Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Mixmasters in Wonderland: Chaotic dynamics from Carroll limits of gravity

  Gerben Oling, Juan F. Pedraza

  SciPost Phys. Core 8, 025 (2025) · published 27 February 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We demonstrate that the Carroll limit of general relativity coupled to matter captures the chaotic mixmaster dynamics of near-singularity limits. Zooming in on the behavior of general relativity close to spacelike singularities reveals rich and solvable ultra-local Belinski-Khalatnikov-Lifshitz (BKL) dynamics, which we show to be captured by a Carroll limit. Specifically, building on recent work on geometric Carroll expansions of general relativity, we establish that leading-order Carroll gravity, with suitable matter coupling, accurately describes well-known cosmological billiards behavior. Since the Carroll limit implements the ultra-local limit off shell, this opens up the door to a wide range of possible tractable applications, including spatially inhomogeneous setups and the emergence of spikes at late times. This further suggests that Carroll gravity, along with its subleading corrections, could serve as a valuable tool for studying deep infrared physics in AdS/CFT.

  5 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.

  5 citations

• Investigating finite-size effects in random matrices by counting resonances

  Anton Kutlin, Carlo Vanoni

  SciPost Phys. 18, 090 (2025) · published 12 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Resonance counting is an intuitive and widely used tool in Random Matrix Theory and Anderson Localization. Its undoubted advantage is its simplicity: in principle, it is easily applicable to any random matrix ensemble. On the downside, the notion of resonance is ill-defined, and the "number of resonances" does not have a direct mapping to any commonly used physical observable like the participation entropy, the fractal dimensions, or the gap ratios (r-parameter), restricting the method's predictive power to the thermodynamic limit only where it can be used for locating the Anderson localization transition. In this work, we reevaluate the notion of resonances and relate it to measurable quantities, building a foundation for the future application of the method to finite-size systems. To access the HTML version of the paper & discuss it with the authors, visit https://enabla.com/pub/558.

  5 citations

• The mass of the $\pi^-$

  M. Daum, D. Gotta

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 5, 010 (2021) · published 6 September 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The most precise values of the mass of the negatively charged pion have been determined from several measurements of X-ray wavelengths for transitions in pionic atoms at PSI. The Particle Data Group gives the average $m_{\pi^-}= (139.570 61 \pm 0.000 24) MeV/c^2$.

  5 citations

• Network construction of non-Abelian chiral spin liquids

  Hernan B. Xavier, Claudio Chamon, Rodrigo G. Pereira

  SciPost Phys. 14, 105 (2023) · published 10 May 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We use a network of chiral junctions to construct a family of topological chiral spin liquids in two spatial dimensions. The chiral spin liquid phase harbors SU(2)$_k$ anyons, which stem from the underlying SU(2)$_k$ WZW models that describe the constituent spin chains of the network. The network exhibits quantized spin and thermal Hall conductances. We illustrate our construction by inspecting the topological properties of the SU(2)$_2$ model. We find that this model has emergent Ising anyons, with spinons acting as vortex excitations that bind Majorana zero modes. We also show that the ground state of this network is threefold degenerate on the torus, asserting its non-Abelian character. Our results shed new light on the stability of non-Abelian topological phases in artificial quantum materials.

  5 citations

• Counterdiabatic Hamiltonians for multistate Landau-Zener problem

  Kohji Nishimura, Kazutaka Takahashi

  SciPost Phys. 5, 029 (2018) · published 27 September 2018 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the Landau-Zener transitions generalized to multistate systems. Based on the work by Sinitsyn et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 190402 (2018)], we introduce the auxiliary Hamiltonians that are interpreted as the counterdiabatic terms. We find that the counterdiabatic Hamiltonians satisfy the zero curvature condition. The general structures of the auxiliary Hamiltonians are studied in detail and the time-evolution operator is evaluated by using a deformation of the integration contour and asymptotic forms of the auxiliary Hamiltonians. For several spin models with transverse field, we calculate the transition probability between the initial and final ground states and find that the method is useful to study nonadiabatic regime.

  5 citations

• Tau-decay determination of the strong coupling

  Antonio Pich

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 1, 036 (2019) · published 21 February 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We review the current status of the determination of the strong coupling from tau decay. Using the most recent release of the ALEPH data, a very comprehensive phenomenological analysis has been performed, exploring all strategies previously considered in the literature and several complementary approaches. Once their actual uncertainties are properly assessed, the results from all adopted methodologies are in excellent agreement, leading to a very robust and reliable value of the strong coupling, $\alpha_s^{(n_f=3)}(m_\tau^2) = 0.328\pm 0.013$, which implies $\alpha_s^{(n_f=5)}(M_Z^2) = 0.1197\pm 0.0015$.

  5 citations

• Anomalous Luttinger equivalence between temperature and curved spacetime: From black holes to thermal quenches

  Baptiste Bermond, Maxim Nikolaevich Chernodub, Adolfo G. Grushin, David Carpentier

  SciPost Phys. 16, 084 (2024) · published 25 March 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Building on the idea of Tolman and Ehrenfest that heat has weight, Luttinger established a deep connection between gravitational fields and thermal transport. However, this relation does not include anomalous quantum fluctuations that become paramount in strongly curved spacetime. In this work, we revisit the celebrated Tolman-Ehrenfest and Luttinger relations and show how to incorporate the quantum energy scales associated with these fluctuations, captured by gravitational anomalies of quantum field theories. We point out that such anomalous fluctuations naturally occur in the quantum atmosphere of a black hole. Our results reveal that analogous fluctuations are also observable in thermal conductors in flat-space time provided local temperature varies strongly. As a consequence, we establish that the gravitational anomalies manifest themselves naturally in non-linear thermal response of a quantum wire. In addition, we propose a systematic way to identify thermal analogues of black hole's anomalous quantum fluctuations associated to gravitational anomalies. We identify their signatures in propagating energy waves following a thermal quench, as well as in the energy density of heating Floquet states induced by repeated thermal quenches.

  5 citations

• Coherent forward scattering as a robust probe of multifractality in critical disordered media

  Maxime Martinez, Gabriel Lemarié, Bertrand Georgeot, Christian Miniatura, Olivier Giraud

  SciPost Phys. 14, 057 (2023) · published 31 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study coherent forward scattering (CFS) in critical disordered systems, whose eigenstates are multifractals. We give general and simple arguments that make it possible to fully characterize the dynamics of the shape and height of the CFS peak. We show that the dynamics is governed by multifractal dimensions $D_1$ and $D_2$, which suggests that CFS could be used as an experimental probe for quantum multifractality. Our predictions are universal and numerically verified in three paradigmatic models of quantum multifractality: Power-law Random Banded Matrices (PRBM), the Ruijsenaars-Schneider ensembles (RS), and the three-dimensional kicked-rotor (3DKR). In the strong multifractal regime, we show analytically that these universal predictions exactly coincide with results from standard perturbation theory applied to the PRBM and RS models.

  5 citations

• Excitonic Bloch equations from first principles

  Gianluca Stefanucci, Enrico Perfetto

  SciPost Phys. 18, 009 (2025) · published 9 January 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The ultrafast conversion of coherent excitons into incoherent excitons, as well as the subsequent exciton diffusion and thermalization, are central topics in current scientific research due to their relevance in optoelectronics, photovoltaics and photocatalysis. Current approaches to the exciton dynamics rely on model Hamiltonians that depend on already screened electron-electron and electron-phonon couplings. In this work, we subject the state-of-the-art methods to scrutiny using the ab initio Hamiltonian for electrons and phonons. We offer a rigorous and intuitive proof demonstrating that the exciton dynamics governed by model Hamiltonians is affected by an overscreening of the electron-phonon interaction. The introduction of an auxiliary exciton species, termed the irreducible exciton, enables us to formulate a theory free from overscreening and derive the excitonic Bloch equations. These equations describe the time-evolution of coherent, irreducible, and incoherent excitons during and after the optical excitation. They are applicable beyond the linear regime, and predict that the total number of excitons is preserved when the external fields are switched off.

  5 citations