Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Formation of Majorana fermions in finite-size graphene strips

  Vardan Kaladzhyan, Cristina Bena

  SciPost Phys. 3, 002 (2017) · published 7 July 2017 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate the formation of Majorana fermions in finite-size graphene strips with open boundary conditions in both directions, in the presence of an in-plane magnetic field and in the proximity of a superconducting substrate. We show that for long enough strips the Majorana states can form in the presence of a Rashba-like spin-orbit coupling, as well as in the presence of an inhomogeneous magnetic field. We find that, unlike infinite graphene ribbons in which Majorana states arise solely close to the bottom of the band and the Van Hove singularities, for finite-size systems this can happen also at much smaller doping values, close to the Dirac points, and depends strongly on the type of the short edges of the systems (e.g. armchair vs. zigzag), as well as on the width of the ribbons.

  14 citations

• Bulk entanglement entropy for photons and gravitons in AdS$_3$

  Alexandre Belin, Nabil Iqbal, Jorrit Kruthoff

  SciPost Phys. 8, 075 (2020) · published 13 May 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study quantum corrections to holographic entanglement entropy in AdS$_3$/CFT$_2$; these are given by the bulk entanglement entropy across the Ryu-Takayanagi surface for all fields in the effective gravitational theory. We consider bulk $U(1)$ gauge fields and gravitons, whose dynamics in AdS$_3$ are governed by Chern-Simons terms and are therefore topological. In this case the relevant Hilbert space is that of the edge excitations. A novelty of the holographic construction is that such modes live not only on the bulk entanglement cut but also on the AdS boundary. We describe the interplay of these excitations and provide an explicit map to the appropriate extended Hilbert space. We compute the bulk entanglement entropy for the CFT vacuum state and find that the effect of the bulk entanglement entropy is to renormalize the relation between the effective holographic central charge and Newton's constant. We also consider excited states obtained by acting with the $U(1)$ current on the vacuum, and compute the difference in bulk entanglement entropy between these states and the vacuum. We compute this UV-finite difference both in the bulk and in the CFT finding a perfect agreement.

  14 citations

• Toward a 3d Ising model with a weakly-coupled string theory dual

  Nabil Iqbal, John McGreevy

  SciPost Phys. 9, 019 (2020) · published 13 August 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  It has long been expected that the 3d Ising model can be thought of as a string theory, where one interprets the domain walls that separate up spins from down spins as two-dimensional string worldsheets. The usual Ising Hamiltonian measures the area of these domain walls. This theory has string coupling of unit magnitude. We add new local terms to the Ising Hamiltonian that further weight each spin configuration by a factor depending on the genus of the corresponding domain wall, resulting in a new 3d Ising model that has a tunable bare string coupling $g_s$. We use a combination of analytical and numerical methods to analyze the phase structure of this model as $g_s$ is varied. We study statistical properties of the topology of worldsheets and discuss the prospects of using this new deformation at weak string coupling to find a worldsheet description of the 3d Ising transition.

  14 citations

• Bloch oscillations and the lack of the decay of the false vacuum in a one-dimensional quantum spin chain

  O. Pomponio, M. A. Werner, G. Zarand, G. Takacs

  SciPost Phys. 12, 061 (2022) · published 15 February 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We consider the decay of the false vacuum, realised within a quantum quench into an anti-confining regime of the Ising spin chain with a magnetic field opposite to the initial magnetisation. Although the effective linear potential between the domain walls is repulsive, the time evolution of correlations still shows a suppression of the light cone and a reduction of vacuum decay. The suppressed decay is a lattice effect, and can be assigned to emergent Bloch oscillations.

  14 citations

• Bubble instabilities of mIIA on AdS$_4\times S^6$

  Pieter Bomans, Davide Cassani, Giuseppe Dibitetto, Nicolò Petri

  SciPost Phys. 12, 099 (2022) · published 18 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We consider compactifications of massive IIA supergravity on a six-sphere. This setup is known to give rise to non-supersymmetric AdS$_4$ vacua preserving SO$(7)$ as well as G$_2$ residual symmetry. Both solutions have a round $S^6$ metric and are supported by the Romans’ mass and internal $F_6$ flux. While the SO$(7)$ invariant vacuum is known to be perturbatively unstable, the G$_2$ invariant one has been found to have a fully stable Kaluza-Klein spectrum. Moreover, it has been shown to be protected against brane-jet instabilities. Motivated by these results, we study possible bubbling solutions connected to the G$_2$ vacuum, representing non-perturbative instabilities of the latter. We indeed find an instability channel represented by the nucleation of a bubble of nothing dressed up with a homogeneous D2 brane charge distribution in the internal space. Our solution generalizes to the case where $S^6$ is replaced by any six-dimensional nearly-Kähler manifold.

  14 citations

• Quantum quench dynamics in the transverse-field Ising model: A numerical expansion in linked rectangular clusters

  Jonas Richter, Tjark Heitmann, Robin Steinigeweg

  SciPost Phys. 9, 031 (2020) · published 3 September 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study quantum quenches in the transverse-field Ising model defined on different lattice geometries such as chains, two- and three-leg ladders, and two-dimensional square lattices. Starting from fully polarized initial states, we consider the dynamics of the transverse and the longitudinal magnetization for quenches to weak, strong, and critical values of the transverse field. To this end, we rely on an efficient combination of numerical linked cluster expansions (NLCEs) and a forward propagation of pure states in real time. As a main result, we demonstrate that NLCEs comprising solely rectangular clusters provide a promising approach to study the real-time dynamics of two-dimensional quantum many-body systems directly in the thermodynamic limit. By comparing to existing data from the literature, we unveil that NLCEs yield converged results on time scales which are competitive to other state-of-the-art numerical methods.

  14 citations

• Honeycomb rare-earth magnets with anisotropic exchange interactions

  Zhu-Xi Luo, Gang Chen

  SciPost Phys. Core 3, 004 (2020) · published 4 September 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the rare-earth magnets on a honeycomb lattice, and are particularly interested in the experimental consequences of the highly anisotropic spin interaction due to the spin-orbit entanglement. We perform a high-temperature series expansion using a generic nearest-neighbor Hamiltonian with anisotropic interactions, and obtain the heat capacity, the parallel and perpendicular spin susceptibilities, and the magnetic torque coefficients. We further examine the electron spin resonance linewidth as an important signature of the anisotropic spin interactions. Due to the small interaction energy scale of the rare-earth moments, it is experimentally feasible to realize the strong-field regime. Therefore, we perform the spin-wave analysis and study the possibility of topological magnons when a strong field is applied to the system. The application and relevance to the rare-earth Kitaev materials are discussed.

  14 citations

• Unbounded entanglement production via a dissipative impurity

  Vincenzo Alba

  SciPost Phys. 12, 011 (2022) · published 10 January 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate the entanglement dynamics in a free-fermion chain initially prepared in a Fermi sea and subjected to localized losses (dissipative impurity). We derive a formula describing the dynamics of the entanglement entropies in the hydrodynamic limit of long times and large intervals. The result depends only on the absorption coefficient of the effective delta potential describing the impurity in the hydrodynamic limit. Genuine dissipation-induced entanglement is certified by the linear growth of the logarithmic negativity. Finally, in the quantum Zeno regime at strong dissipation the entanglement growth is arrested (Zeno entanglement death).

  14 citations

• On the Euclidean action of de Sitter black holes and constrained instantons

  Edward K. Morvan, Jan Pieter van der Schaar, Manus R. Visser

  SciPost Phys. 14, 022 (2023) · published 23 February 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We compute the on-shell Euclidean action of Schwarzschild-de Sitter black holes, and take their contributions in the gravitational path integral into account using the formalism of constrained instantons. Although Euclidean de Sitter black hole geometries have conical singularities for generic masses, their on-shell action is finite and is shown to be independent of the Euclidean time periodicity and equal to minus the sum of the black hole and cosmological horizon entropy. We apply this result to compute the probability for a nonrotating, neutral arbitrary mass black hole to nucleate spontaneously in empty de Sitter space, which separates into a constant and a "non-perturbative" contribution, the latter corresponding to the proper saddle-point instanton in the Nariai limit. We also speculate on some further applications of our results, most notably as potential non-perturbative corrections to correlators in the de Sitter vacuum.

  14 citations

• On the boundary conformal field theory approach to symmetry-resolved entanglement

  Giuseppe Di Giulio, René Meyer, Christian Northe, Henri Scheppach, Suting Zhao

  SciPost Phys. Core 6, 049 (2023) · published 11 July 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the symmetry resolution of the entanglement entropy of an interval in two-dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs), by relating the bipartition to the geometry of an annulus with conformal boundary conditions. In the presence of extended symmetries such as Kac-Moody type current algebrae, symmetry resolution is possible only if the boundary conditions on the annulus preserve part of the symmetry group, i.e. if the factorization map associated with the spatial bipartition is compatible with the symmetry in question. The partition function of the boundary CFT (BCFT) is then decomposed in terms of the characters of the irreducible representations of the symmetry group preserved by the boundary conditions. We demonstrate that this decomposition already provides the symmetry resolution of the entanglement spectrum of the corresponding bipartition. Considering the various terms of the partition function associated with the same representation, or charge sector, the symmetry-resolved Rényi entropies can be derived to all orders in the UV cutoff expansion without the need to compute the charged moments. We apply this idea to the theory of a free massless boson with $U(1)$, $\mathbb{R}$ and $\mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry.

  14 citations