Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Vortex states in a PbTiO$_3$ ferroelectric cylinder

  Svitlana Kondovych, Maksim Pavlenko, Yurii Tikhonov, Anna Razumnaya, Igor Lukyanchuk

  SciPost Phys. 14, 056 (2023) · published 30 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The past decade's discovery of topological excitations in nanoscale ferroelectrics has turned the prevailing view that the polar ground state in these materials is uniform. However, the systematic understanding of the topological polar structures in ferroelectrics is still on track. Here we study stable vortex-like textures of polarization in the nanocylinders of ferroelectric PbTiO$_3$, arising due to the competition of the elastic and electrostatic interactions. Using the phase-field numerical modeling and analytical calculations, we show that the orientation of the vortex core with respect to the cylinder axis is tuned by the geometrical parameters and temperature of the system.

  3 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

• Pychastic: Precise Brownian dynamics using Taylor-Itō integrators in Python

  Radost Waszkiewicz, Maciej Bartczak, Kamil Kolasa, Maciej Lisicki

  SciPost Phys. Codebases 11 (2023) · published 3 April 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  In the last decade, Python-powered physics simulations ecosystem has been growing steadily, allowing greater interoperability, and becoming an important tool in numerical exploration of physical phenomena, particularly in soft matter systems. Driven by the need for fast and precise numerical integration in colloidal dynamics, here we formulate the problem of Brownian Dynamics (BD) in a mathematically consistent formalism of the Itō calculus, and develop a Python package to assist numerical computations. We show that, thanks to the automatic differentiation packages, the classical truncated Taylor-Itō integrators can be implemented without the burden of computing the derivatives of the coefficient functions beforehand. Furthermore, we show how to circumvent the difficulties of BD simulations such as calculations of the divergence of the mobility tensor in the diffusion equation and discontinuous trajectories encountered when working with dynamics on $S^2$ and $SO(3)$. The resulting Python package, Pychastic, is capable of performing BD simulations including hydrodynamic interactions at speeds comparable to dedicated implementations in lower-level programming languages, but with a much simpler end-user interface.

  3 citations

• Gaussian-state Ansatz for the non-equilibrium dynamics of quantum spin lattices

  Raphaël Menu, Tommaso Roscilde

  SciPost Phys. 14, 151 (2023) · published 12 June 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The study of non-equilibrium dynamics is one of the most important challenges of modern quantum many-body physics, in relationship with fundamental questions in quantum statistical mechanics, as well as with the fields of quantum simulation and computing. In this work we propose a Gaussian Ansatz for the study of the nonequilibrium dynamics of quantum spin systems. Within our approach, the quantum spins are mapped onto Holstein-Primakoff bosons, such that a coherent spin state - chosen as the initial state of the dynamics - represents the bosonic vacuum. The state of the system is then postulated to remain a bosonic Gaussian state at all times, an assumption which is exact when the bosonic Hamiltonian is quadratic; and which is justified in the case of a nonlinear Hamiltonian if the boson density remains moderate. We test the accuracy of such an Ansatz in the paradigmatic case of the $S=1/2$ transverse-field Ising model, in one and two dimensions, initialized in a state aligned with the applied field. We show that the Gaussian Ansatz, when applied to the bosonic Hamiltonian with nonlinearities truncated to quartic order, is able to reproduce faithfully the evolution of the state, including its relaxation to the equilibrium regime, for fields larger than the critical field for the paramagnetic-ferromagnetic transition in the ground state. In particular the spatio-temporal pattern of correlations reconstructed via the Gaussian Ansatz reveals the dispersion relation of quasiparticle excitations, exhibiting the softening of the excitation gap upon approaching the critical field. Our results suggest that the Gaussian Ansatz correctly captures the essential effects of nonlinearities in quantum spin dynamics; and that it can be applied to the study of fundamental phenomena such as quantum thermalization and its breakdown.

  3 citations

• Dynamics of the order parameter statistics in the long range Ising model

  Nishan Ranabhat, Mario Collura

  SciPost Phys. 12, 126 (2022) · published 11 April 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the relaxation of the local ferromagnetic order in the transverse field quantum Ising chain with power-law decaying interactions $1/r^{\alpha}$. We prepare the system in the GHZ state and study the time evolution of the probability distribution function (PDF) of the order parameter within a block of $l$ when quenching the transverse field. The model is known to support long range order at finite temperature for $\alpha \leq 2.0$ . In this regime, quasi-localized topological magnetic defects are expected to strongly affect the equilibration of the full probability distribution. We highlight different dynamical regimes where gaussification mechanism may be slowed down by confinement and eventually breaks. We further study the PDF dynamics induced by changing the effective dimensionality of the system; we mimic this by quenching the range of the interactions. As a matter of fact, the behavior of the system crucially depends on the value of $\alpha$ governing the unitary evolution.

  3 citations

• Quantum tricriticality of incommensurate phase induced by quantum strings in frustrated Ising magnetism

  Zheng Zhou (周正), Changle Liu (刘长乐), Dong-Xu Liu (刘东旭), Zheng Yan (严正), Yan Chen (陈焱), Xue-Feng Zhang (张学锋)

  SciPost Phys. 14, 037 (2023) · published 16 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Incommensurability plays a critical role in many strongly correlated systems. In some cases, the origin of such exotic order can be theoretically understood in the framework of 1d line-like topological excitations known as "quantum strings". Here we study an extended transverse field Ising model on a triangular lattice. Using large-scale quantum Monte Carlo simulations, we find that the spatial anisotropy can stabilize an incommensurate phase out of the commensurate clock order. Our results for the structure factor and the string density exhibit a linear relationship between incommensurate ordering wave vector and the density of quantum strings, which is reminiscent of hole density in under-doped cuprate superconductors. When introducing the next-nearest-neighbor interaction, we observe a quantum tricritical point out of the incommensurate phase. After carefully analyzing the ground state energies within different string topological sectors, we conclude that this tricriticality is non-trivially caused by effective long-range inter-string interactions with two competing terms following different decaying behaviors.

  3 citations

• Low-energy excitations and transport functions of the one-dimensional Kondo insulator

  Robert Peters, Roman Rausch

  SciPost Phys. 14, 166 (2023) · published 21 June 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Using variational matrix product states, we analyze the finite temperature behavior of a half-filled periodic Anderson model in one dimension, a prototypical model of a Kondo insulator. We present an extensive analysis of single-particle Green's functions, two-particle Green's functions, and transport functions creating a broad picture of the low-temperature properties. We confirm the existence of energetically low-lying spin excitations in this model and study their energy-momentum dispersion and temperature dependence. We demonstrate that charge-charge correlations at the Fermi energy exhibit a different temperature dependence than spin-spin correlations. While energetically low-lying spin excitations emerge approximately at the Kondo temperature, which exponentially depends on the interaction strength, charge correlations vanish already at high temperatures. Furthermore, we analyze the charge and thermal conductivity at finite temperatures by calculating the time-dependent current-current correlation functions. While both charge and thermal conductivity can be fitted for all interaction strengths by gapped systems with a renormalized band gap, the gap in the system describing the thermal conductivity is generally smaller than the system describing the charge conductivity. Thus, two-particle correlations affect the charge and heat conductivities in a different way resulting in a temperature region where the charge conductivity of this one-dimensional Kondo insulator is already decreasing while the heat conductivity is still increasing.

  3 citations

• Autoregressive neural Slater-Jastrow ansatz for variational Monte Carlo simulation

  Stephan Humeniuk, Yuan Wan, Lei Wang

  SciPost Phys. 14, 171 (2023) · published 27 June 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Direct sampling from a Slater determinant is combined with an autoregressive deep neural network as a Jastrow factor into a fully autoregressive Slater-Jastrow ansatz for variational quantum Monte Carlo, which allows for uncorrelated sampling. The elimination of the autocorrelation time leads to a stochastic algorithm with provable cubic scaling (with a potentially large prefactor), i.e. the number of operations for producing an uncorrelated sample and for calculating the local energy scales like $\mathcal{O}(N_s^3)$ with the number of orbitals $N_s$. The implementation is benchmarked on the two-dimensional $t-V$ model of spinless fermions on the square lattice.

  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

• Systematic analysis of crystalline phases in bosonic lattice models with algebraically decaying density-density interactions

  Jan A. Koziol, Antonia Duft, Giovanna Morigi, Kai P. Schmidt

  SciPost Phys. 14, 136 (2023) · published 30 May 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We propose a general approach to analyse diagonal ordering patterns in bosonic lattice models with algebraically decaying density-density interactions on arbitrary lattices. The key idea is a systematic search for the energetically best order on all unit cells of the lattice up to a given extent. Using resummed couplings we evaluate the energy of the ordering patterns in the thermodynamic limit using finite unit cells. We apply the proposed approach to the atomic limit of the extended Bose-Hubbard model on the triangular lattice at fillings $f=1/2$ and $f=1$. We investigate the ground-state properties of the antiferromagnetic long-range Ising model on the triangular lattice and determine a six-fold degenerate plain-stripe phase to be the ground state for finite decay exponents. We also probe the classical limit of the Fendley-Sengupta-Sachdev model describing Rydberg atom arrays. We focus on arrangements where the atoms are placed on the sites or links of the Kagome lattice. Our method provides a general framework to treat cristalline structures resulting from long-range interactions.

  3 citations