Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Anomalous Luttinger equivalence between temperature and curved spacetime: From black holes to thermal quenches

  Baptiste Bermond, Maxim Nikolaevich Chernodub, Adolfo G. Grushin, David Carpentier

  SciPost Phys. 16, 084 (2024) · published 25 March 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Building on the idea of Tolman and Ehrenfest that heat has weight, Luttinger established a deep connection between gravitational fields and thermal transport. However, this relation does not include anomalous quantum fluctuations that become paramount in strongly curved spacetime. In this work, we revisit the celebrated Tolman-Ehrenfest and Luttinger relations and show how to incorporate the quantum energy scales associated with these fluctuations, captured by gravitational anomalies of quantum field theories. We point out that such anomalous fluctuations naturally occur in the quantum atmosphere of a black hole. Our results reveal that analogous fluctuations are also observable in thermal conductors in flat-space time provided local temperature varies strongly. As a consequence, we establish that the gravitational anomalies manifest themselves naturally in non-linear thermal response of a quantum wire. In addition, we propose a systematic way to identify thermal analogues of black hole's anomalous quantum fluctuations associated to gravitational anomalies. We identify their signatures in propagating energy waves following a thermal quench, as well as in the energy density of heating Floquet states induced by repeated thermal quenches.

• Thouless pumping in Josephson junction arrays

  Stavros Athanasiou, Ida Egholm Nielsen, Matteo M. Wauters, Michele Burrello

  SciPost Phys. 16, 083 (2024) · published 22 March 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Recent advancements in fabrication techniques have enabled unprecedented clean interfaces and gate tunability in semiconductor-superconductor heterostructures. Inspired by these developments, we propose protocols to realize Thouless quantum pumping in electrically tunable Josephson junction arrays. We analyze, in particular, the implementation of the Rice-Mele and the Harper-Hofstadter pumping schemes, whose realization would validate these systems as flexible platforms for quantum simulations. We investigate numerically the long-time behavior of chains of controllable superconducting islands in the Coulomb-blockaded regime. Our findings provide new insights into the dynamics of periodically driven interacting systems and highlight the robustness of Thouless pumping with respect to boundary effects typical of superconducting circuits.

• Exploring kinetically induced bound states in triangular lattices with ultracold atoms: Spectroscopic approach

  Ivan Morera Navarro, Christof Weitenberg, Klaus Sengstock, Eugene Demler

  SciPost Phys. 16, 081 (2024) · published 20 March 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Quantum simulations with ultracold fermions in triangular optical lattices have recently emerged as a new platform for studying magnetism in frustrated systems. Experimental realizations of the Fermi Hubbard model revealed striking contrast between magnetism in bipartite and triangular lattices. In bipartite lattices magnetism is strongest at half filling, and doped charge carriers tend to suppress magnetic correlations. In triangular-type lattices for large U/t and t>0, antiferromagnetism (ferromagnetism) gets enhanced by doping away from n=1 with holes (doublons) because kinetic energy of dopants can be lowered through developing magnetic correlations, corresponding to formation of magnetic polarons. Snapshots of many-body states obtained with quantum gas microscopes demonstrated existence of magnetic polarons by revealing the magnetic correlations around dopants at temperatures that considerably exceed superexchange energy scale. In this paper we discuss theoretically that additional insight into properties of magnetic polarons in triangular lattices can be achieved using spectroscopic experiments with ultracold atoms. We consider starting from a spin polarized state with small hole doping and applying a two-photon Raman photoexcitation, which transfers atoms into a different spin state. We show that such magnon injection spectra exhibit a separate peak corresponding to formation of a bound state between a hole and a magnon. This polaron peak is separated from the simple magnon spectrum by energy proportional to single particle tunneling and can be easily resolved with currently available experimental techniques. For some momentum transfer there is an additional peak corresponding to photoexciting a bound state between two holes and a magnon. We point out that in two component Bose mixtures in triangular lattices one can also create dynamical magnetic polarons, with one hole and one magnon forming a repulsive bound state.

• The Floquet Baxterisation

  Yuan Miao, Vladimir Gritsev, Denis V. Kurlov

  SciPost Phys. 16, 078 (2024) · published 18 March 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Quantum integrability has proven to be a useful tool to study quantum many-body systems out of equilibrium. In this paper we construct a generic framework for integrable quantum circuits through the procedure of Floquet Baxterisation. The integrability is guaranteed by establishing a connection between Floquet evolution operators and inhomogeneous transfer matrices obtained from the Yang-Baxter relations. This allows us to construct integrable Floquet evolution operators with arbitrary depths and various boundary conditions. Furthermore, we focus on the example related to the staggered 6-vertex model. In the scaling limit we establish a connection of this Floquet protocol with a non-rational conformal field theory. Employing the properties of the underlying affine Temperley-Lieb algebraic structure, we demonstrate the dynamical anti-unitary symmetry breaking in the easy-plane regime. We also give an overview of integrability-related quantum circuits, highlighting future research directions.

• Faraday rotation and transmittance as markers of topological phase transitions in 2D materials

  Manuel Calixto, Alberto Mayorgas, Nicolás A. Cordero, Elvira Romera, Octavio Héctor Castaños Garza

  SciPost Phys. 16, 077 (2024) · published 18 March 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We analyze the magneto-optical conductivity (and related magnitudes like transmittance and Faraday rotation of the irradiated polarized light) of some elemental two-dimensional Dirac materials of group IV (graphene analogues, buckled honeycomb lattices, like silicene, germanene, stannane, etc.), group V (phosphorene), and zincblende heterostructures (like HgTe/CdTe quantum wells) near the Dirac and gamma points, under out-of-plane magnetic and electric fields, to characterize topological-band insulator phase transitions and their critical points. We provide plots of the Faraday angle and transmittance as a function of the polarized light frequency, for different external electric and magnetic fields, chemical potential, HgTe layer thickness and temperature, to tune the material magneto-optical properties. We have shown that absortance/transmittance acquires extremal values at the critical point, where the Faraday angle changes sign, thus providing fine markers of the topological phase transition. In the case of non-topological materials as phosphorene, a minimum of the transmittance is also observed due to the energy gap closing by an external electric field.

• Topological defects in Floquet circuits

  Mao Tian Tan, Yifan Wang, Aditi Mitra

  SciPost Phys. 16, 075 (2024) · published 13 March 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We introduce a Floquet circuit describing the driven Ising chain with topological defects. The corresponding gates include a defect that flips spins as well as the duality defect that explicitly implements the Kramers-Wannier duality transformation. The Floquet unitary evolution operator commutes with such defects, but the duality defect is not unitary, as it projects out half the states. We give two applications of these defects. One is to analyze the return amplitudes in the presence of "space-like" defects stretching around the system. We verify explicitly that the return amplitudes are in agreement with the fusion rules of the defects. The second application is to study unitary evolution in the presence of "time-like" defects that implement anti-periodic and duality-twisted boundary conditions. We show that a single unpaired localized Majorana zero mode appears in the latter case. We explicitly construct this operator, which acts as a symmetry of this Floquet circuit. We also present analytic expressions for the entanglement entropy after a single time step for a system of a few sites, for all of the above defect configurations.

• Semiconductor electron-phonon equations: A rung above Boltzmann in the many-body ladder

  Gianluca Stefanucci, Enrico Perfetto

  SciPost Phys. 16, 073 (2024) · published 13 March 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Starting from the ab initio many-body theory of electrons and phonons, we go through a series of well defined simplifications to derive a set of coupled equations of motion for the electronic occupations and polarizations, nuclear displacements as well as phononic occupations and coherences. These are the semiconductor electron-phonon equations (SEPE), sharing the same scaling with system size and propagation time as the Boltzmann equations. At the core of the SEPE is the mirrored Generalized Kadanoff-Baym Ansatz (GKBA) for the Green's functions, an alternative to the standard GKBA which we show to lead to unstable equilibrium states. The SEPE treat coherent and incoherent degrees of freedom on equal footing, widen the scope of the semiconductor Bloch equations and Boltzmann equations, and reduce to them under additional simplifications. The new features of the SEPE pave the way for first-principles studies of phonon squeezed states and coherence effects in time-resolved absorption and diffraction experiments.

  1 citation

• Measurement induced transitions in non-Markovian free fermion ladders

  Mikheil Tsitsishvili, Dario Poletti, Marcello Dalmonte, Giuliano Chiriacò

  SciPost Phys. Core 7, 011 (2024) · published 12 March 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Recently there has been an intense effort to understand measurement induced transitions, but we still lack a good understanding of non-Markovian effects on these phenomena. To that end, we consider two coupled chains of free fermions, one acting as the system of interest, and one as a bath. The bath chain is subject to Markovian measurements, resulting in an effective non-Markovian dissipative dynamics acting on the system chain which is still amenable to numerical studies in terms of quantum trajectories. Within this setting, we study the entanglement within the system chain, and use it to characterize the phase diagram depending on the ladder hopping parameters and on the measurement probability. For the case of pure state evolution, the system is in an area law phase when the internal hopping of the bath chain is small, while a non-area law phase appears when the dynamics of the bath is fast. The non-area law exhibits a logarithmic scaling of the entropy compatible with a conformal phase, but also displays linear corrections for the finite system sizes we can study. For the case of mixed state evolution, we instead observe regions with both area, and non-area scaling of the entanglement negativity. We quantify the non-Markovianity of the system chain dynamics and find that for the regimes of parameters we study, a stronger non-Markovianity is associated to a larger entanglement within the system.

  1 citation

• The functional generalization of the Boltzmann-Vlasov equation and its gauge-like symmetry

  Giorgio Torrieri

  SciPost Phys. 16, 070 (2024) · published 11 March 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We argue that one can model deviations from the ensemble average in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics by promoting the Boltzmann equation to an equation in terms of functionals , representing possible candidates for phase space distributions inferred from a finite observed number of degrees of freedom. We find that, provided the collision term and the Vlasov drift term are both included, a gauge-like redundancy arises which does not go away even if the functional is narrow. We argue that this effect is linked to the gauge-like symmetry found in relativistic hydrodynamics [Ann. Phys. 442, 168902 (2022)] and that it could be part of the explanation for the apparent fluid-like behavior in small systems in hadronic collisions and other strongly-coupled small systems [Annu. Rev. Nucl. Part. Sci. 68, 211 (2018)]. When causality and Lorentz invariance are omitted this problem can be look at via random matrix theory show, and we show that in such a case thermalization happens much more quickly than the Boltzmann equation would infer. We also sketch an algorithm to study this problem numerically.

• Entanglement-enabled symmetry-breaking orders

  Cheng-Ju Lin, Liujun Zou

  SciPost Phys. Core 7, 010 (2024) · published 11 March 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  A spontaneous symmetry-breaking order is conventionally described by a tensor-product wavefunction of some few-body clusters; some standard examples include the simplest ferromagnets and valence bond solids. We discuss a type of symmetry-breaking orders, dubbed entanglement-enabled symmetry-breaking orders, which cannot be realized by any such tensor-product state. Given a symmetry breaking pattern, we propose a criterion to diagnose if the symmetry-breaking order is entanglement-enabled, by examining the compatibility between the symmetries and the tensor-product description. For concreteness, we present an infinite family of exactly solvable gapped models on one-dimensional lattices with nearest-neighbor interactions, whose ground states exhibit entanglement-enabled symmetry-breaking orders from a discrete symmetry breaking. In addition, these ground states have gapless edge modes protected by the unbroken symmetries. We also propose a construction to realize entanglement-enabled symmetry-breaking orders with spontaneously broken continuous symmetries. Under the unbroken symmetries, some of our examples can be viewed as symmetry-protected topological states that are beyond the conventional classifications.