Condensed Matter

I will discuss the violation of spin-charge separation in generic Luttinger liquids and investigate its effect on the relaxation, thermal and electrical transport of genuine spin-1/2 electron liquids in ballistic quantum wires. We will identify basic scattering processes compatible with the symmetry of the problem and conservation laws that lead to the decay of plasmons into the spin modes and also discuss Brownian backscattering of spin excitations.

A quantum phase transition is usually achieved by tuning physical parameters in a Hamiltonian at zero temperature. Here, we demonstrate that the ground state of a topological phase itself encodes critical properties of its transition to a trivial phase. To extract this information, we introduce a partition of the system into two subsystems both of which extend throughout the bulk in all directions.

We discuss properties of 2-point functions in CFTs in 2+1D at finite temperature. For concreteness, we focus on those involving conserved flavour currents, in particular on the associated conductivity. At frequencies much greater than the temperature, ω >> T, the ω dependence of the conductivity can be computed from the operator product expansion (OPE) between the currents and operators which acquire a non-zero expectation value at T > 0. Such results are found to be in excellent agreement with quantum Monte Carlo studies of the O(2) Wilson-Fisher CFT.

We show that the numerical strong disorder renormalization group algorithm (SDRG) of Hikihara et.\ al.\ [{Phys. Rev. B} {\bf 60}, 12116 (1999)] for the one-dimensional disordered Heisenberg model naturally describes a tree tensor network (TTN) with an irregular structure defined by the strength of the couplings. Employing the holographic interpretation of the TTN in Hilbert space, we compute expectation values, correlation functions and the entanglement entropy using the geometrical properties of the TTN.