Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Josephson junctions of topological nodal superconductors

  Ranjani Seshadri, Maxim Khodas, Dganit Meidan

  SciPost Phys. 12, 197 (2022) · published 23 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) offer a unique platform to study unconventional superconductivity, owing to the presence of strong spin-orbit coupling and a remarkable stability to an in-plane magnetic field. A recent study found that when an in-plane field applied to a superconducting monolayer TMD is increased beyond the Pauli critical limit, a quantum phase transition occurs into a topological nodal superconducting phase which hosts Majorana flat bands. We study the current-phase relation of this nodal superconductor in a Josephson junction geometry. We find that the nodal superconductivity is associated with an energy-phase relation that depends on the momentum transverse to the current direction, with a $4\pi$ periodicity in between pairs of nodal points. We interpret this response as a result of a series of quantum phase transitions, driven by the transverse momentum, which separate a topological trivial phase and two distinct topologically non-trivial phases characterized by different winding invariants. This analysis sheds light on the stability of the Majorana flat bands to symmetry-breaking perturbations.

  3 citations

• Pfaffian invariant identifies magnetic obstructed atomic insulators

  Isidora Araya Day, Anastasiia Varentcova, Daniel Varjas, Anton R. Akhmerov

  SciPost Phys. 15, 114 (2023) · published 25 September 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We derive a $\mathbb{Z}_4$ topological invariant that extends beyond symmetry eigenvalues and Wilson loops and classifies two-dimensional insulators with a $C_4 \mathcal{T}$ symmetry. To formulate this invariant, we consider an irreducible Brillouin zone and constrain the spectrum of the open Wilson lines that compose its boundary. We fix the gauge ambiguity of the Wilson lines by using the Pfaffian at high symmetry momenta. As a result, we distinguish the four $C_4 \mathcal{T}$-protected atomic insulators, each of which is adiabatically connected to a different atomic limit. We establish the correspondence between the invariant and the obstructed phases by constructing both the atomic limit Hamiltonians and a $C_4 \mathcal{T}$-symmetric model that interpolates between them. The phase diagram shows that $C_4 \mathcal{T}$ insulators allow $\pm 1$ and $2$ changes of the invariant, where the latter is overlooked by symmetry indicators.

  3 citations

• An ideal rapid-cycle Thouless pump

  Savvas Malikis, Vadim Cheianov

  SciPost Phys. 12, 203 (2022) · published 27 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Thouless pumping is a fundamental instance of quantized transport, which is topologically protected. Although its theoretical importance, the adiabaticity condition is an obstacle for further practical applications. Here, focusing on the Rice-Mele model, we provide a family of finite-frequency examples that ensure both the absence of excitations and the perfect quantization of the pumped charge at the end of each cycle. This family, which contains an adiabatic protocol as a limiting case, is obtained through a mapping onto the zero curvature representation of the Euclidean sinh-Gordon equation.

  3 citations

• Semiconductor electron-phonon equations: A rung above Boltzmann in the many-body ladder

  Gianluca Stefanucci, Enrico Perfetto

  SciPost Phys. 16, 073 (2024) · published 13 March 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Starting from the ab initio many-body theory of electrons and phonons, we go through a series of well defined simplifications to derive a set of coupled equations of motion for the electronic occupations and polarizations, nuclear displacements as well as phononic occupations and coherences. These are the semiconductor electron-phonon equations (SEPE), sharing the same scaling with system size and propagation time as the Boltzmann equations. At the core of the SEPE is the mirrored Generalized Kadanoff-Baym Ansatz (GKBA) for the Green's functions, an alternative to the standard GKBA which we show to lead to unstable equilibrium states. The SEPE treat coherent and incoherent degrees of freedom on equal footing, widen the scope of the semiconductor Bloch equations and Boltzmann equations, and reduce to them under additional simplifications. The new features of the SEPE pave the way for first-principles studies of phonon squeezed states and coherence effects in time-resolved absorption and diffraction experiments.

  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

• Density matrices in integrable face models

  Holger Frahm, Daniel Westerfeld

  SciPost Phys. 11, 057 (2021) · published 14 September 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Using the properties of the local Boltzmann weights of integrable interaction-round-a-face (IRF or face) models we express local operators in terms of generalized transfer matrices. This allows for the derivation of discrete functional equations for the reduced density matrices in inhomogeneous generalizations of these models. We apply these equations to study the density matrices for IRF models of various solid-on-solid type and quantum chains of non-Abelian ${SU(2)_3}$ or Fibonacci anyons. Similar as in the six vertex model we find that reduced density matrices for a sequence of consecutive sites can be 'factorized', i.e.\ expressed in terms of nearest-neighbour correlators with coefficients which are independent of the model parameters. Explicit expressions are provided for correlation functions on up to three neighbouring sites.

  3 citations

• Modulation induced transport signatures in correlated electron waveguides

  Gal Shavit, Yuval Oreg

  SciPost Phys. 9, 051 (2020) · published 14 October 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Recent transport experiments in spatially modulated quasi-1D structures created on top of LaAlO$_3$/SrTiO$_3$ interfaces have revealed some interesting features, including phenomena conspicuously absent without the modulation. In this work, we focus on two of these remarkable features and provide theoretical analysis allowing their interpretation. The first one is the appearance of two-terminal conductance plateaus at rational fractions of $e^2/h$. We explain how this phenomenon, previously believed to be possible only in systems with strong repulsive interactions, can be stabilized in a system with attraction in the presence of the modulation. Using our theoretical framework we find the plateau amplitude and shape, and characterize the correlated phase which develops in the system due to the partial gap, namely a Luttinger liquid of electronic trions. The second observation is a sharp conductance dip below a conductance of $1\times e^2/h$, which changes its value over a wide range when tuning the system. We theorize that it is due to resonant backscattering caused by a periodic spin-orbit field. The behavior of this dip can be reliably accounted for by considering the finite length of the electronic waveguides, as well as the interactions therein. The phenomena discussed in this work exemplify the intricate interplay of strong interactions and spatial modulations, and reveal the potential for novel strongly correlated phases of matter in systems which prominently feature both.

  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

• Relating non-Hermitian and Hermitian quantum systems at criticality

  Chang-Tse Hsieh, Po-Yao Chang

  SciPost Phys. Core 6, 062 (2023) · published 12 September 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We demonstrate three types of transformations that establish connections between Hermitian and non-Hermitian quantum systems at criticality, which can be described by conformal field theories (CFTs). For the transformation preserving both the energy and the entanglement spectra, the corresponding central charges obtained from the logarithmic scaling of the entanglement entropy are identical for both Hermitian and non-Hermitian systems. The second transformation, while preserving the energy spectrum, does not perserve the entanglement spectrum. This leads to different entanglement entropy scalings and results in different central charges for the two types of systems. We demonstrate this transformation using the dilation method applied to the free fermion case. Through this method, we show that a non-Hermitian system with central charge $c = -4$ can be mapped to a Hermitian system with central charge $c = 2$. Lastly, we investigate the Galois conjugation in the Fibonacci model with the parameter $\phi \to - 1/\phi$, in which the transformation does not preserve both energy and entanglement spectra. We demonstrate the Fibonacci model and its Galois conjugation relate the tricritical Ising model/3-state Potts model and the Lee-Yang model with negative central charges from the scaling property of the entanglement entropy.

  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