Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Emergence of PT-symmetry breaking in open quantum systems

  Julian Huber, Peter Kirton, Stefan Rotter, Peter Rabl

  SciPost Phys. 9, 052 (2020) · published 19 October 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The effect of PT-symmetry breaking in coupled systems with balanced gain and loss has recently attracted considerable attention and has been demonstrated in various photonic, electrical and mechanical systems in the classical regime. Here we generalize the definition of PT symmetry to finite-dimensional open quantum systems, which are described by a Markovian master equation. Specifically, we show that the invariance of this master equation under a certain symmetry transformation implies the existence of stationary states with preserved and broken parity symmetry. As the dimension of the Hilbert space grows, the transition between these two limiting phases becomes increasingly sharp and the classically expected PT-symmetry breaking transition is recovered. This quantum-to-classical correspondence allows us to establish a common theoretical framework to identify and accurately describe PT-symmetry breaking effects in a large variety of physical systems, operated both in the classical and quantum regimes.

  36 citations

• Self-consistent theory of many-body localisation in a quantum spin chain with long-range interactions

  Sthitadhi Roy, David E. Logan

  SciPost Phys. 7, 042 (2019) · published 3 October 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Many-body localisation is studied in a disordered quantum spin-1/2 chain with long-ranged power-law interactions, and distinct power-law exponents for interactions between longitudinal and transverse spin components. Using a self-consistent mean-field theory centring on the local propagator in Fock space and its associated self-energy, a localisation phase diagram is obtained as a function of the power-law exponents and the disorder strength of the random fields acting on longitudinal spin-components. Analytical results are corroborated using the well-studied and complementary numerical diagnostics of level statistics, entanglement entropy, and participation entropy, obtained via exact diagonalisation. We find that increasing the range of interactions between transverse spin components hinders localisation and enhances the critical disorder strength. In marked contrast, increasing the interaction range between longitudinal spin components is found to enhance localisation and lower the critical disorder.

  36 citations

• Entanglement spreading in non-equilibrium integrable systems

  Pasquale Calabrese

  SciPost Phys. Lect. Notes 20 (2020) · published 1 December 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  These are lecture notes for a short course given at the Les Houches Summer School on ``Integrability in Atomic and Condensed Matter Physics'', in summer 2018. Here, I pedagogically discuss recent advances in the study of the entanglement spreading during the non-equilibrium dynamics of isolated integrable quantum systems. I first introduce the idea that the stationary thermodynamic entropy is the entanglement accumulated during the non-equilibrium dynamics and then join such an idea with the quasiparticle picture for the entanglement spreading to provide quantitive predictions for the time evolution of the entanglement entropy in arbitrary integrable models, regardless of the interaction strength.

  35 citations

• Casting a graph net to catch dark showers

  Elias Bernreuther, Thorben Finke, Felix Kahlhoefer, Michael Krämer, Alexander Mück

  SciPost Phys. 10, 046 (2021) · published 23 February 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Strongly interacting dark sectors predict novel LHC signatures such as semi-visible jets resulting from dark showers that contain both stable and unstable dark mesons. Distinguishing such semi-visible jets from large QCD backgrounds is difficult and constitutes an exciting challenge for jet classification. In this article we explore the potential of supervised deep neural networks to identify semi-visible jets. We show that dynamic graph convolutional neural networks operating on so-called particle clouds outperform convolutional neural networks analysing jet images as well as other neural networks based on Lorentz vectors. We investigate how the performance depends on the properties of the dark shower and discuss training on mixed samples as a strategy to reduce model dependence. By modifying an existing mono-jet analysis we show that LHC sensitivity to dark sectors can be enhanced by more than an order of magnitude by using the dynamic graph network as a dark shower tagger.

  35 citations

• Integrable Matrix Product States from boundary integrability

  Balázs Pozsgay, Lorenzo Piroli, Eric Vernier

  SciPost Phys. 6, 062 (2019) · published 27 May 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We consider integrable Matrix Product States (MPS) in integrable spin chains and show that they correspond to "operator valued" solutions of the so-called twisted Boundary Yang-Baxter (or reflection) equation. We argue that the integrability condition is equivalent to a new linear intertwiner relation, which we call the "square root relation", because it involves half of the steps of the reflection equation. It is then shown that the square root relation leads to the full Boundary Yang-Baxter equations. We provide explicit solutions in a number of cases characterized by special symmetries. These correspond to the "symmetric pairs" $(SU(N),SO(N))$ and $(SO(N),SO(D)\otimes SO(N-D))$, where in each pair the first and second elements are the symmetry groups of the spin chain and the integrable state, respectively. These solutions can be considered as explicit representations of the corresponding twisted Yangians, that are new in a number of cases. Examples include certain concrete MPS relevant for the computation of one-point functions in defect AdS/CFT.

  35 citations

• Operator Entanglement in Local Quantum Circuits II: Solitons in Chains of Qubits

  Bruno Bertini, Pavel Kos, Tomaz Prosen

  SciPost Phys. 8, 068 (2020) · published 28 April 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We provide exact results for the dynamics of local-operator entanglement in quantum circuits with two-dimensional wires featuring ultralocal solitons, i.e. single-site operators which, up to a phase, are simply shifted by the time evolution. We classify all circuits allowing for ultralocal solitons and show that only dual-unitary circuits can feature moving ultralocal solitons. Then, we rigorously prove that if a circuit has an ultralocal soliton moving to the left (right), the entanglement of local operators initially supported on even (odd) sites saturates to a constant value and its dynamics can be computed exactly. Importantly, this does not bound the growth of complexity in chiral circuits, where solitons move only in one direction, say to the left. Indeed, in this case we observe numerically that operators on the odd sublattice have unbounded entanglement. Finally, we present a closed-form expression for the local-operator entanglement entropies in circuits with ultralocal solitons moving in both directions. Our results hold irrespectively of integrability.

  35 citations

• The Global Form of Flavor Symmetries and 2-Group Symmetries in 5d SCFTs

  Fabio Apruzzi, Sakura Schäfer-Nameki, Lakshya Bhardwaj, Jihwan Oh

  SciPost Phys. 13, 024 (2022) · published 17 August 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  2-group symmetries arise when 1-form symmetries and 0-form symmetries of a theory mix with each other under group multiplication. We discover the existence of 2-group symmetries in 5d N=1 abelian gauge theories arising on the (non-extended) Coulomb branch of 5d superconformal field theories (SCFTs), leading us to argue that the UV 5d SCFT itself admits a 2-group symmetry. Furthermore, our analysis determines the global forms of the 0-form flavor symmetry groups of 5d SCFTs, irrespective of whether or not the 5d SCFT admits a 1-form symmetry. As a concrete application of our method, we analyze 2-group symmetries of all 5d SCFTs, which reduce in the IR, after performing mass deformations, to 5d N=1 non-abelian gauge theories with simple, simply connected gauge groups. For rank-1 Seiberg theories, we check that our predictions for the flavor symmetry groups match with the superconformal and ray indices available in the literature. We also comment on the mixed 't Hooft anomaly between 1-form and 0-form symmetries arising in 5d N=1 non-abelian gauge theories and its relation to the 2-groups.

  35 citations

• Superfluids as higher-form anomalies

  Luca V. Delacrétaz, Diego M. Hofman, Grégoire Mathys

  SciPost Phys. 8, 047 (2020) · published 26 March 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We recast superfluid hydrodynamics as the hydrodynamic theory of a system with an emergent anomalous higher-form symmetry. The higher-form charge counts the winding planes of the superfluid — its constitutive relation replaces the Josephson relation of conventional superfluid hydrodynamics. This formulation puts all hydrodynamic equations on equal footing. The anomalous Ward identity can be used as an alternative starting point to prove the existence of a Goldstone boson, without reference to spontaneous symmetry breaking. This provides an alternative characterization of Landau phase transitions in terms of higher-form symmetries and their anomalies instead of how the symmetries are realized. This treatment is more general and, in particular, includes the case of BKT transitions. As an application of this formalism we construct the hydrodynamic theories of conventional (0-form) and 1-form superfluids.

  35 citations

• Why are fractional charges of orientifolds compatible with Dirac quantization?

  Yuji Tachikawa, Kazuya Yonekura

  SciPost Phys. 7, 058 (2019) · published 1 November 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Orientifold $p$-planes with $p\le4$ have fractional D$p$-charges, and therefore appear inconsistent with Dirac quantization with respect to D$(6-p)$-branes. We explain in detail how this issue is resolved by taking into account the anomaly of the worldvolume fermions using the $\eta$ invariants. We also point out relationships to the classification of interacting fermionic symmetry protected topological phases. In an appendix, we point out that the duality group of type IIB string theory is the pin+ version of the double cover of $GL(2,\mathbb{Z})$.

  35 citations

• Time-dependent study of disordered models with infinite projected entangled pair states

  Claudius Hubig, J. Ignacio Cirac

  SciPost Phys. 6, 031 (2019) · published 11 March 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Infinite projected entangled pair states (iPEPS), the tensor network ansatz for two-dimensional systems in the thermodynamic limit, already provide excellent results on ground-state quantities using either imaginary-time evolution or variational optimisation. Here, we show (i) the feasibility of real-time evolution in iPEPS to simulate the dynamics of an infinite system after a global quench and (ii) the application of disorder-averaging to obtain translationally invariant systems in the presence of disorder. To illustrate the approach, we study the short-time dynamics of the square lattice Heisenberg model in the presence of a bi-valued disorder field.

  35 citations