Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Codebase release 1.0 for Worm Algorithm for Bose-Hubbard and XXZ Models

  Nicolas Sadoune, Lode Pollet

  SciPost Phys. Codebases 9-r1.0 (2022) · published 29 November 2022 | Toggle abstract · src

  We present a novel and open-source implementation of the worm algorithm, which is an algorithm to simulate Bose-Hubbard and sign-positive spin models using a path-integral representation of the partition function. The code can deal with arbitrary lattice structures and assumes spin-exchange terms, or bosonic hopping amplitudes, between nearest-neighbor sites, and local or nearest-neighbor interactions of the density-density type. We explicitly demonstrate the near-linear scaling of the algorithm with respect to the system volume and the inverse temperature and analyze the autocorrelation times in the vicinity of a $U(1)$ second order phase transition. The code is written in such a way that extensions to other lattice models as well as closely-related sign-positive models can be done straightforwardly on top of the provided framework.

  2 citations

• Latest Belle results on Tau decays

  Yifan Jin, Denis Epifanov, Hiroaki Aihara

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 1, 002 (2019) · published 18 February 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We present preliminary results of a latest measurement at Belle, the branching fraction of rare tau decay, $\tau^- \rightarrow \pi^- \nu_{\tau} \ell^+ \ell^-$ ($\ell = e$ or $\mu$), using a 562 $\rm fb^{-1}$\ data set. The branching fraction of $\tau^- \rightarrow \pi^- e^+ e^- \nu_\tau$ is measured to be $\mathbf{ \mathcal{B}(\tau^-\rightarrow \pi^- e^+ e^- \nu_\tau) = (2.11 \pm 0.19 \pm 0.30) \times 10^{-5}}$, where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second is systematic. An upper limit is set on the branching fraction of $\tau^- \rightarrow \pi^- \mu^+ \mu^- \nu_\tau$, $\mathbf{\mathcal{B}(\tau^-\rightarrow \pi^- \mu^+ \mu^- \nu_\tau) < 1.06 \times 10^{-5}}$, at 90\% confidence level.

  2 citations

• "The Greatest and Most Important Human Right": Citizenship and Bureaucratic Indifference in Refugee-UNHCR Correspondence

  Lamis Abdelaaty

  Mig. Pol. 3, 001 (2024) · published 8 April 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  This article examines how refugees advocate for themselves with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), and what responses their communications engender. It analyzes letters sent by refugees in Kenya to UNHCR headquarters in Geneva between 1983 and 1994. The findings underline a disjuncture between refugees’ efforts to constitute themselves as political agents, and UNHCR’s insistence on viewing them as depoliticized subjects. The refugees perform citizenship vis-à-vis UNHCR, using their shared identity as a basis for collective claims-making and trying to renegotiate their unequal relationship with the international organization. To empower themselves, they adopt the international organization’s own refugee rights vocabulary and play off different organizations and layers of UNHCR against each other. UNHCR’s responses (or lack thereof) demonstrate the consequences of its insulation and bureaucratization. These insights are especially noteworthy in light of recent progress on meaningful refugee participation in the refugee regime.

  2 citations

• “Reborn in Guate”: Making Resource Frontiers in Asylum in Guatemala’s Northern Petén

  Julia Morris

  Mig. Pol. 3, 003 (2024) · published 12 August 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The last decade and a half have seen a dramatic increase in the outsourcing and offshoring of asylum processing and resettlement to countries in the Global South. This article advances a new theoretical framework to examine the surge in new asylum regimes worldwide. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in several externalised asylum sites and specifically in Guatemala, it looks at these recent developments through the lens of ‘resource frontiers.’ Merging critical political ecological approaches on resource frontiers with research on border externalisation, I argue that ‘asylum frontiers’ are the social spaces connected to the exploration and development of a resource sector that extracts value from people on the move. I centre my analysis on the US-driven development of an asylum regime in Guatemala’s northern Petén region. I consider the specificities of Guatemala’s emerging asylum frontier, detailing how this arrangement sits with the country’s own histories of asylum and enforced return. In doing so, I show how different political actors – migrants, Indigenous Mayan refugees, and deported Guatemalans – ‘live with’ these frontier economies.

  2 citations

• Python-JAX-based fast Stokesian dynamics

  Kim William Torre, Raoul D. Schram, Joost de Graaf

  SciPost Phys. Codebases 56 (2025) · published 30 June 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Stokesian Dynamics (SD) is a powerful computational framework for simulating the motion of particles in a viscous Newtonian fluid under Stokes-flow conditions. Traditional SD implementations can be computationally expensive as they rely on the inversion of large mobility matrices to determine hydrodynamic interactions. Recently, however, the simulation of thermalized systems with large numbers of particles has become feasible [Fiore and Swan, J. Fluid Mech. 878, 544 (2019)]. Their "fast Stokesian dynamics" (FSD) method leverages a saddle-point formulation to ensure overall scaling of the algorithm that is linear in the number of particles $\mathcal{O}(N)$; performance relies on dedicated graphics-processing-unit computing. Here, we present a different route toward implementing FSD, which instead leverages the Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation capabilities of Google JAX. We refer to this implementation as JFSD and perform benchmarks on it to verify that it has the right scaling and is sufficiently fast by the standards of modern computational physics. In addition, we provide a series of physical test cases that help ensure accuracy and robustness, as the code undergoes further development. Thus, JFSD is ready to facilitate the study of hydrodynamic effects in particle suspensions across the domains of soft, active, and granular matter.

  2 citations

• A simple guide from machine learning outputs to statistical criteria in particle physics

  Charanjit Kaur Khosa, Veronica Sanz, Michael Soughton

  SciPost Phys. Core 5, 050 (2022) · published 2 November 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  In this paper we propose ways to incorporate Machine Learning training outputs into a study of statistical significance. We describe these methods in supervised classification tasks using a CNN and a DNN output, and unsupervised learning based on a VAE. As use cases, we consider two physical situations where Machine Learning are often used: high-$p_T$ hadronic activity, and boosted Higgs in association with a massive vector boson.

  2 citations

• Galilei particles revisited

  José Miguel Figueroa-O'Farrill, Simon Pekar, Alfredo Pérez, Stefan Prohazka

  SciPost Phys. Lect. Notes 93 (2025) · published 13 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We revisit the classifications of classical and quantum galilean particles: that is, we fully classify homogeneous symplectic manifolds and unitary irreducible projective representations of the Galilei group. Equivalently, these are coadjoint orbits and unitary irreducible representations of the Bargmann group, the universal central extension of the Galilei group. We provide an action principle in each case, discuss the nonrelativistic limit, as well as exhibit, whenever possible, the unitary irreducible representations in terms of fields on Galilei spacetime. Motivated by a forthcoming study of planons we pay close attention to the mobility of the less familiar massless Galilei particles.

  2 citations

• Nonlinear sigma model description of deconfined quantum criticality in arbitrary dimensions

  Da-Chuan Lu

  SciPost Phys. Core 6, 047 (2023) · published 6 July 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  In this paper, we propose using the nonlinear sigma model (NLSM) with the Wess-Zumino-Witten (WZW) term as a general description of deconfined quantum critical points that separate two spontaneously symmetry-breaking (SSB) phases in arbitrary dimensions. In particular, we discuss the suitable choice of the target space of the NLSM, which is in general the homogeneous space G/K, where $G$ is the UV symmetry and $K$ is generated by ${\mathfrak k}={\mathfrak h}_1\cap {\mathfrak h}_2$, and ${\mathfrak h}_i$ is the Lie algebra of the unbroken symmetry in each SSB phase. With this specific target space, the symmetry defects in both SSB phases are on equal footing, and their intertwinement is captured by the WZW term. The DQCP transition is then tuned by proliferating the symmetry defects. By coupling the $G/K$ NLSM with the WZW term to the background gauge field, the 't Hooft anomaly of this theory can be determined. The bulk symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phase that cancels the anomaly is described by the relative Chern-Simons term in odd spacetime dimensions or mixed $\theta$ term in even dimensions. We construct and discuss a series of models with Grassmannian symmetry defects in 3+1d. We also provide the fermionic model that reproduces the $G/K$ NLSM with the WZW term.

  2 citations

• Scattering from an external field in quantum chromodynamics at high energies: From foundations to interdisciplinary connections

  Athanasia-Konstantina Angelopoulou, Anh Dung Le, Stéphane Munier

  SciPost Phys. Lect. Notes 92 (2025) · published 12 March 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We review the factorization of the $S$-matrix elements in the context of particle scattering off an external field, which can serve as a model for the field of a large nucleus. The factorization takes the form of a convolution of light cone wave functions describing the physical incoming and outgoing states in terms of bare partons, and products of Wilson lines. The latter represent the interaction between the bare partons and the external field. Specializing to elastic scattering amplitudes of onia at very high energies, we introduce the color dipole model, which formulates the calculation of the modulus-squared of the wave functions in quantum chromodynamics with the help of a branching random walk, and the scattering amplitudes as observables on this classical stochastic process. Methods developed for general branching processes produce analytical formulas for the asymptotics of such observables, and thus enable one to derive exact large-rapidity expressions for onium-nucleus cross sections, from which electron-nucleus cross sections may be inferred.

  2 citations

• Joule heating in bad and slow metals

  Paolo Glorioso, Sean A. Hartnoll

  SciPost Phys. 13, 095 (2022) · published 12 October 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Heat supplied to a metal is absorbed by the electrons and then transferred to the lattice. In conventional metals energy is released to the lattice by phonons emitted from the Lindhard continuum. However in a 'bad' metal, with short mean free path, the low energy Lindhard continuum is destroyed. Furthermore in a 'slow' metal, with Fermi velocity less than the sound velocity, particle-hole pairs are kinematically unable to emit phonons. To describe energy transfer to the lattice in these cases we obtain a general Kubo formula for the energy relaxation rate in terms of the electronic density spectral weight $\text{Im} \, G^R_{nn}(\omega_k,k)$ evaluated on the phonon dispersion $\omega_k$. We apply our Kubo formula to the high temperature Hubbard model, using recent data from quantum Monte Carlo and experiments in ultracold atoms to characterize $\text{Im} \, G^R_{nn}(\omega_k,k)$. We furthermore use recent data from electron energy-loss spectroscopy to estimate the energy relaxation rate of the cuprate strange metal to a high energy optical phonon. As a second, distinct, application of our formalism we consider 'slow' metals. These are defined to have Fermi velocity less than the sound velocity, so that particle-hole pairs are kinematically unable to emit phonons. We obtain an expression for the energy relaxation rate of a slow metal in terms of the optical conductivity.

  2 citations