arXiv subjects

Christophe Mora

Publications and source records attributed to Christophe Mora.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Higher-order van Hove singularity in magic-angle twisted trilayer graphene

We study the presence of higher-order van Hove singularities in mirror-symmetric twisted trilayer graphene. This geometry has recently emerged experimentally as a fascinating playground for studying correlated and exotic superconducting phases. We find that the trilayer hosts a zero-energy higher-order van Hove singularity with an exponent -1/3. The singularity is protected by the threefold rotation symmetry and a combined mirror-particle-hole symmetry and it can be tuned with only the twist angle and a perpendicular electric field. It arises from the combined merging of van Hove singularities and Dirac cones at zero energy, beyond the recent classifications of van Hove singularities. Moreover, we find that varying a third parameter such as corrugation brings the system to a topological Lifshitz transition, with anomalous exponent -2/5, separating regions of locally open and closed semiclassical orbits.

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arXiv2022

Anderson's theorem for correlated insulating states in twisted bilayer graphene

The emergence of correlated insulating phases in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene exhibits strong sample dependence. Here, we derive an Anderson theorem governing the robustness against disorder of the Kramers intervalley coherent (K-IVC) state, a prime candidate for describing the correlated insulators at even fillings of the moiré flat bands. We find that the K-IVC gap is robust against local perturbations, which are odd under $\mathcal{PT}$, where $\mathcal{P}$ and $\mathcal{T}$ denote particle-hole conjugation and time reversal, respectively. In contrast, $\mathcal{PT}$-even perturbations will in general induce subgap states and reduce or even eliminate the gap. We use this result to classify the stability of the K-IVC state against various experimentally relevant perturbations. The existence of an Anderson theorem singles out the K-IVC state from other possible insulating ground states.

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arXiv2022

Fractionalization and anyonic statistics in the integer quantum Hall collider

One remarkable feature of strongly correlated systems is the phenomenon of fractionalization where quasiparticles carry only a fraction of the charge or spin of the elementary constituents. Such quasiparticles often present anyonic statistics in two dimensions and lie at the heart of the fractional quantum Hall effect. We discuss the observation of fractionalization and anyonic statistics already in the integer quantum Hall effect coupled to a metallic island. A continuous fractional emitter is proposed, which sends dilute beams of non-integer charges, and its full counting statistics is obtained. The fractional charge is governed solely by the number of ballistic channels covered by the island and it is one half of the electron charge for a single ballistic channel. We further characterize the mixing of two such fractional beams through a quantum point contact beam splitter. We predict negative cross-correlations, in strong contrast with free electrons, that depend on the double exchange phase between electrons and the fractional charges emulating anyons. The result is similar to a genuine fractional edge state as recently measured at filling $ν= 1/3$. We revisit the physical interpretation of this experiment and point towards a direct braiding measurement rather than a deviation from fermionic antibunching.

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arXiv2022

Two-sites quantum island in the quasi-ballistic regime

Quantum Hall edge channels can be combined with metallic regions to fractionalize electrons and form correlated impurity models. We study a minimal device, that has been experimentally achieved quite recently, with two floating islands connected to three edge channels via quantum point contacts in the integer quantum Hall regime. At high transparency of the quantum point contacts, we establish a mapping to the boundary sine-Gordon model and thereby reveal the nature of the quantum critical point. We deduce from this mapping universal expressions for the conductance and noise, in agreement with the experimental findings, and discuss the competition between Kondo-like screening of each individual island and the cooperative transfer of electrons between them. We further predict that the device operated at finite voltage bias produces fractional charges $e^* =e/3$ and propose a generalization to $N$ islands with the fractional charge $e^* =e/(N+1)$.

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arXiv2021

Moiré lattice effects on the orbital magnetic response of twisted bilayer graphene and Condon instability

We analyze the orbital magnetic susceptibility from the band structure of twisted bilayer graphene. Close to charge neutrality, the out-of-plane susceptibility inherits the strong diamagnetic response from graphene. Increasing the doping, a crossover from diamagnetism to paramagnetism is obtained and a logarithmic divergence develops at the van Hove singularity of the Moiré lattice in the first band. The enhanced paramagnetism at the van Hove singularity is stronger for relatively large angle but gets suppressed by the flat spectrum towards the vicinity of the first magic angle. A diverging paramagnetic susceptibility indicates an instability towards orbital ferromagnetism with an orbital out-of-plane magnetization and a Landau level structure. The region of instability is however found to be practically very small, parametrically suppressed by the ratio of the electron velocity to the speed of light. We also discuss the in-plane orbital susceptibility at charge neutrality where we find a paramagnetic response and a logarithmic divergence at the magic angle. The paramagnetic response is associated with negative counterflow current in the two layers and does not admit a semiclassical description.

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arXiv2021

Quantum magnetism and topological superconductivity in Yu-Shiba-Rusinov chains

Chains of magnetic adatoms on superconductors have been discussed as promising systems for realizing Majorana end states. Here, we show that dilute Yu-Shiba-Rusinov (YSR) chains are also a versatile platform for quantum magnetism and correlated electron dynamics, with widely adjustable spin values and couplings. Focusing on subgap excitations, we derive an extended $t-J$ model for dilute quantum YSR chains and use it to study the phase diagram as well as tunneling spectra. We explore the implications of quantum magnetism for the formation of a topological superconducting phase, contrasting it to existing models assuming classical spin textures.

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arXiv2020

Phase-Coherent Dynamics of Quantum Devices With Local Interactions

This review illustrates how Local Fermi Liquid (LFL) theories describe the strongly correlated and coherent low-energy dynamics of quantum dot devices. This approach consists in an effective elastic scattering theory, accounting exactly for strong correlations. Here, we focus on the mesoscopic capacitor and recent experiments achieving Coulomb-induced quantum state transfer. Extending to out-of-equilibrium regimes, aiming at triggered single electron emission, we illustrate how inelastic effects become crucial, requiring approaches beyond LFLs, shedding new light on past experimental data, by showing clear interaction effects in the dynamics of mesoscopic capacitors.

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arXiv2020

Superradiant phase transition in electronic systems and emergent topological phases

We derive a general criterion for determining the onset of superradiant phase transition in electronic bands coupled to a cavity field, with possibly electron-electron interactions. For longitudinal superradiance in 2D or genuine 1D systems, we prove that it is always prevented, thereby extending existing no-go theorems. Instead, a superradiant phase transition can occur to a nonuniform transverse cavity field and we give specific examples in non-interacting models, either through Fermi surface nesting or parabolic band touching. Investigating the resulting time-reversal symmetry breaking superradiant states, we find in the former case Fermi surface lifting down to four Dirac points on a square lattice model, with topologically protected zero-modes, and in the latter case topological bands with non-zero Chern number on an hexagonal lattice.

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arXiv2019

Double-periodic Josephson junctions in a quantum dissipative environment

Embedded in an ohmic environment, the Josephson current peak can transfer part of its weight to finite voltage and the junction becomes resistive. The dissipative environment can even suppress the superconducting effect of the junction via a quantum phase transition occuring when the ohmic resistance $R_s$ exceeds the quantum resistance $R_{q}=h/(2e)^2$. For a topological junction hosting Majorana bound states with a $4 π$ periodicity of the superconducting phase, the phase transition is shifted to $4 R_{q}$. We consider a Josephson junction mixing the $2 π$ and $4 π$ periodicities shunted by a resistor, with a resistance between $R_q$ and $4 R_q$. Starting with a quantum circuit model, we derive the non-monotonic temperature dependence of its differential resistance resulting from the competition between the two periodicities; the $4 π$ periodicity dominating at the lowest temperatures. The non-monotonic behaviour is first revealed by straightforward perturbation theory and then substantiated by a fermionization to exactly solvable models when $R_s=2R_{q}$: the model is mapped onto a helical wire coupled to a topological superconductor when the Josephson energy is small and to the Emery-Kivelson line of the two-channel Kondo model in the opposite case.

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arXiv2019

Parametric amplification and squeezing with an ac- and dc-voltage biased superconducting junction

We theoretically investigate a near-quantum-limited parametric amplifier based on the nonlinear dynamics of quasiparticles flowing through a superconducting-insulator-superconducting junction. Photon-assisted tunneling, resulting from the combination of dc- and ac-voltage bias, gives rise to a strong parametric interaction for the electromagnetic modes reflected by the junction coupled to a transmission line. We show phase-sensitive and phase-preserving amplification, together with single- and two-mode squeezing. For an aluminum junction pumped at twice the center frequency, $ω_0/2π=6$~GHz, we predict narrow-band phase-sensitive amplification of microwaves signals to more than 20 dB, and broadband phase-preserving amplification of 20 dB over a 1.2 GHz 3-dB bandwidth. We also predict single- and two-mode squeezing reaching more than -12 dB over 5.3 GHz 3-dB bandwidth. Moreover, with a simple impedance matching circuit, we demonstrate 3 dB bandwidth reaching 4.3 GHz for 20 dB of gain. A key feature of the device is that its performance can be controlled in-situ with the applied dc- and ac-voltage biases.

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arXiv2019

Stabilizing arrays of photonic cat states via spontaneous symmetry breaking

The controlled generation and the protection of entanglement is key to quantum simulation and quantum computation. At the single-mode level, protocols based on photonic cat states hold strong promise as they present unprecedentedly long-lived coherence and may be combined with powerful error correction schemes. Here, we demonstrate that robust ensembles of "many-body photonic cat states" can be generated in a Bose-Hubbard model with pair hopping via a spontaneous U(1) symmetry breaking mechanism. We identify a parameter region where the ground state is a massively degenerate manifold consisting of local cat states which are factorized throughout the lattice and whose conserved individual parities can be used to make a register of qubits. This phenomenology occurs for arbitrary system sizes or geometries, as soon as long-range order is established, and it extends to driven-dissipative conditions. In the thermodynamic limit, it is related to a Mott insulator to pair-superfluid phase transition.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2019

Flat bands and perfect metal in trilayer moiré graphene

We investigate the electronic structure of a twisted multilayer graphene system forming a moiré pattern. We consider small twist angles separating the graphene sheets and develop a low-energy theory to describe the coupling of Dirac Bloch states close to the K point in each individual plane. Extending beyond the bilayer case, we show that, when the ratio of the consecutive twist angles is rational, a periodicity emerges in quasimomentum space with moiré Bloch bands even when the system does not exhibit a crystalline lattice structure in real space. For a trilayer geometry, we find flat bands in the spectrum at certain rotation angles. Performing a symmetry analysis of the band model for the trilayer, we prove that the system is a perfect metal in the sense that it is gapless at all energies. This striking result originates from the three Dirac cones which can only gap in pairs and produce bands with an infinite connectivity. The full gapless property is protected by an emergent particle-hole symmetry valid at sufficiently small angles.

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arXiv2019

4$π$ and 8$π$ dual Josephson effects induced by symmetry defects

In topological insulator edges, the duality between the Zeeman field orientation and the proximitized superconducting phase has been recently exploited to predict a magneto-Josephson effect with a 4$π$ periodicity. We revisit this latter Josephson effect in the light of this duality and show that the same 4$π$ quantum anomaly occurs when bridging two spinless Thouless pumps to a p-wave superconducting region that could be as small as a single and experimentally-relevant superconducting quantum dot - a point-like defect. This interpretation as a dual Josephson effect never requires the presence of Majorana modes but rather builds on the topological properties of adiabatic quantum pumps with Z topological invariants. It allows for the systematic construction of dual Josephson effects of arbitrary periodicity, such as 4$π$ and 8$π$, by using point-like defects whose symmetry differs from that of the pump, dubbed symmetry defects. Although adiabatic quantum pumps are typically discussed via mappings to two-dimensional geometries, we show that this phenomenology does not have any counterpart in conventional two-dimensional systems.

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arXiv2018

Non-topological parafermions in a one-dimensional fermionic model with even multiplet pairing

We discuss a one-dimensional fermionic model with a generalized $\mathbb{Z}_{N}$ even multiplet pairing extending Kitaev $\mathbb{Z}_{2}$ chain. The system shares many features with models believed to host localized edge parafermions, the most prominent being a similar bosonized Hamiltonian and a $\mathbb{Z}_{N}$ symmetry enforcing an $N$-fold degenerate ground state robust to certain disorder. Interestingly, we show that the system supports a pair of parafermions but they are non-local instead of being boundary operators. As a result, the degeneracy of the ground state is only partly topological and coexists with spontaneous symmetry breaking by a (two-particle) pairing field. Each symmetry-breaking sector is shown to possess a pair of Majorana edge modes encoding the topological twofold degeneracy. Surrounded by two band insulators, the model exhibits for $N=4$ the dual of an $8 π$ fractional Josephson effect highlighting the presence of parafermions.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2018

Bipartite Fluctuations and Topology of Dirac and Weyl Systems

Bipartite fluctuations can provide interesting information about entanglement properties and correlations in many-body quantum systems. We address such fluctuations in relation with the topology of Dirac and Weyl quantum systems, in situations where the relevant particle number is not conserved, leading to additional volume laws scaling with the Quantum Fisher information. Through the example of the $p+ip$ superconductor, we build a relation between charge fluctuations and the associated winding numbers of Dirac cones in the low-energy sector. Topological aspects of the Hamiltonian in the vicinity of these points induce long-range entanglement in real space. We provide a detailed analysis of such fluctuation properties, including the role of gap anisotropy, and discuss higher-dimensional Weyl analogues.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2018

Driven dissipative dynamics and topology of quantum impurity systems

In this review, we provide an introduction and overview to some more recent advances in real-time dynamics of quantum impurity models and their realizations in quantum devices. We focus on the Ohmic spin-boson and related models, which describes a single spin-1/2 coupled to an infinite collection of harmonic oscillators. The topics are largely drawn from our efforts over the past years, but we also present a few novel results. In the first part of this review, we begin with a pedagogical introduction to the real-time dynamics of a dissipative spin at both high and low temperatures. We then focus on the driven dynamics in the quantum regime beyond the limit of weak spin-bath coupling. In these situations, the non-perturbative stochastic Schroedinger equation method is ideally suited to numerically obtain the spin dynamics as it can incorporate bias fields $h_z(t)$ of arbitrary time-dependence in the Hamiltonian. We present different recent applications of this method: (i) how topological properties of the spin such as the Berry curvature and the Chern number can be measured dynamically, and how dissipation affects the topology and the measurement protocol, (ii) how quantum spin chains can experience synchronization dynamics via coupling to a common bath. In the second part of this review, we discuss quantum engineering of spin-boson and related models in circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED), quantum electrical circuits and cold-atoms architectures. In different realizations, the Ohmic environment can be represented by a long (microwave) transmission line, a Luttinger liquid, a one-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate, a chain of superconducting Josephson junctions. We show that the quantum impurity can be used as a quantum sensor to detect properties of a bath at minimal coupling, and how dissipative spin dynamics can lead to new insight in the Mott-Superfluid transition.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2018

At which magnetic field, exactly, does the Kondo resonance begin to split? A Fermi liquid description of the low-energy properties of the Anderson model

This paper is a corrected version of Phys. Rev. B 95, 165404 (2017), which we have retracted because it contained a trivial but fatal sign error that lead to incorrect conclusions. --- We extend a recently-eveloped Fermi-liquid (FL) theory for the asymmetric single-impurity Anderson model [C. Mora $et al.$, Phys. Rev. B, 92, 075120 (2015)] to the case of an arbitrary local magnetic field. To describe the system's low-lying quasiparticle excitations for arbitrary values of the bare Hamiltonian's model parameters, we construct an effective low-energy FL Hamiltonian whose FL parameters are expressed in terms of the local level's spin-dependent ground-state occupations and their derivatives with respect to level energy and local magnetic field. These quantities are calculable with excellent accuracy from the Bethe Ansatz solution of the Anderson model. Applying this effective model to a quantum dot in a nonequilibrium setting, we obtain exact results for the curvature of the spectral function, $c_A$, describing its leading $\sim\varepsilon^2$ term, and the transport coefficients $c_V$ and $c_T$, describing the leading $\sim V^2$ and $\sim T^2$ terms in the nonlinear differential conductance. A sign change in $c_A$ or $c_V$ is indicative of a change from a local maximum to a local minimum in the spectral function or nonlinear conductance, respectively, as is expected to occur when an increasing magnetic field causes the Kondo resonance to split into two subpeaks. We find that the fields $B_A$, $B_T$ and $B_V$ at which $c_A$, $c_T$ and $c_V$ change sign, respectively, are all of order $T_K$, as expected, with $B_A = B_T = B_V = 0.75073\,T_K$ in the Kondo limit.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2018

Braiding Majorana zero modes using quantum dots

We discuss a network of Kitaev wires coupled to several individually-tunable quantum dots as an extension of the recent experiments on a quantum dot coupled to a nanowire hosting Majorana zero modes [Deng et al. Science 354 1557 (2016) and Deng et al. arXiv:1712.03536 (2017)]. The setup features localized Majorana modes with exact zero energy and we show that they can be manipulated by solely acting on the quantum dots. A braiding process can be obtained by arranging three wires as a trijunction and a charge readout of the quantum dots can be used to reveal the non-Abelian statistics of Majorana zero modes. The setup can be scaled up to serve the more advanced purposes of topological quantum computation.

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