Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Phase transitions in quantum dot-Majorana zero mode coupling systems

  Yue Mao, Qing-Feng Sun

  SciPost Phys. Core 8, 031 (2025) · published 11 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The magnetic doublet ground state (GS) of a quantum dot (QD) could be changed to a spin-singlet GS by coupling to a superconductor. In analogy, here we study the GS phase transitions in QD-Majorana zero mode (MZM) coupling systems: GS behaves phase transition versus intra-dot energy level and QD-MZM coupling strength. The phase diagrams of GS are obtained, for cases with and without Zeeman term. Along with the phase transition, we also study the change of spin feature and density of states. The properties of the phase transition are understood via a mean-field picture. Our study not only serves as an analogue to QD-superconductor phase transitions, but also gives alternative explanations on MZM-relevant experiments.

• Dark matter searches and energy accumulation and release in materials

  Sergey Pereverzev

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 12, 009 (2023) · published 3 July 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Efforts to identify dark matter by detecting nuclear recoils produced by dark matter particles reveal low-energy backgrounds of unknown origin in different types of detectors. In many cases, energy accumulation and delayed burst-like releases of stored energy could provide an explanation. These dynamics follow Prigogine's ideas on systems with energy flow and the general Self-Organized Criticality scenario. We compare these models with properties of excess backgrounds in cryogenic solid-state detectors, relaxation processes in glasses and crystals, our observations of delayed luminescence in NaI(Tl), and make predictions for more phenomena present in these systems and in superconducting photon detectors and qubits. Experiments to create accurate phenomenological models are needed.

• Emergent Kitaev materials in synthetic Fermi-Hubbard bilayers

  Daniel González-Cuadra, Alejandro Bermudez

  SciPost Phys. 19, 130 (2025) · published 18 November 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate the emergence of bond-directional spin-spin interactions in a synthetic Fermi-Hubbard bilayer that can be realized with ultracold fermions in Raman optical lattices. The model exploits synthetic dimensions to couple two honeycomb layers, each corresponding to a different hyperfine atomic state, via Raman-assisted tunneling and, moreover, via an inter-layer Hubbard repulsion due to the cold-atom scattering. In the strong-coupling regime at half filling, we derive effective spin Hamiltonians for the kinetic exchange featuring Kitaev, Heisenberg, off-diagonal exchange ($\Gamma$-couplings), as well as tunable Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions. We identify specific configurations that generate both ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic Kitaev couplings with various perturbations of relevance to Kitaev materials, providing a tunable platform that can explore how quantum spin liquids emerge from itinerant fermion systems. We analyze the Fermi-liquid and Mott-insulating phases, highlighting a correspondence between Dirac and Majorana quasi-particles, with possible phase transitions thereof. In an extreme anisotropic limit, we show that the model reduces to an inter-layer ribbon in a quasi-1D ladder, allowing for a numerical study of the correlated ground state using matrix product states. We find a transition from a symmetry-protected topological insulator to a Kitaev-like regime characterized by nonlocal string order. Our results establish that cold-atom quantum simulators based on Raman optical lattices can be a playground for extended Kitaev models, bridging itinerant fermionic systems and spin-liquid physics.

• Chiral adiabatic transmission protected by Fermi surface topology

  Isidora Araya Day, Kostas Vilkelis, Antonio L. R. Manesco, Ahmet Mert Bozkurt, Valla Fatemi, Anton R. Akhmerov

  SciPost Phys. 18, 098 (2025) · published 18 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We demonstrate that Andreev modes that propagate along a transparent Josephson junction have a perfect transmission at the point where three junctions meet. The chirality and the number of quantized transmission channels is determined by the topology of the Fermi surface and the vorticity of the superconducting phase differences at the trijunction. We explain this chiral adiabatic transmission (CAT) as a consequence of the adiabatic evolution of the scattering modes both in momentum and real space. The dispersion relation of the junction then separates the scattering trajectories by introducing inaccesible regions of phase space. We expect that CAT is observable in nonlocal conductance and thermal transport measurements. Furthermore, because it does not rely on particle-hole symmetry, CAT is also possible to observe directly in metamaterials.

• Fusion of low-entanglement excitations in 2D toric code

  Jing-Yu Zhao, Xie Chen

  SciPost Phys. 18, 106 (2025) · published 20 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  On top of a $D$-dimensional gapped bulk state, Low Entanglement Excitations (LEE) on $d(<D)$-dimensional sub-manifolds can have extensive energy but preserves the entanglement area law of the ground state. Due to their multi-dimensional nature, the LEEs embody a higher-category structure in quantum systems. They are the ground state of a modified Hamiltonian and hence capture the notions of 'defects' of generalized symmetries. In previous works, we studied the low-entanglement excitations in a trivial phase as well as those in invertible phases. We find that LEEs in these phases have the same structure as lower-dimensional gapped phases and their defects within. In this paper, we study the LEEs inside non-invertible topological phases. We focus on the simple example of $\mathbb{Z}_2$ toric code and discuss how the fusion result of 1d LEEs with 0d morphisms can depend on both the choice of fusion circuit and the ordering of the fused defects.

• Photon counting statistics in Gaussian bosonic networks

  Kalle Sulo Ukko Kansanen, Pedro Portugal, Christian Flindt, Peter Samuelsson

  SciPost Phys. 18, 116 (2025) · published 1 April 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The statistics of transmitted photons in microwave cavities play a foundational role in microwave quantum optics and its technological applications. By utilizing quantum mechanical phase-space methods, we here develop a general theory of the photon counting statistics in Gaussian bosonic networks consisting of driven cavities with beamsplitter interactions and two-mode-squeezing. The dynamics of the network can be captured by a Lyapunov equation for the covariance matrix of the cavity fields, which generalizes to a Riccati equation, when counting fields are included. By solving the Riccati equation, we obtain the statistics of emitted and absorbed photons as well as the time-dependent correlations encoded in waiting time distributions and second-order coherence functions. To illustrate our theoretical framework, we first apply it to a simple linear network consisting of two coupled cavities, for which we evaluate the photon cross-correlations and discuss connections between the photon emission statistics and the entanglement between the cavities. We then consider a bosonic circulator consisting of three coupled cavities, for which we investigate how a synthetic flux may affect the direction of the photon flow, similarly to recent experiments. Our general framework paves the way for systematic investigations of the photon counting statistics in Gaussian bosonic networks.

• Emptiness instanton in quantum polytropic gas

  Alexander G. Abanov, Dimitri M. Gangardt

  SciPost Phys. 18, 122 (2025) · published 9 April 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The emptiness formation problem is addressed for a one-dimensional quantum polytropic gas characterized by an arbitrary polytropic index $\gamma$, which defines the equation of state $P \sim \rho^\gamma$, where $P$ is the pressure and $\rho$ is the density. The problem involves determining the probability of the spontaneous formation of an empty interval in the ground state of the gas. In the limit of a macroscopically large interval, this probability is dominated by an instanton configuration. By solving the hydrodynamic equations in imaginary time, we derive the analytic form of the emptiness instanton. This solution is expressed as an integral representation analogous to those used for correlation functions in Conformal Field Theory. Prominent features of the spatiotemporal profile of the instanton are obtained directly from this representation.

• Rényi complexity in mean-field disordered systems

  Nina Javerzat, Eric Bertin, Misaki Ozawa

  SciPost Phys. 18, 124 (2025) · published 10 April 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Configurational entropy, or complexity, plays a critical role in characterizing disordered systems such as glasses, yet its measurement often requires significant computational resources. Recently, Rényi entropy, a one-parameter generalization of Shannon entropy, has gained attention across various fields of physics due to its simpler functional form, making it more practical for measurements. In this paper, we compute the Rényi version of complexity for prototypical mean-field disordered models, including the random energy model, its generalization, referred to as the random free energy model, and the $p$-spin spherical model. We first demonstrate that the Rényi complexity with index $m$ is related to the free energy difference for a generalized annealed Franz-Parisi potential with $m$ clones. Detailed calculations show that for models having one-step replica symmetry breaking (RSB), the Rényi complexity vanishes at the Kauzmann transition temperature $T_K$, irrespective of $m>1$, while RSB solutions are required even in the liquid phase. This study strengthens the link between Rényi entropy and the physics of disordered systems and provides theoretical insights for its practical measurements.

• Remote detectability from entanglement bootstrap I: Kirby’s torus trick

  Bowen Shi, Jin-Long Huang, John McGreevy

  SciPost Phys. 18, 126 (2025) · published 14 April 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Remote detectability is often taken as a physical assumption in the study of topologically ordered systems, and it is a central axiom of mathematical frameworks of topological quantum field theories. We show under the entanglement bootstrap approach that remote detectability is a necessary property; that is, we derive it as a theorem. Starting from a single wave function on a topologically-trivial region satisfying the entanglement bootstrap axioms, we can construct states on closed manifolds. The crucial technique is to immerse the punctured manifold into the topologically trivial region and then heal the puncture. This is analogous to Kirby's torus trick. We then analyze a special class of such manifolds, which we call pairing manifolds. For each pairing manifold, which pairs two classes of excitations, we identify an analog of the topological $S$-matrix. This pairing matrix is unitary, which implies remote detectability between two classes of excitations. These matrices are in general not associated with the mapping class group of the manifold. As a by-product, we can count excitation types (e.g., graph excitations in 3+1d). The pairing phenomenon occurs in many physical contexts, including systems in different dimensions, with or without gapped boundaries. We provide a variety of examples to illustrate its scope.

• Field-induced local Fermi-liquid states in the underscreened Kondo model for Eu compounds

  Shingo Kuniyoshi, Ryousuke Shiina

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 11, 015 (2023) · published 6 June 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We have studied an underscreened Kondo model for the impurity spin $S=7/2$ capturing the $4f$ characteristics of a nearly divalent Eu ion. By using the numerical renormalization group method, it is shown that an unusual heavy-fermion state is induced from the underscreened spin state when a weak crystal field is introduced. It is also found that the application of the magnetic field enhances the effective mass of the heavy fermions, reflecting the field-induced level crossing of the spin states. We will discuss the mechanism of these mass enhancements in terms of a realization of the two-stage Kondo effect.