Condensed Matter

It is a generic feature of strongly correlated electronic systems that several mechanisms (broadly represented by interactions) compete with each other. This competition often leads to the phenomenon of frustration. In strongly correlated systems such as doped Mott insulators kinetic energy and Coulomb repulsion frustrate the tendency of doped holes to phase separate. The result is the onset of a set of novel phases, which we dubbed Electronic Liquid Crystal (ELC) states, with varying degrees of complexity. Much like classical liquid crystals, electronic liquid crystal phases break translation and rotational invariance to varying degrees. In this talk I will focus on the experimental evidence and theory of two these phases, stripes and nematics, in several different systems including two-dimensional electron gases in large magnetic fields, ruthenate oxides, heavy fermions, and cuprate and pnictide superconductors.

In this talk, I will first give an overview of holographic entanglement entropy. Next I will introduce recent our results on its applications to the quantum quenches and a holography for flat spacetime.

We will discuss the effect of non-equilibrium drive near a quantum critical point in itinerant electron systems. Non-equilibrium field theory is formulated in terms of the Keldysh functional integral. The renormalization group approach is used to study the universality class of the non-equilibrium phase transition in the steady state system. The role of the non-equilibrium drive in the quantum-classical crossover will be discussed using the example of the Hertz-Millis theory and the generalization thereof.

We propose a mechanism where high entanglement between very distant boundary spins is generated by suddenly connecting two long Kondo spin chains. We show that this procedure provides an efficient way to route entanglement between multiple distant sites useful for quantum computation and multi-party quantum communication. We observe that the key features of the entanglement dynamics of the composite spin chain are remarkably well described using a simple model of two singlets, each formed by two spins. The proposed entanglement routing mechanism is a footprint of the emergence of a Kondo cloud in a Kondo system and can be engineered and observed in varied physical settings.

In the last many years a number of metallic solids have been studied that defy understanding within the principles of conventional textbook solid state physics. The most famous are the cuprate high temperature superconductors though many other examples have been found. In this talk I will argue that the mysterious properties of many such materials arises from an imminent `death' of their Fermi surfaces. I will discuss some theoretical ideas on how to kill a Fermi surface, and their implications for experiments.

The standard method to study nonperturbative properties of quantum field theories is to Wick rotate the theory to Euclidean space and regulate it on a Euclidean Lattice. An alternative is "fuzzy field theory". This involves replacing the lattice field theory by a matrix model that approximates the field theory of interest, with the approximation becoming better as the matrix size is increased. The regulated field theory is one on a background noncommutative space. I will describe how this method works and present recent progress and surprises.

Traditional condensed matter physics is based on two theories: symmetry breaking theory for phases and phase transitions, and Fermi liquid theory for metals. Mean-field theory is a powerful method to describe symmetry breaking phases and phase transitions by assuming the ground state wavefunctions for many-body systems can be approximately described by direct product states. The Fermi liquid theory is another powerful method to study electron systems by assuming that the ground state wavefunctions for the electrons can be approximately described by Slater determinants. From the encoding point of view, both methods only use a polynomial amount of information to approximately encode many-body ground state wavefunctions which contain an exponentially large amount of information. Moreover, another nice property of both approaches is that all the physical quantities (energy, correlation functions, etc.) can be efficiently calculated (polynomially hard). In this talk, I'll introduce a new class of states: (Grassmann-number) tensor-net states. These states only need polynomial amount of information to approximately encode many-body ground states. Many classes of states, such as Slater determinant states, projective states, string-net states and their generalizations, etc., are subclasses of (Grassmann-number) tensor-net states. However, calculating the physical quantities for these state can be exponentially hard in general. To solve this difficulty, we develop the Tensor-Entanglement Renormalization Group (TERG) method to efficiently calculate the physical quantities. We demonstrate our algorithm by studying several interesting boson/fermion models, including t-J model on a honeycomb lattice.

We consider one dimensional devices supporting a pair of Majorana bound states at their ends We firstly show [1] that edge Majorana bound modes allow for processes with an actual transfer of electronic material between well-separated points and provide an explicit computation of the tunnelling amplitude for this process. We then show [2] that these devices can produce remarkable Hanbury-Brown Twiss like interference effects between well separated Dirac fermions of pertinent energies: we find indeed that, at these energies, the simultaneous scattering of two incoming electrons or two incoming holes from the Majorana bound states leads exclusively to an electron-hole final state. This "anti-bunching" in electron-hole internal pseudospin space can be detected through a measure of current-current correlations. Finally, we show [2] that, by scattering appropriate spin polarized electrons from the Majorana bound states, one can engineer a non-local entangler of electronic spins useful for quantum information applications. [1] G. W. Semenoff and P. Sodano: J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 40, 1479 (2007); [2] S. Bose and P. Sodano: “Non-local Handbury- Brown Twiss Interferometry & Entanglement Generation from Majorana

The simulation of systems of anyons offers a significant challenge to the condensed matter physicist. These systems are presently of substantial theoretical and experimental interest due to their potential for universal quantum computation, but due to their non-trivial exchange statistics, the tools available for their study have been limited. In this talk, I will present a formalism whereby any existing tensor network algorithm may be adapted for use with both Abelian and non-Abelian anyons, culminating in our recent simulations of infinite 1-D chains of interacting anyons using the Multi-scale Entanglement Renormalisation Ansatz, or MERA, demonstrating that tensor network algorithms may be effectively employed in the study of anyonic systems.

Graphene-like materials provide a unique opportunity to explore quantum-relativistic phenomena in a condensed matter laboratory. Interesting phenomena associated with the internal degrees of freedom, spin and valley, including quantum spin-Hall effect, have been theoretically proposed, but could not be observed so far largely due to disorder and density inhonogeneity. We show that weak magnetic field breaks the symmetries that protect flavor (spin, valley) degeneracy, and induces large bulk non-quantized flavor-Hall effect in graphene. The effect occurs due to flavor splitting which generates the imbalance of the Hall resistivities of the two flavor species. At the Dirac point, flavor-Hall effect is greatly enhanced due to anomalous magnetotransport of Dirac-like carriers. The flavor-Hall effect is robust in the presence of disorder and interactions, and can serve as a hallmark of the quasi-relativistic carriers in the system. It manifests itself in large nonlocal transport mediated by long-lived flavor currents, as well as in flavor injection and accumulation experiments. Recent experimental observation of the giant nonlocal transport in graphene following our prediction opens up new opportunities for creating and manipulating flavor currents. Our work also shows that nonlocal electric transport provides a tool to study neutral modes in solid-states systems.

Anderson localization emerges in quantum systems when randomised parameters cause the exponential suppression of motion. In this talk we will consider the localization phenomenon in the toric code, demonstrating its ability to sustain quantum information in a fault tolerant way. We show that an external magnetic field induces quantum walks of anyons, causing logical information to be destroyed in a time linear with the system size when even a single pair of anyons is present. However, by taking into account the disorder inherent in any physical realisation of the code, it is found that localization allows the memory to be stable in the presence of a finite anyon density. Enhancements to this effect are also considered using random lattices, and similar problems for anyons transported by thermal errors are considered.

More than forty years ago Nobel laureate P.W. Anderson studied the overlap between two nearby ground states. The result that the overlap tends to zero in the thermodynamics limit was catastrophic for those times. More recently the study of the overlap between ground states, i.e. the fidelity, led to the formulation of the so called fidelity approach to (quantum) phase transition (QPT). This new approach to QPT does not rely on the identification of order parameters or symmetry pattern; rathers it embodies the theory of phase transitions with an operational meaning in terms of measurements. Nowadays orthogonality of ground states is much less surprising. I will provide the general scaling behavior of the fidelity at regular and at critical points of the phase diagrams, Anderson's result being a particular case. These results are useful to many areas of theoretical physics. A related quantity extensively studied here, the fidelity susceptibility, is well known in various other contexts under different names. In metrology it is called quantum Fisher information; in the theory of adiabatic computation it represents the figure of merit for efficient computation; in yet another context it is known as (real part of) the Berry geometric tensor.