Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Annealed averages in spin and matrix models

  Laura Foini, Jorge Kurchan

  SciPost Phys. 12, 080 (2022) · published 3 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  A disordered system is denominated 'annealed' when the interactions themselves may evolve and adjust their values to lower the free energy. The opposite ('quenched') situation when disorder is fixed, is the one relevant for physical spin-glasses, and has received vastly more attention. Other problems however are more natural in the annealed situation: in this work we discuss examples where annealed averages are interesting, in the context of matrix models. We first discuss how in practice, when system and disorder adapt together, annealed systems develop `planted' solutions spontaneously, as the ones found in the study of inference problems. In the second part, we study the probability distribution of elements of a matrix derived from a rotationally invariant (not necessarily Gaussian) ensemble, a problem that maps into the annealed average of a spin glass model.

  3 citations

• Laser-induced heating for the experimental study of critical Casimir forces with optical trapping

  Ignacio A. Martinez, Artyom Petrosyan, Sergio Ciliberto

  SciPost Phys. 15, 247 (2023) · published 20 December 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Critical Casimir interactions represent a perfect example of bath-induced forces at mesoscales. These forces may have a relevant role in the living systems as well as a role in the design of nanomachines fueled by environmental fluctuations. Since the thermal fluctuations are enhanced in the vicinity of a demixing point of a second-order phase transition, we can modulate the magnitude and range of these Casimir-like forces by slight changes in the temperature. Here, we consider two optical trapped colloidal beads inside a binary mixture. The Casimir interaction is controlled by warming the mixture by laser-induced heating, whose local application ensures high reproducibility. Once this two-particle system is warmed, the critical behavior of different observables allows the system to become its self-thermometer. We use this experimental scheme for analyzing the energetics of a critical colloidal system under a non-equilibrium-driven protocol. We quantify how the injected work can be dissipated to the environment as heat or stored as free energy. Indeed, our system allows us to use the fluctuation theorems framework for analyzing the performance of this critically driven toy model. Our work paves the way for future experimental studies on the non-equilibrium features of bath-induced forces and the design of critically driven nanosystems.

  3 citations

• Uhlmann phase of coherent states and the Uhlmann-Berry correspondence

  Xin Wang, Xu-Yang Hou, Zheng Zhou, Hao Guo, and Chih-Chun Chien

  SciPost Phys. Core 6, 024 (2023) · published 31 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We first compare the geometric frameworks behind the Uhlmann and Berry phases in a fiber-bundle language and then evaluate the Uhlmann phases of bosonic and fermionic coherent states. The Uhlmann phases of both coherent states are shown to carry geometric information and decrease smoothly with temperature. Importantly, the Uhlmann phases approach the corresponding Berry phases as temperature decreases. Together with previous examples in the literature, we propose a correspondence between the Uhlmann and Berry phases in the zero-temperature limit as a general property except some special cases and present a conditional proof of the correspondence.

  3 citations

• Multimode-polariton superradiance via Floquet engineering

  Christian Høj Johansen, Johannes Lang, Andrea Morales, Alexander Baumgärtner, Tobias Donner, Francesco Piazza

  SciPost Phys. 12, 094 (2022) · published 16 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We consider an ensemble of ultracold bosonic atoms within a near-planar cavity, driven by a far detuned laser whose phase is modulated at a frequency comparable to the transverse cavity mode spacing. We show that a strong, dispersive atom-photon coupling can be reached for many transverse cavity modes at once. The resulting Floquet polaritons involve a superposition of a set of cavity modes with a density excitation of the atomic cloud. The mutual interactions between these modes lead to distinct avoided crossings between the polaritons. Increasing the laser drive intensity, a low-lying multimode Floquet polariton softens and eventually becomes undamped, corresponding to the transition to a superradiant, self-organized phase. We demonstrate the stability of the stationary state for a broad range of parameters.

  3 citations

• The role of fluctuations in quantum and classical time crystals

  Toni L. Heugel, Alexander Eichler, Ramasubramanian Chitra, Oded Zilberberg

  SciPost Phys. Core 6, 053 (2023) · published 10 August 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Discrete time crystals (DTCs) are a many-body state of matter whose dynamics are slower than the forces acting on it. The same is true for classical systems with period-doubling bifurcations. Hence, the question naturally arises what differentiates classical from quantum DTCs. Here, we analyze a variant of the Bose-Hubbard model, which describes a plethora of physical phenomena and has both a classical and a quantum time-crystalline limit. Fluctuations enter the system due to the intrinsic quantum uncertainty and/or due to finite coupling to an environment. These fluctuations can activate transitions between the system's various stationary solutions. We study the role of fluctuations on the stability of the system in the long-time limit and find no distinction between quantum and classical DTCs. This allows us to probe the fluctuations in an experiment using two strongly coupled parametric resonators subject to classical noise.

  3 citations

• Fermion mass hierarchies from supersymmetric gauged flavour symmetry in 5D

  Ketan M. Patel

  SciPost Phys. 10, 154 (2021) · published 24 June 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  A mechanism to generate realistic fermion mass hierarchies based on supersymmetric gauged $U(1)_F$ symmetry in flat five-dimensional (5D) spacetime is proposed. The fifth dimension is compactified on $S^1/Z_2$ orbifold. The standard model fermions charged under the extra abelian symmetry along with their superpartners live in the 5D bulk. Bulk masses of fermions are generated by the vacuum expectation value of $N=2$ superpartner of $U(1)_F$ gauge field, and they are proportional to $U(1)_F$ charges of respective fermions. This decides localization of fermions in the extra dimension, which in turn gives rise to exponentially suppressed Yukawa couplings in the effective 4D theory. Anomaly cancellation puts stringent constraints on the allowed $U(1)_F$ charges which leads to correlations between the masses of quarks and leptons. We perform an extensive numerical scan and obtain several solutions for anomaly-free $U(1)_F$, which describe the observed pattern of fermion masses and mixing with all the fundamental parameters of order unity. It is found that the possible existence of SM singlet neutrinos substantially improves the spectrum of solutions by offering more freedom in choosing $U(1)_F$ charges. The model predicts $Z^\prime$ boson mediating flavour violating interactions in both the quark and lepton sectors with the couplings which can be explicitly determined from the Yukawa couplings.

  3 citations

• Evaluating one-loop string amplitudes

  Lorenz Eberhardt, Sebastian Mizera

  SciPost Phys. 15, 119 (2023) · published 27 September 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We evaluate one-loop open-string amplitudes at finite $\alpha'$ for the first time. Our method involves a deformation of the integration contour over the modular parameter $\tau$ to a fractal contour introduced by Rademacher in the context of analytic number theory. This procedure leads to explicit and practical formulas for the one-loop four-point amplitudes in type-I superstring theory, amenable to numerical evaluation. We plot the amplitudes as a function of the Mandelstam invariants $s$ and $t$ and directly verify long-standing conjectures about their behaviour at high energies.

  3 citations

• A general-mass scheme for prompt charm production at hadron colliders

  Keping Xie, John M. Campbell, Pavel M. Nadolsky

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 8, 084 (2022) · published 12 July 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  In these proceedings, we apply the recently developed S-ACOT-MPS factorization scheme at the next-to-leading order to prompt charm production at hadron colliders. It provides a good agreement with experimental data on charm meson production measured by LHCb at 7 and 13 TeV. The low-$p_T$ data are on the margins of the theoretical error bands, emphasizing the importance of including contributions beyond the next-to-leading order.

  3 citations

• How to understand limitations of generative networks

  Ranit Das, Luigi Favaro, Theo Heimel, Claudius Krause, Tilman Plehn, David Shih

  SciPost Phys. 16, 031 (2024) · published 25 January 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Well-trained classifiers and their complete weight distributions provide us with a well-motivated and practicable method to test generative networks in particle physics. We illustrate their benefits for distribution-shifted jets, calorimeter showers, and reconstruction-level events. In all cases, the classifier weights make for a powerful test of the generative network, identify potential problems in the density estimation, relate them to the underlying physics, and tie in with a comprehensive precision and uncertainty treatment for generative networks.

  3 citations

• Two-point boundary correlation functions of dense loop models

  Alexi Morin-Duchesne, Jesper Lykke Jacobsen

  SciPost Phys. 4, 034 (2018) · published 19 June 2018 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate six types of two-point boundary correlation functions in the dense loop model. These are defined as ratios $Z/Z^0$ of partition functions on the $m\times n$ square lattice, with the boundary condition for $Z$ depending on two points $x$ and $y$. We consider: the insertion of an isolated defect (a) and a pair of defects (b) in a Dirichlet boundary condition, the transition (c) between Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions, and the connectivity of clusters (d), loops (e) and boundary segments (f) in a Neumann boundary condition. For the model of critical dense polymers, corresponding to a vanishing loop weight ($\beta = 0$), we find determinant and pfaffian expressions for these correlators. We extract the conformal weights of the underlying conformal fields and find $\Delta = -\frac18$, $0$, $-\frac3{32}$, $\frac38$, $1$, $\tfrac \theta \pi (1+\tfrac{2\theta}\pi)$, where $\theta$ encodes the weight of one class of loops for the correlator of type f. These results are obtained by analysing the asymptotics of the exact expressions, and by using the Cardy-Peschel formula in the case where $x$ and $y$ are set to the corners. For type b, we find a $\log|x-y|$ dependence from the asymptotics, and a $\ln (\ln n)$ term in the corner free energy. This is consistent with the interpretation of the boundary condition of type b as the insertion of a logarithmic field belonging to a rank two Jordan cell. For the other values of $\beta = 2 \cos \lambda$, we use the hypothesis of conformal invariance to predict the conformal weights and find $\Delta = \Delta_{1,2}$, $\Delta_{1,3}$, $\Delta_{0,\frac12}$, $\Delta_{1,0}$, $\Delta_{1,-1}$ and $\Delta_{\frac{2\theta}\lambda+1,\frac{2\theta}\lambda+1}$, extending the results of critical dense polymers. With the results for type f, we reproduce a Coulomb gas prediction for the valence bond entanglement entropy of Jacobsen and Saleur.

  3 citations