Condensed Matter
This series consists of talks in the area of Condensed Matter.
Seminar Series Events/Videos
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Tuesday Dec 02, 2014
In two spatial dimensions, it is well known that particle-like excitations can come with fractional statistics, beyond the usual dichotomy of Bose versus Fermi statistics. In this talk, I move one dimension higher to three spatial dimensions, and study loop-like objects instead of point-like particles. Just like particles in 2D, loops can exhibit interesting fractional braiding statistics in 3D. I will talk about loop braiding statistics in the context of symmetry protected topological phases, which is a generalization of topological insulators.
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Tuesday Nov 25, 2014Speaker(s):
We present an analytic, gauge invariant tensor network ansatz for the ground state of lattice Yang-Mills theory for nonabelian gauge groups. It naturally takes the form of a MERA, where the top level is the strong coupling limit of the lattice theory. Each layer performs a fine-graining operation defined in a fixed way followed by an optional step of adiabatic evolution, resulting in the ground state at an intermediate coupling.
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Tuesday Nov 18, 2014Speaker(s):
A featureless insulator is a gapped phase of matter that does not exhibit fractionalization or other exotic physics, and thus has a unique ground state. The classic albeit non-interacting example is an electronic band insulator. A standard textbook argument tells us that band insulators require an even number of electrons -- an integer number for each spin -- per unit cell.
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Tuesday Nov 04, 2014Speaker(s):
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.
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Tuesday Nov 04, 2014Speaker(s):
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.
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Tuesday Oct 21, 2014Speaker(s):
We construct a model which realizes a (3+1)-dimensional symmetry-protected topological phase of bosons with U(1) charge conservation and time reversal symmetry, envisioned by A. Vishwanath and T. Senthil [PRX 4 011016]. Our model works by introducing an additional spin degree of freedom, and binding its hedgehogs to a species of charged bosons. We study the model using Monte Carlo and determine its bulk phase diagram; the phase where the bound states of hedgehogs and charges condense is the topological phase, and we demonstrate this by observing a Witten effect.
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Tuesday Oct 14, 2014Speaker(s):
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.
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Tuesday Sep 30, 2014Speaker(s):
We show that for a system evolving unitarily under a stochastic quantum circuit, the notions of irreversibility, universality of computation, and entanglement are closely related. As the state of the system evolves from an initial product state, it becomes increasingly entangled until entanglement reaches a maximum. We define irreversibility as the failure to find a circuit that disentangles a maximally entangled state.
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Friday Sep 19, 2014Speaker(s):
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.
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Wednesday Sep 17, 2014Speaker(s):
In the last few decades, substantial advances have been made in our ability to make general statements about the thermodynamics of systems driven far from thermal equilibrium. In this talk, I will give a brief overview of some the most basic results in this area and explain their connection to classic results in linear response theory.
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