Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Dynamic decay and superadiabatic forces in the van Hove dynamics of bulk hard sphere fluids

  Lucas L. Treffenstädt, Thomas Schindler, Matthias Schmidt

  SciPost Phys. 12, 133 (2022) · published 20 April 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the dynamical decay of the van Hove function of Brownian hard spheres using event-driven Brownian dynamics simulations and dynamic test particle theory. Relevant decays mechanisms include deconfinement of the self particle, decay of correlation shells, and shell drift. Comparison to results for the Lennard-Jones system indicates the generality of these mechanisms for dense overdamped liquids. We use dynamical density functional theory on the basis of the Rosenfeld functional with self interaction correction. Superadiabatic forces are analysed using a recent power functional approximation. The power functional yields a modified Einstein long-time self diffusion coefficient in good agreement with simulation data.

  4 citations

• Associative bond swaps in molecular dynamics

  Simone Ciarella, Wouter G. Ellenbroek

  SciPost Phys. 12, 128 (2022) · published 12 April 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We implement a three-body potential to model associative bond swaps, and release it as part of the HOOMD-blue software. The use of a three-body potential to model swaps has been proven to be effective and has recently provided useful insights into the mechanics and dynamics of adaptive network materials such as vitrimers. It is elegant because it can be used in plain molecular dynamics simulations without the need for topology-altering Monte Carlo steps, and naturally represents typical physical features such as slip-bond behavior. It is easily tunable with a single parameter to control the average swap rate. Here, we show how associative bond swaps can be used to speed up the equilibration of systems that self-assemble by avoiding traps and pitfalls, corresponding to long-lived metastable configurations. Our results demonstrate the possibilities of these swaps not only for modeling systems that are associative by nature, but also for increasing simulation efficiency in other systems that are modellable in HOOMD-blue.

  2 citations

• Information Scrambling with Conservation Laws

  Jonah Kudler-Flam, Ramanjit Sohal, Laimei Nie

  SciPost Phys. 12, 117 (2022) · published 4 April 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The delocalization or scrambling of quantum information has emerged as a central ingredient in the understanding of thermalization in isolated quantum many-body systems. Recently, significant progress has been made analytically by modeling non-integrable systems as stochastic systems, lacking a Hamiltonian picture, while honest Hamiltonian dynamics are frequently limited to small system sizes due to computational constraints. In this paper, we address this by investigating the role of conservation laws (including energy conservation) in the thermalization process from an information-theoretic perspective. For general non-integrable models, we use the equilibrium approximation to show that the maximal amount of information is scrambled (as measured by the tripartite mutual information of the time-evolution operator) at late times even when a system conserves energy. In contrast, we explicate how when a system has additional symmetries that lead to degeneracies in the spectrum, the amount of information scrambled must decrease. This general theory is exemplified in case studies of holographic conformal field theories (CFTs) and the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model. Due to the large Virasoro symmetry in 1+1D CFTs, we argue that, in a sense, these holographic theories are not maximally chaotic, which is explicitly seen by the non-saturation of the second R\'enyi tripartite mutual information. The roles of particle-hole and U(1) symmetries in the SYK model are milder due to the degeneracies being only two-fold, which we confirm explicitly at both large- and small-$N$. We reinterpret the operator entanglement in terms the growth of local operators, connecting our results with the information scrambling described by out-of-time-ordered correlators, identifying the mechanism for suppressed scrambling from the Heisenberg perspective.

  11 citations

• Mechanisms for the emergence of Gaussian correlations

  Marek Gluza, Thomas Schweigler, Mohammadamin Tajik, João Sabino, Federica Cataldini, Frederik S. Møller, Si-Cong Ji, Bernhard Rauer, Jörg Schmiedmayer, Jens Eisert, Spyros Sotiriadis

  SciPost Phys. 12, 113 (2022) · published 30 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We comprehensively investigate two distinct mechanisms leading to memory loss of non-Gaussian correlations after switching off the interactions in an isolated quantum system undergoing out-of-equilibrium dynamics. The first mechanism is based on spatial scrambling and results in the emergence of locally Gaussian steady states in large systems evolving over long times. The second mechanism, characterized as `canonical transmutation', is based on the mixing of a pair of canonically conjugate fields, one of which initially exhibits non-Gaussian fluctuations while the other is Gaussian and dominates the dynamics, resulting in the emergence of relative Gaussianity even at finite system sizes and times. We evaluate signatures of the occurrence of the two candidate mechanisms in a recent experiment that has observed Gaussification in an atom-chip controlled ultracold gas and elucidate evidence that it is canonical transmutation rather than spatial scrambling that is responsible for Gaussification in the experiment. Both mechanisms are shown to share the common feature that the Gaussian correlations revealed dynamically by the quench are already present though practically inaccessible at the initial time. On the way, we present novel observations based on the experimental data, demonstrating clustering of equilibrium correlations, analyzing the dynamics of full counting statistics, and utilizing tomographic reconstructions of quantum field states. Our work aims at providing an accessible presentation of the potential of atom-chip experiments to explore fundamental aspects of quantum field theories in quantum simulations.

  5 citations

• Detection of Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition via Generative Adversarial Networks

  Daniele Contessi, Elisa Ricci, Alessio Recati, Matteo Rizzi

  SciPost Phys. 12, 107 (2022) · published 25 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The detection of phase transitions in quantum many-body systems with lowest possible prior knowledge of their details is among the most rousing goals of the flourishing application of machine-learning techniques to physical questions. Here, we train a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) with the Entanglement Spectrum of a system bipartition, as extracted by means of Matrix Product States ans\"atze. We are able to identify gapless-to-gapped phase transitions in different one-dimensional models by looking at the machine inability to reconstruct outsider data with respect to the training set. We foresee that GAN-based methods will become instrumental in anomaly detection schemes applied to the determination of phase-diagrams.

  4 citations

• Partial thermalisation of a two-state system coupled to a finite quantum bath

  Philip J. D. Crowley, Anushya Chandran

  SciPost Phys. 12, 103 (2022) · published 23 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The eigenstate thermalisation hypothesis (ETH) is a statistical characterisation of eigen-energies, eigenstates and matrix elements of local operators in thermalising quantum systems. We develop an ETH-like ansatz of a partially thermalising system composed of a spin-1/2 coupled to a finite quantum bath. The spin-bath coupling is sufficiently weak that ETH does not apply, but sufficiently strong that perturbation theory fails. We calculate (i) the distribution of fidelity susceptibilities, which takes a broadly distributed form, (ii) the distribution of spin eigenstate entropies, which takes a bi-modal form, (iii) infinite time memory of spin observables, (iv) the distribution of matrix elements of local operators on the bath, which is non-Gaussian, and (v) the intermediate entropic enhancement of the bath, which interpolates smoothly between zero and the ETH value of log 2. The enhancement is a consequence of rare many-body resonances, and is asymptotically larger than the typical eigenstate entanglement entropy. We verify these results numerically and discuss their connections to the many-body localisation transition.

  7 citations

• Algebraic theory of quantum synchronization and limit cycles under dissipation

  Berislav Buča, Cameron Booker, Dieter Jaksch

  SciPost Phys. 12, 097 (2022) · published 17 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Synchronization is a phenomenon where interacting particles lock their motion and display non-trivial dynamics. Despite intense efforts studying synchronization in systems without clear classical limits, no comprehensive theory has been found. We develop such a general theory based on novel necessary and sufficient algebraic criteria for persistently oscillating eigenmodes (limit cycles) of time-independent quantum master equations. We show these eigenmodes must be quantum coherent and give an exact analytical solution for all such dynamics in terms of a dynamical symmetry algebra. Using our theory, we study both stable synchronization and metastable/transient synchronization. We use our theory to fully characterise spontaneous synchronization of autonomous systems. Moreover, we give compact algebraic criteria that may be used to prove absence of synchronization. We demonstrate synchronization in several systems relevant for various fermionic cold atom experiments.

  55 citations

• Statistical mechanics of coupled supercooled liquids in finite dimensions

  Benjamin Guiselin, Ludovic Berthier, Gilles Tarjus

  SciPost Phys. 12, 091 (2022) · published 14 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the statistical mechanics of supercooled liquids when the system evolves at a temperature $T$ with a field $\epsilon$ linearly coupled to its overlap with a reference configuration of the same liquid sampled at a temperature $T_0$. We use mean-field theory to fully characterize the influence of the reference temperature $T_0$, and we mainly study the case of a fixed, low-$T_0$ value in computer simulations. We numerically investigate the extended phase diagram in the $(\epsilon,T)$ plane of model glass-forming liquids in spatial dimensions $d=2$ and $d=3$, relying on umbrella sampling and reweighting techniques. For both $2d$ and $3d$ cases, a similar phenomenology with nontrivial thermodynamic fluctuations of the overlap is observed at low temperatures, but a detailed finite-size analysis reveals qualitatively distinct behaviors. We establish the existence of a first-order transition line for nonzero $\epsilon$ ending in a critical point in the universality class of the random-field Ising model (RFIM) in $d=3$. In $d=2$ instead, no phase transition is found in large enough systems at least down to temperatures below the extrapolated calorimetric glass transition temperature $T_g$. Our results confirm that glass-forming liquid samples of limited size display the thermodynamic fluctuations expected for finite systems undergoing a random first-order transition. They also support the relevance of the physics of the RFIM for supercooled liquids, which may then explain the qualitative difference between $2d$ and $3d$ glass-formers.

  17 citations

• Random quench predicts universal properties of amorphous solids

  Masanari Shimada, Eric De Giuli

  SciPost Phys. 12, 090 (2022) · published 11 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Amorphous solids display numerous universal features in their mechanics, structure, and response. Current models assume heterogeneity in mesoscale elastic properties, but require fine-tuning in order to quantitatively explain vibrational properties. A complete model should derive the magnitude and character of elastic heterogeneity from an initially structureless medium, through a model of the quenching process during which the temperature is rapidly lowered and the solid is formed. Here we propose a field-theoretic model of a quench, and compute structural, mechanical, and vibrational observables in arbitrary dimension $d$. This allows us to relate the properties of the amorphous solid to those of the initial medium, and to those of the quench. We show that previous mean-field results are subsumed by our analysis and unify spatial fluctuations of elastic moduli, long-range correlations of inherent state stress, universal vibrational anomalies, and localized modes into one picture.

  7 citations

• Coarse-grained curvature tensor on polygonal surfaces

  Charlie Duclut, Aboutaleb Amiri, Joris Paijmans, Frank Jülicher

  SciPost Phys. Core 5, 011 (2022) · published 11 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Using concepts from integral geometry, we propose a definition for a local coarse-grained curvature tensor that is well-defined on polygonal surfaces. This coarse-grained curvature tensor shows fast convergence to the curvature tensor of smooth surfaces, capturing with accuracy not only the principal curvatures but also the principal directions of curvature. Thanks to the additivity of the integrated curvature tensor, coarse-graining procedures can be implemented to compute it over arbitrary patches of polygons. When computed for a closed surface, the integrated curvature tensor is identical to a rank-2 Minkowski tensor. We also provide an algorithm to extend an existing C++ package, that can be used to compute efficiently local curvature tensors on triangulated surfaces.

  2 citations