Publications

Order by: publication date number of 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.

  16 citations

• Probing proton structure at the Large Hadron electron Collider

  Rabah Abdul Khalek, Shaun Bailey, Jun Gao, Lucian Harland-Lang, Juan Rojo

  SciPost Phys. 7, 051 (2019) · published 17 October 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  For the foreseeable future, the exploration of the high-energy frontier will be the domain of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Of particular significance will be its high-luminosity upgrade (HL-LHC), which will operate until the mid-2030s. In this endeavour, for the full exploitation of the HL-LHC physics potential an improved understanding of the parton distribution functions (PDFs) of the proton is critical. The HL-LHC program would be uniquely complemented by the proposed Large Hadron electron Collider (LHeC), a high-energy lepton-proton and lepton-nucleus collider based at CERN. In this work, we build on our recent PDF projections for the HL-LHC to assess the constraining power of the LHeC measurements of inclusive and heavy quark structure functions. We find that the impact of the LHeC would be significant, reducing PDF uncertainties by up to an order of magnitude in comparison to state-of-the-art global fits. In comparison to the HL-LHC projections, the PDF constraints from the LHeC are in general more significant for small and intermediate values of the momentum fraction x. At higher values of x, the impact of the LHeC and HL-LHC data is expected to be of a comparable size, with the HL-LHC constraints being more competitive in some cases, and the LHeC ones in others. Our results illustrate the encouraging complementarity of the HL-LHC and the LHeC in terms of charting the quark and gluon structure of the proton.

  16 citations

• Dynamics of a colloidal particle coupled to a Gaussian field: from a confinement-dependent to a non-linear memory

  Urna Basu, Vincent Démery, Andrea Gambassi

  SciPost Phys. 13, 078 (2022) · published 3 October 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The effective dynamics of a colloidal particle immersed in a complex medium is often described in terms of an overdamped linear Langevin equation for its velocity with a memory kernel which determines the effective (time-dependent) friction and the correlations of fluctuations. Recently, it has been shown in experiments and numerical simulations that this memory may depend on the possible optical confinement the particle is subject to, suggesting that this description does not capture faithfully the actual dynamics of the colloid, even at equilibrium. Here, we propose a different approach in which we model the medium as a Gaussian field linearly coupled to the colloid. The resulting effective evolution equation of the colloidal particle features a non-linear memory term which extends previous models and which explains qualitatively the experimental and numerical evidence in the presence of confinement. This non-linear term is related to the correlations of the effective noise via a novel fluctuation-dissipation relation which we derive.

  16 citations

• Large second-order Josephson effect in planar superconductor-semiconductor junctions

  P. Zhang, A. Zarassi, L. Jarjat, V. Van de Sande, M. Pendharkar, J. S. Lee, C. P. Dempsey, A. P. McFadden, S. D. Harrington, J. T. Dong, H. Wu, A. -H. Chen, M. Hocevar, C. J. Palmstrøm, S. M. Frolov

  SciPost Phys. 16, 030 (2024) · published 25 January 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate the current-phase relations of Al/InAs-quantum well planar Josephson junctions fabricated using nanowire shadowing technique. Based on several experiments, we conclude that the junctions exhibit an unusually large second-order Josephson harmonic, the $\sin(2\varphi)$ term. First, superconducting quantum interference devices (dc-SQUIDs) show half-periodic oscillations, tunable by gate voltages as well as magnetic flux. Second, Josephson junction devices exhibit kinks near half-flux quantum in supercurrent diffraction patterns. Third, half-integer Shapiro steps are present in the junctions. Similar phenomena are observed in Sn/InAs quantum well devices. We perform data fitting to a numerical model with a two-component current phase relation. Analysis including a loop inductance suggests that the sign of the second harmonic term is negative. The microscopic origins of the observed effect remain to be understood. We consider alternative explanations which can account for some but not all of the evidence.

  16 citations

• Dissipation-driven integrable fermionic systems: from graded Yangians to exact nonequilibrium steady states

  Enej Ilievski

  SciPost Phys. 3, 031 (2017) · published 29 October 2017 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Using the Lindblad master equation approach, we investigate the structure of steady-state solutions of open integrable quantum lattice models, driven far from equilibrium by incoherent particle reservoirs attached at the boundaries. We identify a class of boundary dissipation processes which permits to derive exact steady-state density matrices in the form of graded matrix-product operators. All the solutions factorize in terms of vacuum analogues of Baxter's Q-operators which are realized in terms of non-unitary representations of certain finite dimensional subalgebras of graded Yangians. We present a unifying framework which allows to solve fermionic models and naturally incorporates higher-rank symmetries. This enables to explain underlying algebraic content behind most of the previously-found solutions.

  16 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.

  16 citations

• An optimal observable for color singlet identification

  Andy Buckley, Giuseppe Callea, Andrew J. Larkoski, Simone Marzani

  SciPost Phys. 9, 026 (2020) · published 26 August 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We present a novel approach to construct a color tagger, i.e. an observable that is able to discriminate the decay of a color-singlet into two jets from a two-jet background in a different color configuration. We do this by explicitly taking the ratio of the corresponding leading-order matrix elements in the soft limit, thus obtaining an observable that is provably optimal within our approximation. We call this observable the "jet color ring" and we compare its performance to other color-sensitive observables such as jet pull and dipolarity. We also assess the performance of the jet color ring in simulations by applying it to the case of the hadronic decays of a boosted Higgs boson and of an electroweak boson.

  16 citations

• The landscape of unfolding with machine learning

  Nathan Huetsch, Javier Mariño Villadamigo, Alexander Shmakov, Sascha Diefenbacher, Vinicius Mikuni, Theo Heimel, Michael Fenton, Kevin Greif, Benjamin Nachman, Daniel Whiteson, Anja Butter, Tilman Plehn

  SciPost Phys. 18, 070 (2025) · published 25 February 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Recent innovations from machine learning allow for data unfolding, without binning and including correlations across many dimensions. We describe a set of known, upgraded, and new methods for ML-based unfolding. The performance of these approaches are evaluated on the same two datasets. We find that all techniques are capable of accurately reproducing the particle-level spectra across complex observables. Given that these approaches are conceptually diverse, they offer an exciting toolkit for a new class of measurements that can probe the Standard Model with an unprecedented level of detail and may enable sensitivity to new phenomena.

  16 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.

  16 citations

• Scaling at quantum phase transitions above the upper critical dimension

  A. Langheld, J. A. Koziol, P. Adelhardt, S. C. Kapfer, K. P. Schmidt

  SciPost Phys. 13, 088 (2022) · published 10 October 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The hyperscaling relation and standard finite-size scaling (FSS) are known to break down above the upper critical dimension due to dangerous irrelevant variables. We establish a coherent formalism for FSS at quantum phase transitions above the upper critical dimension following the recently introduced Q-FSS formalism for thermal phase transitions. Contrary to long-standing belief, the correlation sector is affected by dangerous irrelevant variables. The presented formalism recovers a generalized hyperscaling relation and FSS form. Using this new FSS formalism, we determine the full set of critical exponents for the long-range transverse-field Ising chain in all criticality regimes ranging from the nearest-neighbor to the long-range mean field regime. For the same model, we also explicitly confirm the effect of dangerous irrelevant variables on the characteristic length scale.

  16 citations