Condensed Matter

We present an effective Z2 gauge theory that captures various competing phases in spin-1/2 kagome lattice antiferromagnets: the topological Z2 spin liquid (SL) phase, and the 12-site and 36- site valence bond solid (VBS) phases. Our effective theory is a generalization of the recent Z2 gauge theory proposed for SL phases by Wan and Tchernyshyov. In particular, we investigate possible VBS phases that arise from vison condensations in the SL. In addition to the 12-site and 36-site VBS phases, there exists 6-site VBS that is closely related to the symmetry-breaking valence bond modulation patterns observed in the recent density matrix renormalization group simulations. We find that our results have remarkable consistency with a previous study using a different Z2 gauge theory. Motivated by the lattice geometry in the recently reported vanadium oxyfluoride kagome antiferromagnet, our gauge theory is extended to incorporate lowered symmetry by inequivalent up- and down-triangles. We investigate effects of this anisotropy on the 12-site, 36-site, and 6-site VBS phases. Particularly, interesting dimer melting effects are found in the 36-site VBS. We discuss the implications of our findings and also compare the results with a different type of Z2 gauge theory used in previous studies.

In recent years, entanglement has become a new frontier with applications across several fields in physics. Nevertheless, simple conceptual pictures and practical ways to quantify entanglement in many-body systems have remained elusive even for the simplest models. In this talk, I will consider entanglement and Renyi entropies as well as quantum (mutual, tripartite, etc.) information in a quantum field theory. For free field theories, I will show that quantum entropies and information can be computed and understood by analogy with the thermal Casimir effect in one higher dimension. Furthermore, I will introduce a geometrical picture for the quantum (mutual, tripartite) information as a sum over polymers establishing a connection to purely entropic effects that prove useful in deriving information inequalities.  Finally, I will show that similar ideas may be extended beyond free field theories.

Many-body systems with both coherent dynamics and dissipation constitute a rich class of models which are nevertheless much less explored than their dissipationless counterparts. The advent of numerous experimental platforms that simulate such dynamics poses an immediate challenge to systematically understand and classify these models. In particular, nontrivial many-body states emerge as steady states under non-equilibrium dynamics. In this talk, I use a systematic approach based on the Keldysh formalism to study nonequilibrium phases and phase transitions in such models. I show that an effective thermal behavior generically emerges as a result of dissipation, and the universal behavior including the dynamics near the steady state is described by a universality class in equilibrium thermodynamics. In the end, I will also discuss possibilities that go beyond the paradigm of an effective thermal behaviour.

Recent experiments show that charge-density wave correlations are prevalent in underdoped cuprate superconductors. The correlations are short-ranged at weak magnetic fields but their intensity and spatial extent increase rapidly at low temperatures beyond a crossover field. Here we consider the possibility of long-range charge-density wave order in a model of a layered system where such order competes with superconductivity. We show that in the clean limit, low-temperature long-range order is stabilized by arbitrarily weak magnetic fields. This apparent discrepancy with the experiments is resolved by the presence of disorder. Like the field, disorder nucleates halos of charge-density wave, but unlike the former it also disrupts inter-halo coherence, leading to a correlation length that is always finite. Our results are compatible with various experimental trends, including the onset of longer range correlations induced by inter-layer coupling above a characteristic field scale.

The iron chalcogenide FeSe has attracted much recent interest due to a high superconducting transition in monolayer samples. In bulk samples, nematic order is seen without the presence of magnetic order, hinting at the importance of nematic order in determining the monolayer properties. More generally, there has been growing evidence of the importance of nematic fluctuations in a variety of strongly correlated high-temperature superconductors. We study an effective two band model of the iron-pnictides with interactions that capture the nematic ordering arising from spontaneous symmetry breaking between the two orbitals. These models are sign-problem free and can be simulated in an unbiased fashion using Determinant Quantum Monte Carlo. We find a variety of unexpected orders and consider the effects of the nematic fluctuations on superconductivity. 

Concepts of information theory are increasingly used to characterize collective phenomena in condensed matter systems, such as the use of entanglement entropies to identify emergent topological order in interacting quantum many-body systems. Here we employ classical variants of these concepts, in particular Renyi entropies and their associated mutual information, to identify topological order in classical systems.

Like for their quantum counterparts, the presence of topological order can be identified in such classical systems via a universal, subleading contribution to the prevalent volume and boundary laws of the classical Renyi entropies. We demonstrate that an additional subleading O(1) contribution generically arises for all Renyi entropies S(n) with n ≥ 2 when driving the system towards a phase transition, e.g. into a conventionally ordered phase. This additional subleading term, which we dub connectivity contribution, tracks back to partial subsystem ordering and is proportional to the number of connected parts in a given bipartition. Notably, the Levin-Wen summation scheme – typically used to extract the topological contribution to the Renyi entropies – does not fully eliminate this additional connectivity contribution in this classical context. This indicates that the distillation of topological order from Renyi entropies requires an additional level of scrutiny to distinguish topological from non-topological O(1) contributions. This is also the case for quantum systems, for which we discuss which entropies are sensitive to these connectivity contributions. We showcase these findings by extensive numerical simulations of a classical variant of the toric code model, for which we study the stability of topological order in the presence of a magnetic field and at finite temperatures from a Renyi entropy perspective.

Solitons in a ferromagnet have interesting dynamics because atomic magnetic moments behave like little gyroscopes. A domain wall in a magnetic wire can be modeled as a bead on a string: it has two soft modes, position and orientation. This "bead" rotates when it is pushed and moves when twisted.

From that one can deduce that the angular momentum is proportional to the domain wall's coordinate and the linear momentum to its azimuthal angle. In fact, the definition of conserved momenta for magnetic solitons has been discussed in the scientific literature for 40 years. A naive attempt to derive them from the application of Noether's theorem yields unphysical, gauge-dependent answers. To resolve this problem, we exploit a similarity between the dynamics of a ferromagnetic soliton and that of a charged particle in a magnetic field. For the latter, canonical momentum is also gauge-dependent and thus unphysical; the physical momentum is the generator of magnetic translations, a symmetry combining physical translations with gauge transformations. We use this analogy to unambiguously define conserved momenta for ferromagnetic solitons.

While entanglement entropy of ground states usually follows the area law, violations do exist, and it is important to understand their origin. In 1D they are found to be associated with quantum criticality. Until recently the only established examples of such violation in higher dimensions are free fermion ground states with Fermi surfaces, where it is found that the area law is enhanced by a logarithmic factor.  In Ref. [1], we use multi-dimensional bosonization to provide a simple derivation of this result, and show that the logarithimic factor has a 1D origin. More importantly the bosonization technique allows us to take into account the Fermi liquid interactions, and obtain the leading scaling behavior of the entanglement entropy of Fermi liquids. The central result of our work is that Fermi liquid interactions do not alter the leading scaling behavior of the entanglement entropy, and the logarithmic enhancement of area law is a robust property of the Fermi liquid phase. In sharp contrast to the fermioic systems with Fermi surfaces, quantum critical (or gapless) bosonic systems do not violate the area law above 1D (except for the case discussed below). The fundamental difference lies in the fact that gapless excitations live near a single point (usually origin of momentum space) in such bosonic systems, while they live around an (extended) Fermi surface in Fermi liquids. In Ref. [2], we studied entanglement properties of some specific examples of the so called Bose metal states, in which bosons neither condense (and become a superfluid) nor localize (and

insulate) at T=0. The system supports gapless excitations around ``Bose surfaces", instead of isolated points in momentum space. We showed that similar to free Fermi gas and Fermi liquids, these states violate the entanglement area law in a logarithmic fashion. Compared to ground states, much less is known concretely about entanglement in

(highly) excited states. Going back to free fermion systems, in [3] we show that there exists a duality relation between ground and excited states, and the area law obeyed by ground state turns into a volume law for excited states, something that is widely expected but very hard to prove. Most importantly, we find in appropriate limits the reduced density matrix of a subsystem takes the form of thermal density matrix, providing an explicit example of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. Our work [3] explicitly demonstrates how statistical physics emerges from entanglement in a single eigenstate.

[1] Entanglement Entropy of Fermi Liquids via Multi-dimensional Bosonization, Wenxin Ding, Alexander Seidel, Kun Yang, Phys. Rev. X 2,

011012 (2012).

[2] Violation of Entanglement-Area Law in Bosonic Systems with Bose

Surfaces: Possible Application to Bose Metals, Hsin-Hua Lai, Kun Yang, N.

E. Bonesteel, Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 210402 (2013).

[3] Entanglement entropy scaling laws and eigenstate thermalization in free fermion systems, Hsin-Hua Lai, Kun Yang, Phys. Rev. B 91,081110 (2015)