Helene Spring, Viktor Könye, Fabian A. Gerritsma, Ion Cosma Fulga, Anton R. Akhmerov

SciPost Phys. 16, 120 (2024) · published 3 May 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

Disorder can localize the eigenstates of one-dimensional non-Hermitian systems, leading to an Anderson transition with a critical exponent of 1. We show that, due to the lack of energy conservation, the dynamics of individual, real-space wave packets follows a different behavior. Both transitions between localization and unidirectional amplification, as well as transitions between distinct propagating phases become possible. The critical exponent of the transition is close to 1/2 in propagating-propagating and (de)localization transitions.

Jackson R. Fliss, Ben Freivogel, Eleni-Alexandra Kontou, Diego Pardo Santos

SciPost Phys. 16, 119 (2024) · published 2 May 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

The non-minimal coupling of scalar fields to gravity has been claimed to violate energy conditions, leading to exotic phenomena such as traversable wormholes, even in classical theories. In this work we adopt the view that the non-minimal coupling can be viewed as part of an effective field theory (EFT) in which the field value is controlled by the theory's cutoff. Under this assumption, the average null energy condition, whose violation is necessary to allow traversable wormholes, is obeyed both classically and in the context of quantum field theory. In addition, we establish a type of "smeared" null energy condition in the non-minimally coupled theory, showing that the null energy averaged over a region of spacetime obeys a state dependent bound, in that it depends on the allowed field range. We finally motivate our EFT assumption by considering when the gravity plus matter path integral remains semi-classically controlled.

Shankar Ganesh, Joseph Maciejko

SciPost Phys. 16, 118 (2024) · published 2 May 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

The Dirac spin liquid (DSL) is a two-dimensional (2D) fractionalized Mott insulator featuring massless Dirac spinon excitations coupled to a compact U(1) gauge field, which allows for flux-tunneling instanton events described by magnetic monopoles in (2+1)D Euclidean spacetime. The state-operator correspondence of conformal field theory has been used recently to define associated monopole operators and determine their quantum numbers, which encode the microscopic symmetries of conventional ordered phases proximate to the DSL. In this work, we utilize semiclassical instanton methods not relying on conformal invariance to construct monopole operators directly in (2+1)D spacetime as instanton-induced 't Hooft vertices, i.e., fermion-number-violating effective interactions originating from zero modes of the Euclidean Dirac operator in an instanton background. In the presence of a flavor-adjoint fermion mass, resummation of the instanton gas is shown to select the correct monopole to be proliferated, in accordance with predictions of the state-operator correspondence. We also show that our instanton-based approach is able to determine monopole quantum numbers on bipartite lattices.

Prashant Kumar, Frederick Duncan Michael Haldane

SciPost Phys. 16, 117 (2024) · published 1 May 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We numerically compute the guiding center static structure factor $\bar S(k)$ of various fractional quantum Hall (FQH) states to $\mathcal{O}(k\ell)^6$ where $k$ is the wavenumber and $\ell$ is the magnetic length. Employing density matrix renormalization group on an infinite cylinder of circumference $L_y$, we study the two-dimensional limit using $L_y/\xi \gg 1$, where $\xi$ is the correlation length. The main findings of our work are: 1) the ground states that deviate away from the ideal conformal block wavefunctions, do not saturate the Haldane bound, and 2) the coefficient of $O(k\ell)^6$ term appears to be bounded above by a value predicted by field theories proposed in the literature. The first finding implies that the graviton mode is not maximally chiral for experimentally relevant FQH states.

Chang Liu, Zheyu Shi, Ce Wang

SciPost Phys. 16, 116 (2024) · published 1 May 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We study the many-body dynamics of weakly interacting Bose gases with two-particle losses. We show that both the two-body interactions and losses in atomic gases may be tuned by controlling the inelastic scattering process between atoms by an optical Feshbach resonance. Interestingly, the low-energy behavior of the scattering amplitude is governed by a single parameter, i.e. the complex $s$-wave scattering length $a_c$. The many-body dynamics are thus described by a Lindblad master equation with complex scattering length. We solve this equation by applying the Bogoliubov approximation in analogy to the closed systems. Various peculiar dynamical properties are discovered, some of them may be regarded as the dissipative counterparts of the celebrated results in closed Bose gases. For example, we show that the next-order correction to the mean-field particle decay rate is to the order of $|n a_c^{3}|^{1/2}$, which is an analogy of the Lee-Huang-Yang correction of Bose gases. It is also found that there exists a dynamical symmetry of symplectic group Sp$(4,\mathbb{C})$ in the quadratic Bogoliubov master equation, which is an analogy of the SU(1,1) dynamical symmetry of the corresponding closed system. We further confirmed the validity of the Bogoliubov approximation by comparing its results with a full numerical calculation in a double-well toy model. Generalizations of other alternative approaches such as the dissipative version of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation and hydrodynamic theory are also discussed in the last.