Talks

In this talk I will review the results of recent work in collaboration with  Cecilia De Fazio, Benjamin Doyon and István M. Szécsényi. We studied the entanglement of excited states consisting of a finite number of particle excitations. More precisely, we studied the difference between the entanglement entropy of such states and that of the ground state in a simple bi-partition of a quantum system, where both the size of the system and of the bi-partition are infinite, but their ratio is finite. We originally studied this problem in massive 1+1 dimensional QFTs where analytic computations were possible. We have found the results to apply more widely, including to higher dimensional free theories. In all cases we find that the increment of entanglement is a simple function of the ratio between region's and system's size only. Such function, turns out to be exactly the entanglement of a qubit state where the coefficients of the state are simply associated with the probabilities of particles being localised in one or the other part of the bi-partition. In this talk I will describe the results in some detail and discuss their domain of applicability. I will also highlight the main QFT techniques that we have used in order to obtain them analytically and  present some numerical data. 

In galaxy redshift surveys, the line-of-sight velocity information is encoded in the observed redshift as a Doppler component that radially distorts the galaxy positions. The linear component of such `Redshift-Space Distortions' (RSD) is directly proportional to the growth rate of structure, f(z), and motivates the interest in RSD as a powerful way to constrain gravity. However, the non-linear evolution of the density and velocity fields requires the use of sophisticated theoretical models to extract reliable cosmological information from quasi-linear scales. Alternatively, one can use tracers of the LSS less sensitive to the non-linear motions at small scales. After an overview of VIPERS I will present a novel method that uses the clustering of luminous blue galaxies to obtain an accurate estimate of the growth rate while keeping the theoretical model relatively simple.

I give an overview of work with Aasen and Mong on topologically invariant defects in two-dimensional classical lattice models, quantum spin chains and tensor networks. We show how to find defects that satisfy commutation relations guaranteeing the partition function depends only on their topological properties. These relations and their solutions can be extended to allow defect lines to branch and fuse, again with properties depending only on topology. These lattice topological defects have a variety of useful applications. In the Ising model, the fusion of duality defects allows Kramers-Wannier duality to be enacted on the torus and higher genus surfaces easily, implementing modular invariance directly on the lattice. These results can be extended to a very wide class of models, giving generalised dualities previously unknown in the statistical-mechanical literature. A consequence is an explicit definition of twisted boundary conditions that yield the precise shift in momentum quantization and thus the spin of the associated conformal field. Other universal quantities we compute exactly on the lattice are the ratios of g-factors for conformal boundary conditions. 

Black-hole recoils are arguably the strong-gravity phenomena with the most striking astrophysical consequences. In the late inspiral and final coalescence of black-hole binaries, anisotropic emission of gravitational waves causes significant linear momentum loss. The remnant black hole, therefore, recoils in the opposite direction. These final kicks can reach magnitudes up to 5000 km/s (“superkicks”), larger than the escape speed of even the most massive galaxies, thus opening the possibility of black hole ejections. In this talk, I summarize recent advances in modeling black-hole recoils and their astrophysical environments. I will address the relevance of disk-assisted spin alignment, new approaches to model black-hole recoils with waveform approximants, and prospects to directly detect superkicks with gravitational-wave detectors.

Large deviation theory gives a general framework for studying nonequilibrium systems which in many ways parallels equilibrium thermodynamics. In transport, according to the large deviation principle, the distribution of rare fluctuations of the total transfer (of charge, energy, etc.) between two baths take a special form encoded by the large deviation function, which plays the role of a free energy. Its Legendre transform is the scaled cumulant generating function (SCGF). For instance, in mesoscopic physics, full counting statistics for charge transport through quantum impurities are SCGFs. In this talk I propose a formalism giving access to SCGFs for ballistic transport in homogeneous, stationary states. The formalism is conjectured to hold for classical and quantum systems alike, and give exact results in terms of the theory of linear fluctuating hydrodynamics. I will explain how it applies to nonequilibrium steady states of integrable models such as the classical hard rod gas, the quantum Lieb-Liniger model and the XXZ chain, using generalised hydrodynamics. This largely extends earlier results for free fermions (Levitov-Lesovik) and for 1+1-dimensional conformal field theory (Bernard-Doyon). The formalism also applies to transport in nonequilibrium critical systems of arbitrary dimension. It is, in a sense, the ballistic counterpart to macroscopic fluctuation theory.