Scientific Series

In the presence of radiation from bright astrophysical sources at radio frequencies, axion dark matter can undergo stimulated decay to two nearly back-to-back photons, meaning that bright sources could have faint counterimages in other parts of the sky. The counterimages will be spectrally distinct from backgrounds, taking the form of a narrow radio line centered at half the axion mass with a spectral width determined by Doppler broadening in the dark matter halo. In essence, axions behave as an imperfect monochromatic mirror. The morphology of the induced images can be nontrivial, with blurring due to the geometry of the source and image as well as spatial smearing due to the galactic kinematics of axion dark matter. I will show that the axion decay-induced counterimages of galactic sources may be bright enough to be detectable with archival data from CHIME and other ongoing or planned radio surveys. CHIME therefore can run as a competitive axion experiment simultaneously with other science objectives, requiring no new hardware.

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The code space of a quantum error-correcting code can often be identified with the degenerate ground-space within a gapped phase of quantum matter. We argue that the stability of such a phase is directly related to a set of coherent error processes against which this quantum error-correcting code (QECC) is robust: such a quantum code can recover from adiabatic noise channels, corresponding to random adiabatic drift of code states through the phase, with asymptotically perfect fidelity in the thermodynamic limit, as long as this adiabatic evolution keeps states sufficiently "close" to the initial ground-space. We further argue that when specific decoders -- such as minimum-weight perfect matching -- are applied to recover this information, an error-correcting threshold is generically encountered within the gapped phase. In cases where the adiabatic evolution is known, we explicitly show examples in which quantum information can be recovered by using stabilizer measurements and Pauli feedback, even up to a phase boundary, though the resulting decoding transitions are in different universality classes from the optimal decoding transitions in the presence of incoherent Pauli noise. This provides examples where non-local, coherent noise effectively decoheres in the presence of syndrome measurements in a stabilizer QECC.

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One big question in the physics of large-scale structures is how we can trace back the evolution of cosmic structures and reconstruct the initial density field. The universe we observe today is dotted with galaxy clusters separated by vast voids, in sharp contrast to its initial state, which was nearly uniform with only minor density fluctuations. The evolution from this early uniformity to today's complex structure of galaxies is a profound transformation, with many intermediate processes still unexplained. This talk focuses on this transformation, aiming to reconstruct both the initial density and the displacement fields of galaxies observed in spectroscopic surveys. I will discuss new reconstruction algorithms that depend weakly, if at all, on a cosmological model. These algorithms have paved the way for new astrophysical achievements in several directions, such as: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) analysis, morphological analysis of proto-halos, and kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect.

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Large neural networks are often studied analytically through scaling limits: regimes in which some structural network parameters (e.g. depth, width, number of training datapoints, and so on) tend to infinity. Such limits are challenging to identify and study in part because the limits as these structural parameters diverge typically do not commute. I will present some recent and ongoing work with Alexander Zlokapa (MIT), in which we provide the first solvable models of learning – in this case by Bayesian inference – with neural networks where the depth, width, and number of datapoints can all be large.

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A formulation of the 2-dimensional Ising model on a triangulated Riemann sphere is proposed that converges to the exact conformal field theory (CFT) in the continuum limit. The solution is based on reconciling Regge's simplicial geometry for the Einstein Hilbert action with an Affine map to quantum correlators on the tangent plane. Numerical tests of the 2d Ising sphere and radial quantized phi4 theory on $R x S^2$ are presented.  Extending the method to more general fields theories on curved manifolds is discussed. 

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At the classical level, one can restrict a spherically symmetric model to the corresponding LTB sector by requiring that a so-called LTB condition is satisfied. In this talk we will discuss how this can be generalised in the context of effective models containing quantum gravity inspired modifications of  the classical theory in the form of polymerisations. The formalism presented allows us to consider more general polymerisations than in previous work in the literature. Applications of this framework are then considered, focusing on a particular class of models that have the property that the effective dynamics is completely decoupled along the radial direction. Examples of effective models that fall into this class are discussed and their physical properties are compared with existing models in the literature.

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Tensor product states are powerful tools for simulating area-law entangled states of many-body systems. The applicability of such methods to the non-equilibrium dynamics of many-body systems is less clear due to the presence of large amounts of entanglement. New methods seek to reduce the numerical cost by selectively discarding those parts of the many-body wavefunction, which are thought to have relatively litte effect on dynamical quantities of interest. We present a theory for the sizes of “backflow corrections”, i.e., systematic errors due to these truncation effects and introduce the dissipation-assisted operator evolution (DAOE) method for calculating transport properties of strongly interacting lattice systems in the high temperature regime. In the DAOE method, we represent the observable as a matrix product operator, and show that the dissipation leads to a decay of operator entanglement, allowing us to capture the dynamics to long times. We benchmark this scheme by calculating spin and energy diffusion constants in a variety of physical models and compare to other existing methods.

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In this talk the role of information theory in the description of physical evolutions will be discussed. After defining information quantifiers, their contractivity with respect to physical dynamics will be explained, a requirement which simply encodes the intuition that noisy transformations should lose information. The interplay between the two concepts will be exemplified for Markovian evolutions, showing how Markovianity can be defined in purely information theoretic terms. Extending on this result, we prove our main theorem: that all physical maps can be defined solely in terms of a particular metric on the space of density matrices, the Fisher information. This result should be understood in the context of reconstruction of quantum mechanics, proving once again the key role of information in shaping our description of the world.

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The two body problem in general relativity is of great theoretical and observational interest, and can be studied in the post-Newtonian, post-Minkowskian and small mass ratio approximations, as well as with effective one body and fully numerical techniques. An issue that arises is whether the motion can be decomposed into dissipative and conservative sectors for which the conservative sector admits a Hamiltonian description. This has been established to various orders in the post-Newtonian and post-Minkowskian approximations. In this talk, I will go over recent work where we showed that in the small mass ratio approximation, the motion of a (spinning) point particle under the conservative piece of the first-order self force is Hamiltonian in any stationary spacetime. After this, I describe two issues that arise when attempting to extend these results to subleading order in the mass ratio, namely infrared divergences and ambiguities in the conservative/dissipative splittings. I suggest resolutions of these issues and successfully derive a subleading Hamiltonian conservative sector for the scalar self force, as a toy model for the gravitational case.

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The interplay of quantum fluctuations and interactions can yield novel quantum phases of matter with fascinating properties. Understanding the physics of such systems is a very challenging problem as it requires to solve quantum many body problems—which are generically exponentially hard to solve on classical computers. In this context, universal quantum computers are potentially an ideal setting for simulating the emergent quantum many-body physics. In this talk, I will discuss two different classes of quantum phases: First, we consider symmetry protected topological (SPT) phases and show that a topological phase transitions can be simulated using shallow circuits. We then utilize quantum convolutional neural networks (QCNNs) as classifiers and introduce an efficient framework to train them. Second, we focus on the realization of topological ordered phases and simulate the braiding of anyons. Taking into account additional symmetries, we then investigate phase transitions between different symmetry enriched topological (SET) phases.

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Particle physics underpins our understanding of the world at a fundamental level by describing the interplay of matter and forces through gauge theories. Yet, despite their unmatched success, the intrinsic quantum mechanical nature of gauge theories makes important problem classes notoriously difficult to address with classical computational techniques. A promising way to overcome these roadblocks is offered by quantum computers, which are based on the same laws that make the classical computations so difficult. Here, we present a quantum computation of the properties of the basic building block of two-dimensional lattice quantum electrodynamics, involving both gauge fields and matter. This computation is made possible by the use of a trapped-ion qudit quantum processor, where quantum information is encoded in different states per ion, rather than in two states as in qubits. Qudits are ideally suited for describing gauge fields, which are naturally high-dimensional, leading to a dramatic reduction in the quantum register size and circuit complexity. Using a variational quantum eigensolver, we find the ground state of the model and observe the interplay between virtual pair creation and quantized magnetic field effects. The qudit approach further allows us to seamlessly observe the effect of different gauge field truncations by controlling the qudit dimension. Our results open the door for hardware-efficient quantum simulations with qudits in near-term quantum devices.

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Topological strings are well understood in perturbation theory, but their non-perturbative structure has been the subject of much work and speculation. A useful approach to this problem is to unveil the non-perturbative sectors of the theory by looking at the large order behavior of the perturbative series. This approach can be formulated in a mathematically rigorous way by using the theory of resurgence. In this talk I review the basic ideas behind this approach and I show that it can be successfully applied to topological string theory on arbitrary Calabi-Yau threefolds. Thsee methods lead, not only to explicit non-perturbative topological string amplitudes, but also to a conjecture relating the “invariants” of the theory of resurgence (also known as Stokes constants) to BPS invariants. Physically, this conjecture implies that the large order behavior of the topological string perturbative series contains information about the spectrum of stable D-brane sectors.

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