose gas

  Jacopo De Nardis, Miłosz Panfil, Andrea Gambassi, Leticia F. Cugliandolo, Robert Konik, Laura Foini

  SciPost Phys. 3, 023 (2017) · published 27 September 2017 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Quantum integrable models display a rich variety of non-thermal excited states with unusual properties. The most common way to probe them is by performing a quantum quench, i.e., by letting a many-body initial state unitarily evolve with an integrable Hamiltonian. At late times, these systems are locally described by a generalized Gibbs ensemble with as many effective temperatures as their local conserved quantities. The experimental measurement of this macroscopic number of temperatures remains elusive. Here we show that they can be obtained by probing the dynamical structure factor of the system after the quench and by employing a generalized fluctuation-dissipation theorem that we provide. Our procedure allows us to completely reconstruct the stationary state of a quantum integrable system from state-of-the-art experimental observations.

  20 citations

• Induced density correlations in a sonic black hole condensate

  Yi-Hsieh Wang, Ted Jacobson, Mark Edwards, Charles W. Clark

  SciPost Phys. 3, 022 (2017) · published 26 September 2017 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Analog black/white hole pairs, consisting of a region of supersonic flow, have been achieved in a recent experiment by J. Steinhauer using an elongated Bose-Einstein condensate. A growing standing density wave, and a checkerboard feature in the density-density correlation function, were observed in the supersonic region. We model the density-density correlation function, taking into account both quantum fluctuations and the shot-to-shot variation of atom number normally present in ultracold-atom experiments. We find that quantum fluctuations alone produce some, but not all, of the features of the correlation function, whereas atom-number fluctuation alone can produce all the observed features, and agreement is best when both are included. In both cases, the density-density correlation is not intrinsic to the fluctuations, but rather is induced by modulation of the standing wave caused by the fluctuations.

  22 citations

• A Short Introduction to Topological Quantum Computation

  Ville Lahtinen, Jiannis K. Pachos

  SciPost Phys. 3, 021 (2017) · published 9 September 2017 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  This review presents an entry-level introduction to topological quantum computation -- quantum computing with anyons. We introduce anyons at the system-independent level of anyon models and discuss the key concepts of protected fusion spaces and statistical quantum evolutions for encoding and processing quantum information. Both the encoding and the processing are inherently resilient against errors due to their topological nature, thus promising to overcome one of the main obstacles for the realisation of quantum computers. We outline the general steps of topological quantum computation, as well as discuss various challenges faced it. We also review the literature on condensed matter systems where anyons can emerge. Finally, the appearance of anyons and employing them for quantum computation is demonstrated in the context of a simple microscopic model -- the topological superconducting nanowire -- that describes the low-energy physics of several experimentally relevant settings. This model supports localised Majorana zero modes that are the simplest and the experimentally most tractable types of anyons that are needed to perform topological quantum computation.

  146 citations

• Inhomogeneous quenches in the transverse field Ising chain: scaling and front dynamics

  Márton Kormos

  SciPost Phys. 3, 020 (2017) · published 8 September 2017 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate the non-equilibrium dynamics of the transverse field quantum Ising chain evolving from an inhomogeneous initial state given by joining two macroscopically different semi-infinite chains. We obtain integral expressions for all two-point correlation functions of the Jordan-Wigner Majorana fermions at any time and for any value of the transverse field. Using this result, we compute analytically the profiles of various physical observables in the space-time scaling limit and show that they can be obtained from a hydrodynamic picture based on ballistically propagating quasiparticles. Going beyond the hydrodynamic limit, we analyze the approach to the non-equilibrium steady state and find that the leading late time corrections display a lattice effect. We also study the fine structure of the propagating fronts which are found to be described by the Airy kernel and its derivatives. Near the front we observe the phenomenon of energy back-flow where the energy locally flows from the colder to the hotter region.

  58 citations

• Emergence of curved light-cones in a class of inhomogeneous Luttinger liquids

  Jérôme Dubail, Jean-Marie Stéphan, Pasquale Calabrese

  SciPost Phys. 3, 019 (2017) · published 6 September 2017 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The light-cone spreading of entanglement and correlation is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of homogeneous extended quantum systems. Here we point out that a class of inhomogenous Luttinger liquids (those with a uniform Luttinger parameter $K$) at low energy display the universal phenomenon of curved light cones: gapless excitations propagate along the geodesics of the metric $ds^2=dx^2+v(x)^2 d\tau^2$, with $v(x)$ being the calculable spatial dependent velocity induced by the inhomogeneity. We confirm our findings with explicit analytic and numerical calculations both in- and out-of-equilibrium for a Tonks-Girardeau gas in a harmonic potential and in lattice systems with artificially tuned hamiltonian density.

  64 citations

• Unifying description of the damping regimes of a stochastic particle in a periodic potential

  Antonio Piscitelli, Massimo Pica Ciamarra

  SciPost Phys. 3, 018 (2017) · published 4 September 2017 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We analyze the classical problem of the stochastic dynamics of a particle confined in a periodic potential, through the so called Il'in and Khasminskii model, with a novel semi-analytical approach. Our approach gives access to the transient and the asymptotic dynamics in all damping regimes, which are difficult to investigate in the usual Brownian model. We show that the crossover from the overdamped to the underdamped regime is associated with the loss of a typical time scale and of a typical length scale, as signaled by the divergence of the probability distribution of a certain dynamical event. In the underdamped regime, normal diffusion coexists with a non Gaussian displacement probability distribution for a long transient, as recently observed in a variety of different systems. We rationalize the microscopic physical processes leading to the non-Gaussian behavior, as well as the timescale to recover the Gaussian statistics. The theoretical results are supported by numerical calculations and are compared to those obtained for the Brownian model.

  1 citation

• Strongly Interacting Light Dark Matter

  Sebastian Bruggisser, Francesco Riva, Alfredo Urbano

  SciPost Phys. 3, 017 (2017) · published 2 September 2017 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  In the presence of approximate global symmetries that forbid relevant interactions, strongly coupled light Dark Matter (DM) can appear weakly coupled at small energy and generate a sizable relic abundance. Fundamental principles like unitarity restrict these symmetries to a small class, where the leading interactions are captured by effective operators up to dimension-8. Chiral symmetry, spontaneously broken global symmetries and non-linearly realized supersymmetry are examples of this. Their DM candidates (composite fermions, pseudo Nambu-Goldstone Bosons and Goldstini) are interesting targets for LHC missing-energy searches.

  25 citations