Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Calibrating Comfort in the Care-Control nexus of Humanitarian Borderwork

  Bronte Alexander

  Mig. Pol. 4, 002 (2025) · published 20 May 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  People seeking safety through migration often move through spaces of humanitarian care, including shelters, camps, and transit sites. Despite differences in resources and infrastructure, issues with overcrowding and poor thermal conditions persist globally. These concerns are directly linked to the degree in which comfort is considered in the design of humanitarian and emergency spaces. Drawing on research regarding Brazil’s military-humanitarian response to Venezuelan migration, this paper explores the often-overlooked role of comfort in humanitarian borderwork. By studying the operations and spatialities of two sites that provide care to incoming migrants and refugees, I argue that comfort can be used as a lens to examine the function of care and control in humanitarian borderwork. In doing so, this research highlights how (dis)comfort works through both care and control to (re)produce differential and restrictive mobilities. Challenging the normalisation and invisibilisation of discomfort in displacement contexts reveals the need to further consider the everyday, mundane implications of care.

• Snowmass 2021 cross frontier report: Dark matter complementarity

  Antonio Boveia, Mohamed Berkat, Thomas Y. Chen, Aman Desai, Caterina Doglioni, Alex Drlica-Wagner, Susan Gardner, Stefania Gori, Joshua Greaves, Patrick Harding, Philip C. Harris, W. Hugh Lippincott, Maria Elena Monzani, Katherine Pachal, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Gray Rybka, Bibhushan Shakya, Jessie Shelton, Tracy R. Slatyer, Amanda Steinhebel, Philip Tanedo, Natalia Toro, Yun-Tse Tsai, Mike Williams, Lindley Winslow, Jaehoon Yu, Tien-Tien Yu

  SciPost Phys. Comm. Rep. 7 (2025) · published 19 May 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The fundamental nature of Dark Matter is a central theme of the Snowmass 2021 process, extending across all frontiers. In the last decade, advances in detector technology, analysis techniques and theoretical modeling have enabled a new generation of experiments and searches while broadening the types of candidates we can pursue. Over the next decade, there is great potential for discoveries that would transform our understanding of dark matter. In the following, we outline a road map for discovery developed in collaboration among the frontiers. A strong portfolio of experiments that delves deep, searches wide, and harnesses the complementarity between techniques is key to tackling this complicated problem, requiring expertise, results, and planning from all Frontiers of the Snowmass 2021 process.

  2 citations

• Spin-chain based quantum thermal machines

  Edoardo Maria Centamori, Michele Campisi, Vittorio Giovannetti

  SciPost Phys. 18, 160 (2025) · published 16 May 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the performance of quantum thermal machines in which the working fluid of the model is represented by a many-body quantum system that is periodically connected with external baths via local couplings. A formal characterization of the limit cycles of the set-up is presented in terms of the mixing properties of the quantum channel that describes the evolution of the fluid over a thermodynamic cycle. For the special case in which the system is a collection of spin $1/2$ particles coupled via magnetization preserving Hamiltonians, a full characterization of the possible operational regimes (i.e., thermal engine, refrigerator, heater and thermal accelerator) is provided: in this context we show in fact that the different regimes only depend upon a limited number of parameters (essentially the ratios of the energy gaps associated with the local Hamiltonians of the parts of the network which are in direct thermal contact with the baths).

  2 citations

• Tighter lower bounds on quantum annealing times

  Luis Pedro García-Pintos, Mrunmay Sahasrabudhe, Christian Arenz

  SciPost Phys. 18, 159 (2025) · published 16 May 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We derive lower bounds on the time needed for a quantum annealer to prepare the ground state of a target Hamiltonian. These bounds do not depend on the annealing schedule and can take the local structure of the Hamiltonian into account. Consequently, the bounds are computable without knowledge of the annealer's dynamics and, in certain cases, scale with the size of the system. We discuss spin systems where the bounds are polynomially tighter than existing bounds, qualitatively capturing the scaling of the exact annealing times as a function of the number of spins.

• On the topology of solutions to random continuous constraint satisfaction problems

  Jaron Kent-Dobias

  SciPost Phys. 18, 158 (2025) · published 15 May 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We consider the set of solutions to $M$ random polynomial equations whose $N$ variables are restricted to the $(N-1)$-sphere. Each equation has independent Gaussian coefficients and a target value $V_0$. When solutions exist, they form a manifold. We compute the average Euler characteristic of this manifold in the limit of large $N$, and find different behavior depending on the target value $V_0$, the ratio $\alpha=M/N$, and the variances of the coefficients. We divide this behavior into five phases with different implications for the topology of the solution manifold. When $M=1$ there is a correspondence between this problem and level sets of the energy in the spherical spin glasses. We conjecture that the transition energy dividing two of the topological phases corresponds to the energy asymptotically reached by gradient descent from a random initial condition, possibly resolving an open problem in out-of-equilibrium dynamics. However, the quality of the available data leaves the question open for now.

  2 citations

• Intertwined order of generalized global symmetries

  Benjamin Moy, Eduardo Fradkin

  SciPost Phys. 18, 157 (2025) · published 15 May 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate the interplay of generalized global symmetries in 2+1 dimensions in a lattice model that couples a $\mathbb{Z}_N$ clock model to a $\mathbb{Z}_N$ gauge theory via a topological interaction. This coupling binds the charges of one symmetry to the disorder operators of the other, and when these composite objects condense, they give rise to emergent generalized symmetries with mixed 't Hooft anomalies. These anomalies result in phases with ordinary symmetry breaking, topological order, and symmetry-protected topological (SPT) order, where the different types of order are not independent but intimately related. We further explore the gapped boundary states of these exotic phases and develop theories for phase transitions between them. Additionally, we extend this lattice model to incorporate a non-invertible global symmetry, which can be spontaneously broken, leading to domain walls with non-trivial fusion rules.

  3 citations

• Political or environmental refugees? Re-examining the flight of the Vietnamese boat people, 1975-1995

  Saphia Fleury

  Mig. Pol. 4, 001 (2025) · published 15 May 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  This paper examines ecocide in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War (1954 to 1975) and the extent to which it drove the ‘boat people’ mass migration from Vietnam from 1975 to the mid-1990s. The exodus has become an archetype of a ‘political’ refugee flow, based on a Western Cold War narrative of people fleeing en masse from the persecution of an autocratic Communist regime. This paper challenges this assumption, showing how the interplay of environmental factors with political and military decisions contributed to the post-war exodus. These findings are reached through the analysis of historical primary sources as well as 229 oral history interviews, some 40 per cent of which were conducted with former child refugees. The implications have contemporary relevance because modern migration flows are frequently mixed, and climate change is further complicating the reasons that people leave their homes and their ability to access asylum. The conclusion argues that ecocide can, in some contexts, be considered a form of persecution for the purpose of refugee determination.

• The club sandwich: Gapless phases and phase transitions with non-invertible symmetries

  Lakshya Bhardwaj, Lea E. Bottini, Daniel Pajer, Sakura Schäfer-Nameki

  SciPost Phys. 18, 156 (2025) · published 14 May 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We provide a generalization of the Symmetry Topological Field Theory (SymTFT) framework to characterize phase transitions and gapless phases with categorical symmetries. The central tool is the club sandwich, which extends the SymTFT setup to include an interface between two topological orders: there is a symmetry boundary, which is gapped, and a physical boundary that may be gapless, but in addition, there is also a gapped interface in the middle. The club sandwich generalizes so-called Kennedy-Tasaki (KT) transformations. Building on the results in [L. Bhardwaj et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 133, 161601 (2024); L. Bhardwaj et al., SciPost Phys. 18, 032 (2025)] on gapped phases with categorical symmetries, we construct gapless theories describing phase transitions with non-invertible symmetries by applying suitable KT transformations on known phase transitions provided by the critical Ising model and the 3-state Potts model. We also describe in detail the order parameters in these gapless theories characterizing the phase transitions, which are generally mixtures of conventional and string-type order parameters mixed together by the action of categorical symmetries. Additionally, removing the physical boundary from the club sandwiches results in club quiches, which characterize all possible gapped boundary phases with (possibly non-invertible) symmetries that can arise on the boundary of a bulk gapped phase. We also provide a mathematical characterization of gapped boundary phases with symmetries as pivotal tensor functors whose targets are pivotal multi-fusion categories.

  20 citations

• SKATR: A self-supervised summary transformer for SKA

  Ayodele Ore, Caroline Heneka, Tilman Plehn

  SciPost Phys. 18, 155 (2025) · published 14 May 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The Square Kilometer Array will initiate a new era of radio astronomy by allowing 3D imaging of the Universe during Cosmic Dawn and Reionization. Modern machine learning is crucial to analyze the highly structured and complex signal. However, accurate training data is expensive to simulate, and supervised learning may not generalize. We introduce a self-supervised vision transformer, SKATR, whose learned encoding can be cheaply adapted for downstream tasks on 21cm maps. Focusing on regression and generative inference of astrophysical and cosmological parameters, we demonstrate that SKATR representations are maximally informative and that SKATR generalizes out-of-domain to differently-simulated, noised, and higher-resolution datasets.

  1 citation

• The complex Liouville string: The matrix integral

  Scott Collier, Lorenz Eberhardt, Beatrix Mühlmann, Victor A. Rodriguez

  SciPost Phys. 18, 154 (2025) · published 13 May 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We propose a duality between the complex Liouville string and a two-matrix integral. The complex Liouville string is defined by coupling two Liouville theories with complex central charges $c = 13 ± i \lambda$ on the worldsheet. The matrix integral is characterized by its spectral curve which allows us to compute the perturbative string amplitudes recursively via topological recursion. This duality constitutes a controllable instance of holographic duality. The leverage on the theory is provided by the rich analytic structure of the string amplitudes that we discussed in [arXiv:2409.18759] and allows us to perform numerous tests on the duality.

  8 citations