SciPost News

"Entanglement evolution and generalised hydrodynamics: interacting integrable systems" by Vincenzo Alba, Bruno Bertini and Maurizio Fagotti has received the Select label. Warm congratulations to the authors!

In this very readable paper, the authors study the entanglement evolution of integrable quantum models. In particular, they focus on the entanglement entropy after a global quench from inhomogeneous states. They combine the ideas of pair particle production with the formalism of generalised hydrodynamics to develop a formula capturing the dynamics of the entanglement entropy. They found that the half chain entanglement rate depends only on the physics at the interface, and it differs from the rate of exchange of thermodynamic entropy. This contrasts with the behaviour in free or homogeneous interacting integrable systems, where the two rates coincide. These results were tested in the Heisenberg chain, finding good agreement with DMRG simulations. This paper makes interesting points regarding the definition of the entanglement entropy, and it calls attention to several interesting directions for future research.

The University of Amsterdam has recently granted 60k to SciPost. This donation makes the UvA the most generous sponsor of our initiative up to now. We will make use of these funds to further develop our services and accelerate our expansion plans.

As background to this, we have talked to Gerard Kohler from the UvA's central library. In the short interview hereby linked, he talks about the background reasons for this support, and his hopes for the future.

It is with great sadness that we mark the passing of Prof. Olga Igonkina, Nikhef particle physicist and prominent member of the ATLAS experiment at CERN. She passed away on Sunday May 19th in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, at the young age of 45.

Prof. Igonkina was a prominently active contributor to SciPost, having organized the proceedings for the 15th International Workshop on Tau Lepton Physics (Amsterdam, 2018-09). She was a Fellow of our Editorial College and was always much appreciated for her dedicated hard work and ethics. We will miss her greatly. We express our most sincere condoleances to her family, friends and further colleagues.

"Living on the walls of super-QCD" by Vladimir Bashmakov, Francesco Benini, Sergio Benvenuti, Matteo Bertolini has received the Select label. Warm congratulations to the authors!

This excellently written paper concerns the 3d theory that lives on
the domain walls of SQCD with less flavors than colors. It contains
nice insights into the interplay between 4d bulk physics and 3d
worldvolume domain walls physics. In particular, the authors propose a
class of three-dimensional Chern-Simons-matter theories to describe
the effective dynamics on the walls. Moreover, they present several
interesting results in the topic, including successful non-trivial
cross-checks of their proposal. In addition, they also provide a
review section that clarifies their presentation. Overall, these
results will be useful in future explorations of 3d non-supersymmetric
QFTs and their connections to 4d physics.

An independent study of scientific metadata collections has recently highlighted the quality of our publishing services. We cannot do better than quote the spontaneous communication we recently received from Dr Habermann:

I am a "metadata guy" in Boulder, Colorado and have recently been working to characterize scientific metadata collections in many repositories around the world. I recently took a look at the CrossRef Participation Reports and implemented a simple quantitative measure of completeness of these collections and a simple plot that compares completeness over time. I am using this approach to try to understand evolution of CrossRef metadata through time. As part of this work I looked at completeness as a function of collections size. The original dataset was a sample from CrossRef. I recently updated the sample to include all CrossRef members.

I am happy to let you know that SciPost has the most complete metadata of all 8670 CrossRef members with current collections of journal articles.

The attached Figure shows the data and you can see that SciPost clearly stands out. […]

Great work,

Ted

Readers can find more details of this study on Dr Habermann’s blog.

We are very grateful for this very interesting and rewarding piece of information, which, besides confirming the top-quality of our services, interestingly points to many aspects of metadata systems (ours and those of others) which can still be improved.

"Snell's Law for a vortex dipole in a Bose-Einstein condensate" by Michael M. Cawte, Xiaoquan Yu, Brian P. Anderson, Ashton S. Bradley has received the Select label. Warm congratulations to the authors!

This paper provides a useful guide for the behaviour of vortex dipoles as they pass through interfaces of sharply changing density, including a thorough numerical study and consequent analysis. As part of this analysis, the authors compare the values of the reflection/refraction vs. incident angles in vortex dipoles with a Snell’s law-like analytical prediction, achieving good agreement between the two before and after the interface. However, the authors found that when passing near the interface the dipole can exhibit dynamics that depart significantly from standard ray optics, involving transient capture by the interface. They conclude that despite the added complexity, an analogue Snell’s law is still applicable for the incoming and outgoing dipole paths when interacting with a sharp interface. This interesting and thorough study could guide future experiments on vortices in flattened geometries.

"A classical density functional from machine learning and a convolutional neural network" by Shang-Chun Lin and Martin Oettel has received the Select label. Warm congratulations to the authors!

This brilliant paper presents an inspiring conceptual DFT study, using machine learning methods to approximate a classical density functional, obtaining precise data for density distributions in given external potentials. In addition, they relate these simulations to their theoretical considerations, which encompass a variety of elements from classical liquid state theory to machine learning techniques. Conceptually, this goes far beyond what has been done in electronic structure DFT using machine learning. The hybrid approach of the current paper gives much insight into the formal (analytical) structure of the attractive contribution to the excess free energy functional. With the increasing use of machine learning, this study points towards the future direction on how to use it in the field of DFT.

SciPost is very happy to announce that the University of Leiden has become a Sponsor through a generous €10 000 contribution. Based on current estimates, this is sufficient to cover the whole submission and publication process for more than 25 articles. SciPost is extremely thankful for this support, and will devote the resources to its services for the academic community worldwide.

This month we have published the first volume of SciPost Physics Proceedings. The conference covered in this issue is the The 15th International Workshop on Tau Lepton Physics (Amsterdam, 24-28 September 2018).

This is the fifteenth workshop of TAU series on physics of the tau lepton, its neutrino, and related processes. The goal of the workshop was to get theorists and experimentalists together to discuss recent progress in the field. New results from high energy machines (e.g LHC experiments: ATLAS, CMS, LHCb), low energy machines (BES-III and other) and B-factories (including Belle-2) will be presented as well as recent results from g-2 and neutrino oscillation experiments. The program also includes related subjects such as hadron cross section measurement at e+e- colliders, lepton universality puzzles in meson decays, searches for Lepton Flavour Violation in τ and μ decays and review talks on the future experiments.

The refereeing of resulting proceedings volume has been managed by our guest fellows Dr. Marcus Matthias Morgenstern and Prof. Olga Igonkina. It contains 53 articles covering topics related to the tau lepton, neutrino and the related processes and possible experiments to detect them.

"Electrical detection of the Majorana fusion rule for chiral edge vortices in a topological superconductor" by C. W. J. Beenakker, A. Grabsch and Y. Herasymenko has received the Select label. Warm congratulations to the authors!

This publication presents a highly novel approach to tackle the demonstration of non-Abelian fusion rules of Majorana zero-modes, which can open a new line of research in the field of Majorana zero-modes. Building on recent research, the authors study how the injection at the edge vortices in systems with chiral Majorana edges affect the non-local fermion parity, and are able to observe this behaviour in electrical measurements.The proposed experiments can be applied to hybrid topological insulator/superconductor systems, and can be an important next step in the rapidly developing field of topological superconductors.