arXiv subjects

Nandini Trivedi

Publications and source records attributed to Nandini Trivedi.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Crossover from Fast Scrambling to Operator Confinement Tuned by an Auxiliary Qubit

We demonstrate a static, disorder-free spin chain Hamiltonian which, by tuning the coupling to an auxiliary qubit, realizes a crossover between super-ballistic, ancilla-accelerated scrambling and sub-ballistic operator confinement. Our minimal model is the mixed-field Ising chain with a spin-1/2 ancilla coupled to its longitudinal magnetization. The ancilla mediates an effective all-to-all interaction which accelerates operator spreading and entanglement growth when weakly coupled, but rapidly saturates its entanglement and projects spin chain operators into effectively frozen subspaces when the ancilla coupling is strong. We locate this crossover independently through both a divergent peak in the mutual-information saturation time near $\lambda_c N/h \approx 8$ and an exponential suppression of the late-time OTOC growth rate, $\log\alpha \propto 1/\lambda$. Through a Feshbach-Fano projection and Schrieffer-Wolff transformation, we reveal an effective hidden symmetry on the chain which confines operators on the chain for a time exponential in the coupling strength. This reconciles the fast, $\log(N)$ scrambling reported for random-unitary-circuit realizations of the star geometry with the confinement previously found in its time-independent Hamiltonian analog, showing both emerge from a single Hamiltonian family as a function of one dimensionless parameter.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

The nature of the "pseudogap" in the insulating phase of highly disordered superconductors

Disordered thin films undergoing a superconductor-insulator transition provide a controlled setting for studying pseudogap physics in the absence of competing electronic orders. Although theory predicts that local Cooper pairing can survive deep into the insulating phase, direct spectroscopic confirmation has remained experimentally inaccessible because tunneling measurements in highly insulating films require ultra-high-resistance junctions and picoampere current sensitivity. Here we combine ultra-high-resistance planar tunneling spectroscopy on amorphous indium oxide films with quantum Monte Carlo simulations of the attractive Hubbard model to probe the single-particle excitation spectrum deep in the insulating regime. We find striking agreement between experiment and theory: the single-particle gap not only survives across the superconductor-insulator transition, but increases substantially with disorder, reaching values more than twice those observed on the superconducting side. With increasing temperature, the gap fills rather than closes, while coherence peaks are suppressed and spectral weight redistributes to energies far exceeding the gap scale. Our results provide direct quantitative experimental confirmation of the theoretically predicted Cooper-pair insulating state with localized Cooper pairs and establish a unified connection between the pseudogap above $T_c$ and the insulating gap as manifestations of pairing without global phase coherence.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2026

Van Hove singularity-driven giant Nernst signal in twisted double bilayer graphene

Twisted graphene layers host van Hove singularities (vHSs), peaks in the electronic density of states, thought to drive exotic phases in moir\'e materials, but their effect on thermal transport has remained unclear. Here we show that vHSs in twisted double bilayer graphene (tDBLG) generate an unusually large Nernst signal-the transverse voltage produced by a longitudinal temperature gradient in a magnetic field. The pronounced Nernst peaks at the vHSs of the conduction and valence bands of tDBLG are tunable by an electric field with a maximum value of $\sim 40$ $\mu V K^{-1} T^{-1}$ at $\sim 1$ $K$, which is comparable to the best-known Nernst materials. Our theoretical calculations show that the large enhancement of the Nernst signal arises from the Lifshitz transitions around the vHSs. These findings establish the Nernst effect as a sensitive probe of Fermi-surface topology in moir\'e materials, and identify a universal thermoelectric signature of van Hove singularities.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2026

Finite temperature precursors of Mottness in the Fermi Hubbard model

We investigate finite-temperature precursors of Mottness in the repulsive Hubbard model above the spin-ordering temperature, using numerically exact determinant quantum Monte Carlo. We show that the finite-temperature crossover is accompanied by a pronounced suppression of charge fluctuations, despite the presence of a gapless single-particle spectra, demonstrating that Mottness first emerges via two-particle response in an anomalous metallic regime, before appearing in single-particle spectral functions. We further show that a gap formation in the density of states occurs through momentum-resolved redistribution of spectral weight across the Brillouin zone, that begins at the onset of anomalous metallic regime, rather than through gap formation in single-particle spectral functions at individual momenta. Upon doping, the anomalous-metallic regime generates transport and spectroscopic signatures characteristic of doped Mott insulators. This shows that the transport and spectroscopic anomalies of the doped Hubbard model do not require the presence of a fully formed Mott insulator at half-filling, but instead originate from the strong charge-response renormalization and spectral-weight redistribution that develop within the precursor anomalous metallic regime at half-filling.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2026

Tunable Chaos in the Finite Mean SYK Model

The complex Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, featuring fermions with all-to-all interactions, serves as a dual paradigm for understanding non-Fermi liquid behavior and the holographic nature of charged black holes. Two defining characteristics of the standard SYK model are its maximal chaos (Lyapunov exponent $\lambda_{\mathrm{L}}=2\pi T$ at temperature $T$), and its finite zero-temperature residual entropy. While previous studies have largely focused on couplings drawn from a zero-mean Gaussian distribution, we investigate a generalized model with a finite mean-to-standard-deviation ratio, $g\equiv J_{0}/\delta J$ of the coupling distribution in order to get deeper insight into the evolution of chaos. We find that increasing $g$ yields the following effects: (i) The system remains a fast scrambler with $\lambda_{\mathrm{L}}=A~T$, but with a suppressed coefficient $A<2\pi$. (ii) In the limit $g\to \infty$, out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs) no longer exhibit exponential growth with $\lambda_{\mathrm{L}}\simeq 0$. (iii) The spectral correlations indicative of late-time chaos maintain Wigner-Dyson level spacing statistics for all values of $g$. (iv) The system preserves a finite residual entropy, albeit with reduced magnitude, for all $g$ values. We conclude that in this generalized SYK model, there is a chaotic to non-chaotic crossover. Moreover different measures of chaos decouple, demonstrating that the presence of finite residual entropy does not strictly imply maximal chaos.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2026

Spectroscopic evidence of disorder-induced quantum phase transitions in monolayer Fe(Te,Se) superconductor

The superconductor-insulator transition as a paradigm of quantum phase transitions has attracted tremendous interest over the past three decades. While the magnetic field and carrier density can be tuned to drive the transition, the role of disorder in the transition is not well understood due to the complicated interplay between superconductivity and electron localization. In this work, we controllably introduce disorder in a two-dimensional high-temperature superconductor by depositing iron clusters onto the superconducting monolayer Fe(Te,Se) crystalline film. The spectral evolution from superconducting gaps to insulating gaps with increasing disorder is detected by scanning tunneling spectroscopy measurements. When the disorder is strong, large U-shaped gaps are observed and attributed to the localization-enhanced Cooper pair correlation. Our observations provide the insight into the emergent phases of low-dimensional and high-temperature superconductors with disorder.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2026

Local Hall Conductivity in Disordered Topological Insulators

We derive the expression for the local Hall conductivity for systems that lack translation symmetry and use it to study the local fluctuations of the Hall signal around disordered patches in magnetic insulators. We find that the regime in parameter space over which the system is a Chern insulating state increases upon inclusion of non-magnetic potential disorder. In addition, the phase space over which the topological Anderson insulator exists can be enhanced by breaking up a single disordered patch into multiple smaller patches with the same total amount of disorder. We expect our results will motivate the next generation of local scanning and local impedance spectroscopy experiments to visualize Hall currents around patches in the bulk of a disordered topological insulator.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2026

Long-range phase coherence and phase patterns in hybrid Josephson junction arrays

The coherence of superconductivity and its suppression near a quantum phase transition is governed by the interplay between local pairing and macroscopic phase coherence. Using scanning SQUID, we image the local susceptibility in a hybrid Josephson junction array. On a square lattice of narrow islands, we simultaneously access both the amplitude and spatial phase structure of sensitive superconducting states. We observe periodic phase patterns at commensurate magnetic fillings. At zero field the long-range phase coherence is strongest. At a finite field, smaller than one percent of flux quantum per unit cell, the system fragments into large regions of constant superconducting phase, as a function of the applied field. Our results provide the first direct measurement of long-range phase coherence in a Josephson junction array.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2026

Magnetic field induced phenomena in Kitaev spin liquids

Quantum spin liquids (QSLs) host a variety of fractionalized particles. In Kitaev's paradigmatic honeycomb model a spin-$\tfrac{1}{2}$ fractionalizes into $Z_2$ flux due to emergent $Z_2$ gauge field and matter Majorana fermions. Although these excitations have well-defined dynamics in the integrable limit, their direct experimental identification is notoriously challenging: realistic materials inevitably host additional symmetry-allowed interactions that break integrability and hybridize gauge and matter sectors, while magnetic fields, which are often required to suppress competing order and stabilize a putative QSL regime, further entangle the responses of different fractionalized quasiparticles and may even drive the system into field-induced spin-liquid phases that are not adiabatically connected to the integrable limit. A prominent example is the quantum Majorana metal, in which the distinct dynamics of fractionalized Majorana fermions can become directly visible in scattering. This report highlights recent progress on these related questions: in which field-stabilized QSL regimes and nearby emergent phases, and under what conditions, can the response of a specific fractionalized quasiparticle be isolated and positively understood, thereby clarifying the existence and the experimental scope of putative spin liquids? We review the progress on these questions across Abelian, non-Abelian, and an emergent quantum phases under magnetic field that are not perturbatively connected to the integrable limit. We connect these field-induced dynamical phenomena to concrete experimental observables, relevant for neutron scattering, resonant inelastic X-ray scattering, and pump-probe spectroscopy that are capable of resolving specific types of fractionalized particles, including Majoranas and $Z_2$ fluxes.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2026

Spin-orbit coupling controlled two-dimensional magnetism in chromium trihalides

CrX$_3$ (X = Cl, Br, I) have the same crystal structure and Hamiltonian but different ligand spin-orbit coupling (SOC) constant $λ_X$, providing excellent material platform exploring for exotic two-dimensional (2D) spin orders. Their microscopic mechanism underlying 2D spin physics remain unestablished, along with experimental corroboration of Kitaev exchange interaction, central to realizing topological quantum spin liquids. Finding direct evidence for Kitaev interaction and determining its value has been an essential but formidable challenge in Kitaev physics. Here we report the direct Kitaev interaction signature in magnetic anisotropy measured by ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) spectroscopy. We present measured values of Heisenberg $J$, Kitaev $K$, and off-diagonal symmetric $Γ$ exchange interactions in CrX$_3$ determined using FMR and exact diagonalization. $K$ and $Γ$ exhibit dominant dependencies on $λ_X$, indicating its central role in 2D magnetism. Our study provides a foundation for designing 2D magnetic materials exhibiting novel behaviors by tuning intrinsic material parameters such as SOC.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2025

Strain Response as a Probe of Spinons in Quantum Spin Liquids

Quantum spin liquids (QSLs) host emergent, fractionalized fermionic excitations that are charge-neutral. Identifying clear experimental signatures of these excitations remains a central challenge in the field of strongly correlated systems, as they do not couple to conventional electromagnetic probes. Here, we propose lattice strain as a powerful and tunable probe: Mechanical deformation of the lattice generates large pseudomagnetic fields, inducing pseudo-Landau levels that serve as distinctive spectroscopic signatures of these excitations. Using the Kitaev model on the honeycomb lattice, we show that distinct QSL phases exhibit strikingly different strain responses. The semimetallic Kitaev spin liquid and the gapped chiral spin liquid display pronounced Landau quantization and a diamagnetic-like response to strain, whereas the Majorana metal phase shows a paramagnetic-like response without forming Landau levels. These contrasting behaviors provide a direct route to experimentally identifying and distinguishing QSL phases hosting fractionalized excitations. We further outline how local resonant ultrasound spectroscopy can detect the strain-induced resonances associated with these responses, offering a practical pathway towards identifying fractionalized excitations in candidate materials.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2025

Enhancement of Curie Temperature in Ferromagnetic Insulator-Topological Insulator Heterostructures

We theoretically analyze the topological insulator (TI) surface state mediated interactions between local moments in a proximate 2D ferromagnetic insulator (FMI) motivated by recent experiments that show a significant increase in the Curie temperature Tc of FMI-TI heterostructures. Such interactions have been investigated earlier with a focus on dilute magnetic dopants in TIs. Our problem involves a dense set of moments for which we find that the short range Bloembergen-Rowland interaction, arising from virtual particle-hole transitions between the valence and conduction bands, dominates over the oscillatory Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida (RKKY) interaction. We show that the Tc enhancement is proportional to the Van Vleck susceptibility and that the spin-momentum locking of surface states leads to out-of-plane ferromagnetic order in the FMI. We investigate how the hybridization between top and bottom surfaces in a thin TI film impacts Tc enhancement, and show how our results can help understand recent experiments on atomically thin Cr2Te3-(Bi,Sb)2Te3.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2025

Charge Modulation in the Vortex Halo of a Superconductor Enhances its Critical Magnetic Field

When an orbital magnetic field suppresses superconductivity, forming periodic vortices in type-II superconductors, subdominant orders can emerge in the vortex cores. Rather than competing with superconductivity, we find that the emergent charge order within the halo of a vortex makes superconductivity more robust by enhancing the upper critical field. We establish that charge modulations nucleate in and around the vortex core for model parameters dictated by the underlying non-superconducting state. We further show that the spectral signatures from the Caroli-de Gennes-Matricon (CdGM) bound states in vortex cores track the charge modulation. The CdGM-like peak is found to shift toward the gap edge and oscillate from particle-to-hole bias from site to site, signaling charge modulation.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2025

Enhanced Ferromagnetism in Monolayer Cr2Te3 via Topological Insulator Coupling

Exchange-coupled interfaces are pivotal in exploiting two-dimensional (2D) ferromagnetism. Due to the extraordinary correlations among charge, spin, orbital and lattice degrees of freedom, layered magnetic transition metal chalcogenides (TMCs) bode well for exotic topological phenomena. Here we report the realization of wafer-scale Cr2Te3 down to monolayer (ML) on insulating SrTiO3(111) and/or Al2O3(001) substrates using molecular beam epitaxy. Robust ferromagnetism persists in the 2D limit. In particular, the Curie temperature TC of 2 ML Cr2Te3 increases from 100 K to ~ 120 K when proximitized to topological insulator (TI) (Bi,Sb)2Te3, with substantially boosted magnetization as observed via polarized neutron reflectometry. Our experiments and theory strongly indicate that the Bloembergen-Rowland interaction is likely universal underlying TC enhancement in TI-coupled magnetic heterostructures. The topological-surface-enhanced magnetism in 2D TMC enables further exchange coupling physics and quantum hybrid studies, including paving the way to realize interface-modulated topological electronics.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2025

Partial Wavefunction Collapse Under Repeated Weak Measurement of a non-Conserved Observable

Two hallmarks of quantum non-demolition (QND) measurement are the ensemble-level conservation of the expectation value of the measured observable $A$ and the eventual, inevitable collapse of the system into some eigenstate of $A$. This requires that $A$ commutes with $H$, the system's Hamiltonian. In what we term "Auxiliary Observable QND" measurement, $A$ does not commute with $H$ and the above two characteristics clearly cannot be present as the system's dynamics prevent $\langle A \rangle$ from reaching a definite value. However, in this paper we find that under such a measurement QND behavior still arises, but is seen in the behavior of a secondary "target" observable we call $B$, with the condition that $B$ commutes with both $A$ and $H$. In such cases, the expectation value of $B$ is conserved and the system at least partially collapses with respect to eigenstates of $B$. We show as an example how this surprising result applies to a Heisenberg chain, where we demonstrate that local measurements on a single site can reveal information about the spectrum of an entire system, a finding which may be of practical use in experiments.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Detection of anyon braiding through pump-probe spectroscopy

We show that the braiding of anyons in a quantum spin liquid leaves a distinct dynamical signature in the nonlinear pump-probe response. Using a combination of exact diagonalization and matrix product state techniques, we study the nonlinear pump-probe response of the toric code in a magnetic field, a model which hosts mobile electric $e$ and magnetic $m$ anyonic excitations. While the linear response signal oscillates and decays with time like $\sim t^{-1.3}$, the amplitude of the nonlinear signal for $χ^{(3)}_{XZZ}$ features a linear-in-time enhancement at early times. The comparison between $χ^{(3)}_{XZZ}$, which involves the non-trivial braiding of $e$ and $m$ anyons, and $χ^{(3)}_{XXX}$ that involves the trivial braiding of the same types of anyons, serves to distinguish the braiding statistics of anyons. We support our analysis by constructing a hard-core anyon model with statistical gauge fields to develop further insights into the time dependence of the pump-probe response. Pump-probe spectroscopy provides a distinctive new probe of quantum spin liquid states, beyond the inconclusive broad features observed in single spin flip inelastic neutron scattering.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2025

Sign changes of the thermoelectric transport coefficient across the metal-insulator crossover in the doped Fermi Hubbard model

We investigate the doping-dependence of the Seebeck coefficient, as calculated from the Kelvin formula, for the Fermi Hubbard model using determinantal quantum Monte Carlo simulations. Our key findings are: (1) Besides the expected hole to electron-like behavior change around half filling, we show that the additional sign change at an electronic density $n_s$ (and correspondingly a hole density $p_s$) is controlled by the opening of a charge gap in the thermodynamic density of states or compressibility and not by the pseudogap scale in the single particle density of states. (2) We find that $n_s(T,U)$ depends strongly on the interaction $U$ and shows an unusual non-monotonic dependence on temperature with a maximum at a temperature $T\approx t$, on the order of the hopping scale. (3) We identify local moment formation close to half filling as the main driver for the anomalous behavior of the thermoelectric transport coefficient.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2025

Emergent quantum Majorana metal from a chiral spin liquid

We propose a mechanism to explain the emergence of an intermediate gapless spin liquid phase in the antiferromagnetic Kitaev model in an externally applied magnetic field, sandwiched between the well-known gapped chiral spin liquid and the gapped partially polarized phase. We propose that, in moderate fields, $π$-fluxes nucleate in the ground state and trap Majorana zero modes. As these fluxes proliferate with increasing field, the Majorana zero modes overlap creating an emergent $\mathbb{Z}_2$ quantum Majorana metallic state with a `Fermi surface' at zero energy. We further show that the Majorana spectral function captures the dynamical spin and dimer correlations obtained by the infinite Projected Entangled Pair States method, thereby validating our variational approach.

cond-mat.str-el↗