Talks

The unexpected diversity of planetary systems has posed challenges to our classical understanding of planetary formation. For instance, Jupiter sized planets have been detected with short orbital periods of a few days in misaligned orbits with respect to the spin-axis of their host stars. I will first describe the statistical implication of detecting misaligned hot Jupiters and will suggest how dynamical interactions between an outer perturber and the inner planet, can naturally lead to the formation of such misaligned hot Jupiters. Next, I will discuss a similar dynamical process in the outer Solar System, far away from our Sun, which could cause the observed clustering of extreme trans-Neptunian objects. This can constrain properties of a possible outer planet, Planet Nine, in our own Solar System. 

Applying a chemical potential bias to a conductor drives the system out of equilibrium into a current carrying non-equilibrium state.  This current flow is associated with entropy production in the leads, but it remains poorly understood under what conditions the system is driven to local equilibrium by this process.  We investigate this problem using two toy models for coherent quantum transport of diffusive fermions:  Anderson models in the conducting phase and a class of random quantum circuits acting on a chain of qubits, which exactly maps to an interacting fermion problem. Under certain conditions, we find that the long-time states in both models exhibit volume-law mutual information and entanglement, in striking violation of local equilibrium.  Extending this analysis to Anderson metal-insulator transitions, we find that the volume-law entanglement scaling persists at the critical point up to mobility edge effects.  This work points towards a broad class of examples of physical systems where volume-law entanglement can be sustained, and potentially harnessed, despite strong coupling of the system to its surrounding environment. 

In the second lecture, I will extend the previous discussion to gravity, and show that the conformal trace anomaly must play a special role in the effective field theory of low energy gravity. Classical General Relativity receives an infrared relevant modification from the conformal trace anomaly of the energy-momentum tensor of massless, or nearly massless, quantum fields, which implies the existence of a new long range massless scalar degree of freedom, not present in the classical Einstein theory, that contributes to gravitational scattering processes and has long range gravitational effects. Similar to the axial anomaly, the local form of the effective action associated with the conformal anomaly is expressible in terms of a dynamical scalar field that couples to the conformal factor of the spacetime metric, allowing it to propagate over macroscopic distances. Among the significant implications of this effective field theory of gravity are the prediction of scalar gravitational wave solutions—a spin-0 breather mode— in addition to the transversely polarized tensor waves of the classical Einstein theory. Astrophysical sources for scalar gravitational waves are considered, with the excited gluonic condensates in the interiors of neutron stars in merger events with other compact objects likely to provide the strongest burst signals. The conformal anomaly also implies generically large quantum back reaction effects and conformal correlators in the vicinity of black hole horizons which are relevant to the formation of a non-singular interior, as well as an additional scalar degree of freedom in cosmology, providing a theoretical foundation for dynamical dark energy.

Ubiquitous in the behavior of physical systems is the competition between an energy term E and an entropy term S of their free energy F = E - beta S. These concepts are also relevant for error correction, where the `energy` E is the number of qubits afflicted by an error, the `entropy' S(E) is the logarithm of the number of energy-E failing errors, and beta relates to the probability of each qubit's error. Error-correction schemes with larger minimum free energy have better performance. Often distance d (which correct all errors with energy less than d/2) is used as a proxy for a code's performance since it increases the minimal E and therefore tends to increases the minimal F. However, a sufficiently large entropy S can counteract a large d and reduce the free energy (negatively impacting a code's performance). A great example of these principles is the surface code, which is at present the leading architecture for fault tolerant quantum computing. Rotating a square lattice geometry over the surface of the torus can increase the distance of the code by a factor of root two, but at the cost of increased entropy. We obtain exact expressions for this entropic effect in the low error regime, and introduce an analytical model that qualitatively describes the behavior for error rates all the way up to threshold. Our predictions are corroborated by numerical estimates of the low error failure rate, using the splitting method algorithm introduced by Bravyi et al. We find that although the rotated lattice outperforms the non-rotated lattice with the same number of qubits for low error rates, the two codes have very similar performance for error rates which are an appreciable fraction of the threshold error rate. Surprisingly, we also find some system sizes and error rates for which the non-rotated lattice has marginally better performance. 

I will discuss the status and future of numerical lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) calculations for nuclear physics. With advances in supercomputing, we are beginning to quantitatively understand nuclear structure and interactions directly from the fundamental quark and gluon degrees of freedom of the Standard Model. Recent studies provide insight into the neutrino-nucleus interactions relevant to long-baseline neutrino experiments, double beta decay, and nuclear sigma terms needed for theory predictions of dark matter cross-sections at underground detectors. I will also address new work constraining `exotic glue’ in nuclei, which will be measurable for the first time at a future electron-ion collider, and explain how machine learning tools are providing new possibilities in this field.

In this first of two lectures, intended to be a pedagogical introduction, I will review the quantum field theory origin of anomalies starting with the more familiar example of the axial anomaly in QED, emphasizing the infrared effects and the appearance of a two-particle massless state, similar to a Cooper pairing in superconductor, associated with both the axial and conformal anomalies in two and four dimensions. In both cases the effective action of the anomaly is non-local, but may be expressed in a local form by the introduction of a bosonic field, which one can verify becomes a bona fide propagating quantum field in its own right. At finite chiral chemical potential this boson is a chiral density wave, a gapless pseudo-scalar collective excitation of the Fermi surface of a dissipationless chiral superfluid, analogous to the Goldstone-Nambu boson of spontaneous symmetry breaking. In the limit of vanishing chiral background the boson is a chiral collective mode of the Dirac vacuum itself, which therefore supports an axion-like boson excitation with a two-photon coupling, arising directly from the axial anomaly.

 

Despite much theoretical effort, there is no complete theory of the “strange” metal phase of the high temperature 

superconductors, and its linear-in-temperature resistivity. This phase is believed to be a strongly-interacting metallic 

phase of matter without fermionic quasiparticles, and is virtually impossible to model accurately using traditional

perturbative field-theoretic techniques. Recently, progress has been made using large-N techniques based on the 

solvable Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, which do not involve expanding about any weakly-coupled limit. I will 

describe constructions of solvable models of strange metals based on SYK-like large-N limits, which can reproduce  

some of the experimentally observed features of strange metals and adjoining phases. These models, and further 

extensions, could possibly pave the way to developing a controlled theoretical understanding of the essential building 

blocks of the electronic state in correlated-electron superconductors near optimal doping.