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The phase diagram of QCD may contain a moat regime in a large region of temperature $T$ and chemical potential $\mu\neq0$. A moat regime is characterized by quasiparticle moatons (pions) whose energy is minimal at nonzero spatial momentum. At $\mu\neq 0$, higher mass dimension operators play a critical role in a moat regime. At dimension six, there are nine possible gauge invariant couplings between scalars and photons. For back-to-back dilepton production, only one operator contributes, which significantly enhances production near a moat threshold. This enhancement is an experimental signature of moatons., Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures; 4 pages references & supplemental material

Many complex problems encountered in both production and daily life can be conceptualized as combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) over graphs. Recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) based models have emerged as a promising direction, which treat the COPs solving as a heuristic learning problem. However, current finite-horizon-MDP based RL models have inherent limitations. They are not allowed to explore adquately for improving solutions at test time, which may be necessary given the complexity of NP-hard optimization tasks. Some recent attempts solve this issue by focusing on reward design and state feature engineering, which are tedious and ad-hoc. In this work, we instead propose a much simpler but more effective technique, named gauge transformation (GT). The technique is originated from physics, but is very effective in enabling RL agents to explore to continuously improve the solutions during test. Morever, GT is very simple, which can be implemented with less than 10 lines of Python codes, and can be applied to a vast majority of RL models. Experimentally, we show that traditional RL models with GT technique produce the state-of-the-art performances on the MaxCut problem. Furthermore, since GT is independent of any RL models, it can be seamlessly integrated into various RL frameworks, paving the way of these models for more effective explorations in the solving of general COPs.

The Classical Nucleation Theory (CNT) has played a key role in crystal nucleation studies since the 19th century and has significantly advanced the understanding of nucleation. However, certain key assumptions of CNT, such as a compact and spherical nucleating cluster and the concept of individual diffusive jumps are questionable. The results of molecular dynamics (MD) studies of crystal nucleation in a Al20Ni60Zr20 metallic liquid demonstrate that the nucleating cluster is neither spherical nor compact. The seeding method was employed to determine the critical cluster size and nucleation parameters from CNT, which were then compared to those derived from the Mean First Passage Time (MFPT) method. While the CNT-based nucleation rate aligns well with experimental data from similar metallic liquids, the MFPT rate differs significantly. Further, contrary to the assumption of individual jumps for atoms to join the nucleating cluster, a cooperative mechanism of attachment or detachment is observed. This is accompanied by synchronized changes in the local potential energy. Similar cooperative motion also appeared in a non-classical nucleation process, particularly during the coalescence of nuclei.

When liquids are cooled sufficiently rapidly below their melting temperature, they may bypass crystalization and, instead, enter a long-lived metastable supercooled state that has long been the focus of intense research. Although they exhibit strikingly different properties, both the (i) long-lived supercooled liquid state and (ii) truly equilibrated (i.e., conventional equilibrium fluid or crystalline) phases of the same material share an identical Hamiltonian. This suggests a mapping between dynamical and other observables in these two different arenas. We formalize these notions via a simple theorem and illustrate that given a Hamiltonian defining the dynamics: (1) the reduced probability densities of all possible stationary states are linear combinations of reduced probability densities associated with thermal equilibria at different temperatures, chemical potentials, etc. (2) Excusing special cases, amongst all of these stationary states, a clustering of correlations is only consistent with conventional thermal equilibrium states (associated with a sharp distribution of the above state variables). (3) Other stationary states may be modified so as to have local correlations. These deformations concomitantly lead to metastable (yet possibly very long-lived) states. Since the lifetime of the supercooled state is exceptionally long relative to the natural microscopic time scales, their reduced probability densities may be close to those that we find for exact stationary states (i.e., a weighted average of equilibrium probability densities at different state variables). This form suggests several new predictions such as the existence of dynamical heterogeneity stronger than probed for thus far and a relation between the specific heat peak and viscosities. Our theorem may further place constraints on the putative "ideal glass" phase., Comment: 30 pages, 4 figures

We consider the effect of perturbing a single bond on ground-states of nearest-neighbor Ising spin-glasses, with a Gaussian distribution of the coupling constants, across various two and three-dimensional lattices and regular random graphs. Our results reveal that the ground-states are strikingly susceptible to such changes. Altering the strength of only a single bond beyond a critical threshold value leads to a new ground-state that differs from the original one by a droplet of flipped spins whose boundary and volume diverge with the system size -- an effect that is reminiscent of the more familiar phenomenon of disorder chaos. These elementary fractal-boundary zero-energy droplets and their composites feature robust characteristics and provide the lowest-energy macroscopic spin-glass excitations. Remarkably, within numerical accuracy, the size of such droplets conforms to a nearly universal power-law distribution with exponents dependent on the spatial dimension of the system. Furthermore, the critical coupling strengths adhere to a stretched Gaussian distribution that is predominantly determined by the local coordination number., Comment: (14 pages, 8 figures)

We wish to thank Stefan Boettcher for prompting us to further check and highlight the accuracy and scaling of our results. Here we provide a comprehensive response to the Comment written by him. We argue that the Comment did not account for the fairness of the comparison between different methods in searching for the spin-glass ground states. We demonstrate that, with a reasonably larger number of initial spin configurations, our results agree with the asymptotic scaling form assumed by finite-size corrections., Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure

We discuss our recent study of local quantum mechanical uncertainty relations in quantum many body systems. These lead to fundamental bounds for quantities such as the speed, acceleration, relaxation times, spatial gradients and the Lyapunov exponents. We additionally obtain bounds on various transport coefficients like the viscosity, the diffusion constant, and the thermal conductivity. Some of these bounds are related to earlier conjectures, such as the bound on chaos by Maldacena, Shenker and Stanford while others are new. Our approach is a direct way of obtaining exact bounds in fairly general settings. We employ uncertainty relations for local quantities from which we strip off irrelevant terms as much as possible, thereby removing non-local terms. To gauge the utility of our bounds, we briefly compare their numerical values with typical values available from experimental data. In various cases, approximate simplified variants of the bounds that we obtain can become fairly tight, i.e., comparable to experimental values. These considerations lead to a minimal time for thermal equilibrium to be achieved. Building on a conjectured relation between quantum measurements and equilibration, our bounds, far more speculatively, suggest a minimal time scale for measurements to stabilize to equilibrium values., Comment: To be presented at RTPAS-2023, Banwarilal Bhalotia College, Asansol, West Bengal, India

Classical theories of crystal nucleation and growth from the liquid assume activated processes that are interface limited, with the atoms individually joining the growing interface by jumps that occur at a rate that is determined by the diffusion coefficient in the liquid phase. These assumptions are in contradiction with the results of molecular dynamics studies that are presented here for supercooled Ni and Al20Ni60Zr20. Instead of diffusion-based attachment across the interface, atoms join the interface by making small changes so as to match the orientational order parameter of the nucleating crystal. Further, instead of joining individually multiple atoms join cooperatively, with the number of cooperative atoms increasing with decreasing temperature., Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures

We establish, in the spirit of the Lieb-Schultz-Mattis theorem, lower bounds on the spectral degeneracy of quantum systems with higher (Gauge Like) symmetries with rather generic physical boundary conditions in an arbitrary number of spatial dimensions. Contrary to applying twists or equivalent adiabatic operations, we exploit the effects of modified boundary conditions. When a general choice of boundary geometry is immaterial in approaching the thermodynamic limit, systems that exhibit non-commuting Gauge Like symmetries, such as the orbital compass model, must have an exponential (in the size of the boundary) degeneracy of each of their spectral levels. We briefly discuss why, in spite of the proven large degeneracy associated with infrared-ultraviolet mixing, some systems may still exhibit conventional physical behaviors, i.e., of those of systems with non-extensive degeneracies, due to entropic "order by disorder" type effects., Comment: 21 pages, 3 figures

Advancing a microscopic framework that rigorously unveils the underlying topological hallmarks of fractional quantum Hall (FQH) fluids is a prerequisite for making progress in the classification of strongly-coupled topological matter. Here we advance a second-quantization framework that helps reveal an exact fusion mechanism for particle fractionalization in FQH fluids, and uncover the fundamental structure behind the condensation of non-local operators characterizing topological order in the lowest-Landau-level (LLL). We show the first exact analytic computation of the quasielectron Berry connections leading to its fractional charge and exchange statistics, and perform Monte Carlo simulations that numerically confirm the fusion mechanism for quasiparticles. Thus, for instance, two quasiholes plus one electron of charge $e$ lead to an exact quasielectron of fractional charge $e/3$, and exchange statistics $1/3$, in a $\nu=1/3$ Laughlin fluid. We express, in a compact manner, the sequence of (both bosonic and fermionic) Laughlin second-quantized states highlighting the lack of local condensation. Furthermore, we present a rigorous constructive subspace bosonization dictionary for the bulk fluid and establish universal long-distance behavior of edge excitations by formulating a conjecture based on the DNA, or root state, of the FQH fluid., Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures

Spin glasses are disordered magnets with random interactions that are, generally, in conflict with each other. Finding the ground states of spin glasses is not only essential for the understanding of the nature of disordered magnetic and other physical systems, but also useful to solve a broad array of hard combinatorial optimization problems across multiple disciplines. Despite decades-long efforts, an algorithm with both high accuracy and high efficiency is still lacking. Here we introduce DIRAC - a deep reinforcement learning framework, which can be trained purely on small-scale spin glass instances and then applied to arbitrarily large ones. DIRAC displays better scalability than other methods and can be leveraged to enhance any thermal annealing method. Extensive calculations on 2D, 3D and 4D Edwards-Anderson spin glass instances demonstrate the superior performance of DIRAC over existing methods. As many hard combinatorial optimization problems have Ising spin glass formulations, our results suggest a promising tool in solving these hard problems. Moreover, the presented algorithm will help us better understand the nature of the low-temperature spin-glass phase, which is a fundamental challenge in statistical physics., Comment: 35 pages, 6 figures

A recent preprint by Cheipesh {\it et al.} pointed out that the zero-point motion of Tritium atoms bound to Graphene may blur the measured energies of $\beta$ electrons. Smearing due to zero point motion is well known. Such an effect features in studies of the $\beta$ spectrum expected in experiments like KATRIN using diatomic Tritium. The recent preprint may, however, challenge new planned experiments seeking to discover the Cosmic Neutrino Background (CNB) neutrinos (and/or other neutrinos of masses smaller than $0.1$ eV) which plan to use Tritium adsorbed onto Graphene or other materials. Our paper clarifies these issues and examines the more general problem of smearing induced by quantum uncertainty. We find that the effect of Cheipesh {\it et al.} is reduced considerably. The importance of the chemical evolution of the $^{3}$H atom hosting the Tritium nucleus into a tightly bound neutral $^{3}$He atom is emphasized. We estimate the excess blurring caused by the dense spectrum near the lowest state of the Graphene or other hosts of the Tritium atom, generated by the electronic response to the "sudden" escape of the $\beta$ electron. Our analysis suggests yet larger effects and difficulties facing many experiments searching for small mass neutrinos. We speculate on a possible experimental setup which could minimize quantum broadening., Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure

We introduce "local uncertainty relations" in thermal many body systems. Using these relations, we derive basic bounds. These results include the demonstration of universal non-relativistic speed limits (regardless of interaction range), bounds on acceleration or force/stress, acceleration or material stress rates, transport coefficients (including the diffusion constant and viscosity), electromagnetic or other gauge field strengths, correlation functions of arbitrary spatio-temporal derivatives, Lyapunov exponents, and thermalization times. We further derive analogs of the Ioffe-Regel limit. These bounds are relatively tight when compared to various experimental data. In the $\hbar \to 0$ limit, all of our bounds either diverge (e.g., the derived speed and acceleration limit) or vanish (as in, e.g., our viscosity and diffusion constant bounds). Our inequalities hold at all temperatures and, as corollaries, imply general power law bounds on response functions at both asymptotically high and low temperatures. Our results shed light on how apparent nearly instantaneous effective "collapse" to energy eigenstates may arise in macroscopic interacting many body quantum systems. We comment on how random off-diagonal matrix elements of local operators (in the eigenbasis of the Hamiltonian) may inhibit their dynamics., Comment: 58 pages

Liquids realize a highly complex state of matter in which strong competing kinetic and interaction effects come to life. As such, liquids are more challenging to understand than either gases or solids generally. In weakly interacting gases, the kinetic effects dominate. By contrast, low temperature solids typically feature far smaller fluctuations about their ground state. Notwithstanding their complexity, with the exception of quantum fluids and supercooled liquids, various aspects of common liquid dynamics such as their dynamic viscosity are often assumed to be given by rather simple, Arrhenius-type, activated forms with nearly constant (i.e., temperature independent) energy barriers. In this work, we analyze experimentally measured viscosities of numerous liquids far above their equilibrium melting temperature to see how well this assumption fares. We find, for the investigated liquids, marked deviations from simple activated dynamics. Even far above their equilibrium melting temperatures, as the temperature drops, the viscosity of these liquids increases more strongly than predicted by activated dynamics dominated by a single uniform energy barrier. For metallic fluids, the scale of the prefactors of the best Arrhenius fits for the viscosity is typically consistent with that given by the product $nh$ with $n$ the number density and $h$ Planck's constant. In various fluids that we examined, $nh$ constitutes a lower bound scale on the viscosity. We find that a scaling of the temperature axis (complementing that of the viscosity) leads to a partial collapse of the temperature dependent viscosities of different fluids; such a scaling allows for a functional dependence of the viscosity on temperature that includes yet is far more general than activated Arrhenius form alone. We speculate on relations between non-Arrhenius dynamics and thermodynamic observables., Comment: 18 pages, 12 figures

Unsupervised machine learning methods can be of great help in many traditional engineering disciplines, where huge amount of labeled data is not readily available or is extremely difficult or costly to generate. Two specific examples include the structure of granular materials and atomic structure of metallic glasses. While the former is critically important for several hundreds of billion dollars global industries, the latter is still a big puzzle in fundamental science. One thing is common in both the examples is that the particles are the elements of the ensembles that are embedded in Euclidean space and one can create a spatially embedded network to represent their key features. Some recent studies show that clustering, which generically refers to unsupervised learning, holds great promise in partitioning these networks. In many complex networks, the spatial information of nodes play very important role in determining the network properties. So understanding the structure of such networks is very crucial. We have compared the performance of our newly developed modularity function with some of the well-known modularity functions. We performed this comparison by finding the best partition in 2D and 3D granular assemblies. We show that for the class of networks considered in this article, our method produce much better results than the competing methods., Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures

We present analytic results for a special dimer model on the {\em non-bipartite} and {\em non-planar} checkerboard lattice that does not allow for parallel dimers surrounding diagonal links. We {\em exactly} calculate the number of closed packed dimer coverings on finite checkerboard lattices under periodic boundary conditions, and determine all dimer-dimer correlations. The latter are found to vanish beyond a certain distance. We find that this solvable model, despite being non-planar, is in close kinship with well-known paradigm-setting planar counterparts that allow exact mappings to $\mathbb{Z}_2$ lattice gauge theory., Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures

Unsupervised segmentation of large images using a Potts model Hamiltonian is unique in that segmentation is governed by a resolution parameter which scales the sensitivity to small clusters. Here, the input image is first modeled as a graph, which is then segmented by minimizing a Hamiltonian cost function defined on the graph and the respective segments. However, there exists no closed form solution of this optimization, and using previous iterative algorithmic solution techniques, the problem scales quadratically in the Input Length. Therefore, while Potts model segmentation gives accurate segmentation, it is grossly underutilized as an unsupervised learning technique. We propose a fast statistical down-sampling of input image pixels based on the respective color features, and a new iterative method to minimize the Potts model energy considering pixel to segment relationship. This method is generalizable and can be extended for image pixel texture features as well as spatial features. We demonstrate that this new method is highly efficient, and outperforms existing methods for Potts model based image segmentation. We demonstrate the application of our method in medical microscopy image segmentation; particularly, in segmenting renal glomerular micro-environment in renal pathology. Our method is not limited to image segmentation, and can be extended to any image/data segmentation/clustering task for arbitrary datasets with discrete features., Comment: 46 pages, 19 Figures

Machine learning (ML) is quickly emerging as a powerful tool with diverse applications across an extremely broad spectrum of disciplines and commercial endeavors. Typically, ML is used as a black box that provides little illuminating rationalization of its output. In the current work, we aim to better understand the generic intuition underlying unsupervised ML with a focus on physical systems. The systems that are studied here as test cases comprise of six different 2-dimensional (2-D) particulate systems of different complexities. It is noted that the findings of this study are generic to any unsupervised ML problem and are not restricted to materials systems alone. Three rudimentary unsupervised ML techniques are employed on the adjacency (connectivity) matrix of the six studied systems: (i) using principal eigenvalue and eigenvectors of the adjacency matrix, (ii) spectral decomposition, and (iii) a Potts model based community detection technique in which a modularity function is maximized. We demonstrate that, while solving a completely classical problem, ML technique produces features that are distinctly connected to quantum mechanical solutions. Dissecting these features help us to understand the deep connection between the classical non-linear world and the quantum mechanical linear world through the kaleidoscope of ML technique, which might have far reaching consequences both in the arena of physical sciences and ML.

Using an algebra of second quantized operators, we develop local two-body parent Hamiltonians for all unprojected Jain states at filling factor $n/(2n{\sf p}+1)$, with integer $n$, and (half-)integer ${\sf p}$. We rigorously establish that these states are uniquely stabilized and that zero mode counting reproduces mode counting in the associated edge conformal field theory. We further establish an associated "entangled Pauli principle" describing these states and associated zero mode spaces, as well as an emergent SU($n$) symmetry., Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures, published version, extended and improved supplement

Stabilizer code quantum Hamiltonians have been introduced with the intention of physically realizing a quantum memory because of their resilience to decoherence. In order to analyze their finite temperature thermodynamics, we show how to generically solve their partition function using duality techniques. By unveiling each model's universality class and effective dimension, insights may be gained on their finite temperature dynamics and robustness. Our technique is demonstrated in particular on the 4D Toric Code and Haah's Code -- we find that the former falls into the 4D Ising universality class, whereas Haah's Code exhibits dimensional reduction and falls into the 1D Ising universality class., Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, 1 table; v2: added references, fixed minor typos

While multiband systems are usually considered for flat-band physics, here we study one-band models that have flat portions in the dispersion to explore correlation effects in the 2D repulsive Hubbard model in an intermediate coupling regime. The FLEX+DMFT~(the dynamical mean-field theory combined with the fluctuation exchange approximation) is used to show that we have a crossover from ferromagnetic to antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations as the band filling is varied, which triggers a crossover from triplet to singlet pairings with a peculiar filling dependence that is dominated by the size of the flat region in the dispersion. A curious manifestation of the flat part appears as larger numbers of nodal lines associated with pairs extended in real space. We further detect non-Fermi liquid behavior in the momentum distribution function, frequency dependence of the self-energy and spectral function. These indicate correlation physics peculiar to flat-band systems., Comment: 7+2 pages

We investigate thermal properties of the X-Cube model and its $\mathbb{Z}_{p}$ `clock-type' ($p$X-Cube) extension. In the latter, the elementary spin-1/2 operators of the X-Cube model are replaced by elements of the Weyl algebra. We study different boundary condition realizations of these models and analyze their finite temperature dynamics and thermodynamics. We find that (i) no finite temperature phase transitions occur in these systems. In tandem, employing bond-algebraic dualities, we show that for Glauber type solvable baths, (ii) thermal fluctuations might not enable system size dependent time autocorrelations at all positive temperatures (i.e., they are thermally fragile). Qualitatively, our results demonstrate that similar to Kitaev's Toric code model, the X-Cube model (and its $p$-state clock-type descendants) may be mapped to simple classical Ising ($p$-state clock) chains in which neither phase transitions nor anomalously slow glassy dynamics might appear., Comment: 67 pages, 18 figures; v4: minor typos corrected

Motivated by recent experiments realizing correlated phenomena and superconductivity in 2D van der Waals devices, we consider the general problem of whether correlation effects may be enhanced by modifying band structure while keeping a fixed weak interaction strength. Using determinantal quantum Monte Carlo, we study the 2D Hubbard model for two different band structures: a regular nearest-neighbor tight-binding model, and a partially flat band structure containing a non-dispersing region, with identical total non-interacting bandwidth $W$. For both repulsive and attractive weak interactions ($|U| \ll W$), correlated phenomena are significantly stronger in the partially flat model. In the repulsive case, even with $U$ an order of magnitude smaller than $W$, we find the presence of a Mott insulating state near half-filling of the flat region in momentum space. In the attractive case, where generically the ground state is superconducting, the partially flat model exhibits significantly enhanced superconducting transition temperatures. These results suggest the possibility of engineering correlation effects in materials by tuning the non-interacting electronic dispersion.

Recently two fundamental topological properties of a magnetic vortex at the interface of a superconductor (SC) and a strong topological insulator (TI) have been established: the vortex carries both a Majorana zero-mode relevant for topological quantum computation and, for a time-reversal invariant TI, a charge of $e/4$. This fractional charge is caused by the axion term in the electromagnetic Lagrangian of the TI. Here we determine the angular momentum $J$ of the vortices, which in turn determines their mutual statistics. Solving the axion-London electrodynamic equations including screening in both SC and TI, we find that the elementary quantum of angular momentum of the vortex is $-n^2\hbar/8$, where $n$ is the flux quantum of the vortex line. Exchanging two elementary fluxes thus changes the phase of the wavefunction by $-\pi/4$., Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures. In this version a proposal for an experimental setup for detecting fractional statistics is added, including a schematic figure; references added. Version accepted for publication in PRL

A formalism is developed for the rigorous study of solvable fractional quantum Hall parent Hamiltonians with Landau level mixing. The idea of organization through "generalized Pauli principles" is expanded to allow for root level entanglement, giving rise to "entangled Pauli principles". Through the latter, aspects of the effective field theory description become ingrained in exact microscopic solutions for a great wealth of phases for which no similar single Landau level description is known. We discuss in detail braiding statistic, edge theory, and rigorous zero mode counting for the Jain-221 state as derived from a microscopic Hamiltonian. The relevant root-level entanglement is found to feature an AKLT-type MPS structure associated with an emergent SU(2) symmetry., Comment: 12 pages, including supplemental. Revised version includes two references corresponding to multi-layer graphene

To establish a unified framework for studying both discrete and continuous coupling distributions, we introduce the {\it binomial} spin glass, a class of models where the couplings are sums of $m$ identically distributed Bernoulli random variables. In the continuum limit $m \to \infty$, the class reduces to one with Gaussian couplings, while $m=1$ corresponds to the $\pm J$ spin glass. We demonstrate that for short-range Ising models on $d$-dimensional hypercubic lattices the ground-state entropy density for $N$ spins is bounded from above by $(\sqrt{d/2m} + 1/N)\ln2$, and further show that the actual entropies follow the scaling behavior implied by this bound. We thus uncover a fundamental non-commutativity of the thermodynamic and continuous coupling limits that leads to the presence or absence of degeneracies depending on the precise way the limits are taken. Exact calculations of defect energies reveal a crossover length scale $L^\ast(m) \sim L^\kappa$ below which the binomial spin glass is indistinguishable from the Gaussian system. Since $\kappa = -1/(2\theta)$, where $\theta$ is the spin-stiffness exponent, discrete couplings become irrelevant at large scales for systems with a finite-temperature spin-glass phase.

We consider general systems that start from and/or end in thermodynamic equilibrium while experiencing a finite rate of change of their energy density or other intensive quantities $q$ at intermediate times. We demonstrate that at these times, during which $q$ varies at a finite rate, the associated covariance, the connected pair correlator $G_{ij} = \langle q_{i} q_{j} \rangle - \langle q_{i} \rangle \langle q_{j} \rangle$, between any two (far separated) sites $i$ and $j$ in a macroscopic system may, on average, become finite. Once the global mean $q$ no longer changes, the average of $G_{ij}$ over all site pairs $i$ and $j$ may tend to zero. However, when the equilibration times are significant (e.g., as in a glass that is not in true thermodynamic equilibrium yet in which the energy density (or temperature) reaches a final steady state value), these long range correlations may persist also long after $q$ ceases to change. We explore viable experimental implications of our findings and speculate on their potential realization in glasses (where a prediction of a theory based on the effect that we describe here suggests a universal collapse of the viscosity that agrees with all published viscosity measurements over sixteen decades) and non-Fermi liquids. We discuss effective equilibrium in driven systems and derive uncertainty relation based inequalities that connect the heat capacity to the dynamics in general open thermal systems. These rigorous thermalization inequalities suggest the shortest possible fluctuation times scales in open equilibrated systems at a temperature $T$ are typically "Planckian" (i.e., ${\cal{O}}(\hbar/(k_{B} T))$). We briefly comment on parallels between quantum measurements, unitary quantum evolution, and thermalization and on how Gaussian distributions may generically emerge., Comment: 145 pages, 7 figures (increase in page number primarily due to new style file)

We introduce a statistical physics inspired supervised machine learning algorithm for classification and regression problems. The method is based on the invariances or stability of predicted results when known data is represented as expansions in terms of various stochastic functions. The algorithm predicts the classification/regression values of new data by combining (via voting) the outputs of these numerous linear expansions in randomly chosen functions. The few parameters (typically only one parameter is used in all studied examples) that this model has may be automatically optimized. The algorithm has been tested on 10 diverse training data sets of various types and feature space dimensions. It has been shown to consistently exhibit high accuracy and readily allow for optimization of parameters, while simultaneously avoiding pitfalls of existing algorithms such as those associated with class imbalance. We very briefly speculate on whether spatial coordinates in physical theories may be viewed as emergent "features" that enable a robust machine learning type description of data with generic low order smooth functions., Comment: 30 pages, 42 figures

A broad fundamental understanding of the mechanisms underlying the phenomenology of supercooled liquids has remained elusive, despite decades of intense exploration. When supercooled beneath its characteristic melting temperature, a liquid sees a sharp rise in its viscosity over a narrow temperature range, eventually becoming frozen on laboratory timescales. Explaining this immense increase in viscosity is one of the principle goals of condensed matter physicists. To that end, numerous theoretical frameworks have been proposed which explain and reproduce the temperature dependence of the viscosity of supercooled liquids. Each of these frameworks appears only applicable to specific classes of glassformers and each possess a number of variable parameters. Here we describe a classical framework for explaining the dynamical behavior of supercooled liquids based on statistical mechanical considerations, and possessing only a single variable parameter. This parameter varies weakly from liquid to liquid. Furthermore, as predicted by this new classical theory and its earlier quantum counterpart, we find with the aid of a small dimensionless constant that varies in size from $\sim 0.05-0.12$, a universal (16 decade) collapse of the viscosity data as a function of temperature. The collapse appears in all known types of glass forming supercooled liquids (silicates, metallic alloys, organic systems, chalcogenide, sugars, and water)., Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures

We reveal the existence of a new type of topological Josephson effect involving type II superconductors and three-dimensional topological insulators as tunnel junctions. We predict that vortex lines induce a variant of the Witten effect that is the consequence of the axion electromagnetic response of the topological insulator: at the interface of the junction each flux quantum attains a fractional electrical charge of e/4. As a consequence, if an external magnetic field is applied perpendicular to the junction, the Witten effect induces an AC Josephson effect in absence of any external voltage. We derive a number of further experimental consequences and propose potential setups where these {quantized, flux induced, Witten} effects may be observed., Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure. Published version (PRL editor's suggestion)

We investigate the structure of metastable states in self-generated Coulomb glasses. In dramatic contrast to disordered electron glasses, we find that these states lack marginal stability. Such absence of marginal stability is reflected by the suppression of the single-particle density of states into an exponentially soft gap of the form $g(\epsilon) \sim e^{-V / \xi |\epsilon|}$. To analytically explain this behavior, we extend the stability criterion of Efros and Shklovskii to incorporate local charge correlations, in qualitative agreement with our numerical findings. Our work suggests the existence of a new class of self-generated glasses dominated by strong geometric frustration., Comment: v3 is the published version in New Journal of Physics

We present a self-contained review of the theory of dislocation-mediated quantum melting at zero temperature in two spatial dimensions. The theory describes the liquid-crystalline phases with spatial symmetries in between a quantum crystalline solid and an isotropic superfluid: quantum nematics and smectics. It is based on an Abelian-Higgs-type duality mapping of phonons onto gauge bosons ("stress photons"), which encode for the capacity of the crystal to propagate stresses. Dislocations and disclinations, the topological defects of the crystal, are sources for the gauge fields and the melting of the crystal can be understood as the proliferation (condensation) of these defects, giving rise to the Anderson-Higgs mechanism on the dual side. For the liquid crystal phases, the shear sector of the gauge bosons becomes massive signaling that shear rigidity is lost. Resting on symmetry principles, we derive the phenomenological imaginary time actions of quantum nematics and smectics and analyze the full spectrum of collective modes. The quantum nematic is a superfluid having a true rotational Goldstone mode due to rotational symmetry breaking, and the origin of this 'deconfined' mode is traced back to the crystalline phase. The two-dimensional quantum smectic turns out to be a dizzyingly anisotropic phase with the collective modes interpolating between the solid and nematic in a non-trivial way. We also consider electrically charged bosonic crystals and liquid crystals, and carefully analyze the electromagnetic response of the quantum liquid crystal phases. In particular, the quantum nematic is a real superconductor and shows the Meissner effect. Their special properties inherited from spatial symmetry breaking show up mostly at finite momentum, and should be accessible by momentum-sensitive spectroscopy., Comment: Review article, 137 pages, 32 figures. Accepted version

The glass transition remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of contemporary condensed matter physics. When crystallization is bypassed by rapid cooling, a supercooled liquid, retaining amorphous particle arrangment, results. The physical phenomenology of supercooled liquids is as vast as it is interesting. Most significant, the viscosity of the supercooled liquid displays an incredible increase over a narrow temperature range. Eventually, the supercooled liquid ceases to flow, becomes a glass, and gains rigidity and solid-like behaviors. Understanding what underpins the monumental growth of viscosity, and how rigidity results without long range order is a long-sought goal. Many theories of the glassy slowdown require the growth of static lengthscale related to structure with lowering of the temperature. To that end, we have proposed a new, natural lengthscale- "the shear penetration depth". This lengthscale quantifies the structural connectivity of the supercooled liquid. The shear penetration depth is defined as the distance up to which a shear perturbation applied to the boundary propagates into the liquid. We provide numerical data, based on the simulations of $NiZr_2$, illustrating that this length scale exhibits dramatic growth and eventual divergence upon approach to the glass transition. We further discuss this in relation to percolating structural connectivity and a new theory of the glass transition., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, special journal article

We consider a compact abelian Higgs model in 3+1 dimensions with a topological axion term and construct its dual theories for both bulk and boundary at strong coupling. The model may be viewed as describing a superconductor with magnetic monopoles, which can also be interpreted as a field theory of a topological Mott insulator. We show that this model is dual to a non-compact topological field theory of particles and vortices. It has exactly the same form of a model for superconducting cosmic strings with an axion term. We consider the duality of the boundary field theory at strong coupling and show that in this case $\theta$ is quantized as $-8\pi n/m$ where $n$ and $m$ are the quantum numbers associated to electric and magnetic charges. These topological states lack a non-interacting equivalent., Comment: 9.1 pages, 1 figure; v3: minor changes; references added; published version

Despite decades of intense study, the mechanisms underlying the extraordinary dynamics of supercooled liquids as they approach the glass transition remain, at best, mis-characterized, and at worst, misunderstood. A long standing endeavor is to understand the remarkable increase of the viscosity with supercooling. Recently, a new theory of supercooled liquids has been proposed that starts from first principles, using elementary statistical mechanics arguments, to derive a form for the viscosity that contains only a single fitting parameter in its simplest form. In this we demonstrate that this exact same form may be derived from a different starting point, and then critically examine its performance. In the process we find that functional form proposed fits the viscosity data of a diverse group of 45 liquids exceptionally well over a wide temperature range, and uncover a number of interesting correlations of the single parameter with various thermodynamic quantities, ultimately allowing for the prediction of low temperature viscosity from high temperature data. Additionally, we find that similar physical reasoning can be used to derive a similar, single parameter form for the viscosity of hard-sphere/jammed liquids. We demonstrate that this form accurately reproduces the viscosity of hard-spheres, suggesting an underlying universality in metastable dynamics., Comment: 34 pages, 30 Figures, 5 Tables, significant revisions, title change, author removal, doubled length, content expanded

We challenge the hypothesis that the ground states of a physical system whose degeneracy depends on topology must necessarily realize topological quantum order and display non-local entanglement. To this end, we introduce and study a classical rendition of the Toric Code model embedded on Riemann surfaces of different genus numbers. We find that the minimal ground state degeneracy (and those of all levels) depends on the topology of the embedding surface alone. As the ground states of this classical system may be distinguished by local measurements, a characteristic of Landau orders, this example illustrates that topological degeneracy is not a sufficient condition for topological quantum order. This conclusion is generic and, as shown, it applies to many other models. We also demonstrate that certain lattice realizations of these models, and other theories, display a ground state entropy (and those of all levels) that is "holographic", i.e., extensive in the system boundary. We find that clock and $U(1)$ gauge theories display topological (in addition to gauge) degeneracies., Comment: 21 pages

Commensurability is of paramount importance in numerous strongly interacting electronic systems. In the Fractional Quantum Hall effect, a rich cascade of increasingly narrow plateaux appear at larger denominator filling fractions. Rich commensurate structures also emerge, at certain filling fractions, in high temperature superconductors and other electronic systems. A natural question concerns the character of these and other electronic systems at irrational filling fractions. Here we demonstrate that quasicrystalline structures naturally emerge in these situations, and trigger behaviors not typically expected of periodic systems. We first show that irrationally filled quantum Hall systems cross over into quasiperiodically ordered configuration in the thin-torus limit. Using known properties of quasicrystals, we argue that these states are unstable against the effects of disorder, in agreement with the existence of quantum Hall plateaux. We then study analogous physical situations in a system of cold Rydberg atoms placed on an optical lattice. Such an experimental setup is generally disorder free, and can therefore be used to detect the emergent quasicrystals we predict. We discuss similar situations in the Falicov-Kimball model, where known exact results can be used to establish quasicrystalline structures in one and two dimensions. We briefly speculate on possible relations between our theoretical findings and the existence of glassy dynamics and other features of strongly correlated electronic systems.

We apply microcanonical ensemble considerations to suggest that, whenever it may thermalize, a general disorder-free many-body Hamiltonian of a typical atomic system has solid-like eigenstates at low energies and fluid-type (and gaseous, plasma) eigenstates associated with energy densities exceeding those present in the melting (and, respectively, higher energy) transition(s). In particular, the lowest energy density at which the eigenstates of such a clean many body atomic system undergo a non-analytic change is that of the melting (or freezing) transition. We invoke this observation to analyze the evolution of a liquid upon supercooling (i.e., cooling rapidly enough to avoid solidification below the freezing temperature). Expanding the wavefunction of a supercooled liquid in the complete eigenbasis of the many-body Hamiltonian, only the higher energy liquid-type eigenstates contribute significantly to measurable hydrodynamic relaxations (e.g., those probed by viscosity) while static thermodynamic observables become weighted averages over both solid- and liquid-type eigenstates. Consequently, when extrapolated to low temperatures, hydrodynamic relaxation times of deeply supercooled liquids (i.e., glasses) may seem to diverge at nearly the same temperature at which the extrapolated entropy of the supercooled liquid becomes that of the solid. In this formal quantum framework, the increasingly sluggish (and spatially heterogeneous) dynamics in supercooled liquids as their temperature is lowered stems from the existence of the single non-analytic change of the eigenstates of the clean many-body Hamiltonian at the equilibrium melting transition present in low energy solid-type eigenstates. We derive a single (possibly computable) dimensionless parameter fit to the viscosity and suggest other testable predictions of our approach., Comment: 30 pages, 3 figures, 1 table; to appear in Philosophical Magazine

The Madelung equations map the non-relativistic time-dependent Schrodinger equation into hydrodynamic equations of a virtual fluid. Here we show that an increase of the Boltzmann entropy of this Madelung fluid is proportional to the expectation value of its velocity divergence. Hence, entropy growth is accompanied by expansion resulting from the ability of the Madelung fluid to be compressible. The compressibility itself reflects superposition of solutions of the Schrodinger equation. Thus, in unitary processes where the Madelung fluid expands and then shrinks, the Boltzmann entropy may, correspondingly, grow and then decrease. The notion of entropy growth due to expansion is common in diffusive processes, however in the latter the process is irreversible. Much unlike the Boltzmann entropy, the von Neumann entropy, does not vary with time. To elucidate the physical underpinning of the Boltzmann entropy, we examine several specific examples. We demonstrate that, for classical diffusive processes, the "force" accelerating diffusion has the form of the positive gradient of the quantum Bohm potential. In the Madelung fluid, the advective and the diffusive velocities correspond respectively to the the real and imaginary parts of the complex momentum. We find that the diffusion coefficient provides a lower bound of Heisenberg uncertainty type product between the gas mean free path and the Brownian momentum., Comment: 9 pages. The second version contains more examples and explanations

Finding a suitably growing length scale that increases in tandem with the immense viscous slowdown of supercooled liquids is an open problem associated with the glass transition. Here, we define and demonstrate the existence of one such length scale which may be experimentally verifiable. This is the length scale over which external shear perturbations appreciably penetrate into a liquid as the glass transition is approached. We provide simulation based evidence of its existence, and its growth by at least an order of magnitude, by using molecular dynamics simulations of NiZr2, a good fragile glass former. On the probed timescale, upon approaching the glass transition temperature from above, this length scale, {\xi} is also shown to be consistent with Ising-like scaling. Furthermore, we demonstrate the possible scaling of {\xi} about the temperature at which super-Arrhenius growth of viscosity, and a marked growth of the penetration depth sets in. Our simulation results suggest that upon supercooling, marked initial increase of the shear penetration depth in fluids may occur in tandem with the breakdown of the Stokes-Einstein relation., Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures;Renamed, Massive Revisions, PRB Accepted

Recent experimental results suggest that metallic liquids universally exhibit a high-temperature dynamical crossover, which is correlated with the glass transition temperature ($T_{g}$). We demonstrate, using molecular dynamics results for Cu64Zr36, that this temperature, $T_{A} \approx 2 \times T_{g}$, is linked with cooperative atomic rearrangements that produce domains of connected icosahedra. Supercooling to a new characteristic temperature, $T_{D}$, is shown to produce higher order cooperative rearrangements amongst connected icosahedra, leading to large-scale domain fluctuations and the onset of glassy dynamics. These extensive domains then abruptly stabilize above $T_{g}$ and eventually percolate before the glass is formed. All characteristic temperatures ($T_{A}$, $T_{D}$ and $T_{g}$) are thus connected by successive manifestations of the structural cooperativity that begins at $T_{A}$., Comment: 21 pages with 9 figures, Philosophical Magazine, 2016

We introduce a "second-quantized" representation of the ring of symmetric functions to further develop a purely second-quantized -- or "lattice" -- approach to the study of zero modes of frustration free Haldane-pseudo-potential-type Hamiltonians, which in particular stabilize Laughlin ground states. We present three applications of this formalism. We start demonstrating how to systematically construct all zero-modes of Laughlin-type parent Hamiltonians in a framework that is free of first-quantized polynomial wave functions, and show that they are in one-to-one correspondence with dominance patterns. The starting point here is the pseudo-potential Hamiltonian in "lattice form", stripped of all information about the analytic structure of Landau levels (dynamical momenta). Secondly, as a by-product, we make contact with the bosonization method, and obtain an alternative proof for the equivalence between bosonic and fermionic Fock spaces. Finally, we explicitly derive the second-quantized version of Read's non-local (string) order parameter for the Laughlin state, extending an earlier description by Stone. Commutation relations between the local quasi-hole operator and the local electron operator are generalized to various geometries., Comment: version published in PRB, editor's suggestion