Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Confined vs. extended Dirac surface states in topological crystalline insulator nanowires

  Roni Majlin Skiff, Fernando de Juan, Raquel Queiroz, Subramanian Mathimalar, Haim Beidenkopf, Roni Ilan

  SciPost Phys. Core 6, 011 (2023) · published 13 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Confining two dimensional Dirac fermions on the surface of topological insulators has remained an outstanding conceptual challenge. Here we show that Dirac fermion confinement is achievable in topological crystalline insulators (TCI), which host multiple surface Dirac cones depending on the surface termination and the symmetries it preserves. This confinement is most dramatically reflected in the flux dependence of these Dirac states in the nanowire geometry, where different facets connect to form a closed surface. Using SnTe as a case study, we show how wires with all four facets of the $\langle 100 \rangle$ type display novel Aharonov-Bohm oscillations, while nanowires with the four facets of the $\langle 110 \rangle$ type such oscillations are absent due to strong confinement of the Dirac states to each facet separately. Our results place TCI nanowires as a versatile platform for confining and manipulating Dirac surface states.

  3 citations

• Characteristic properties of a composite system of topological phases separated by gapped domain walls via an exactly solvable Hamiltonian model

  Yu Zhao, Shan Huang, Hongyu Wang, Yuting Hu, Yidun Wan

  SciPost Phys. Core 6, 076 (2023) · published 8 November 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  In this paper, we construct an exactly solvable lattice Hamiltonian model to investigate the properties of a composite system consisting of multiple topological orders separated by gapped domain walls. There are interdomain elementary excitations labeled by a pair of anyons in different domains of this system; This system also has elementary excitations with quasiparticles in the gapped domain wall. Each set of elementary excitations corresponds to a basis of the ground states of this composite system on the torus, reflecting that the ground-state degeneracy matches the number of either set of elementary excitations. The characteristic properties of this composite system lie in the basis transformations, represented by the $S$ and $T$ matrices: The $S$ matrix encodes the mutual statistics between interdomain excitations and domain-wall quasiparticles, and the $T$ matrix encapsulates the topological spins of interdomain excitations. Our model realizes a spatial counterpart of a temporal phase transition triggered by anyon condensation, bringing the abstract theory of anyon condensation into manifestable spatial interdomain excitation states.

  3 citations

• Quantum engineering of a synthetic thermal bath for bosonic atoms in a one-dimensional optical lattice via Markovian feedback control

  Ling-Na Wu, André Eckardt

  SciPost Phys. 13, 059 (2022) · published 21 September 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We propose and investigate a scheme for engineering a synthetic thermal bath for a bosonic quantum gas in a one-dimensional optical lattice based on Markovian feedback control. The performance of our scheme is quantified by the fidelity between the steady state of the system and the effective thermal state. For double-well and triple-well systems with non-interacting particles, the steady state is found to be an exact thermal state, which is attributed to the fact that the transfer rates between all pairs of coupled eigenstates satisfy detailed balance condition. The scenario changes when there are more lattice sites, where the detailed balance condition does not hold any more, but remains an accurate approximation. Remarkably, our scheme performs very well at low and high temperature regimes, with the fidelity close to one. The performance at the intermediate temperature regime (where a crossover into a Bose condensed regime occurs) is slightly worse, and the fidelity shows a gentle decrease with increasing system size. We also discuss the interacting cases. In contrast to the non-interacting cases, the scheme is found to perform better at a higher temperature. Another difference is that the minimal temperature that can be engineered is nonzero and increases with the interaction strength.

  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

• Itinerant ferromagnetism in dilute SU(N) Fermi gases

  Jordi Pera, Joaquim Casulleras, Jordi Boronat

  SciPost Phys. 14, 038 (2023) · published 17 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We present exact analytic results for the energy of a SU(N) repulsive Fermi gas as a function of the spin-channel occupation at second order in the gas parameter. This is an extension of previous results that now incorporates the degree of polarization of the system. Therefore, the magnetic properties of the gas can be obtained, free from numerical uncertainties. For spin 1/2 we find that second-order corrections change the itinerant ferromagnetic transition from continuous to first-order. Instead, for spin larger than 1/2 the phase transition is always of first-order type. The transition critical density reduces when the spin increases, making the phase transition more accessible to experiments with ultracold dilute Fermi gases. Estimations for Fermi gases of Yb and Sr with spin 5/2 and 9/2, respectively, are reported.

  3 citations

• Ab initio electron-lattice downfolding: Potential energy landscapes, anharmonicity, and molecular dynamics in charge density wave materials

  Arne Schobert, Jan Berges, Erik G. C. P. van Loon, Michael A. Sentef, Sergey Brener, Mariana Rossi, Tim O. Wehling

  SciPost Phys. 16, 046 (2024) · published 9 February 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The interplay of electronic and nuclear degrees of freedom presents an outstanding problem in condensed matter physics and chemistry. Computational challenges arise especially for large systems, long time scales, in nonequilibrium, or in systems with strong correlations. In this work, we show how downfolding approaches facilitate complexity reduction on the electronic side and thereby boost the simulation of electronic properties and nuclear motion-in particular molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Three different downfolding strategies based on constraining, unscreening, and combinations thereof are benchmarked against full density functional calculations for selected charge density wave (CDW) systems, namely 1H-TaS$_2$, 1T-TiSe$_2$, 1H-NbS$_2$, and a one-dimensional carbon chain. We find that the downfolded models can reproduce potential energy surfaces on supercells accurately and facilitate computational speedup in MD simulations by about five orders of magnitude in comparison to purely ab initio calculations. For monolayer 1H-TaS$_2$ we report classical and path integral replica exchange MD simulations, revealing the impact of thermal and quantum fluctuations on the CDW transition.

  2 citations

• Critical properties of a comb lattice

  Natalia Chepiga, Steven R. White

  SciPost Phys. 9, 013 (2020) · published 27 July 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  In this paper we study the critical properties of the Heisenberg spin-1/2 model on a comb lattice -- a 1D backbone decorated with finite 1D chains -- the teeth. We address the problem numerically by a comb tensor network that duplicates the geometry of a lattice. We observe a fundamental difference between the states on a comb with even and odd number of sites per tooth, which resembles an even-odd effect in spin-1/2 ladders. The comb with odd teeth is always critical, not only along the teeth, but also along the backbone, which leads to a competition between two critical regimes in orthogonal directions. In addition, we show that in a weak-backbone limit the excitation energy scales as $1/(NL)$, and not as $1/N$ or $1/L$ typical for 1D systems. For even teeth in the weak backbone limit the system corresponds to a collection of decoupled critical chains of length $L$, while in the strong backbone limit, one spin from each tooth forms the backbone, so the effective length of a critical tooth is one site shorter, $L-1$. Surprisingly, these two regimes are connected via a state where a critical chain spans over two nearest neighbor teeth, with an effective length $2L$.

  2 citations

• Microscopic derivation of Ginzburg-Landau theories for hierarchical quantum Hall states

  Yoran Tournois, Maria Hermanns, Thors Hans Hansson

  SciPost Phys. 8, 079 (2020) · published 18 May 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We propose a Ginzburg-Landau theory for a large and important part of the abelian quantum Hall hierarchy, including the prominently observed Jain sequences. By a generalized "flux attachment" construction we extend the Ginzburg-Landau-Chern-Simons composite boson theory to states obtained by both quasielectron and quasihole condensation, and express the corresponding wave functions as correlators in conformal field theories. This yields a precise identification of the relativistic scalar fields entering these correlators in terms of the original electron field.

  2 citations

• Microscopic theory of fractional excitations in gapless quantum Hall states: semi-quantized quantum Hall states

  Oğuz Türker, Tobias Meng

  SciPost Phys. 8, 031 (2020) · published 28 February 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We derive the low-energy theory of semi-quantized quantum Hall states, a recently observed class of gapless bilayer fractional quantum Hall states. Our theory shows these states to feature gapless quasiparticles of fractional charge coupled to an emergent Chern-Simons gauge field. These gapless quasiparticles can be understood as composites of electrons and Laughlin-like quasiparticles. We show that semi-quantized quantum Hall states exhibit perfect interlayer drag, host non-Fermi liquid physics, and serve as versatile parent states for fully gapped topological phases hosting anyonic excitations.

  2 citations

• An investigation of the appearance of a long range nuclear potential in ultra low energy nuclear synthesis

  Shinsho Oryu, Takashi Watanabe, Yasuhisa Hiratsuka, Masayuki Takeda

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 3, 050 (2020) · published 27 February 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  A new potential, the $general$ $particle$ $transfer$ $potential$: so called ``GPT'' potential was represented in the previous paper which indicates a Yukawa-type potential for shorter range, but a $1/r^n$-type potential for longer range where $n=2$ includes the Efimov-like potential in the hadron system. In order to confirm the existence of a GPT potential, we investigate the possibility of Cs+2d$\rightarrow$La reaction on the three-ion quasi-molecule CsD$_2$ which is covered by twelve Pd or a CsD$_2$Pd$_{12}$-cluster, where the three-body bound states and wave functions for D-Cs-D molecular and d-Cs-d nuclear systems are calculated. We obtain an approximate E2-transition from the molecular states to the nuclear states. The transition ratio between the short range nuclear potential with the $1/r^2$-type long range potential and without long range potential is $W_{i\rightarrow f}^{E2';L}/W_{i\rightarrow f}^{E2';S}\approx 10^8$. If the reaction Cs+2D$\rightarrow$La is experimentally observed, then the existence of the GPT potential could be confirmed.

  2 citations