Talks

I will present a few recent exact results about macroscopic fluctuations (large deviations) in non-equilibrium states. These include fluctuations in the non-equilibrium stationary state of systems coupled with unequal reservoirs, in the non-stationary state evolving towards equilibrium, and in active matter. Most of these results are based on fluctuating hydrodynamic descriptions. I will conclude by presenting an approach for this macroscopic description, starting from microscopic dynamics.

I will discuss the motion of a slow distinguishable particle (an impurity) in one-dimensional quantum liquids within a microscopic theory. The impurity experiences the friction force due to scattering off thermally excited quasiparticles. I will present detailed analysis of an arbitrarily strong impurity coupling constant in a wide range of temperatures and uncover new regimes of the impurity dynamics.

We shall discuss properties of quantum scars in a Rydberg ladder with staggered detuning. We shall demonstrate that they are qualitatively different from their counterparts in the well-known Rydberg chain and lead to long-time ETH violating imbalance in absence of disorder.    

Amorphous materials are ubiquitously used in various mechanical appliances, including in diverse athermal forms. Understanding the response, from a microscopic perspective, to mechanical perturbations is thus fundamental to developing materials with specific functionalities. In this talk, I will summarize some recent results, obtained via extensive numerical simulations, on how these athermal materials respond to different kinds of perturbations, be it at the macro-scale or micro-scale, thus allowing us to gain insights into the physical processes at play.

Many-body localization is the paradigm for how interacting quantum systems can resist thermalization in the presence of strong disorder.
After a brief recap on the main ideas of many-body localization,
I will present new results in the limit of weakly interacting systems, where our numerical simulations indicate that below a certain disorder threshold, weak interactions necessarily lead to ergodic instabilities.


Reference: Jeanne Colbois, Fabien Alet, Nicolas Laflorencie, Phys. Rev. Lett. 133, 116502 (2024)

We have used Langevin dynamics simulations to study the effects of activity in a two-dimensional athermal glass-forming system of Lennard-Jones particles. We consider the limit of infinite persistence time in which the self-propulsion forces on the particles have the same magnitude but different directions that do not change with time. This system exhibits a liquid state for large values of the self-propulsion force and a force-balanced jammed state if the self-propulsion force is smaller than a threshold value. The liquid state is found to exhibit long-range correlations. A length scale extracted from spatial correlations of the velocity field increases with system size as a power law with exponent close to one. Spatial correlations of the self-propulsion forces also exhibit a similar length scale, indicating that the particles self-organize to form a steady state in which particles with similar directions of self-propulsion forces come close to one another and move together. This state is “critical” in the sense that it exhibits a correlation length that diverges in the limit of infinite system size. The velocity pattern in the steady state exhibit an intriguing asymmetry. The development of correlations in time, starting from an initial state with random velocities and forces, is analogous to that in domain growth and coarsening in spin systems after a quench from the disordered to the ordered state. However, quantitative features of this process appear to be different from those in domain growth in spin systems with the same symmetry.

This work was done in collaboration with Suman Dutta, Atharva Shukla, Pinaki Chaudhuri and Madan Rao.

The study of Langevin dynamics within highly non-convex random landscapes has been crucial for understanding fundamental aspects of glassy dynamics such as aging, violations of fluctuation-dissipation relations, the emergence of effective temperatures, and the role of high dimensionality and entropy in slowing down relaxation. A comprehensive understanding of the activated regime of the dynamics, where the system transitions between metastable states by overcoming energy barriers, remains however elusive. In the talk I will consider a prototypical model of a high-dimensional energy landscape with Gaussian statistics, exhibiting plenty of metastable states. After recalling the main reasons why activated dynamics is theoretically challenging, I will consider effective processes in which the system jumps in the landscape, visiting the closest metastable states at given energy. Understanding this effective dynamics requires to analyze the geometry of the landscape, particularly the joint distribution of triplets of metastable states that lie in the same region of the high-dimensional configuration space. I will report on the results of this geometrical analysis, and comment on implication for activated dynamics.