Talks

Periodically driven (Floquet) systems can display entirely new many-body phases of matter that have no analog in stationary systems. One such phase is the Floquet time crystal, which spontaneously breaks a discrete time-translation symmetry. In this talk, I will survey the physics of these new phases of matter. I explain how they can be stabilized either through strong quenched disorder (many-body localization), or alternatively in clean systems in a "prethermal" regime which persists until a time that is exponentially long in a small parameter.

We will discuss recent trapping and cooling experiments with optically levitated nanoparticles [1]. We will report on the cooling of all translational motional degrees of freedom of a single trapped silica particle to 1mK simultaneously at vacuum of 10-5 mbar using a parabolic mirror. We will further report on the squeezing of a thermal motional state of the trapped particle by rapid switching of the trap frequency [2]. 

We will further discuss ideas to experimentally test quantum mechanics by means of collapse models [3] by both matter-wave interferometry [4] and non-interferometric methods [5]. While first experimental bounds by non-interferometric tests have been achieved during the last year by a number of different experiments according to our idea [4], we at Southampton work on setting up the Nanoparticle Talbot Interferometer (NaTalI) to test the quantum superposition principle directly for one million atomic mass unit (amu) particles.

We will further discuss some ideas to probe the interplay between quantum mechanics and gravity by such levitated optomechanics experiments. One idea is to seek experimental evidence about the fundamentally quantum or classical nature of gravity by using the torsional motion of a non-spherical trapped particle [6], while a second idea is to test the effect of the gravity related shift of energy levels of the mechanical harmonic oscillator, which is predicted by semi-classical gravity (Schroedinger-Newton equation) [7] or thirdly try to pick up entanglement mediated by gravity [8].

I will discuss a class of models in which thermal dark matter is lighter than an MeV. If dark matter thermalizes with the Standard Model below the temperature of neutrino-photon decoupling, constraints from measurements of the effective number of neutrino species are alleviated. This framework motivates new experiments in the direct search for sub-MeV thermal dark matter and light force carriers.

In this talk first I will introduce and motivate the problem of finding finite energy Yang-Mills instantons on curved backgrounds.  

After the historical introduction, I will focus the example of the Euclidean Schwarzschild (ES) manifold from Quantum gravity. The ES manifold was first introduced by Hawking in the late 70's. It is an asymptotically locally flat solution of the Euclidean Einstein equation, but not hyper-Kahler, which makes instanton theory harder. Throughout the past four decades, related results have been sporadic: there have been only finitely many (at most 2) known solutions for each energy value.

In our work, making use of an old idea of Witten, and subsequently Taubes and Garcia-Prada, we produce infinitely many unit energy solutions, and also solutions of continuously varying energy, a feature (seemingly) unique to asymptotically locally flat spaces. These instantons describe vortex-like pseudoparticles; at the end of the talk I will present an intuitive picture in terms of planar (Ginzburg-Landau) vortices.

This is joint work with Gonçalo Oliveira (IMPA).

We suggest that two-to-two dark matter fusion may be the relaxation process that resolves the small-scale structure problems of the cold collisionless dark matter paradigm. In order for the fusion cross section to scale correctly across many decades of astrophysical masses from dwarf galaxies to galaxy clusters, we require the fractional binding energy released to be greater than v^n ~ [10^{-(2-3)}]^n, where n=1,2 depends on local dark sector chemistry. The size of the dark-sector interaction cross sections must be sigma ~ 0.1-1 barn, moderately larger than for Standard Model deuteron fusion, indicating a dark nuclear scale Lambda ~ O(100 MeV). Dark fusion firmly predicts constant sigma v below the characteristic velocities of galaxy clusters. Observations of the inner structure of galaxy groups with velocity dispersion of several hundred kilometer per second, of which a handful have been identified, could differentiate dark fusion from a dark photon model.

"Recently, exactly solvable 3D lattice models have been discovered for a new kind of phase, dubbed fracton topological order, in which the topological excitations are immobile or are bound to lines or surfaces. Unlike liquid topologically ordered phases (e.g. Z_2 gauge theory), which are only sensitive to topology (e.g. the ground state degeneracy only depends on the topology of spatial manifold), fracton orders are also sensitive to the geometry of the lattice. This geometry dependence allows for remarkably new physics which was forbidden in topologically invariant phases of matter.

In this talk, I will review the X-cube model [1] of fracton order. I will then explain how geometry dependence allows for braiding of point-like particles in this 3D phase. I'll summary how the X-cube model can be described by a quantum field theory, which is analogous to a topological quantum field theory (TQFT). [3] We will see that the gauge invariance of the field theory results in the mobility restrictions of the topological excitations by imposing a new kind of geometric charge conservation. I will conclude by briefly discussing current work on the remarkable geometry-dependent phenomenology of fracton order. For example, I will explain why even on a manifold with trivial topology, spatial curvature can induce a robust ground state degeneracy.

[1] Vijay, Haah, Fu 1603.04442

[2] Slagle, Kim 1704.03870"

In this talk, I will show that light cones in MInkowski spacetime are a beautiful analoue of black hole horizons in curved spacetime. To do so, I will prove the analogue of the four laws of black hole thermodynamics in this setting. This is what we called light cone thermodynamics. More precisely, I will consider null surfaces defined by the out-going and in-falling wave fronts emanating from and arriving at a sphere in Minkowski spacetime. Such null surfaces, made of pieces of light cones, are bifurcate conformal Killing horizons for suitable conformally stationary observers. They can be extremal and non-extremal depending on the radius of the shining sphere. Such conformal Killing horizons have a constant light cone (conformal) temperature, given by the standard expression in terms of the surface gravity. Considering exchanges of conformally invariant energy across the conformal horizon, one can prove, in perturbation theory, a first law where entropy changes are given by 1/4 of the changes of the area of the bifurcate surface in Planck units. In the extremal case they become light cones associated with a single event; these have vanishing temperature as well as vanishing entropy. I will conclude with possible generalisations and applications of such results.

The construction of trial wave functions has proven itself to be very useful for understanding strongly interacting quantum many-body systems. Two famous examples of such trial wave functions are the resonating valence bond state proposed by Anderson and the Laughlin wave function, which have provided an (intuitive) understanding of respectively spin liquids and fractional Quantum Hall states. Tensor network states are another, more recent, class of such trial wave functions which are based on entanglement properties of local, gapped systems. In this talk I will discuss the use of tensor network states for topological phases, and what we can learn from this approach. I will consider one- and two-dimensional systems, consisting of both spins and fermions. The focus will be on the different connections that can be made using tensor networks, such as connecting theory to numerics, and physical properties to ground state entanglement.

The observations of gravitational waves from the mergers of compact binary sources opens a new way to learn about the universe as well as to test General Relativity in the limit of strong gravitational interactions – the dynamics of massive bodies traveling at relativistic speeds in a highly curved space-time. The lecture will describe some of the difficult history of gravitational waves proposed about 100 years ago.  The concepts used in the instruments and the methods for data analysis that enable the measurement of gravitational wave strains of 10-21 and smaller will be presented. The results derived from the measured waveforms, their relation to the Einstein field equations and the astrophysical implications are discussed. The talk will end with a vision for the future of gravitational wave astronomy.

From a quantum information perspective, we will study universal features of chaotic quantum systems. Recent progress has made evident that quantifying chaos is a useful way to gain insight into strongly-coupled field theories, quantum many-body systems, as well as the quantum nature of black holes. We will derive relations between different diagnostics of chaos and scrambling (OTOCs, spectral functions, and frame potentials) and define a quantity to capture the onset of a random matrix description. We will review and use tools from quantum information and random matrix theory, but our goal will be to understand strongly-interacting systems.