Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Laughable borders: Making the case for the humorous in migration studies

  Anja K. Franck

  Mig. Pol. 1, 004 (2022) · published 14 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Humor is widely recognized as a fundamental aspect of the human experience, that has also played a vital role in the way marginalized groups comment on and mock power. Yet, in migration research the methodological and analytical value of humor has been largely overlooked. Rather, migration studies has commonly centered its analysis around suffering and tragedy and, in the process, depicted migrant trajectories as endeavors largely devoid of laughter, humor, irony and play. This article suggests that such humorless representations of the migration process – and indeed of the migrant subject itself – has broader implications for the types of knowledge that we (re)produce around migrants’ experiences, subjectivities and struggles. In fact, it argues that migration studies’ failure to recognize migrants as humorous individuals risks feeding into processes of exceptionalization and de-humanization through setting “the migrant” up as an obscure figure that lacks “essentially human” qualities. In order to make the case for the humorous in migration research, the article illustrates how refugees arriving to the Greek island of Lesvos in the early summer of 2015 laughed at their own predicament as well as the technologies put in place to control their freedom of movement and how their laughter, humor and comic displays did important political work in refusing subjugation, in speaking truth to power and in capturing the absurdity of the violence that they faced.

  7 citations

• Rényi entropies and negative central charges in non-Hermitian quantum systems

  Yi-Ting Tu, Yu-Chin Tzeng, Po-Yao Chang

  SciPost Phys. 12, 194 (2022) · published 13 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Quantum entanglement is one essential element to characterize many-body quantum systems. However, the entanglement measures are mostly discussed in Hermitian systems. Here, we propose a natural extension of entanglement and R\'enyi entropies to non-Hermitian quantum systems. There have been other proposals for the computation of these quantities, which are distinct from what is proposed in the current paper. We demonstrate the proposed entanglement quantities which are referred to as generic entanglement and R\'enyi entropies. These quantities capture the desired entanglement properties in non-Hermitian critical systems, where the low-energy properties are governed by the non-unitary conformal field theories (CFTs). We find excellent agreement between the numerical extrapolation of the negative central charges from the generic entanglement/R\'enyi entropy and the non-unitary CFT prediction. Furthermore, we apply the generic entanglement/R\'enyi entropy to symmetry-protected topological phases with non-Hermitian perturbations. We find the generic $n$-th R\'enyi entropy captures the expected entanglement property, whereas the traditional R\'enyi entropy can exhibit unnatural singularities due to its improper definition.

  19 citations

• Real-time ab initio description of the photon-echo mechanisms in extended systems: the case study of bulk GaAs

  Marco D'Alessandro, Davide Sangalli

  SciPost Phys. 12, 193 (2022) · published 13 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  In this paper we present an ab initio real-time analysis of free polarization decay and photon echo in extended systems. As a prototype material, we study bulk GaAs driven by ultra-short laser pulses of 10 fs (energy spread of 0.4 eV), with frequency tuned in the continuum of the optical spectrum. We compute the electronic polarization P(t), and define a computational procedure to extract the echo signal in the dipole approximation. Results are obtained in both the low and high field regime, and compared with a two-levels system (TLS) model, with parameters extracted from the ab initio simulations. ab initio results are in optimal agreement with the TLS in the low-field case, whereas some differences are observed in the high-field regime where the multi-band nature of GaAs becomes relevant. In the high field regime we compute the pulse area, and look for fluences with pulse area close to {\pi}. We highlight that such fluences are well below the damage threshold of GaAs. However a unique value of the area cannot be defined, due to the strong dependence of the transition dipoles in the energy window excited by the laser pulse.

• Page curves and bath deformations

  Elena Caceres, Arnab Kundu, Ayan K. Patra, Sanjit Shashi

  SciPost Phys. Core 5, 033 (2022) · published 13 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the black hole information problem within a semiclassically gravitating AdS$_d$ black hole coupled to and in equilibrium with a $d$-dimensional thermal conformal bath. We deform the bath state by a relevant scalar deformation, triggering a holographic RG flow whose “trans-IR” region deforms from a Schwarzschild geometry to a Kasner universe. The setup manifests two independent scales which control both the extent of coarse-graining and the entanglement dynamics when counting Hawking degrees of freedom in the bath. In tuning either, we find nontrivial changes to the Page time and Page curve. We consequently view the Page curve as a probe of the holographic RG flow, with a higher Page time manifesting as a result of increased coarse-graining of the bath degrees of freedom.

  19 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.

  10 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.

  16 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.

  12 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.

  43 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.

  25 citations