Condensed Matter

Topological states of matter are of of fundamental interest in contemporate condensed matter physics. Today, the fractional Quantum Hall effect remains the only known experimental system expected to exhibit intrinsic topological order. The question remains whether also different systems might stabilize this kind of ordering. Chiral spin liquids are an analogue of Fractional Quantum Hall Effect wave functions for spin systems. These wavefunctions have been envisioned in 1987 but only very recently several simple frustrated quantum spin models have been proposed realizing this physics. In this talk we will introduce chiral spin liquids, discuss their relation to the Fractional Quantum Hall effect and present our recent numerical studies that provide conclusive evidence for the emergence of this exotic state of matter in extended frustrated Heisenberg models. In the course of these projects novel algorithms and techniques for large scale Exact Diagonalization were developed and applied. We briefly discuss these techniques and show that they allow for sparse diagonalizations of Heisenberg systems up to 48-50 spin-1/2 particles.

Since its first discovery in 1986, high-Tc superconductors have been attracting constant interests and meticulous efforts from both theorists and experimentalists, not merely due to its large transition temperature, but also because it offers a well characterized laboratory for the study of exotic phenomena such as quantum criticality, non-Fermi liquid behavior, and intertwined orders. One pressing question in the field is the role played by disorder:

inevitable in real materials, disorder is able to fundamentally alter the properties of the system under certain circumstances. In this talk, we will discuss from a theoretical point of view, how different types of disorders affect various electronic orders in copper-based high-Tc superconductors. We also discuss the implications in experiments, and investigate the possibility of generalizing our conclusions to a variety of other physical systems.

Motivated by the question about reconstructing a Conformal field theory from the data of a subfactor of finite index, Jones studied the continuous limit of the periodic quantum spin chain which Thompson group acts on. Based on planar algebras, the topological axiomatization of subfactors, we will illustrate the idea of the correspondence between the skein theory of planar algebras and presentation of Thompson groups.

Bosonic symmetric protected topological (BSPT) phases are bosonic anagolue of electron topological insulators and superconductors. Despite the theoretical progresses of classifying these states, little attention has been paid to experimental realization of BSPT states in dimensions higher than 1. We propose bilayer graphene system in a out-of-plane magnetic field with Coulomb interaction is a natural platform for BSPT states with $U(1)\times U(1)$ symmetry. We also propose that the quantum phase transition between the BSPT state and the trivial state, which may be tuned by an out-of-plane electric field, could be a novel transition with only gapless bosonic degrees of freedom. In the second part of the talk we will discuss the out-of-time-order correlation (OTOC) and its application in many-body localized and marginal MBL systems. We demonstrate, in marginal MBL systems, the scrambling time follows a stretched exponential scaling with the distance between the operators, which demonstrates Sinai diffusion of quantum information and the enhanced scrambling by the quantum criticality in non-chaotic systems.

The matrix product state (MPS) ansatz makes possible computationally-efficient representations of weakly entangled many-body quantum systems with gapped Hamiltonians near their ground states, notably including massive, relativistic quantum fields on the lattice. No Wick rotation is required to apply the time evolution operator, enabling study of time-dependent Hamiltonians. Using free massive scalar field theory on the 1+1 Robertson-Walker metric as a toy example, I present early efforts to exploit this fact to model quantum fields in curved spacetime. We use the ADM formalism to write the appropriate Hamiltonian witnessed by a particular class of normal observers. Possible applications include simulations of gravitational particle production in the presence of interactions, studies of the slicing-dependence of entanglement production, and inclusion of the expectation of the stress-energy tensor as a matter source in a numerical relativity simulation.