Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Physical representations for scattering amplitudes and the wavefunction of the universe

  Paolo Benincasa, William J. Torres Bobadilla

  SciPost Phys. 12, 192 (2022) · published 10 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The way we organise perturbation theory is of fundamental importance both for computing the observables of relevance and for extracting fundamental physics out of them. If on one hand the different ways in which the perturbative observables can be written make manifest different features ({\it e.g.} symmetries as well as principles such as unitarity, causality and locality), on the other hand precisely demanding that some concrete features are manifest lead to different ways of organising perturbation theory. In the context of flat-space scattering amplitudes, a number of them are already known and exploited, while much less is known for cosmological observables. In the present work, we show how to systematically write down both the wavefunction of the universe and the flat-space scattering amplitudes, in such a way that they manifestly show physical poles only. We make use of the invariant definition of such observables in terms of {\it cosmological polytopes} and their {\it scattering facet}. In particular, we show that such representations correspond to triangulations of such objects through hyperplanes identified by the intersection of their facets outside of them. All possible triangulations of this type generate the different representations. This allows us to provide a general proof for the conjectured all-loop causal representation of scattering amplitudes. Importantly, all such representations can be viewed as making explicit a subset of compatible singularities, and our construction provides a way to extend Steinmann relations to higher codimension singularities for both the flat-space scattering amplitudes and the cosmological wavefunction.

  9 citations

• $\mathrm{T}\overline{\mathrm{T}}$-deformed 1d Bose gas

  Yunfeng Jiang

  SciPost Phys. 12, 191 (2022) · published 10 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  $\mathrm{T}\overline{\mathrm{T}}$ deformation was originally proposed as an irrelevant solvable deformation for 2d relativistic quantum field theories (QFTs). The same family of deformations can also be defined for integrable quantum spin chains which was first studied in the context of integrability in AdS/CFT. In this paper, we construct such deformations for yet another type of models, which describe a collection of particles moving in 1d and interacting in an integrable manner. The prototype of such models is the Lieb-Liniger model. This shows that such deformations can be defined for a very wide range of systems. We study the finite volume spectrum and thermodynamics of the $\mathrm{T}\overline{\mathrm{T}}$-deformed Lieb-Liniger model. We find that for one sign of the deformation parameter $(\lambda<0)$, the deformed spectrum becomes complex when the volume of the system is smaller than certain critical value, signifying the break down of UV physics. For the other sign $(\lambda>0)$, there exists an upper bound for the temperature, similar to the Hagedorn behavior of the $\mathrm{T}\overline{\mathrm{T}}$ deformed QFTs. Both behaviors can be attributed to the fact that $\mathrm{T}\overline{\mathrm{T}}$ deformation changes the size the particles. We show that for $\lambda>0$, the deformation increases the spaces between particles which effectively increases the volume of the system. For $\lambda<0$, $\mathrm{T}\overline{\mathrm{T}}$ deformation fattens point particles to finite size hard rods. This is similar to the observation that the action of $\mathrm{T}\overline{\mathrm{T}}$-deformed free boson is the Nambu-Goto action, which describes bosonic strings -- also an extended object with finite size.

  13 citations

• Relativistic reduced density matrix functional theory.

  Mauricio Rodríguez-Mayorga, Klaas J.H. Giesbertz, Lucas Visscher

  SciPost Chem. 1, 004 (2022) · published 10 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  As a new approach to efficiently describe correlation effects in the relativistic quantum world we propose to consider reduced density matrix functional theory, where the key quantity is the first-order reduced density matrix (1-RDM). In this work, we first introduce the theoretical foundations to extend the applicability of this theory to the relativistic domain. Then, using the so-called no-pair (np) approximation, we arrive at an approximate treatment of the relativistic effects by focusing on electronic wavefunctions and neglecting explicit contributions from positrons. Within the np approximation the theory becomes similar to the nonrelativistic case, with as unknown only the functional that describes the electron-electron interactions in terms of the 1-RDM. This requires the construction of functional approximations, and we therefore also present the relativistic versions of some common RDMFT approximations that are used in the nonrelativistic context and discuss their properties.

  11 citations

• The extraordinary boundary transition in the 3d O(N) model via conformal bootstrap

  Jaychandran Padayasi, Abijith Krishnan, Max A. Metlitski, Ilya A. Gruzberg, Marco Meineri

  SciPost Phys. 12, 190 (2022) · published 9 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  This paper studies the critical behavior of the 3d classical $\mathrm{O}(N)$ model with a boundary. Recently, one of us established that upon treating $N$ as a continuous variable, there exists a critical value $N_c > 2$ such that for $2 \leq N < N_c$ the model exhibits a new extraordinary-log boundary universality class, if the symmetry preserving interactions on the boundary are enhanced. $N_c$ is determined by a ratio of universal amplitudes in the normal universality class, where instead a symmetry breaking field is applied on the boundary. We study the normal universality class using the numerical conformal bootstrap. We find truncated solutions to the crossing equation that indicate $N_c \approx 5$. Additionally, we use semi-definite programming to place rigorous bounds on the boundary CFT data of interest to conclude that $N_c > 3$, under a certain positivity assumption which we check in various perturbative limits.

  37 citations

• Destruction of localization by thermal inclusions: Anomalous transport and Griffiths effects in the Anderson and André-Aubry-Harper models

  Xhek Turkeshi, Damien Barbier, Leticia F. Cugliandolo, Marco Schirò, Marco Tarzia

  SciPost Phys. 12, 189 (2022) · published 9 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We discuss and compare two recently proposed toy models for anomalous transport and Griffiths effects in random systems near the Many-Body Localization transitions: the random dephasing model, which adds thermal inclusions in an Anderson Insulator as local Markovian dephasing channels that heat up the system, and the random Gaussian Orthogonal Ensemble (GOE) approach which models them in terms of ensembles of random regular graphs. For these two settings we discuss and compare transport and dissipative properties and their statistics. We show that both types of dissipation lead to similar Griffiths-like phenomenology, with the GOE bath being less effective in thermalising the system due to its finite bandwidth. We then extend these models to the case of a quasi-periodic potential as described by the André-Aubry-Harper model coupled to random thermal inclusions, that we show to display, for large strength of the quasiperiodic potential, a similar phenomenology to the one of the purely random case. In particular, we show the emergence of subdiffusive transport and broad statistics of the local density of states, suggestive of Griffiths like effects arising from the interplay between quasiperiodic localization and random coupling to the baths.

  4 citations

• Symmetries, safety, and self-supervision

  Barry M. Dillon, Gregor Kasieczka, Hans Olischlager, Tilman Plehn, Peter Sorrenson, Lorenz Vogel

  SciPost Phys. 12, 188 (2022) · published 9 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Collider searches face the challenge of defining a representation of high-dimensional data such that physical symmetries are manifest, the discriminating features are retained, and the choice of representation is new-physics agnostic. We introduce JetCLR to solve the mapping from low-level data to optimized observables though self-supervised contrastive learning. As an example, we construct a data representation for top and QCD jets using a permutation-invariant transformer-encoder network and visualize its symmetry properties. We compare the JetCLR representation with alternative representations using linear classifier tests and find it to work quite well.

  18 citations

• Comparing machine learning and interpolation methods for loop-level calculations

  Ibrahim Chahrour, James D. Wells

  SciPost Phys. 12, 187 (2022) · published 8 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The need to approximate functions is ubiquitous in science, either due to empirical constraints or high computational cost of accessing the function. In high-energy physics, the precise computation of the scattering cross-section of a process requires the evaluation of computationally intensive integrals. A wide variety of methods in machine learning have been used to tackle this problem, but often the motivation of using one method over another is lacking. Comparing these methods is typically highly dependent on the problem at hand, so we specify to the case where we can evaluate the function a large number of times, after which quick and accurate evaluation can take place. We consider four interpolation and three machine learning techniques and compare their performance on three toy functions, the four-point scalar Passarino-Veltman $D_0$ function, and the two-loop self-energy master integral $M$. We find that in low dimensions ($d = 3$), traditional interpolation techniques like the Radial Basis Function perform very well, but in higher dimensions ($d=5, 6, 9$) we find that multi-layer perceptrons (a.k.a neural networks) do not suffer as much from the curse of dimensionality and provide the fastest and most accurate predictions.

  9 citations

• The 3d twisted index and wall-crossing

  Mathew Bullimore, Andrea E.V. Ferrari, Heeyeon Kim

  SciPost Phys. 12, 186 (2022) · published 8 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the twisted index of 3d $\mathcal{N}=2$ supersymmetric gauge theories on $S^1 \times \Sigma$ in the presence of a real FI parameter deformation. This parameter induces a 1d FI parameter for the effective supersymmetric quantum mechanics on $S^1$. Using supersymmetric localisation, the twisted index can be expressed as a contour integral. We show that the contour prescription is modified in the presence of the 1d FI parameter, leading to wall-crossing phenomena for the twisted index. In particular, we derive a general wall-crossing formula for abelian gauge theories. We also examine the origin of wall-crossing as change of stability condition in the algebro-geometric interpretation of the twisted index. These ideas are illustrated for abelian theories with $\mathcal{N}=4$ supersymmetry and in a non-abelian example that reproduces wall-crossing phenomena associated to moduli spaces of stable pairs.

  6 citations

• On the generalizability of artificial neural networks in spin models

  Hon Man Yau, Nan Su

  SciPost Phys. Core 5, 032 (2022) · published 8 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The applicability of artificial neural networks (ANNs) is typically limited to the models they are trained with and little is known about their generalizability, which is a pressing issue in the practical application of trained ANNs to unseen problems. Here, by using the task of identifying phase transitions in spin models, we establish a systematic generalizability such that simple ANNs trained with the two-dimensional ferromagnetic Ising model can be applied to the ferromagnetic q-state Potts model in different dimensions for q>=2. The same scheme can be applied to the highly nontrivial antiferromagnetic q-state Potts model. We demonstrate that similar results can be obtained by reducing the exponentially large state space spanned by the training data to one that comprises only three representative configurations artificially constructed through symmetry considerations. We expect our findings to simplify and accelerate the development of machine learning-assisted tasks in spin-model related disciplines in physics and materials science.

  5 citations

• Shallow trimers of two identical fermions and one particle in resonant regimes

  Pascal Naidon, Ludovic Pricoupenko, Christiane Schmickler

  SciPost Phys. 12, 185 (2022) · published 7 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We consider two identical fermions interacting in the p-wave channel. Each fermion also interacts with another particle in the vicinity of an s-wave resonance. We find that in addition to the Kartavtsev-Malykh universal trimer states resulting from the s-wave particle-fermion interaction, the fermion-fermion p-wave interaction induces one or two shallow trimers in a large domain of the control parameters, including a borromean regime where the ground-state trimer exists in the absence of dimers at any mass ratio between the fermions and the particle. A generic picture of the trimer spectrum emerges from this work in terms of the low-energy parameters of the interactions.

  4 citations