Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Boundary time crystals as AC sensors: Enhancements and constraints

  Dominic Gribben, Anna Sanpera, Rosario Fazio, Jamir Marino, Fernando Iemini

  SciPost Phys. 18, 100 (2025) · published 18 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate the use of a boundary time crystals (BTCs) as quantum sensors of AC fields. Boundary time crystals are non-equilibrium phases of matter in contact to an environment, for which a macroscopic fraction of the many-body system breaks the time translation symmetry. We find an enhanced sensitivity of the BTC when its spins are resonant with the applied AC field, as quantified by the quantum Fisher information (QFI). The QFI dynamics in this regime is shown to be captured by a relatively simple Ansatz consisting of an initial power-law growth and late-time exponential decay. We study the scaling of the Ansatz parameters with resources (encoding time and number of spins) and identify a moderate quantum enhancement in the sensor performance through comparison with classical QFI bounds. Investigating the precise source of this performance, we find that despite of its long coherence time and multipartite correlations (advantageous properties for quantum metrology), the entropic cost of the BTC (which grows indefinitely in the thermodynamic limit) hinders an optimal decoding of the AC field information. This result has implications for future candidates of quantum sensors in open system and we hope it will encourage future study into the role of entropy in quantum metrology.

  5 citations

• Molecular sorting on a fluctuating membrane

  Damiano Andreghetti, Luca Dall'Asta, Andrea Gamba, Igor Kolokolov, Vladimir Lebedev

  SciPost Phys. 18, 099 (2025) · published 18 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Molecular sorting in biological membranes is essential for proper cellular function. It also plays a crucial role in the budding of enveloped viruses from host cells. We recently proposed that this process is driven by phase separation, where the formation and growth of sorting domains depend primarily on direct intermolecular interactions. In addition to these, Casimir-like forces—arising from entropic effects in fluctuating membranes —may also play a significant role in the molecular distillation process. Here, using a combination of theoretical analysis and numerical simulations, we explore how Casimir-like forces between rigid membrane inclusions contribute to sorting, particularly in the biologically relevant regime where direct intermolecular interactions are weak. Our results show that these forces enhance molecular distillation by reducing the critical radius for the formation of new sorting domains and facilitating the capture of molecules within these domains. We identify the relative rigidity of the membrane and supermolecular domains as a key parameter controlling molecular sorting efficiency, offering new insights into the physical principles underlying molecular sorting in biological systems.

  1 citation

• Chiral adiabatic transmission protected by Fermi surface topology

  Isidora Araya Day, Kostas Vilkelis, Antonio L. R. Manesco, Ahmet Mert Bozkurt, Valla Fatemi, Anton R. Akhmerov

  SciPost Phys. 18, 098 (2025) · published 18 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We demonstrate that Andreev modes that propagate along a transparent Josephson junction have a perfect transmission at the point where three junctions meet. The chirality and the number of quantized transmission channels is determined by the topology of the Fermi surface and the vorticity of the superconducting phase differences at the trijunction. We explain this chiral adiabatic transmission (CAT) as a consequence of the adiabatic evolution of the scattering modes both in momentum and real space. The dispersion relation of the junction then separates the scattering trajectories by introducing inaccesible regions of phase space. We expect that CAT is observable in nonlocal conductance and thermal transport measurements. Furthermore, because it does not rely on particle-hole symmetry, CAT is also possible to observe directly in metamaterials.

• Symmetry fractionalization, mixed-anomalies and dualities in quantum spin models with generalized symmetries

  Heidar Moradi, Ömer M. Aksoy, Jens H. Bardarson, Apoorv Tiwari

  SciPost Phys. 18, 097 (2025) · published 17 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate the gauging of higher-form finite Abelian symmetries and their sub-groups in quantum spin models in spatial dimensions $d=2$ and 3. Doing so, we naturally uncover gauged models with dual higher-group symmetries and potential mixed ‘t Hooft anomalies. We demonstrate that the mixed anomalies manifest as the symmetry fractionalization of higher-form symmetries participating in the mixed anomaly. Gauging is realized as an isomorphism or duality between the bond algebras that generate the space of quantum spin models with the dual generalized symmetry structures. We explore the mapping of gapped phases under such gauging related dualities for 0-form and 1-form symmetries in spatial dimension $d=2$ and 3. In $d=2$, these include several non-trivial dualities between short-range entangled gapped phases with 0-form symmetries and 0-form symmetry enriched Higgs and (twisted) deconfined phases of the gauged theory with possible symmetry fractionalizations. Such dualities also imply strong constraints on several unconventional, i.e., deconfined or topological transitions. In $d=3$, among others, we find, dualities between topological orders via gauging of 1-form symmetries. Hamiltonians self-dual under gauging of 1-form symmetries host emergent non-invertible symmetries, realizing higher-categorical generalizations of the Tambara-Yamagami fusion category.

  6 citations

• Generative learning of continuous data by tensor networks

  Alex Meiburg, Jing Chen, Jacob Miller, Raphaëlle Tihon, Guillaume Rabusseau, Alejandro Perdomo-Ortiz

  SciPost Phys. 18, 096 (2025) · published 17 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Beyond their origin in modeling many-body quantum systems, tensor networks have emerged as a promising class of models for solving machine learning problems, notably in unsupervised generative learning. While possessing many desirable features arising from their quantum-inspired nature, tensor network generative models have previously been largely restricted to binary or categorical data, limiting their utility in real-world modeling problems. We overcome this by introducing a new family of tensor network generative models for continuous data, which are capable of learning from distributions containing continuous random variables. We develop our method in the setting of matrix product states, first deriving a universal expressivity theorem proving the ability of this model family to approximate any reasonably smooth probability density function with arbitrary precision. We then benchmark the performance of this model on several synthetic and real-world datasets, finding that the model learns and generalizes well on distributions of continuous and discrete variables. We develop methods for modeling different data domains, and introduce a trainable compression layer which is found to increase model performance given limited memory or computational resources. Overall, our methods give important theoretical and empirical evidence of the efficacy of quantum-inspired methods for the rapidly growing field of generative learning.

  2 citations

• Space-time first-order correlations of an open Bose Hubbard model with incoherent pump and loss

  Martina Zündel, Leonardo Mazza, Léonie Canet, Anna Minguzzi

  SciPost Phys. 18, 095 (2025) · published 17 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate the correlation properties in the steady state of driven-dissipative interacting bosonic systems in the quantum regime, as for example non-linear photonic cavities. Specifically, we consider the Bose-Hubbard model on a periodic chain and with spatially homogeneous one-body loss and pump within the Markovian approximation. The steady state is non-thermal and is formally equivalent to an infinite-temperature state with finite chemical potential set by the dissipative parameters. While there is no effect of interactions on the steady state, we observe a nontrivial behaviour of the space-time two-point correlation function, obtained by exact diagonalisation. In particular, we find that the decay width of the propagator is not only renormalised at increasing interactions, as it is the case of a single non-linear resonator, but also at increasing hopping strength. Furthermore, we numerically predict at large interactions a plateau value of the decay rate which goes beyond perturbative results in the interaction strength. We then compute the full spectral function, finding that it contains both a dispersive free-particle like dispersion at low energy and a doublon branch at energy corresponding to the on-site interactions. We compare with the corresponding calculation for the ground state of a closed quantum system and show that the driven-dissipative nature – determining both the steady state and the dynamical evolution – changes the low-lying part of the spectrum, where noticeably, the dispersion is quadratic instead of linear at small wavevectors. Finally, we compare to a high temperature grand-canonical equilibrium state and show the difference with respect to the open system stemming from the additional degree of freedom of the dissipation that allows one to vary the width of the dispersion lines.

  1 citation

• Pivoting through the chiral-clock family

  Nick G. Jones, Abhishodh Prakash, Paul Fendley

  SciPost Phys. 18, 094 (2025) · published 14 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The Onsager algebra, invented to solve the two-dimensional Ising model, can be used to construct conserved charges for a family of integrable $N$-state chiral clock models. We show how it naturally gives rise to a "pivot" procedure for this family of chiral Hamiltonians. These Hamiltonians have an anti-unitary CPT symmetry that when combined with the usual $\mathbb{Z}_N$ clock symmetry gives a non-Abelian dihedral symmetry group $D_{2N}$. We show that this symmetry gives rise to symmetry-protected topological (SPT) order in this family for all even $N$, and representation-SPT (RSPT) physics for all odd $N$. The simplest such example is a next-nearest-neighbour chain generalising the spin-1/2 cluster model, an SPT phase of matter. We derive a matrix-product state representation of its fixed-point ground state along with the ensuing entanglement spectrum and symmetry fractionalisation. We analyse a rich phase diagram combining this model with the Onsager-integrable chiral Potts chain, and find trivial, symmetry-breaking and (R)SPT orders, as well as extended gapless regions. For odd $N$, the phase transitions are "unnecessarily" critical from the SPT point of view.

  4 citations

• Higher-genus Fay-like identities from meromorphic generating functions

  Konstantin Baune, Johannes Broedel, Egor Im, Artyom Lisitsyn, Yannis Moeckli

  SciPost Phys. 18, 093 (2025) · published 14 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  A possible way of constructing polylogarithms on Riemann surfaces of higher genera facilitates integration kernels, which can be derived from generating functions incorporating the geometry of the surface. Functional relations among polylogarithms rely on identities for those integration kernels. In this article, we derive identities for Enriquez' meromorphic generating function and investigate the implications for the associated integration kernels. The resulting identities are shown to be exhaustive and therefore reproduce all identities for Enriquez' kernels conjectured in arXiv:2407.11476 recently.

  4 citations

• Lefschetz thimble-inspired weight regularizations for complex Langevin simulations

  Kirill Boguslavski, Paul Hotzy, David I. Müller

  SciPost Phys. 18, 092 (2025) · published 14 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Complex Langevin (CL) is a computational method to circumvent the numerical sign problem with applications in finite-density quantum chromodynamics and the real-time dynamics of quantum field theories. It has long been known that, depending on the simulated system, CL does not always converge correctly. In this work, we provide numerical evidence that the success or failure of the complex Langevin method is deeply tied to the Lefschetz thimble structure of the simulated system. This is demonstrated by constructing weight function regularizations that deform the thimbles of systems with compact domains. Our results indicate that CL converges correctly when the regularized system exhibits a single relevant compact thimble. We introduce a bias correction to retrieve the values of the original theory for parameter sets where a direct complex Langevin approach fails. The effectiveness of this method is illustrated using several toy models, including the cosine model and the SU(2) and SU(3) Polyakov chains. Finally, we discuss the opportunities and limitations of this regularization approach for lattice field theories.

  1 citation

• Nonlinearity of transparent SNS weak links decreases sharply with length

  Valla Fatemi, Pavel D. Kurilovich, Anton R. Akhmerov, Bernard van Heck

  SciPost Phys. 18, 091 (2025) · published 12 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Superconductor-normal material-superconductor (SNS) junctions are being integrated into microwave circuits for fundamental and applied research goals. The short junction limit is a common simplifying assumption for experiments with SNS junctions, but this limit constrains how small the nonlinearity of the microwave circuit can be. Here, we show that a finite length of the weak link strongly suppresses the nonlinearity compared to its zero-length limit -- the suppression can be up to a factor of ten even when the length remains shorter than the induced coherence length. We tie this behavior to the nonanalytic dependence of nonlinearity on length, which the critical current does not exhibit. Further, we identify additional experimentally observable consequences of nonzero length, and we conjecture that anharmonicity is bounded between zero and a maximally negative value for any non-interacting Josephson junction in the presence of time-reversal symmetry. We promote SNS junction length as a useful parameter for designing weakly nonlinear microwave circuits.

  4 citations