Condensed Matter

I will talk on experiments and their interpretation done with Professor Lei Shu and her collaborators at Fudan University, Shanghai, and some tentative theory for the observations.  Thermodynamic and magnetic relaxation measurements in zero and finite magnetic field have been performed in two related almost triangular lattices of S=1/2 spins. One of these compounds is the purest of any of the potential spin-liquid compounds investigated so far. All its measured properties are extra-ordinary and characterized simply by just one parameter, the exchange energy obtained from susceptibility measurements. There are also colossal ultra-low energy singlet excitations. This may be the first characterization of the intrinsic properties of a class of spin-liquids.  An ansatz in which the excitations are calculated from a state of singlet-dimers interacting with excitations from other such singlets can be expressed in terms of Majoranas and gives properties similar to those observed.

Recently, a new class of kagomé metals, with chemical formula AV3Sb5, where A = K, Rb, or Cs, have emerged as an exciting realization of quasi-2D correlated metals with hexagonal symmetry. These materials have been shown to display several electronic orders setting in through thermodynamic phase transitions: multi-component (“3Q”) hexagonal charge density wave (CDW) order below a Tc≈90K, andsuperconductivity with critical temperature of 2.5K or smaller, and some indications of nematicity and one-dimensional charge order in the normal and superconducting states. Other experiments show a strong anomalous Hall effect, suggesting possible topological physics.  I will discuss a theory of these phenomena based in part on strong interactions between electrons at saddle points, as well as ideas related to different competing density wave orders.

I will present a new  mechanism for superconductivity from strong electron-electron repulsion in multi-band systems. When the kinetic energy is small, the dynamics of nearby electrons on the lattice is strongly correlated. I will introduce a controlled expansion in the kinetic term to demonstrate pairing induced by correlated tunneling process involving a third electron in the occupied band. This mechanism can also be viewed as the real space picture of exciton-mediated pairing. Possible realization of this idea leading to strong-coupling, spin-triplet superconductivity in WTe2 and magic-angle graphene will be discussed.

Based on works with Valentine Crepel and Kevin Slagle:
[1] V. Crepel and L. Fu, arXiv:2012.08528
[2] V. Crepel and L. Fu, arXiv:2103.12060
[3] K. Slagle and L. Fu, Phys. Rev. B 102, 235423 (2020)

The vast complexity is a daunting property of generic quantum states that poses a significant challenge for theoretical treatments, especially in non-equilibrium setups. Therefore, it is vital to recognize states which are locally less complex and thus describable with (classical) effective theories.

I will discuss how unsupervised learning can detect the local complexity of states. This approach can be used as a probe of scrambling and thermalization in chaotic quantum systems or to assign the local complexity of density matrices in open setups without knowing the corresponding Hamiltonian or Liouvillian. The analysis actually allows for the reconstruction of Hamiltonian operators or even noise-type that might be contaminating the measurements. Our approach is an ideal diagnostics tool for data obtained from (noisy) quantum simulators because it requires only practically accessible local observations. For example, it would be perfectly suited to detect the many-body localization (MBL) transition or integrability effects from the experimental snapshots obtained with cold atoms.

If time permits, I will mention other ways to detect properties of MBL transition in weakly open and driven setups and the advantages of such an unconventional approach.

M. Schmitt and Z. Lenarcic, arXiv:2102.11328.

Z. Lenarcic, O. Alberton, A. Rosch and E. Altman, PRL 125, 116601 (2020).

We know that different systems with the same unbroken global symmetry can nevertheless be in distinct phases of matter.  These different "symmetry-protected topological" phases are characterized by protected (gapless) surface states.  After reviewing this physics in interacting systems with global symmetries, I will describe how a different class of symmetries known as subsystem symmetries, which are neither local nor global, can also lead to protected gapless boundaries.  I will discuss how some of these subsystem-symmetry protected phases are related (though not equivalent) to interacting higher-order topological insulators, with protected gapless modes along corners or hinges in higher dimensional systems.

We propose a new type of critical quantum liquids, dubbed Stiefel liquids, based on 2+1 dimensional Wess-Zumino-Witten models on target space SO(N)/SO(4). We show that the well known deconfined quantum critical point and U(1) Dirac spin liquid are unified as two special examples of Stiefel liquids, with N = 5 and N = 6, respectively. Furthermore, we conjecture that Stiefel liquids with N > 6 are non-Lagrangian, in the sense that the theories do not (at least not easily) admit any weakly-coupled UV completion. Such non-Lagrangian states are beyond the paradigm of parton gauge theory familiar in the study of exotic quantum liquids in condensed matter physics. The intrinsic absence of mean-field construction also makes it difficult to decide whether a non-Lagrangian state can emerge from a specific UV system (such as a lattice spin system). For this purpose we hypothesize that a quantum state is emergible from a lattice system if its quantum anomalies match with the constraints from the (generalized) Lieb-Schultz-Mattis theorems. Based on this hypothesis, we find that some of the non-Lagrangian Stiefel liquids can indeed be realized in frustrated quantum spin systems, for example, on triangular or Kagome lattice, through the intertwinement between non-coplanar magnetic orders and valence-bond-solid orders.

The extension of many-body quantum dynamics to the non-unitary domain has led to a series of exciting developments, including new out-of-equilibrium entanglement phases and phase transitions. We show how a duality transformation between space and time on one hand, and unitarity and non-unitarity on the other, can be used to realize steady state phases of non-unitary dynamics that exhibit a rich variety of behavior in their entanglement scaling with subsystem size --- from logarithmic to extensive to fractal. We show how these outcomes in non-unitary circuits (that are ``spacetime-dual" to unitary circuits) relate to the growth of entanglement in time in the corresponding unitary circuits, and how they differ, through an exact mapping to a problem of unitary evolution with boundary decoherence, in which information gets ``radiated away'' from one edge of the system. In spacetime-duals of chaotic unitary circuits, this mapping allows us to uncover a non-thermal volume-law entangled phase with a logarithmic correction to the entropy distinct from other known examples. Most notably, we also find novel steady state phases with fractal entanglement scaling, $S(\ell) \sim \ell^{\alpha}$ with tunable $0 < \alpha < 1$ for subsystems of size $\ell$ in one dimension. These fractally entangled states add a qualitatively new entry to the families of many-body quantum states that have been studied as energy eigenstates or dynamical steady states, whose entropy almost always displays either area-law, volume-law or logarithmic scaling. We also present an experimental protocol for preparing these novel steady states with only a very limited amount of postselection via a type of ``teleportation" between spacelike and timelike slices of quantum circuits.

Recently, the notion of symmetry has been extended from 0-symmetry described by group to higher symmetry described by higher group. In this talk, we show that the notion of symmetry can be generalized even further to "algebraic higher symmetry". Then we will describe an even more general point of view of symmetry, which puts the (generalized) symmetry charges and topological excitations at equal footing: symmetry can be viewed gravitational anomaly, or symmetry can be viewed as shadow topological order in one higher dimension.

In this work, we introduce and study "hybrid" fracton orders, especially though a family of exactly solvable models. The hybrid fracton orders exhibit both the phenomenology of a conventional 3d topological ordered phase and a fracton phase. There are simple yet non-trivial fusion and braiding between the excitations between the two kinds. One example is the hybrid order of the Z2 topological order with the Z2 Xcube order, in which the fracton excitations fuse into the toric code charge, and in turn, the flux loop of the toric code can fuse into various lineon excitations. In the same way there is a hybrid ordered phase of Haah's code and the 3d toric code. Proliferating certain gapped excitations in these hybrid orders can drive a phase transition into either a fracton order or a conventional 3d topological phase. 

Reference. ArXiv 2102.09555

Fracton models are characterized by an exponentially increasing ground state degeneracy and point excitations with constrained motion. In this talk, I will focus on a prototypical 3D fracton model -- the X-cube model -- and discuss how its ground state degeneracy can be understood from a foliation structure in the model. In particular, we show that there are hidden 2D topological layers in the 3D bulk. To calculate the ground state degeneracy, we can remove the layers until a minimal structure is reached. The ground state degeneracy comes from the combination of the degeneracy of the foliation layers and that associated with the minimal structure. We discuss explicitly how this works for X-cube model with periodic boundary condition, open boundary condition, and even in the presence of screw dislocation defects.

Despite decades of theoretical work, the physical realization of topological order, outside of the fractional quantum Hall effect, has proved to be an elusive goal. Even the simplest example of a time-reversal symmetric topological order, as encountered in the paradigmatic toric code, awaits experimental realization. Key challenges include the lack of physically realistic models in these phases, and of ways to probe their defining properties. I will discuss a simple `Rydberg blockade' model, and describe numerical results that point to (i) a ground state with toric code topological order that could potentially be realized in experiment and (ii) ``smoking gun'' signatures of the phase which be accessed using a dynamic protocol. I will also briefly discuss how a topological qubit can be constructed in this platform by tuning boundaries as well as implications for constructing fault-tolerant quantum memories. Time permitting, a different platform for realizing exotic phases, magic-angle graphene and the special features of its band structure will be described, which make it a prime candidate for realizing fractional quantum Hall topological order even in the absence of a magnetic field.

References: arXiv:2011.12310. and arXiv:1912.09634
 

In this talk I will begin by introducing symmetry protected topological (SPT) Floquet systems in 1D. I will describe the topological invariants that characterize these systems,  and highlight their differences from SPT phases arising in static systems.  I will also discuss how the entanglement properties of a many-particle wavefunction depend on these  topological invariants. I will then show that the edge modes encountered in free fermion SPTs are remarkably robust to adding interactions, even in disorder-free systems where generic bulk quantities can heat to infinite temperatures due to the periodic driving. This robustness of the edge modes to heating can be understood in the language of strong modes for free fermion SPTs, and  almost strong modes for interacting SPTs.

I will then outline a tunneling calculation for extracting the long lifetimes of these edge modes by mapping the Heisenberg time-evolution of the edge operator to dynamics of a single particle in Krylov space.