Publications

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• Energy diffusion and the butterfly effect in inhomogeneous Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev chains

  Yingfei Gu, Andrew Lucas, Xiao-Liang Qi

  SciPost Phys. 2, 018 (2017) · published 28 May 2017 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We compute the energy diffusion constant $D$, Lyapunov time $\tau_{\text{L}}$ and butterfly velocity $v_{\text{B}}$ in an inhomogeneous chain of coupled Majorana Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) models in the large $N$ and strong coupling limit. We find $D\le v_{\text{B}}^2 \tau_{\text{L}}$ from a combination of analytical and numerical approaches. Our example necessitates the sharpening of postulated transport bounds based on quantum chaos.

  76 citations

• Symmetry resolved entanglement in gapped integrable systems: a corner transfer matrix approach

  Sara Murciano, Giuseppe Di Giulio, Pasquale Calabrese

  SciPost Phys. 8, 046 (2020) · published 26 March 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the symmetry resolved entanglement entropies in gapped integrable lattice models. We use the corner transfer matrix to investigate two prototypical gapped systems with a U(1) symmetry: the complex harmonic chain and the XXZ spin-chain. While the former is a free bosonic system, the latter is genuinely interacting. We focus on a subsystem being half of an infinitely long chain. In both models, we obtain exact expressions for the charged moments and for the symmetry resolved entropies. While for the spin chain we found exact equipartition of entanglement (i.e. all the symmetry resolved entropies are the same), this is not the case for the harmonic system where equipartition is effectively recovered only in some limits. Exploiting the gaussianity of the harmonic chain, we also develop an exact correlation matrix approach to the symmetry resolved entanglement that allows us to test numerically our analytic results.

  75 citations

• Entanglement spectrum and symmetries in non-Hermitian fermionic non-interacting models

  Loïc Herviou, Nicolas Regnault, Jens H. Bardarson

  SciPost Phys. 7, 069 (2019) · published 28 November 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the properties of the entanglement spectrum in gapped non-interacting non-Hermitian systems, and its relation to the topological properties of the system Hamiltonian. Two different families of entanglement Hamiltonians can be defined in non-Hermitian systems, depending on whether we consider only right (or equivalently only left) eigenstates or a combination of both left and right eigenstates. We show that their entanglement spectra can still be computed efficiently, as in the Hermitian limit. We discuss how symmetries of the Hamiltonian map into symmetries of the entanglement spectrum depending on the choice of the many-body state. Through several examples in one and two dimensions, we show that the biorthogonal entanglement Hamiltonian directly inherits the topological properties of the Hamiltonian for line gapped phases, with characteristic singular and energy zero modes. The right (left) density matrix carries distinct information on the topological properties of the many-body right (left) eigenstates themselves. In purely point gapped phases, when the energy bands are not separable, the relation between the entanglement Hamiltonian and the system Hamiltonian breaks down.

  74 citations

• Fractal Symmetric Phases of Matter

  Trithep Devakul, Yizhi You, F. J. Burnell, S. L. Sondhi

  SciPost Phys. 6, 007 (2019) · published 16 January 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study spin systems which exhibit symmetries that act on a fractal subset of sites, with fractal structures generated by linear cellular automata. In addition to the trivial symmetric paramagnet and spontaneously symmetry broken phases, we construct additional fractal symmetry protected topological (FSPT) phases via a decorated defect approach. Such phases have edges along which fractal symmetries are realized projectively, leading to a symmetry protected degeneracy along the edge. Isolated excitations above the ground state are symmetry protected fractons, which cannot be moved without breaking the symmetry. In 3D, our construction leads additionally to FSPT phases protected by higher form fractal symmetries and fracton topologically ordered phases enriched by the additional fractal symmetries.

  74 citations

• Bad Metals from Fluctuating Density Waves

  Luca V. Delacrétaz, Blaise Goutéraux, Sean A. Hartnoll, Anna Karlsson

  SciPost Phys. 3, 025 (2017) · published 29 September 2017 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Bad metals have a large resistivity without being strongly disordered. In many bad metals the Drude peak moves away from zero frequency as the resistivity becomes large at increasing temperatures. We catalogue the position and width of the `displaced Drude peak' in the observed optical conductivity of several families of bad metals, showing that $\omega_\text{peak} \sim \Delta \omega \sim k_BT/\hbar$. This is the same quantum critical timescale that underpins the $T$-linear dc resistivity of many of these materials. We provide a unified theoretical description of the optical and dc transport properties of bad metals in terms of the hydrodynamics of short range quantum critical fluctuations of incommensurate density wave order. Within hydrodynamics, pinned translational order is essential to obtain the nonzero frequency peak.

  72 citations

• Integrable Floquet dynamics

  Vladimir Gritsev, Anatoli Polkovnikov

  SciPost Phys. 2, 021 (2017) · published 16 June 2017 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We discuss several classes of integrable Floquet systems, i.e. systems which do not exhibit chaotic behavior even under a time dependent perturbation. The first class is associated with finite-dimensional Lie groups and infinite-dimensional generalization thereof. The second class is related to the row transfer matrices of the 2D statistical mechanics models. The third class of models, called here "boost models", is constructed as a periodic interchange of two Hamiltonians - one is the integrable lattice model Hamiltonian, while the second is the boost operator. The latter for known cases coincides with the entanglement Hamiltonian and is closely related to the corner transfer matrix of the corresponding 2D statistical models. We present several explicit examples. As an interesting application of the boost models we discuss a possibility of generating periodically oscillating states with the period different from that of the driving field. In particular, one can realize an oscillating state by performing a static quench to a boost operator. We term this state a "Quantum Boost Clock". All analyzed setups can be readily realized experimentally, for example in cold atoms.

  72 citations

• Whispers from the dark side: Confronting light new physics with NANOGrav data

  Wolfram Ratzinger, Pedro Schwaller

  SciPost Phys. 10, 047 (2021) · published 23 February 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The NANOGrav collaboration has recently observed first evidence of a grav- itational wave background (GWB) in pulsar timing data. Here we explore the possibility that this GWB is due to new physics, and show that the signal can be well fit also with peaked spectra like the ones expected from phase transitions (PTs) or from the dynamics of axion like particles (ALPs) in the early universe. We find that a good fit to the data is obtained for a very strong PT at temperatures around 1 MeV to 10 MeV. For the ALP explanation the best fit is obtained for a decay constant of F ≈ 5 × 10^17 GeV and an axion mass of 2 × 10^−13 eV. We also illustrate the ability of PTAs to constrain the parameter space of these models, and obtain limits which are already comparable to other cosmological bounds.

  72 citations

• Universality of the SAT-UNSAT (jamming) threshold in non-convex continuous constraint satisfaction problems

  Silvio Franz, Giorgio Parisi, Maksim Sevelev, Pierfrancesco Urbani, Francesco Zamponi

  SciPost Phys. 2, 019 (2017) · published 2 June 2017 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Random constraint satisfaction problems (CSP) have been studied extensively using statistical physics techniques. They provide a benchmark to study average case scenarios instead of the worst case one. The interplay between statistical physics of disordered systems and computer science has brought new light into the realm of computational complexity theory, by introducing the notion of clustering of solutions, related to replica symmetry breaking. However, the class of problems in which clustering has been studied often involve discrete degrees of freedom: standard random CSPs are random K-SAT (aka disordered Ising models) or random coloring problems (aka disordered Potts models). In this work we consider instead problems that involve continuous degrees of freedom. The simplest prototype of these problems is the perceptron. Here we discuss in detail the full phase diagram of the model. In the regions of parameter space where the problem is non-convex, leading to multiple disconnected clusters of solutions, the solution is critical at the SAT/UNSAT threshold and lies in the same universality class of the jamming transition of soft spheres. We show how the critical behavior at the satisfiability threshold emerges, and we compute the critical exponents associated to the approach to the transition from both the SAT and UNSAT phase. We conjecture that there is a large universality class of non-convex continuous CSPs whose SAT-UNSAT threshold is described by the same scaling solution.

  71 citations

• Entanglement of exact excited eigenstates of the Hubbard model in arbitrary dimension

  Oskar Vafek, Nicolas Regnault, B. Andrei Bernevig

  SciPost Phys. 3, 043 (2017) · published 26 December 2017 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We compute exactly the von Neumann entanglement entropy of the eta-pairing states - a large set of exact excited eigenstates of the Hubbard Hamiltonian. For the singlet eta-pairing states the entropy scales with the logarithm of the spatial dimension of the (smaller) partition. For the eta-pairing states with finite spin magnetization density, the leading term can scale as the volume or as the area-times-log, depending on the momentum space occupation of the Fermions with flipped spins. We also compute the corrections to the leading scaling. In order to study the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH), we also compute the entanglement Renyi entropies of such states and compare them with the corresponding entropies of thermal density matrix in various ensembles. Such states, which we find violate strong ETH, may provide a useful platform for a detailed study of the time-dependence of the onset of thermalization due to perturbations which violate the total pseudospin conservation.

  69 citations

• Primordial black holes as dark matter candidates

  Bernard Carr, Florian Kuhnel

  SciPost Phys. Lect. Notes 48 (2022) · published 2 May 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We review the formation and evaporation of primordial black holes (PBHs) and their possible contribution to dark matter. Various constraints suggest they could only provide most of it in the mass windows $10^{17}$ - $10^{23}\,$g or $10$ - $10^{2}\,M_{\odot}$, with the last possibility perhaps being suggested by the LIGO/Virgo observations. However, PBHs could have important consequences even if they have a low cosmological density. Sufficiently large ones might generate cosmic structures and provide seeds for the supermassive black holes in galactic nuclei. Planck-mass relics of PBH evaporations or stupendously large black holes bigger than $10^{12}\,M_{\odot}$ could also be an interesting dark component.

  68 citations