Scientific Series

Entanglement renormalization is a coarse-graining transformation for quantum lattice systems. It produces the multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz, a tensor network state used to represent ground states of strongly correlated systems in one and two spatial dimensions. In 1D, the MERA is known to reproduce the logarithmic violation of the boundary law for entanglement entropy, S(L)~log L, characteristic of critical ground states. In contrast, in 2D the MERA strictly obeys the entropic boundary law, S(L)~L, characteristic of gapped systems and a class of critical systems. Therefore a number of highly entangled 2D systems, such as free fermions with a 1D Fermi surface, Fermi liquids and spin Bose metals, which display a logarithmic violation of the boundary law, S(L)~L log L, cannot be described by a regular 2D MERA. It is well-known that at low energies, a many-body system may decouple into two or more independent degrees of freedom (e.g. spin-charge separation in 1D systems of electrons). In this talk I will explain how, in systems where low energy decoupling occurs, entanglement renormalization can be used to obtain an explicit decoupled description. The resulting tensor network state, the branching MERA, can reproduce a logarithmic violation of the boundary law in 2D and, as additional numeric evidence also suggests, might be a good ansatz for the highly entangled systems with a 1D Fermi (or Bose) surface mentioned above. In addition, after recalling that the MERA can be regarded as a specific (discrete) realization of the holographic principle, we will see that the branching MERA leads to exotic holographic geometries.

CRESST is a cryogenic dark matter search located at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy. Scintillating CaWO4 crystals are operated as cryogenic calorimeters. The phonon (heat) signal measured with a tungten transition edge sensor on the surface of these crystals allows a precise determination of the energy deposited in the crystal, independent of the type of interaction. A light signal, simultaneously registered by a separate cryogenic detector, serves to identify the type of interaction. This phonon/light technique allows a discrimination of electron recoils induced by radioative backgrounds from the searched nuclear recoils with high efficiency ,and, to some extent, even to determine which type of nucleus was recoiling. I will present results from 564 kg-days of data of the presently still ongoing run, which reveal an unexpected excess of oxygen recoils. To shine some light on the nature of these events, I will discuss possible backgrounds in some detail.

Nonlocality is the most striking feature of quantum mechanics. It might even be considered its defining feature and understanding it may be the most important step towards understanding the whole theory. Yet for a long time it was impossible to pinpoint the reason behind the exact amount of nonlocality allowed by quantum mechanics expressed by Tsirelson bound. Recently information causality has been shown to be the principle from which this bound can be derived. However the whole set of nonlocal correlations and nonlocal information processing protocols that quantum mechanics allows is not specified by the Tsirelson bound. It remains an open question whether this whole zoo of nonlocality can be derived from information causality. In this talk I present the fields where information causality is applied together with most recent results or lack of such.

Why is a vertical column of gas at thermal equilibrium slighly hotter at the bottom than a the top? My answer in this talk will be that time runs slower in a deeper gravitational potential, and temperature is nothing but the (inverse) speed of time. Specifically, I will (i) introduce Rovelli's notion of thermal time, (ii) use it to provide a "principle" characterization of thermal equilibrium in stationary spacetimes, and (iii) effortlessly derive the Tolman-Ehrenfest relation. This approach contrasts with the "constructive" accounts of thermal equilibrium in curved spacetimes given in the literature, and vindicates the time-temperature relationship cropping up in the Hawking-Unruh and Kubo-Martin-Schwinger relations.

We analyze the delta = 2 Tomimatsu-Sato spacetime in the context of the proposed Kerr/CFT correspondence. This 4-dimensional vacuum spacetime is asymptotically flat and has a well-defined ADM mass and angular momentum, but also involves several exotic features including a naked ring singularity, and two disjoint Killing horizons separated by a region with closed timelike curves and a rod-like conical singularity. We demonstrate that the near horizon geometry belongs to a general class of Ricci-flat metrics with SL(2,R) X U(1) symmetry that includes both the extremal Kerr and extremal Kerr-bolt geometries. We calculate the central charge and temperature for the CFT dual to this spacetime and confirm the Cardy formula reproduces the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. We find that all of the basic parameters of the dual CFT are most naturally expressed in terms of charges defined intrinsically on the horizon, which are distinct from the ADM charges in this geometry.

: In this talk I will review the common appearance of torsion in solids as well as some new developments. Torsion typically appears in condensed matter physics associated to topological defects known as dislocations. Now we are beginning to uncover new aspects of the coupling of torsion to materials. Recently, a dissipationless viscosity has been studied in the quantum Hall effect. I will connect this viscosity to a 2+1-d torsion Chern-Simons term and discuss possible thought experiments in which this could be measured. Additionally I will discuss a new topological defect in 3+1-d, the torsional monopole, which does not require a lattice deformation to exist. If present, torsional monopoles are likely to impact the behavior of materials with strong spin-orbit coupling such as topological insulators.

The dynamics of fluids is a long standing challenge that remained as an unsolved problem for centuries. Understanding its main features, chaos and turbulence, is likely to provide an understanding of the principles and non-linear dynamics of a large class of systems far from equilibrium. We consider a conceptually new viewpoint to study these features using black hole dynamics. Since the gravitational field is characterized by a curved geometry, the gravity variables provide a geometrical framework for studying the dynamics of fluids: A geometrization of turbulence. We present new experimental predictions for relativsitic and non-relativistic turbulent flows and for heavy ion collisions.

Numerical simulations of binary black holes with spin have revealed some surprising behavior: for antialigned spins in the orbital plane, 1) one sees an up-and-down "bobbing" of the entire orbital plane at the orbital frequency and 2) the merged black hole receives an enormous kick that depends on the phase at merger. Natural questions are: What causes the bobbing? Can the kick be viewed as a post-merger continuation of the bobbing? We show that this type of bobbing is in fact ubiquitous in relativistic mechanics, occurring independently of the type of force holding two spinning bodies in orbit. The cause can be identified as a spin correction to the naive center of mass of a body; the effect is analogous to Thomas precession and is ``purely kinematical'' in the same way. Since a kick requires the release of field momentum, it is instead very dependent on the type of force holding bodies in orbit. In a mechanical analog (spinning balls connected by a string), there is bobbing but can be no kick. In an electromagnetic analog, one should be able to tune the kick independently of the bobbing. In the gravitational case the spin parameter happens to control both bobbing and kick, making separate tuning impossible and giving the appearance of causation to two essentially unrelated phenomena. Our answers are therefore: the bobbing is caused by a purely kinematical effect of spin, and the kick cannot be viewed its post-merger continuation.

The dynamics of fluids is a long standing challenge that remained as an unsolved problem for centuries. Understanding its main features, chaos and turbulence, is likely to provide an understanding of the principles and non-linear dynamics of a large class of systems far from equilibrium. We consider a conceptually new viewpoint to study these features using black hole dynamics. Since the gravitational field is characterized by a curved geometry, the gravity variables provide a geometrical framework for studying the dynamics of fluids: A geometrization of turbulence. We present new experimental predictions for relativsitic and non-relativistic turbulent flows and for heavy ion collisions.

Quantum computers have emerged as the natural architecture to study the physics of strongly correlated many-body quantum systems, thus providing a major new impetus to the field of many-body quantum physics. While the method of choice for simulating classical many-body systems has long since been the ubiquitous Monte Carlo method, the formulation of a generalization of this method to the quantum regime has been impeded by the fundamental peculiarities of quantum mechanics, including, interference effects and the no-cloning theorem. We overcome those difficulties by constructing a quantum algorithm to sample from the Gibbs distribution of a quantum Hamiltonian at arbitrary temperatures, both for bosonic and fermionic systems. This is a further step in validating the quantum computer as a full quantum simulator, with a wealth of possible applications to quantum chemistry, condensed matter physics and high energy physics.