Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Magnetic properties of a capped kagome molecule with 60 quantum spins

  Roman Rausch, Matthias Peschke, Cassian Plorin, Christoph Karrasch

  SciPost Phys. 12, 143 (2022) · published 2 May 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We compute ground-state properties of the isotropic, antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model on the sodalite cage geometry. This is a 60-spin spherical molecule with 24 vertex-sharing tetrahedra which can be regarded as a molecular analogue of a capped kagome lattice and which has been synthesized with high-spin rare-earth atoms. Here, we focus on the $S=1/2$ case where quantum effects are strongest. We employ the SU(2)-symmetric density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG). We find a threefold degenerate ground state that breaks the spatial symmetry and that splits up the molecule into three large parts which are almost decoupled from each other. This stands in sharp contrast to the behaviour of most known spherical molecules. On a methodological level, the disconnection leads to ``glassy dynamics'' within the DMRG that cannot be targeted via standard techniques. In the presence of finite magnetic fields, we find broad magnetization plateaus at 4/5, 3/5, and 1/5 of the saturation, which one can understand in terms of localized magnons, singlets, and doublets which are again nearly decoupled from each other. At the saturation field, the zero-point entropy is $S=\ln(182)\approx 5.2$ in units of the Boltzmann constant.

  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

• Carroll black holes

  Florian Ecker, Daniel Grumiller, Jelle Hartong, Alfredo Pérez, Stefan Prohazka, Ricardo Troncoso

  SciPost Phys. 15, 245 (2023) · published 19 December 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Despite the absence of a lightcone structure, some solutions of Carroll gravity show black hole-like behaviour. We define Carroll black holes as solutions of Carroll gravity that exhibit Carroll thermal properties and have a Carroll extremal surface, notions introduced in our work. The latter is a Carroll analogue of a Lorentzian extremal surface. As examples, we discuss the Carroll versions of Schwarzschild, Reissner-Nordström, and BTZ black holes and black hole solutions of generic 1+1 dimensional Carroll dilaton gravity, including Carroll JT and Carroll Witten black holes.

  3 citations

• Quantum local random networks and the statistical robustness of quantum scars

  Federica Maria Surace, Marcello Dalmonte, Alessandro Silva

  SciPost Phys. 14, 174 (2023) · published 29 June 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate the emergence of quantum scars in a general ensemble of random Hamiltonians (of which the PXP is a particular realization), that we refer to as quantum local random networks. We find a class of scars, that we call "statistical", and we identify specific signatures of the localized nature of these eigenstates by analyzing a combination of indicators of quantum ergodicity and properties related to the network structure of the model. Within this parallelism, we associate the emergence of statistical scars to the presence of "motifs" in the network, that reflects how these are associated to links with anomalously small connectivity. Most remarkably, statistical scars appear at well-defined values of energy, predicted solely on the base of network theory. We study the scaling of the number of statistical scars with system size: by continuously changing the connectivity of the system we find that there is a transition from a regime where the constraints are too weak for scars to exist for large systems to a regime where constraints are stronger and the number of statistical scars increases with system size. This allows to define the concept of "statistical robustness" of quantum scars.

  3 citations

• Entanglement entropy in quantum spin chains with broken parity number symmetry

  Arash Jafarizadeh, M. A. Rajabpour

  SciPost Phys. 12, 195 (2022) · published 14 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Consider a generic quantum spin chain that can be mapped to free quadratic fermions via Jordan-Wigner (JW) transformation. In the presence of arbitrary boundary magnetic fields, this Hamiltonian is no longer a quadratic Hamiltonian after JW transformation. Using ancillary sites and enlarging the Hamiltonian we first introduce a bigger quadratic Hamiltonian. Then we diagonalize this enlarged Hamiltonian in its most generic form and show that all the states are degenerate because of the presence of a zero mode. The eigenstates of the original spin chain with boundary magnetic fields can be derived after appropriate projection. We study in-depth the properties of the eigenstates of the enlarged Hamiltonian. In particular, we find: 1) the eigenstates in configuration bases, 2) calculate all the correlation functions, 3) find the reduced density matrices, 4) calculate the entanglement entropy. We show that the generic eigenstate of the enlarged Hamiltonian (including the eigenstates of the original spin chain) breaks the parity number symmetry and consequently one needs to take care of some technicalities regarding the calculation of the reduced density matrix and entanglement entropy. Interestingly we show that the entanglement structure of these eigenstates is quite universal and independent of the Hamiltonian. We support our results by applying them to a couple of examples.

  3 citations

• A quantum theory of the nearly frozen charge glass

  Simone Fratini, Katherine Driscoll, Sergio Ciuchi, Arnaud Ralko

  SciPost Phys. 14, 124 (2023) · published 23 May 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study long-range interacting electrons on the triangular lattice using mixed quantum/classical simulations going beyond the usual classical descriptions of the lattice Coulomb fluid. Our results in the strong interaction limit indicate that the proliferation of quantum defects governs the low-temperature dynamics of this strongly frustrated system. The present theoretical findings explain the phenomenology observed in the $\theta$-ET$_2$X materials as they fall out of equilibrium, including glassiness, resistive switching and a strong sensitivity to the electronic structure anisotropy. The method devised here can be easily generalized to address other systems and devices where itinerant and correlation-localized degrees of freedom are intertwined on short lengthscales.

  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

• Phases of cold holographic QCD: Baryons, pions and rho mesons

  Nicolas Kovensky, Aaron Poole, Andreas Schmitt

  SciPost Phys. 15, 162 (2023) · published 13 October 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We improve the holographic description of isospin-asymmetric baryonic matter within the Witten-Sakai-Sugimoto model by accounting for a realistic pion mass, computing the pion condensate dynamically, and including rho meson condensation by allowing the gauge field in the bulk to be anisotropic. This description takes into account the coexistence of baryonic matter with pion and rho meson condensates. Our main result is the zero-temperature phase diagram in the plane of baryon and isospin chemical potentials. We find that the effective pion mass in the baryonic medium increases with baryon density and that, as a consequence, there is no pion condensation in neutron-star matter. Our improved description also predicts that baryons are disfavored at low baryon chemical potentials even for arbitrarily large isospin chemical potential. Instead, rho meson condensation sets in on top of the pion condensate at an isospin chemical potential of about $9.4 m_\pi$. We further observe a highly non-monotonic phase boundary regarding the disappearance of pion condensation.

  3 citations

• Relativistic Landau quantization in non-uniform magnetic field and its applications to white dwarfs and quantum information

  Srishty Aggarwal, Banibrata Mukhopadhyay, Gianluca Gregori

  SciPost Phys. 11, 093 (2021) · published 18 November 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate the two-dimensional motion of relativistic cold electrons in the presence of ‘strictly’ spatially varying magnetic fields satisfying, however, no magnetic monopole condition. We find that the degeneracy of Landau levels, which arises in the case of the constant magnetic field, lifts out when the field is variable and the energy levels of spin-up and spin-down electrons align in an interesting way depending on the nature of change of field. Also the varying magnetic field splits Landau levels of electrons with zero angular momentum from positive angular momentum, unlike the constant field which only can split the levels between positive and negative angular momenta. Exploring Landau quantization in non-uniform magnetic fields is a unique venture on its own and has interdisciplinary implications in the fields ranging from condensed matter to astrophysics to quantum information. As examples, we show magnetized white dwarfs, with varying magnetic fields, involved simultaneously with Lorentz force and Landau quantization affecting the underlying degenerate electron gas, exhibiting a significant violation of the Chandrasekhar mass-limit; and an increase in quantum speed of electrons in the presence of a spatially growing magnetic field.

  3 citations

• Local Unitarity

  Zeno Capatti

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 7, 024 (2022) · published 21 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Within the Local Unitarity formalism, any physical cross-section is re-written in such a way that cancellations of infrared singularities between real and virtual contributions are realised locally. Consequently, phase-space and loop integrals are regulated locally without the need of any counter-terms or dimensional regularisation aside from those strictly needed to achieve ultraviolet regularisation. This Local Unitarity representation is especially suitable to direct Monte Carlo integration. As such, it offers a clear and direct path to automate the computation of fixed-order differential observables in Quantum Field Theories.

  3 citations