Stuart Yi-Thomas, Yi Huang, Jay D. Sau, Sankar Das Sarma
24 pages, 18 figures
January 23, 2025
We theoretically consider disorder and temperature effects on the integer quantum Hall effect (IQHE) using a variety of distinct and complementary analytical and numerical techniques. In particular, we address simple, physical, and experimentally relevant questions: How does disorder and/or temperature affect the IQHE plateau width? Does the plateau width increase or decrease with disorder and/or temperature? What happens to the peak in the longitudinal conductance with increasing disorder/temperature? Does the longitudinal conductance obey any universal scaling property? Is there "floating" with increasing disorder and/or decreasing magnetic field? Can disorder destroy the IQHE? Is there an IQHE to localization transition? What is the Landau level dependence of the plateau width? Our detailed theory provides answers to these and other related experimentally relevant questions. We discuss our results in the context of existing experimental results and suggest future experiments arising from our work. A key finding is that disorder and temperature are intrinsically connected in affecting IQHE, and there is an intricate interplay between them leading to nonmonotonicity in how the IQHE plateau width behaves as a function of increasing disorder. Both must be considered on an equal footing in understanding IQHE experiments.
Stuart Yi-Thomas, Jay D. Sau
Phys. Rev. Lett. 133, 266601 (2024)10 pages, 3 figures
December 3, 2024
Discrete time crystals are novel phases of matter that break the discrete time translational symmetry of a periodically driven system. In this work, we propose a classical system of weakly-nonlinear parametrically-driven coupled oscillators as a testbed to understand these phases. Such a system of parametric oscillators can be used to model period-doubling instabilities of Josephson junction arrays as well as semiconductor lasers. To show that this instability leads to a discrete time crystal we first show that a certain limit of the system is close to Langevin dynamics in a symmetry breaking potential. We numerically show that this phase exists even in the presence of Ising symmetry breaking using a Glauber dynamics approximation. We then use a field theoretic argument to show that these results are robust to other approximations including the semiclassical limit when applied to dissipative quantum systems.
Stuart Yi-Thomas, Brayden Ware, Jay D. Sau, Christopher David White
Phys. Rev. B 110, 134308 (2024)18 pages, 13 figures
October 17, 2024
In ergodic quantum spin chains, locally conserved quantities such as energy or particle number generically evolve according to hydrodynamic equations as they relax to equilibrium. We investigate the complexity of simulating hydrodynamics at infinite temperature with multiple methods: time evolving block decimation (TEBD), TEBD with density matrix truncation (DMT), the recursion method with a universal operator growth hypothesis (R-UOG), and operator-size truncated (OST) dynamics. Density matrix truncation and the OST dynamics give consistent dynamical correlations to and diffusion coefficients agreeing within 1%. TEBD only converges for , but still produces diffusion coefficients accurate within 1%. The universal operator growth hypothesis fails to converge and only matches other methods on short times. We see no evidence of long-time tails in either DMT or OST calculations of the current-current correlator, although we cannot rule out that they appear at longer times. We do observe power-law corrections to the energy density correlator. At finite wavelength, we observe a crossover from purely diffusive, overdamped decay of the energy density, to underdamped oscillatory behavior similar to that of cold atom experiments. We dub this behavior "hot band second sound" and offer a microscopically-motivated toy model.
Stuart N. Yi-Thomas, Jay D. Sau
5 pages, 3 figures
June 25, 2024
A recent experiment [Cohen et al., Science 382, 542 (2023)] observed a quantized conductance tunneling into a fractional quantum hall edge in the strong coupling limit, which is consistent with the prediction of a quantum Hall transformer. We model this quantum point contact (QPC) as a quantum wire with a spatially-varying Luttinger parameter and a back-scattering impurity and use a numerical solution to find the wavepacket scattering and microwave (i.e. finite frequency) has conductance at the interface. We then compare the microwave conductance to an analytic solution of a Luttinger liquid with an abruptly varying Luttinger parameter and a back-scattering impurity, which is obtained by mapping the problem to a boundary sine-Gordon (BSG) model. Finally, we show that the quantum Hall transformer can survive the inclusion of the domain wall which is expected to occur in a wide QPC, which is experimentally relevant, provided the momentum change in the QPC is generated by electrostatics. We find that back-scattering generated by the domain wall is of an order of magnitude consistent with the experiment.
Stuart N. Thomas, Sankar Das Sarma, Jay D. Sau
Phys. Rev. B 106, 174501 (2022)13 pages, 2 figures
July 11, 2022
Disorder in a proximitizing bulk superconductor can scatter quasiparticles in a putative topological superconductor and eventually destroy the topological superconducting state. We use a scattering approach and a random-matrix calculation to estimate the disorder scattering time in a topological Josephson junction. We find that the disorder scattering rate from the bulk of the superconductor, even in the strong coupling limit, is suppressed in the ratio of Fermi momenta between the semiconductor and superconductor. This suppression of disorder scattering is accompanied by near perfect Andreev reflection at such semiconductor/superconductor interfaces, which can be used as a signature of such clean proximity effect. We also find that these results can be understood by a semiclassical estimate of scattering. We discuss limits in other systems such as the semiconductor nanowire where disorder scattering is suppressed according to similar classical estimates.
Stuart Yi-Thomas, Christopher Monahan
The 38th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, LATTICE2021 26th-30th July, 2021 Zoom/Gather@Massachusetts Institute of Technology
December 13, 2021
The O(3) non-linear sigma model (NLSM) is a prototypical field theory for QCD and ferromagnetism, and provides a simple system in which to study topological effects. In lattice QCD, the gradient flow has been demonstrated to remove ultraviolet singularities from the topological susceptibility. In contrast, lattice simulations of the NLSM find that the topological susceptibility diverges in the continuum limit, even in the presence of the gradient flow. We introduce a -term and analyze the topological charge as a function of under the gradient flow. Our results show that divergence persists in the presence of the flow, even at non-zero .
