Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Towards traversable wormholes from force-free plasmas

  Nabil Iqbal, Simon F. Ross

  SciPost Phys. 12, 086 (2022) · published 9 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The near-horizon region of magnetically charged black holes can have very strong magnetic fields. A useful low-energy effective theory for fluctuations of the fields, coupled to electrically charged particles, is force-free electrodynamics. The low energy collective excitations include a large number of Alfven wave modes, which have a massless dispersion relation along the field worldlines. We attempt to construct traversable wormhole solutions using the negative Casimir energy of the Alfven wave modes, analogously to the recent construction using charged massless fermions. The behaviour of massless scalars in the near-horizon region implies that the size of the wormholes is strongly restricted and cannot be made large, even though the force free description is valid in a larger regime.

  3 citations

• Enstrophy from symmetry

  Raja Marjieh, Natalia Pinzani-Fokeeva, Amos Yarom

  SciPost Phys. 12, 085 (2022) · published 9 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study symmetry principles associated with the approximately conserved enstrophy current, responsible for the inverse energy cascade in non relativistic 2+1 dimensional turbulence. We do so by identifying the accidental symmetry associated with enstrophy current conservation in a recently realized effective action principle for hydrodynamics. Our analysis deals with both relativistic and non relativistic effective actions and their associated symmetries.

  3 citations

• Semi-local Bounds on Null Energy in QFT

  Jackson R. Fliss, Ben Freivogel

  SciPost Phys. 12, 084 (2022) · published 7 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate whether the null energy, averaged over some region of space- time, is bounded below in QFT. First, we use light-sheet quantization to prove a version of the “Smeared Null Energy Condition” (SNEC) proposed in [1], applicable for free and super-renormalizable QFT’s equipped with a UV cut- off. Through an explicit construction of squeezed states, we show that the SNEC bound cannot be improved by smearing on a light-sheet alone. We propose that smearing the null energy over two null directions defines an op- erator that is bounded below and independent of the UV cutoff, in what we call the “Double-Smeared Null Energy Condition,” or DSNEC. We indicate schematically how this bound behaves with respect to the smearing lengths and argue that the DSNEC displays a transition when the smearing lengths are comparable to the correlation length.

  4 citations

• Trapping effects in quantum atomic arrays

  Pengfei Zhang

  SciPost Phys. Core 5, 010 (2022) · published 7 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Quantum emitters, particularly atomic arrays with subwavelength lattice constant, have been proposed to be an ideal platform for studying the interplay between photons and electric dipoles. In this work, motivated by the recent experiment [1], we develop a microscopic quantum treatment using annihilation and creation operator of atoms in deep optical lattices. Using a diagrammatic approach on the Keldysh contour, we derive the cooperative scattering of the light and obtain the general formula for the $S$ matrix. We apply our method to study the trapping effect, which is beyond previous treatment with spin operators. If the optical lattices are formed by light fields with magical wavelength, the result matches previous results using spin operators. When there is a mismatch between the trapping potentials for atoms in the ground state and the excited state, atomic mirrors become imperfect, with multiple resonances in the optical response. We further study the effect of recoil for large but finite trapping frequency. Our results are consistent with existing experiments.

• Hyperbolic compactification of M-theory and de Sitter quantum gravity

  Giuseppe Bruno De Luca, Eva Silverstein, Gonzalo Torroba

  SciPost Phys. 12, 083 (2022) · published 4 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We present a mechanism for accelerated expansion of the universe in the generic case of negative-curvature compactifications of M-theory, with minimal ingredients. M-theory on a hyperbolic manifold with small closed geodesics supporting Casimir energy -- along with a single classical source (7-form flux) -- contains an immediate 3-term structure for volume stabilization at positive potential energy. Hyperbolic manifolds are well-studied mathematically, with an important rigidity property at fixed volume. They and their Dehn fillings to more general Einstein spaces exhibit explicit discrete parameters that yield small closed geodesics supporting Casimir energy. The off-shell effective potential derived by M. Douglas incorporates the warped product structure via the constraints of general relativity, screening negative energy. Analyzing the fields sourced by the localized Casimir energy and the available discrete choices of manifolds and fluxes, we find a regime where the net curvature, Casimir energy, and flux compete at large radius and stabilize the volume. Further metric and form field deformations are highly constrained by hyperbolic rigidity and warping effects, leading to calculations giving strong indications of a positive Hessian, and residual tadpoles are small. We test this via explicit back reacted solutions and perturbations in patches including the Dehn filling regions, initiate a neural network study of further aspects of the internal fields, and derive a Maldacena-Nunez style no-go theorem for Anti-de Sitter extrema. A simple generalization incorporating 4-form flux produces axion monodromy inflation. As a relatively simple de Sitter uplift of the large-N M2-brane theory, the construction applies to de Sitter holography as well as to cosmological modeling, and introduces new connections between mathematics and the physics of string/M theory compactifications.

  20 citations

• Circular Rosenzweig-Porter random matrix ensemble

  Wouter Buijsman, Yevgeny Bar Lev

  SciPost Phys. 12, 082 (2022) · published 3 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The Rosenzweig-Porter random matrix ensemble serves as a qualitative phenomenological model for the level statistics and fractality of eigenstates across the many-body localization transition in static systems. We propose a unitary (circular) analogue of this ensemble, which similarly captures the phenomenology of many-body localization in periodically driven (Floquet) systems. We define this ensemble as the outcome of a Dyson Brownian motion process. We show numerical evidence that this ensemble shares some key statistical properties with the Rosenzweig-Porter ensemble for both the eigenvalues and the eigenstates.

  14 citations

• The edge of chaos: quantum field theory and deep neural networks

  Kevin T. Grosvenor, Ro Jefferson

  SciPost Phys. 12, 081 (2022) · published 3 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We explicitly construct the quantum field theory corresponding to a general class of deep neural networks encompassing both recurrent and feedforward architectures. We first consider the mean-field theory (MFT) obtained as the leading saddlepoint in the action, and derive the condition for criticality via the largest Lyapunov exponent. We then compute the loop corrections to the correlation function in a perturbative expansion in the ratio of depth T to width N, and find a precise analogy with the well-studied O(N) vector model, in which the variance of the weight initializations plays the role of the 't Hooft coupling. In particular, we compute both the O(1) corrections quantifying fluctuations from typicality in the ensemble of networks, and the subleading O(T/N) corrections due to finite-width effects. These provide corrections to the correlation length that controls the depth to which information can propagate through the network, and thereby sets the scale at which such networks are trainable by gradient descent. Our analysis provides a first-principles approach to the rapidly emerging NN-QFT correspondence, and opens several interesting avenues to the study of criticality in deep neural networks.

  9 citations

• Annealed averages in spin and matrix models

  Laura Foini, Jorge Kurchan

  SciPost Phys. 12, 080 (2022) · published 3 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  A disordered system is denominated 'annealed' when the interactions themselves may evolve and adjust their values to lower the free energy. The opposite ('quenched') situation when disorder is fixed, is the one relevant for physical spin-glasses, and has received vastly more attention. Other problems however are more natural in the annealed situation: in this work we discuss examples where annealed averages are interesting, in the context of matrix models. We first discuss how in practice, when system and disorder adapt together, annealed systems develop `planted' solutions spontaneously, as the ones found in the study of inference problems. In the second part, we study the probability distribution of elements of a matrix derived from a rotationally invariant (not necessarily Gaussian) ensemble, a problem that maps into the annealed average of a spin glass model.

  4 citations

• Local measures of entanglement in black holes and CFTs

  Andrew Rolph

  SciPost Phys. 12, 079 (2022) · published 1 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the structure and dynamics of entanglement in CFTs and black holes. We use a local entanglement measure, the entanglement contour, which is a spatial density function for von Neumann entropy with some additional properties. The entanglement contour can be calculated in many 1+1d condensed matter systems and simple models of black hole evaporation. We calculate the entanglement contour of a state excited by a splitting quench, and find universal results for the entanglement contours of low energy non-equilibrium states in 2d CFTs. We also calculate the contour of a non-gravitational bath coupled to an extremal AdS$_2$ black hole, and find that the contour only has finite support within the bath, due to an island phase transition. The particular entanglement contour proposal we use quantifies how well the bath's state can be reconstructed from its marginals, through its connection to conditional mutual information, and the vanishing contour is a reflection of the protection of bulk island regions against erasures of the boundary state.

  16 citations

• Effective description of non-equilibrium currents in cold magnetized plasma

  Nabil Iqbal

  SciPost Phys. 12, 078 (2022) · published 28 February 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The dynamics of cold strongly magnetized plasma -- traditionally the domain of force-free electrodynamics -- has recently been reformulated in terms of symmetries and effective field theory, where the degrees of freedom are the momentum and magnetic flux carried by a fluid of cold strings. In physical applications where the electron mass can be neglected one might expect the presence of extra light charged modes -- electrons in the lowest Landau level -- propagating parallel to the magnetic field lines. We construct an effective description of such electric charges, describing their interaction with plasma degrees of freedom in terms of a new collective mode that can be thought of as a bosonization of the electric charge density along each field line. In this framework QED phenomena such as charged pair production and the axial anomaly are described at the classical level. Formally, our construction corresponds to gauging a particular part of the higher form symmetry associated with magnetic flux conservation. We study some simple applications of our effective theory, showing that the scattering of magnetosonic modes generically creates particles and that the rotating Michel monopole is now surrounded by a cloud of electric charge.

  1 citation