Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Symmetry restoration and the gluon mass in the Landau gauge

  Urko Reinosa, Julien Serreau, Rodrigo Carmo Terin, Matthieu Tissier

  SciPost Phys. 10, 035 (2021) · published 16 February 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate the generation of a gluon screening mass in Yang-Mills theory in the Landau gauge. We propose a gauge-fixing procedure where the Gribov ambiguity is overcome by summing over all Gribov copies with some weight function. This can be formulated in terms of a local field theory involving constrained, nonlinear sigma model fields. We show that a phenomenon of radiative symmetry restoration occurs in this theory, similar to what happens in the standard nonlinear sigma model in two dimensions. This results in a nonzero gluon screening mass, as seen in lattice simulations.

  9 citations

• OASIS: Optimal Analysis-Specific Importance Sampling for event generation

  Konstantin T. Matchev, Prasanth Shyamsundar

  SciPost Phys. 10, 034 (2021) · published 15 February 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We propose a technique called Optimal Analysis-Specific Importance Sampling (OASIS) to reduce the number of simulated events required for a high-energy experimental analysis to reach a target sensitivity. We provide recipes to obtain the optimal sampling distributions which preferentially focus the event generation on the regions of phase space with high utility to the experimental analyses. OASIS leads to a conservation of resources at all stages of the Monte Carlo pipeline, including full-detector simulation, and is complementary to approaches which seek to speed-up the simulation pipeline.

  7 citations

• Phase transitions in the early universe

  Mark Hindmarsh, Marvin Lüben, Johannes Lumma, Martin Pauly

  SciPost Phys. Lect. Notes 24 (2021) · published 15 February 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  These lecture notes are based on a course given by Mark Hindmarsh at the 24th Saalburg Summer School 2018 and written up by Marvin L\"uben, Johannes Lumma and Martin Pauly. The aim is to provide the necessary basics to understand first-order phase transitions in the early universe, to outline how they leave imprints in gravitational waves, and advertise how those gravitational waves could be detected in the future. A first-order phase transition at the electroweak scale is a prediction of many theories beyond the Standard Model, and is also motivated as an ingredient of some theories attempting to provide an explanation for the matter-antimatter asymmetry in our Universe. Starting from bosonic and fermionic statistics, we derive Boltzmann's equation and generalise to a fluid of particles with field dependent mass. We introduce the thermal effective potential for the field in its lowest order approximation, discuss the transition to the Higgs phase in the Standard Model and beyond, and compute the probability for the field to cross a potential barrier. After these preliminaries, we provide a hydrodynamical description of first-order phase transitions as it is appropriate for describing the early Universe. We thereby discuss the key quantities characterising a phase transition, and how they are imprinted in the gravitational wave power spectrum that might be detectable by the space-based gravitational wave detector LISA in the 2030s.

  86 citations

• Continuous Néel-VBS quantum phase transition in non-local one-dimensional systems with SO(3) symmetry

  Chao-Ming Jian, Yichen Xu, Xiao-Chuan Wu, Cenke Xu

  SciPost Phys. 10, 033 (2021) · published 12 February 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  One dimensional $(1d)$ interacting systems with local Hamiltonians can be studied with various well-developed analytical methods. Recently novel $1d$ physics was found numerically in systems with either spatially nonlocal interactions, or at the $1d$ boundary of $2d$ quantum critical points, and the critical fluctuation in the bulk also yields effective nonlocal interactions at the boundary. This work studies the edge states at the $1d$ boundary of $2d$ strongly interacting symmetry protected topological (SPT) states, when the bulk is driven to a disorder-order phase transition. We will take the $2d$ Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki (AKLT) state as an example, which is a SPT state protected by the $SO(3)$ spin symmetry and spatial translation. We found that the original $(1+1)d$ boundary conformal field theory of the AKLT state is unstable due to coupling to the boundary avatar of the bulk quantum critical fluctuations. When the bulk is fixed at the quantum critical point, within the accuracy of our expansion method, we find that by tuning one parameter at the boundary, there is a generic direct transition between the long range antiferromagnetic N\'{e}el order and the valence bond solid (VBS) order. This transition is very similar to the Néel-VBS transition recently found in numerical simulation of a spin-1/2 chain with nonlocal spatial interactions. Connections between our analytical studies and recent numerical results concerning the edge states of the $2d$ AKLT-like state at a bulk quantum phase transition will also be discussed.

  27 citations

• Discrete theta angles, symmetries and anomalies

  Po-Shen Hsin, Ho Tat Lam

  SciPost Phys. 10, 032 (2021) · published 12 February 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Gauge theories in various dimensions often admit discrete theta angles, that arise from gauging a global symmetry with an additional symmetry protected topological (SPT) phase. We discuss how the global symmetry and 't Hooft anomaly depends on the discrete theta angles by coupling the gauge theory to a topological quantum field theory (TQFT). We observe that gauging an Abelian subgroup symmetry, that participates in symmetry extension, with an additional SPT phase leads to a new theory with an emergent Abelian symmetry that also participates in a symmetry extension. The symmetry extension of the gauge theory is controlled by the discrete theta angle which comes from the SPT phase. We find that discrete theta angles can lead to two-group symmetry in 4d QCD with $SU(N),SU(N)/\mathbb{Z}_k$ or $SO(N)$ gauge groups as well as various 3d and 2d gauge theories.

  57 citations

• Bridging nano-optics and condensed matter formalisms in a unified description of inelastic scattering of relativistic electron beams

  Hugo Lourenço-Martins, Axel Lubk, Mathieu Kociak

  SciPost Phys. 10, 031 (2021) · published 10 February 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  In the last decades, the blossoming of experimental breakthroughs in the domain of electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) has triggered a variety of theoretical developments. Those have to deal with completely different situations, from atomically resolved phonon mapping to electron circular dichroism passing by surface plasmon mapping. All of them rely on very different physical approximations and have not yet been reconciled, despite early attempts to do so. As an effort in that direction, we report on the development of a scalar relativistic quantum electrodynamic (QED) approach of the inelastic scattering of fast electrons. This theory can be adapted to describe all modern EELS experiments, and under the relevant approximations, can be reduced to any of the last EELS theories. In that aim, we present in this paper the state of the art and the basics of scalar relativistic QED relevant to the electron inelastic scattering. We then give a clear relation between the two once antagonist descriptions of the EELS, the retarded green Dyadic, usually applied to describe photonic excitations and the quasi-static mixed dynamic form factor (MDFF), more adapted to describe core electronic excitations of material. We then use this theory to establish two important EELS-related equations. The first one relates the spatially resolved EELS to the imaginary part of the photon propagator and the incoming and outgoing electron beam wavefunction, synthesizing the most common theories developed for analyzing spatially resolved EELS experiments. The second one shows that the evolution of the electron beam density matrix is proportional to the mutual coherence tensor, proving that quite universally, the electromagnetic correlations in the target are imprinted in the coherence properties of the probing electron beam.

  9 citations

• The multi-faceted inverted harmonic oscillator: Chaos and complexity

  Arpan Bhattacharyya, Wissam Chemissany, S. Shajidul Haque, Jeff Murugan, Bin Yan

  SciPost Phys. Core 4, 002 (2021) · published 8 February 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The harmonic oscillator is the paragon of physical models; conceptually and computationally simple, yet rich enough to teach us about physics on scales that span classical mechanics to quantum field theory. This multifaceted nature extends also to its inverted counterpart, in which the oscillator frequency is analytically continued to pure imaginary values. In this article we probe the inverted harmonic oscillator (IHO) with recently developed quantum chaos diagnostics such as the out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC) and the circuit complexity. In particular, we study the OTOC for the displacement operator of the IHO with and without a non-Gaussian cubic perturbation to explore genuine and quasi scrambling respectively. In addition, we compute the full quantum Lyapunov spectrum for the inverted oscillator, finding a paired structure among the Lyapunov exponents. We also use the Heisenberg group to compute the complexity for the time evolved displacement operator, which displays chaotic behaviour. Finally, we extended our analysis to N-inverted harmonic oscillators to study the behaviour of complexity at the different timescales encoded in dissipation, scrambling and asymptotic regimes.

  60 citations

• Light dark matter annihilation and scattering in LHC detectors

  Martin Bauer, Patrick Foldenauer, Peter Reimitz, Tilman Plehn

  SciPost Phys. 10, 030 (2021) · published 5 February 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We systematically study models with light scalar and pseudoscalar dark matter candidates and their potential signals at the LHC. First, we derive cosmological bounds on models with the Standard Model Higgs mediator and with a new weak-scale mediator. Next, we study two processes inspired by the indirect and direct detection process topologies, now happening inside the LHC detectors. We find that LHC can observe very light dark matter over a huge mass range if it is produced in mediator decays and then scatters with the detector material to generate jets in the nuclear recoil.

  11 citations

• Feynman diagrams and $Ω$-deformed M-theory

  Jihwan Oh, Yehao Zhou

  SciPost Phys. 10, 029 (2021) · published 5 February 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We derive the simplest commutation relations of operator algebras associated to M2 branes and an M5 brane in the $\Omega$-deformed M-theory, which is a natural set-up for Twisted holography. Feynman diagram 1-loop computations in the twisted-holographic dual side reproduce the same algebraic relations.

  9 citations

• Mapping current and activity fluctuations in exclusion processes: consequences and open questions

  Matthieu Vanicat, Eric Bertin, Vivien Lecomte, Eric Ragoucy

  SciPost Phys. 10, 028 (2021) · published 5 February 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Considering the large deviations of activity and current in the Asymmetric Simple Exclusion Process (ASEP), we show that there exists a non-trivial correspondence between the joint scaled cumulant generating functions of activity and current of two ASEPs with different parameters. This mapping is obtained by applying a similarity transform on the deformed Markov matrix of the source model in order to obtain the deformed Markov matrix of the target model. We first derive this correspondence for periodic boundary conditions, and show in the diffusive scaling limit (corresponding to the Weakly Asymmetric Simple Exclusion Processes, or WASEP) how the mapping is expressed in the language of Macroscopic Fluctuation Theory (MFT). As an interesting specific case, we map the large deviations of current in the ASEP to the large deviations of activity in the SSEP, thereby uncovering a regime of Kardar–Parisi–Zhang in the distribution of activity in the SSEP. At large activity, particle configurations exhibit hyperuniformity [Jack et al., PRL 114 060601 (2015)]. Using results from quantum spin chain theory, we characterize the hyperuniform regime by evaluating the small wavenumber asymptotic behavior of the structure factor at half-filling. Conversely, we formulate from the MFT results a conjecture for a correlation function in spin chains at any fixed total magnetization (in the thermodynamic limit). In addition, we generalize the mapping to the case of two open ASEPs with boundary reservoirs, and we apply it in the WASEP limit in the MFT formalism. This mapping also allows us to find a symmetry-breaking dynamical phase transition (DPT) in the WASEP conditioned by activity, from the prior knowledge of a DPT in the WASEP conditioned by the current.

  4 citations