Talks

To make progress on serious problems in biology and medicine takes a combination of skills, tools, and approaches, often requiring collaboration across seemingly disparate fields. The trick to making breakthroughs often lies in learning to communicate across disciplines to identify existing technologies – and, crucially, the new tools that need to be invented.
 

Anne M. Andrews is a neuroscientist whose work eavesdrops on chemical signaling in the brain. Paul S. Weiss is a nanoscientist who studies materials at the smallest scales. Their scientific collaboration began by advancing nanotechnology to pursue grand challenges in neuroscience, bridging their two fields. This expansion of each of their efforts led to ongoing advances in biology and medicine.
 

In a special joint public lecture, Andrews and Weiss will describe their motivation and explain how they’re training new generations of students and fellow researchers to look beyond traditional academic boundaries to target significant problems and to develop the necessary communication skills to address them.

We study the eigenstate properties of a nonintegrable spin chain that was recently realized experimentally in a Rydberg-atom quantum simulator. In the experiment, long-lived coherent many-body oscillations were observed only when the system was initialized in a particular product state. This pronounced coherence has been attributed to the presence of special "scarred" eigenstates with nearly equally-spaced energies and putative nonergodic properties despite their finite energy density. In this paper we uncover a surprising connection between these scarred eigenstates and low-lying quasiparticle excitations of the spin chain. In particular, we show that these eigenstates can be accurately captured by a set of variational states containing a macroscopic number of magnons with momentum π. This leads to an interpretation of the scarred eigenstates as finite-energy-density condensates of weakly interacting π-magnons. One natural consequence of this interpretation is that the scarred eigenstates possess long-range order in both space and time, providing a rare example of the spontaneous breaking of continuous time-translation symmetry. We verify numerically the presence of this space-time crystalline order and explain how it is consistent with established no-go theorems precluding its existence in ground states and at thermal equilibrium.

In string backgrounds with flux and branes, there are subtleties in identifying the independent, globally-defined degrees of freedom due to required gauge patching, which we illustrate with background flux. Work by Cariglia and Lechner (extending Dirac and Teitelboim) allows separation of D-brane and flux degrees of freedom without doubling the gauge sector in a democratic formalism. We review the Cariglia-Lechner formalism and adapt it for compactifications, point out some previously unremarked features, and give alternate derivations of some new terms in the 10D (and 11D) supergravity actions in the presence of branes. Along the way, we will discuss how to integrate gauge potentials that are only locally defined. Finally, we show how to find the independent degrees of freedom and derive their equations of motion.

In this talk, I will detail two ways to search for low-mass axion dark matter using cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization measurements. These appear, in particular, to be some of the most promising ways to directly detect fuzzy dark matter. Axion dark matter causes rotation of the polarization of light passing through it. This gives rise to two novel phenomena in the CMB. First, the late-time oscillations of the axion field today cause the CMB polarization to oscillate in phase across the entire sky. Second, the early-time oscillations of the axion field wash out the polarization produced at last-scattering, reducing the polarized fraction (TE and EE power spectra) compared to the standard prediction. Since the axion field is oscillating, the common (static) ‘cosmic birefringence’ search is not appropriate for axion dark matter. These two phenomena can be used to search for axion dark matter at the lighter end of the mass range, with a reach several orders of magnitude beyond current constraints. I will present a limit from the washout effect using existing Planck results, and discuss the significant future discovery potential for CMB detectors searching in particular for the oscillating effect.

[1903.02666]

Gauge theories are fundamental to our understanding of interactions between the elementary constituents of matter as mediated by gauge bosons. However, computing the real-time dynamics in gauge theories is a notorious challenge for classical computational methods. In the spirit of Feynman's vision of a quantum simulator, this has recently stimulated theoretical effort to devise schemes for simulating such theories on engineered quantum-mechanical devices, with the difficulty that gauge invariance and the associated local conservation laws (Gauss laws) need to be implemented. Here we report the first digital quantum simulation of a lattice gauge theory, by realising 1+1-dimensional quantum electrodynamics (Schwinger model) on a few-qubit trapped-ion quantum computer. We are interested in the real-time evolution of the Schwinger mechanism, describing the instability of the bare vacuum due to quantum fluctuations, which manifests itself in the spontaneous creation of electron-positron pairs. Our work represents a first step towards quantum simulating high-energy theories with atomic physics experiments, the long-term vision being the extension to real-time quantum simulations of non-Abelian lattice gauge theories.