February 26, 2025
The outcomes of projective measurements on a quantum many-body system in a chosen basis are inherently probabilistic. The Shannon entropy of this probability distribution (the "diagonal entropy") often reveals universal features, such as the existence of a quantum phase transition. A brute-force tomographic approach to estimating this entropy scales exponentially with the system size. Here, we explore using the Lempel-Ziv lossless image compression algorithm as an efficient, ...
October 3, 2022
While volume violation of area law has been exhibited in several quantum spin chains, the construction of a corresponding model in higher dimensions, with isotropic terms, has been an open problem. Here we construct a 2D frustration-free Hamiltonian with maximal violation of the area law. We do so by building a quantum model of random surfaces with color degree of freedom that can be viewed as a collection of colored Dyck paths. The Hamiltonian may be viewed as a 2D generaliz...
March 25, 1996
We analyze free-fermion conditions on vertex models. We show --by examining examples of vertex models on square, triangular, and cubic lattices-- how they amount to degeneration conditions for known symmetries of the Boltzmann weights, and propose a general scheme for such a process in two and more dimensions.
December 9, 2008
In order to better understand the occurrence of phase transitions, we adopt an approach based on the study of energy landscapes: The relation between stationary points of the potential energy landscape of a classical many-particle system and the analyticity properties of its thermodynamic functions is studied for finite as well as infinite systems. For finite systems, each stationary point is found to cause a nonanalyticity in the microcanonical entropy, and the functional fo...
July 26, 2016
We study a model of two dimensional, topological superconductivity on a square lattice. The model contains hopping, spin orbit coupling and a time reversal symmetry breaking Zeeman term. This term, together with the chemical potential act as knobs that induce transitions between trivial and topological superconductivity. As previously found numerically, the transitions are seen in the entanglement entropy as cusps as a function of model parameters. In this work we study the e...
May 9, 1995
We present calculations of the complex-temperature zeros of the partition functions for 2D Ising models on the square lattice with spin $s=1$, 3/2, and 2. These give insight into complex-temperature phase diagrams of these models in the thermodynamic limit. Support is adduced for a conjecture that all divergences of the magnetisation occur at endpoints of arcs of zeros protruding into the FM phase. We conjecture that there are $4[s^2]-2$ such arcs for $s \ge 1$, where $[x]$ d...
January 7, 2012
A model describing the three-dimensional folding of the triangular lattice on the face-centered cubic lattice is generalized allowing the presence of defects corresponding to cuts in the two-dimensional network. The model can be expressed in terms of Ising-like variables with nearest-neighbor and plaquette interactions in the hexagonal lattice; its phase diagram is determined by the Cluster Variation Method. The results found by varying the curvature and defect energy show th...
November 12, 2012
We solve a two dimensional model for polymer chain folding in the presence of mechanical pulling force ($f$) exactly using equilibrium statistical mechanics. Using analytically derived expression for the partition function we determine the phase diagram for the model in the $f$-temperature ($T$) plane. A square root singularity in the susceptibility indicates a second order phase transition from a folded to an unfolded state at a critical force ($f_c$) in the thermodynamic li...
September 16, 2010
I define a statistical model of graphs in which 2-dimensional spaces arise at low temperature. The configurations are given by graphs with a fixed number of edges and the Hamiltonian is a simple, local function of the graphs. Simulations show that there is a transition between a low-temperature regime in which the graphs form triangulations of 2-dimensional surfaces and a high-temperature regime, where the surfaces disappear. I use data for the specific heat and other observa...
January 13, 2012
We present evidence that a nonperturbative model of quantum gravity defined via Euclidean dynamical triangulations contains a region in parameter space with an extended 4-dimensional geometry when a non-trivial measure term is included in the gravitational path integral. Within our extended region we find a large scale spectral dimension of D_s = 4.04 +/- 0.26 and a Hausdorff dimension that is consistent with D_H = 4 from finite size scaling. We find that the short distance s...