Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• (Inter)racialisation: the regulation of domestic and urban space in housing North-African migrants in 1960s and 1970s France

  Rébecca Suzanne Franco

  Mig. Pol. 1, 003 (2022) · published 25 May 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Literature on immigrant housing and assimilation has shown how housing policies perpetuate, create and contest racial boundaries. This paper argues for the necessity to look at the regulation of domestic space together with the regulation of the urban space. By reading “along” and “against” the archival grain, this paper looks at housing policies that targeted the North-African migrant population in the 1960s and 1970s in France as colonial continuities. French authorities ostensibly encouraged gendered assimilation through spatial politics and interventions in the domestic space. Literature on the French context has shown how this perpetuated racialisation in the housing process. Building upon feminist scholarship on gender, intimacy, and colonialism, this paper shows how these policies did not acknowledge interracialised households and prevented interracialised intimacies. This helps understand how housing policies can reinforce racialised exclusion by regulating racial boundaries in the urban space and the domestic space together.

• Fingerprints of hot-phonon physics in time-resolved correlated quantum lattice dynamics

  Emmanuele Cappelluti, Dino Novko

  SciPost Phys. 12, 173 (2022) · published 24 May 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The time dynamics of the energy flow from electronic to lattice degrees of freedom in pump-probe setups could be strongly affected by the presence of a hot-phonon bottleneck, which can sustain longer coherence of the optically excited electronic states. Recently, hot-phonon physics has been experimentally observed and theoretically described in MgB$_2$, the electron-phonon based superconductor with $T_{\rm c}\approx 39$ K. By employing a combined ab-initio and quantum-field-theory approach and by taking MgB$_2$ as an example, here we propose a novel path for revealing the presence and characterizing the properties of hot phonons through a direct analysis of the information encoded in the lattice inter-atomic correlations. Such method exploits the underlying symmetry of the $E_{2g}$ hot modes characterized by a out-of-phase in-plane motion of the two boron atoms. Since hot phonons occur typically at high-symmetry points of the Brillouin zone, with specific symmetries of the lattice displacements, the present analysis is quite general and it could aid in revealing the hot-phonon physics in other promising materials, such as graphene, boron nitride, or black phosphorus.

  3 citations

• Argyres-Douglas theories in class S without irregularity

  Christopher Beem, Wolfger Peelaers

  SciPost Phys. 12, 172 (2022) · published 24 May 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We make a preliminary investigation into twisted $A_{2n}$ theories of class S. Contrary to a common piece of folklore, we establish that theories of this type realise a variety of models of Argyres-Douglas type while utilising only regular punctures. We present an in-depth analysis of all twisted $A_2$ trinion theories, analyse their interrelations via partial Higgsing, and discuss some of their generalised S-dualities.

  9 citations

• Audible axions with a booster: Stochastic gravitational waves from rotating ALPs

  Eric Madge, Wolfram Ratzinger, Daniel Schmitt, Pedro Schwaller

  SciPost Phys. 12, 171 (2022) · published 24 May 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Gravitational waves provide a novel way to probe axions or axion-like particles coupled to a dark photon field, even in the absence of couplings to Standard Model particles. In the conventional misalignment mechanism, the generation of an observable stochastic gravitational wave background, however, requires large axion decay constants. We here investigate the gravitational wave signal generated within the kinetic misalignment scenario, where the axion is assumed to have a large initial velocity. Its kinetic energy then provides a sufficiently high energy budget to generate a detectable gravitational wave signal also at lower values of the decay constant. We obtain an analytic estimate as well as perform numerical simulations of the corresponding gravitational wave signal, and evaluate its detectability at current and future gravitational wave observatories. We further present the corresponding projected constraints on the parameter space of the model, along with the parameter regions in which the dark photon or axion constitute dark matter, or in which the baryon asymmetry of the Universe is generated via the axiogenesis mechanism. Finally we compute the GW production from the fragmentation of rotating axions, which is however difficult to observe experimentally.

  15 citations

• Hidden conformal symmetries from Killing towers with an application to large-D/CFT

  Cynthia Keeler, Victoria Martin, Alankrita Priya

  SciPost Phys. 12, 170 (2022) · published 23 May 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We generalize the notion of hidden conformal symmetry in Kerr/CFT to Kerr-(A)dS black holes in arbitrary dimensions. We build the SL(2, R) generators directly from the Killing tower, whose Killing tensors and Killing vectors enforce the separability of the equations of motion. Our construction amounts to an explicit relationship between hidden conformal symmetries and Killing tensors: we use the Killing tower to build a novel tensor equation connecting the SL(2,R) Casimir with the radial Klein-Gordon operator. For asymptotically flat black holes in four and five dimensions we recover previously known results that were obtained using the "near-region" limit and the monodromy method. We then perform a monodromy evaluation of the Klein-Gordon scalar wave equation for all Kerr-(A)dS black holes, finding explicit forms for the zero mode symmetry generators. We also extend this analysis to the large-dimensional Schwarzschild black hole as a step towards buliding a Large-D/CFT correspondence.

  4 citations

• New directions in the search for dark matter

  Surjeet Rajendran

  SciPost Phys. Lect. Notes 56 (2022) · published 23 May 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The identification of the nature of dark matter is one of the most important problems confronting particle physics. Current observational constraints permit the mass of the dark matter to range from $\sim 10^{-22}$ eV - $10^{48}$ GeV. Given the weak nature of these bounds and the ease with which dark matter models can be constructed, it is clear that the problem can only be solved experimentally. In these lectures, I discuss methods to experimentally probe a wide range of dark matter candidates.

  3 citations

• Landau levels in curved space realized in strained graphene

  Glenn Wagner, Fernando de Juan, Dung X. Nguyen

  SciPost Phys. Core 5, 029 (2022) · published 23 May 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The quantum Hall effect in curved space has been the subject of many theoretical investigations in the past, but devising a physical system to observe this effect is hard. Many works have indicated that electronic excitations in strained graphene realize Dirac fermions in curved space in the presence of a background pseudo-gauge field, providing an ideal playground for this. However, the absence of a direct matching between a numerical, strained tight-binding calculation of an observable and the corresponding curved space prediction has hindered realistic predictions. In this work, we provide this matching by deriving the low-energy Hamiltonian from the tight-binding model analytically to second order in the strain and mapping it to the curved-space Dirac equation. Using a strain profile that produces a constant pseudo-magnetic field and a constant curvature, we compute the Landau level spectrum with real-space numerical tight-binding calculations and find excellent agreement with the prediction of the quantum Hall effect in curved space. We conclude discussing experimental schemes for measuring this effect.

  3 citations

• Dilaton in scalar QFT: a no-go theorem in 4-epsilon and 3-epsilon dimensions

  Daniel Nogradi, Balint Ozsvath

  SciPost Phys. 12, 169 (2022) · published 20 May 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Spontaneous scale invariance breaking and the associated Goldstone boson, the dilaton, is investigated in renormalizable, unitary, interacting non-supersymmetric scalar field theories in $4-\varepsilon$ dimensions. At leading order it is possible to construct models which give rise to spontaneous scale invariance breaking classically and indeed a massless dilaton can be identified. Beyond leading order, in order to have no anomalous scale symmetry breaking in QFT, the models need to be defined at a Wilson-Fisher fixed point with exact conformal symmetry. It is shown that this requirement on the couplings is incompatible with having the type of flat direction which would be necessary for an exactly massless dilaton. As a result spontaneous scale symmetry breaking and an exactly massless dilaton can not occur in renormalizable, unitary $4-\varepsilon$ dimensional scalar QFT. The arguments apply to $\phi^6$ theory in $3-\varepsilon$ dimensions as well.

  1 citation

• Probabilistically violating the first law of thermodynamics in a quantum heat engine

  Timo Kerremans, Peter Samuelsson, Patrick P. Potts

  SciPost Phys. 12, 168 (2022) · published 20 May 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Fluctuations of thermodynamic observables, such as heat and work, contain relevant information on the underlying physical process. These fluctuations are however not taken into account in the traditional laws of thermodynamics. While the second law is extended to fluctuating systems by the celebrated fluctuation theorems, the first law is generally believed to hold even in the presence of fluctuations. Here we show that in the presence of quantum fluctuations, also the first law of thermodynamics may break down. This happens because quantum mechanics imposes constraints on the knowledge of heat and work. To illustrate our results, we provide a detailed case-study of work and heat fluctuations in a quantum heat engine based on a circuit QED architecture. We find probabilistic violations of the first law and show that they are closely connected to quantum signatures related to negative quasi-probabilities. Our results imply that in the presence of quantum fluctuations, the first law of thermodynamics may not be applicable to individual experimental runs.

  8 citations

• Dark Matter direct detection of classical WIMPs

  Jodi Cooley

  SciPost Phys. Lect. Notes 55 (2022) · published 20 May 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  One of the highest priorities in particle physics today is the identification of the constituents of dark matter. This manuscript is a supplement to pedagogical lectures given at the 2021 Les Houches Summer School on Dark Matter. The lectures cover topics related to the direct detection of WIMP dark matter, including the distribution of dark matter, nuclear scattering, backgrounds, planning and designing of experiments, and a sampling of planned and ongoing experiments.

  5 citations