Search Talks

Recent theoretical and experimental efforts have been focused on the identification of excitations in quantum spin ice. Due to their relation to the magnetic monopoles of classical spin ice, their quantum counterparts, called spinons, are a highly sought-after manifestation of fractionalization in frustrated quantum magnets like Yb2Ti2O7. Of particular current interest is the quantum dynamics of spinons, namely, their modes of propagation and interaction with the strongly correlated spin background. To investigate this dynamics, we study excited quantum square ice, as captured by the spin-1/2 checkerboard-lattice XXZ model. We formulate effective free-spinon theories in the strong Ising coupling limit, with spinons either deconfined or artificially confined to nearest-neighbor distance, and calculate the corresponding approximate dynamic spin-structure factors (DSFs). We then evaluate the DSF of the fully interacting model exactly for clusters of up to 72 sites. The resulting spectra allow us to identify dispersive fingerprints of coherent spinon propagation in the correlated ``vacuum'' of quantum square ice within an extended low-energy regime. We thus provide unbiased evidence for the formation of coherent quasiparticles in quantum spin ice above the Ising gap.

Inspired by recent progress into recasting dissipative fluid dynamics within an effective action formalism,

I will show how to embed this problem in holography, where such effective actions can be computed explicitly for the class of relativistic conformal fluids. In particular I will identify the geometric counterpart of certain Goldstone bosons, the light degrees of freedom responsible for the low energy excitations in hydrodynamics. Moreover I will show how the underlying UV Schwinger-Keldysh structure arises at the level of the effective action.

By creating an ultra-clean underground location with a highly reduced radioactive background, otherwise impossible measurements can be performed to study fundamental physics, astrophysics and cosmology. The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) was a 1,000 tonne heavy-water-based neutrino detector created 2 km underground in a mine near Sudbury, Canada. SNO has used neutrinos from 8B decay in the Sun to observe one neutrino reaction sensitive only to solar electron neutrinos and others sensitive to all active neutrino flavors. It found clear evidence for neutrino flavor change that also requires that neutrinos have non-zero mass. This requires modification of the Standard Model for Elementary Particles and confirms solar model calculations with great accuracy. The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics and the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics were awarded for these measurements. Future measurements at the expanded SNOLAB facility will search for Dark Matter particles thought to make up 26% of our Universe and rare forms of radioactivity that can tell us further fundamental properties of neutrinos potentially related to the origin of our matter-dominated Universe.