Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Dynamical instantons and activated processes in mean-field glass models

  Valentina Ros, Giulio Biroli, Chiara Cammarota

  SciPost Phys. 10, 002 (2021) · published 4 January 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We focus on the energy landscape of a simple mean-field model of glasses and analyze activated barrier-crossing by combining the Kac-Rice method for high-dimensional Gaussian landscapes with dynamical field theory. In particular, we consider Langevin dynamics at low temperature in the energy landscape of the pure spherical $p$-spin model. We select as initial condition for the dynamics one of the many unstable index-1 saddles in the vicinity of a reference local minimum. We show that the associated dynamical mean-field equations admit two solutions: one corresponds to falling back to the original reference minimum, and the other to reaching a new minimum past the barrier. By varying the saddle we scan and characterize the properties of such minima reachable by activated barrier-crossing. Finally, using time-reversal transformations, we construct the two-point function dynamical instanton of the corresponding activated process.

  15 citations

• Cavity and replica methods for the spectral density of sparse symmetric random matrices

  Vito A R Susca, Pierpaolo Vivo, Reimer Kühn

  SciPost Phys. Lect. Notes 33 (2021) · published 10 August 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We review the problem of how to compute the spectral density of sparse symmetric random matrices, i.e. weighted adjacency matrices of undirected graphs. Starting from the Edwards-Jones formula, we illustrate the milestones of this line of research, including the pioneering work of Bray and Rodgers using replicas. We focus first on the cavity method, showing that it quickly provides the correct recursion equations both for single instances and at the ensemble level. We also describe an alternative replica solution that proves to be equivalent to the cavity method. Both the cavity and the replica derivations allow us to obtain the spectral density via the solution of an integral equation for an auxiliary probability density function. We show that this equation can be solved using a stochastic population dynamics algorithm, and we provide its implementation. In this formalism, the spectral density is naturally written in terms of a superposition of local contributions from nodes of given degree, whose role is thoroughly elucidated. This paper does not contain original material, but rather gives a pedagogical overview of the topic. It is indeed addressed to students and researchers who consider entering the field. Both the theoretical tools and the numerical algorithms are discussed in detail, highlighting conceptual subtleties and practical aspects.

  15 citations

• Conditional generative models for sampling and phase transition indication in spin systems

  Japneet Singh, Mathias S. Scheurer, Vipul Arora

  SciPost Phys. 11, 043 (2021) · published 30 August 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  In this work, we study generative adversarial networks (GANs) as a tool to learn the distribution of spin configurations and to generate samples, conditioned on external tuning parameters or other quantities associated with individual configurations. For concreteness, we focus on two examples of conditional variables---the temperature of the system and the energy of the samples. We show that temperature-conditioned models can not only be used to generate samples across thermal phase transitions, but also be employed as unsupervised indicators of transitions. To this end, we introduce a GAN-fidelity measure that captures the model’s susceptibility to external changes of parameters. The proposed energy-conditioned models are integrated with Monte Carlo simulations to perform over-relaxation steps, which break the Markov chain and reduce auto-correlations. We propose ways of efficiently representing the physical states in our network architectures, e.g., by exploiting symmetries, and to minimize the correlations between generated samples. A detailed evaluation, using the two-dimensional XY model as an example, shows that these incorporations bring in considerable improvements over standard machine-learning approaches. We further study the performance of our architectures when no training data is provided near the critical region.

  15 citations

• Disorder-free spin glass transitions and jamming in exactly solvable mean-field models

  Hajime Yoshino

  SciPost Phys. 4, 040 (2018) · published 26 June 2018 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We construct and analyze a family of $M$-component vectorial spin systems which exhibit glass transitions and jamming within supercooled paramagnetic states without quenched disorder. Our system is defined on lattices with connectivity $c=\alpha M$ and becomes exactly solvable in the limit of large number of components $M \to \infty$. We consider generic $p$-body interactions between the vectorial Ising/continuous spins with linear/non-linear potentials. The existence of self-generated randomness is demonstrated by showing that the random energy model is recovered from a $M$-component ferromagnetic $p$-spin Ising model in $M \to \infty$ and $p \to \infty$ limit. In our systems the quenched disorder, if present, and the self-generated disorder act additively. Our theory provides a unified mean-field theoretical framework for glass transitions of rotational degree of freedoms such as orientation of molecules in glass forming liquids, color angles in continuous coloring of graphs and vector spins of geometrically frustrated magnets. The rotational glass transitions accompany various types of replica symmetry breaking. In the case of repulsive hardcore interactions in the spin space, continuous the criticality of the jamming or SAT/UNSTAT transition becomes the same as that of hardspheres.

  15 citations

• Transport signature of the magnetic Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition

  Se Kwon Kim, Suk Bum Chung

  SciPost Phys. 10, 068 (2021) · published 12 March 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Motivated by recent experimental progress in 2D magnetism, we theoretically study spin transport in 2D easy-plane magnets at finite temperatures across the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) phase transition, by developing a duality mapping to the 2+1D electromagnetism with the full account of spin's finite lifetime. In particular, we find that the non-conservation of spin gives rise to a distinct signature across the BKT transition, with the spin current decaying with distance power-law (exponentially) below (above) the transition; this is detectable in the proposed experiment with NiPS$_3$ and CrCl$_3$.

  14 citations

• Activity driven transport in harmonic chains

  Ion Santra, Urna Basu

  SciPost Phys. 13, 041 (2022) · published 30 August 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The transport properties of an extended system driven by active reservoirs is an issue of paramount importance, which remains virtually unexplored. Here we address this issue, for the first time, in the context of energy transport between two active reservoirs connected by a chain of harmonic oscillators. The couplings to the active reservoirs, which exert correlated stochastic forces on the boundary oscillators, lead to fascinating behavior of the energy current and kinetic temperature profile even for this linear system. We analytically show that the stationary active current (i) changes non-monotonically as the activity of the reservoirs are changed, leading to a negative differential conductivity (NDC), and (ii) exhibits an unexpected direction reversal at some finite value of the activity drive. The origin of this NDC is traced back to the Lorentzian frequency spectrum of the active reservoirs. We provide another physical insight to the NDC using nonequilibrium linear response formalism for the example of a dichotomous active force. We also show that despite an apparent similarity of the kinetic temperature profile to the thermally driven scenario, no effective thermal picture can be consistently built in general. However, such a picture emerges in the small activity limit, where many of the well-known results are recovered.

  14 citations

• Towards quantifying information flows: relative entropy in deep neural networks and the renormalization group

  Johanna Erdmenger, Kevin T. Grosvenor, Ro Jefferson

  SciPost Phys. 12, 041 (2022) · published 26 January 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate the analogy between the renormalization group (RG) and deep neural networks, wherein subsequent layers of neurons are analogous to successive steps along the RG. In particular, we quantify the flow of information by explicitly computing the relative entropy or Kullback-Leibler divergence in both the one- and two-dimensional Ising models under decimation RG, as well as in a feedforward neural network as a function of depth. We observe qualitatively identical behavior characterized by the monotonic increase to a parameter-dependent asymptotic value. On the quantum field theory side, the monotonic increase confirms the connection between the relative entropy and the c-theorem. For the neural networks, the asymptotic behavior may have implications for various information maximization methods in machine learning, as well as for disentangling compactness and generalizability. Furthermore, while both the two-dimensional Ising model and the random neural networks we consider exhibit non-trivial critical points, the relative entropy appears insensitive to the phase structure of either system. In this sense, more refined probes are required in order to fully elucidate the flow of information in these models.

  14 citations

• Two-species hardcore reversible cellular automaton: matrix ansatz for dynamics and nonequilibrium stationary state

  Marko Medenjak, Vladislav Popkov, Tomaž Prosen, Eric Ragoucy, Matthieu Vanicat

  SciPost Phys. 6, 074 (2019) · published 24 June 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  In this paper we study the statistical properties of a reversible cellular automaton in two out-of-equilibrium settings. In the first part we consider two instances of the initial value problem, corresponding to the inhomogeneous quench and the local quench. Our main result is an exact matrix product expression of the time evolution of the probability distribution, which we use to determine the time evolution of the density profiles analytically. In the second part we study the model on a finite lattice coupled with stochastic boundaries. Once again we derive an exact matrix product expression of the stationary distribution, as well as the particle current and density profiles in the stationary state. The exact expressions reveal the existence of different phases with either ballistic or diffusive transport depending on the boundary parameters.

  14 citations

• Charge-current correlation equalities for quantum systems far from equilibrium

  Dragi Karevski, Gunter M. Schütz

  SciPost Phys. 6, 068 (2019) · published 17 June 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We prove that a recently derived correlation equality between conserved charges and their associated conserved currents for quantum systems far from equilibrium [O.A. Castro-Alvaredo et al., Phys. Rev. X \textbf{6}, 041065 (2016)], is valid under more general conditions than assumed so far. Similar correlation identities, which in generalized Gibbs ensembles give rise to a current symmetry somewhat reminiscent of the Onsager relations, turn out to hold also in the absence of translation invariance, for lattice models, and in any space dimension, and to imply a symmetry of the non-equilibrium linear response functions.

  14 citations

• Riemann surfaces for KPZ with periodic boundaries

  Sylvain Prolhac

  SciPost Phys. 8, 008 (2020) · published 22 January 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The Riemann surface for polylogarithms of half-integer index, which has the topology of an infinite dimensional hypercube, is studied in relation to one-dimensional KPZ universality in finite volume. Known exact results for fluctuations of the KPZ height with periodic boundaries are expressed in terms of meromorphic functions on this Riemann surface, summed over all the sheets of a covering map to an infinite cylinder. Connections to stationary large deviations, particle-hole excitations and KdV solitons are discussed.

  13 citations