Quantum Matter

As helium-4 is cooled below 2.17 K in undergoes a phase transition to a state of matter known as a superfluid which supports flow without viscosity. This type of dissipationless transport can be observed by forcing helium to travel through a narrow constriction that the normal liquid could not penetrate. Recent advances in nanofabrication techniques allow for the construction of smooth pores with nanometer radii, that approach the truly one dimensional limit. In one dimension, it is believed that a system of bosons (like helium-4) may have startlingly different behavior than in three dimensions. The one dimensional system is predicted to have a linear hydrodynamic description known as Luttinger liquid theory, where no type of long range order can be sustained. In the limit where the pore radius is small,  helium inside the channel would behave as a sort of quasi-supersolid with all correlations decaying as power-laws at zero temperature.  We have performed large scale quantum Monte Carlo simulations of helium-4 inside nanopores of varying radii at low temperatures with realistic helium-helium and helium-pore interactions. The results indicate that helium inside the nanopore forms concentric cylindrical layers surrounding a core that can be fully described via Luttinger liquid theory and provides insights towards the exciting possibility of the experimental detection of a Luttinger liquid.

I will discuss some of the most basic questions in fermionic and bosonic transport, such as the conditions for the existence of a steady-state current, its uniqueness, the role of interactions and spin statistics, its entanglement entropy, etc. This will lead me to introduce an alternative viewpoint to conduction - the micro-canonical formalism of transport - which is ideal to study the above issues [1]. I will point out the similarities and differences with the widely used Landauer formalism, and advance a series of predictions that can be verified by loading ultra-cold atoms into artificial optical lattices.

[1] M. Di Ventra, Electrical Transport in Nanoscale Systems (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

One of the biggest challenges in physics is to develop accurate and efficient methods that can solve many currently intractable problems in correlated quantum or statistical systems. Tensor-network model/state is drawing more and more attention since it captures the feature of the area law and is absent from the sign problem. The evaluation of the expectation value of the observables can be reduced to the contraction of a tensor-network, which can be done by means of renormalization group method, and this is exactly what tensor renormalization group (TRG) method has done. In the light of comparison between numerical renormalization group (NRG) and density matrix renormalization group(DMRG), having considered the renormalization effect of the environment, second renormalization group (SRG) method has been proposed to improve the performance of TRG. Although TRG and SRG have achieved great success in 2D lattice, application to 3D is not easy. The talk will give a review of TRG and SRG, and talk about the HOTRG, i.e., TRG based on the higher-order singular value decomposition, and its SRG version, HOSRG. They can be easily applied to 3D lattice with relatively low memory and computation cost. The well-known 3D Ising model on simple cubic lattice has been tested. As far as our group know, HOSRG have achieved by far the most accurate renormalization group results for the 3D Ising model. Some analysis and possible applications will be also discussed.

Recent years have seen a renewed interest, both theoretically and experimentally, in the search for topological states of matter. On the theoretical side, while much progress has been achieved in providing a general classification of non-interacting topological states, the fate of these phases in the presence of strong interactions remains an open question. The purpose of this talk is to describe recent developments on this front. In the first part of the talk, we will consider, in a scenario with time-reversal symmetry breaking, dispersionless electronic Bloch bands (flatbands) with non-zero Chern number and show results of exact diagonalization in a small system at 1/3 filling that support the existence of a fractional quantum Hall state in the absence of an external magnetic field. In the second part of the talk, we will discuss strongly interacting electronic phases with time-reversal symmetry in two dimensions and propose a candidate topological field theory with fractionalized excitations that describes the low energy properties of a class of time-reversal symmetric states.

The description of non-Fermi liquid metals is one of the central problems in the theory of correlated electron systems. I present a holographic theory which builds on general features of the thermal entropy density and the entanglement entropy. Remarkable connections emerge between the holographic approach, and the postulated strong-coupling behavior of the field-theoretic approach.

Although the typical physical system achieves an ordered state at low temperatures, spin liquids stay disordered even in their ground state. In addition to an increasing number of experimental candidates for spin liquids, recent numerical work from Meng, et. al and Yan, et. al. has supplied strong numerical evidence for natural Hamiltonians having spin liquid ground states. Their featureless nature, though, makes  learning about these states particularly difficult. In this talk, we explore what variational ansatz can teach us about them. Additionally, we examine whether the canonical theoretical framework makes sense in the context of the best wave-functions. Finally, we look at what other tools we have to make sense of spin liquids.

The entanglement spectrum denotes the eigenvalues of the reduced density matrix of a region in the ground state of a many-body system. Given these eigenvalues, one can compute the entanglement entropy of the region, but the full spectrum contains much more information. I will review geometric methods to extract this spectrum for special subregions in lorentz and conformally invariant field theories (and any theory whose universal low energy physics is captured by such a field theory). Using this technology, I give a new proof that the entanglement spectrum in quantum hall states is the same as that of a physical edge. I will discuss a number of other applications of the formalism, including, if there is time, a more complicated calculation of universal terms in the entanglement entropy at certain deconfined quantum critical points. The ultimate messages are that geometry is intimately bound up with entanglement and that the entanglement cut should be viewed as a physical cut.

Rare earth pyrochlores, with a chemical formula A2B2O7, exhibit many interesting features in A site spin system. Depending on A site rare earth elements, spin ice and magnetically ordered phases are shown in several experiments. Moreover, they have been also focused as possible candidates of U(1) spin liquid. In order to explore such versatile phases, we study the pseudospin-1/2 model, which is quite generic to describe rare earth pyrochlores with integer spins, in the presence of spin-orbit coupling and crystalline electric field. Using a new "gauge mean field theory", we show the possible ground states, corresponding to several phases listed above.

Novel phases can result from the interplay of electronic interactions and spin orbit coupling. In the first part, we discuss a simple Hubbard model for the pyrochlore iridates, whose phase diagram contains topological insulator (TI) and various magnetic phases. The latter host the novel topological Weyl semimetal, whose excitations behave like Weyl fermions. In the second part we study a novel spin liquid that was proposed to arise in the iridates, the 3D topological Mott insulator: a fractionalized TI where the neutral spinons acquire a topologically non-trivial band structure. The low-energy behavior is dominated by the 2D surface spinons strongly coupled to a bulk gauge field. This phase is characterized by the helical nature of the spinon surface states and the dimensional mismatch between the latter and the gauge bosons. We discuss experimental signatures as well as the possibility of dyonic excitations and a non-trivial magneto-electric response.

A fractional quantized Hall nematic (FQHN) is a novel phase in which a fractional quantum Hall conductance coexists with broken rotational symmetry characteristic of a nematic. Both the topological and symmetry-breaking order present are essential for the description of the state, e..g, in terms of transport properties. Remarkably, such a state has recently been observed by Xia et al. (cond-mat/1109.3219) in a quantum Hall sample at 7/3 filling fraction. As the strength of an applied in-plane magnetic field is increased, they find that the 7/3 state transitions from an isotropic FQH state to a FQHN. In this talk, I will provide a theoretical description of this transition and of the FQHN phase by deforming the usual Landau-Ginzburg/Chern-Simons (LG/CS) theory of the quantum Hall effect. The LG/CS theory allows for the computation of a candidate wave function for the FQHN phase and justifies, on more microscopic grounds, an alternative (particle-vortex) dual theory that I will describe. I will conclude by (qualitatively) comparing the results of our theory with the Xia et al. experiment.

Recent years have seen a renewed interest, both theoretically and experimentally, in the search for topological states of matter. On the theoretical side, while much progress has been achieved in providing a general classification of non-interacting topological states, the fate of these phases in the presence of strong interactions remains an open question. The purpose of this talk is to describe recent developments on this front. In the first part of the talk, we will consider, in a scenario with time-reversal symmetry breaking, dispersionless electronic Bloch bands (flatbands) with non-zero Chern number and show results of exact diagonalization in a small system at 1/3 filling that support the existence of a fractional quantum Hall state in the absence of an external magnetic field. In the second part of the talk, we will discuss strongly interacting electronic phases with time-reversal symmetry in two dimensions and propose a candidate topological field theory with fractionalized excitations that describes the low energy properties of a class of time-reversal symmetric states.