arXiv subjects

Olga Goulko

Publications and source records attributed to Olga Goulko.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Optimal Local Simulations of a Quantum Singlet

Bell's seminal work showed that no local hidden variable (LHV) model can fully reproduce the quantum correlations of a two-qubit singlet state. His argument and later developments by Clauser et al. effectively rely on gaps between the anticorrelations achievable by classical models and quantum theory for projective measurements along randomly chosen axes separated by a fixed angle. However, the size of these gaps has to date remained unknown. Here we numerically determine the LHV models maximizing anticorrelations for random axes separated by any fixed angle, by mapping the problem onto ground state configurations of fixed-range spin models. We identify angles where this gap is largest and thus best suited for Bell tests. These findings enrich the understanding of Bell non-locality as a physical resource in quantum information theory and quantum cryptography.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

The Grasshopper Problem on the Sphere

The spherical grasshopper problem is a geometric optimization problem that arises in the context of Bell inequalities and can be interpreted as identifying the best local hidden variable approximation to quantum singlet correlations for measurements along random axes separated by a fixed angle. In a parallel publication [arXiv:2504.20953], we presented numerical solutions for this problem and explained their significance for singlet simulation and testing. In this companion paper, we describe in detail the geometric and computational framework underlying these results. We examine the role of spherical discretization and compare three natural variants of the problem: antipodal complementary lawns, antipodal independent lawns, and non-antipodal complementary lawns. We analyze the geometric structure of the corresponding optimal lawn configurations and interpret it in terms of a spherical harmonics expansion. We also discuss connections to other physical models and to classical problems in geometric probability.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Transient Dynamical Phase Diagram of the Spin-Boson Model at Finite Temperature

We present numerically exact inchworm quantum Monte Carlo results for the real-time dynamics of the spin polarization in the sub-Ohmic spin-boson model at finite temperature. We focus in particular on the localization and coherence behavior of the model, extending our previous study at low temperature [Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 056502 (2025)]. As the temperature increases, the system becomes less localized and less coherent. The loss of coherence, which is controlled by two independent mechanisms -- a smooth damping-driven crossover and a sharp frequency-driven transition -- exhibits a nontrivial temperature dependence. While both types of coherence loss occur at lower coupling in the high temperature regime, the frequency exhibits a sharper drop at high temperatures and this drop is observed for all values of the sub-Ohmic exponent, in contrast to the zero-temperature case. We discuss the full temperature-dependent dynamical phase diagram of the system and the interplay between coherence and localization across a wide range of physical parameters.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2026

Compact representation and long-time extrapolation of real-time data for quantum systems using the ESPRIT algorithm

Representing real-time data as a sum of complex exponentials provides a compact form that enables both denoising and extrapolation. As a fully data-driven method, the Estimation of Signal Parameters via Rotational Invariance Techniques (ESPRIT) algorithm is agnostic to the underlying physical equations, making it broadly applicable to various observables and experimental or numerical setups. In this work, we consider applications of the ESPRIT algorithm primarily to extend real-time dynamical data from simulations of quantum systems. We evaluate ESPRIT's performance in the presence of noise and compare it to other extrapolation methods. We demonstrate its ability to extract information from short-time dynamics to reliably predict long-time behavior and determine the minimum time interval required for accurate results. We discuss how this insight can be leveraged in numerical methods that propagate quantum systems in time, and show how ESPRIT can predict infinite-time values of dynamical observables, offering a purely data-driven approach to characterizing quantum phases.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2025

The Future of the Correlated Electron Problem

A central problem in modern condensed matter physics is the understanding of materials with strong electron correlations. Despite extensive work, the essential physics of many of these systems is not understood and there is very little ability to make predictions in this class of materials. In this manuscript we share our personal views on the major open problems in the field of correlated electron systems. We discuss some possible routes to make progress in this rich and fascinating field. This manuscript is the result of the vigorous discussions and deliberations that took place at Johns Hopkins University during a three-day workshop January 27, 28, and 29, 2020 that brought together six senior scientists and 46 more junior scientists. Our hope, is that the topics we have presented will provide inspiration for others working in this field and motivation for the idea that significant progress can be made on very hard problems if we focus our collective energies.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2025

Transient dynamical phase diagram of the spin-boson model

We investigate the real-time dynamics of the sub-Ohmic spin-boson model across a broad range of coupling strengths, using the numerically exact inchworm quantum Monte Carlo algorithm. From short- and intermediate-time dynamics starting from an initially decoupled state, we extract signatures of the zero-temperature quantum phase transition between localized and delocalized states. We show that the dynamical phase diagram thus obtained differs from the equilibrium phase diagram in both the values of critical couplings and the associated values of the critical exponent. We also identify and quantitatively analyze two competing mechanisms for the crossover between coherent oscillations and incoherent decay. Deep in the sub-Ohmic regime, the crossover is driven by the damping of the oscillation amplitude, while closer to the Ohmic regime the oscillation frequency itself drops sharply to zero at large coupling.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2024

Origin of Symmetry Breaking in the Grasshopper Model

The planar grasshopper problem, originally introduced in (Goulko & Kent 2017 Proc. R. Soc. A 473, 20170494), is a striking example of a model with long-range isotropic interactions whose ground states break rotational symmetry. In this work we analyze and explain the nature of this symmetry breaking with emphasis on the importance of dimensionality. Interestingly, rotational symmetry is recovered in three dimensions for small jumps, which correspond to the non-isotropic cogwheel regime of the two-dimensional problem. We discuss simplified models that reproduce the symmetry properties of the original system in N dimensions. For the full grasshopper model in two dimensions we obtain quantitative predictions for optimal perturbations of the disk. Our analytical results are confirmed by numerical simulations.

math-ph↗

arXiv2020

Globe-hopping

We consider versions of the grasshopper problem (Goulko and Kent, 2017) on the circle and the sphere, which are relevant to Bell inequalities. For a circle of circumference $2π$, we show that for unconstrained lawns of any length and arbitrary jump lengths, the supremum of the probability for the grasshopper's jump to stay on the lawn is one. For antipodal lawns, which by definition contain precisely one of each pair of opposite points and have length $π$, we show this is true except when the jump length $ϕ$ is of the form $π\frac{p}{q}$ with $p,q$ coprime and $p$ odd. For these jump lengths we show the optimal probability is $1 - 1/q$ and construct optimal lawns. For a pair of antipodal lawns, we show that the optimal probability of jumping from one onto the other is $1 - 1/q$ for $p,q$ coprime, $p$ odd and $q$ even, and one in all other cases. For an antipodal lawn on the sphere, it is known (Kent and Pitalúa-García, 2014) that if $ϕ= π/q$, where $q \in \mathbb N$, then the optimal retention probability of $1-1/q$ for the grasshopper's jump is provided by a hemispherical lawn. We show that in all other cases where $0<ϕ< π/2$, hemispherical lawns are not optimal, disproving the hemispherical colouring maximality hypotheses (Kent and Pitalúa-García, 2014). We discuss the implications for Bell experiments and related cryptographic tests.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2019

Quasi-thermalization of collisionless particles in quadrupole potentials

We analyze several puzzling features of a recent experiment with a noninteracting gas of atoms in a quadrupole trap. After an initial momentum kick, the system reaches a stationary, quasi-thermal state even without collisions, due to the dephasing of individual particle trajectories. Surprisingly, the momentum distribution remains anisotropic at long times, characterized by different "temperatures" along the different directions. In particular, there is no transfer of the kick energy between the axial and radial trap directions. To understand these effects we discuss and solve two closely related models: a spherically symmetric trap $V(r)\simeq r^α$ and a strongly confined gas along one direction (a "pancake" trap). We find that in the isotropic trap, the gas unexpectedly also preserves the anisotropy of the kick at long times, which we are able to explain using the conservation of angular momentum and the virial theorem. Depending on the value of $α$ we find that the kick can cool or heat the orthogonal directions. The pancake trap case is quantitatively similar to the quadrupole one. We show that for the former, the temperature anisotropy and memory of the kick direction are due to the change in the 2D effective potential resulting from the kick, thereby also explaining the quadrupole experimental results.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2018

Restoring a smooth function from its noisy integrals

Numerical (and experimental) data analysis often requires the restoration of a smooth function from a set of sampled integrals over finite bins. We present the bin hierarchy method that efficiently computes the maximally smooth function from the sampled integrals using essentially all the information contained in the data. We perform extensive tests with different classes of functions and levels of data quality, including Monte Carlo data suffering from a severe sign problem and physical data for the Green's function of the Fröhlich polaron.

stat.OT↗

arXiv2017

Collective modes of an imbalanced unitary Fermi gas

We study theoretically the collective mode spectrum of a strongly imbalanced two-component unitary Fermi gas in a cigar-shaped trap, where the minority species forms a gas of polarons. We describe the collective breathing mode of the gas in terms of the Fermi liquid kinetic equation taking collisions into account using the method of moments. Our results for the frequency and damping of the longitudinal in-phase breathing mode are in good quantitative agreement with an experiment by Nascimbène et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 170402 (2009)] and interpolate between a hydrodynamic and a collisionless regime as the polarization is increased. A separate out-of phase breathing mode, which for a collisionless gas is sensitive to the effective mass of the polaron, however, is strongly damped at finite temperature, whereas the experiment observes a well-defined oscillation.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2017

Implementation of the Bin Hierarchy Method for restoring a smooth function from a sampled histogram

We present $\texttt{BHM}$, a tool for restoring a smooth function from a sampled histogram using the bin hierarchy method. The theoretical background of the method is presented in [arXiv:1707.07625]. The code automatically generates a smooth polynomial spline with the minimal acceptable number of knots from the input data. It works universally for any sufficiently regular shaped distribution and any level of data quality, requiring almost no external parameter specification. It is particularly useful for large-scale numerical data analysis. This paper explains the details of the implementation and the use of the program.

stat.OT↗

arXiv2017

The grasshopper problem

We introduce and physically motivate the following problem in geometric combinatorics, originally inspired by analysing Bell inequalities. A grasshopper lands at a random point on a planar lawn of area one. It then jumps once, a fixed distance $d$, in a random direction. What shape should the lawn be to maximise the chance that the grasshopper remains on the lawn after jumping? We show that, perhaps surprisingly, a disc shaped lawn is not optimal for any $d>0$. We investigate further by introducing a spin model whose ground state corresponds to the solution of a discrete version of the grasshopper problem. Simulated annealing and parallel tempering searches are consistent with the hypothesis that for $ d < π^{-1/2}$ the optimal lawn resembles a cogwheel with $n$ cogs, where the integer $n$ is close to $ π( \arcsin ( \sqrtπ d /2 ) )^{-1}$. We find transitions to other shapes for $d \gtrsim π^{-1/2}$.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2016

Dark Continuum in the Spectral Function of the Resonant Fermi Polaron

We present controlled numerical results for the ground state spectral function of the resonant Fermi polaron in three dimensions. We establish the existence of a "dark continuum"---a region of anomalously low spectral weight between the narrow polaron peak and the rest of the spectral continuum. The dark continuum develops when the s-wave scattering length is of the order of the inverse Fermi wavevector, $a\lesssim 1/k_{\rm F}$, i.e. in the absence of a small interaction-related parameter when the spectral weight is not expected to feature a near-perfect gap structure after the polaron peak.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2016

Numerical analytic continuation: Answers to well-posed questions

We formulate the problem of numerical analytic continuation in a way that lets us draw meaningful conclusions about properties of the spectral function based solely on the input data. Apart from ensuring consistency with the input data (within their error bars) and the {\it a priori} and {\it a posteriori} (conditional) constraints, it is crucial to reliably characterize the accuracy---or even ambiguity---of the output. We explain how these challenges can be met with two approaches: stochastic optimization with consistent constraints and the modified maximum entropy method. We perform illustrative tests for spectra with a double-peak structure, where we critically examine which spectral properties are accessible and which ones are lost. For an important practical example, we apply our protocol to the Fermi polaron problem.

cond-mat.other↗

arXiv2016

Analog Simulation of Weyl Particles with Cold Atoms

We study theoretically, numerically, and experimentally the relaxation of a collisionless gas in a quadrupole trap after a momentum kick. The non-separability of the potential enables a quasi thermalization of the single particle distribution function even in the absence of interactions. Suprinsingly, the dynamics features an effective decoupling between the strong trapping axis and the weak trapping plane. The energy delivered during the kick is redistributed according to the symmetries of the system and satisfies the Virial theorem, allowing for the prediction of the final temperatures. We show that this behaviour is formally equivalent to the relaxation of massless relativistic Weyl fermions after a sudden displacement from the center of a harmonic trap.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2016

Numerical study of the unitary Fermi gas across the superfluid transition

We present results from Monte Carlo calculations investigating the properties of the homogeneous, spin-balanced unitary Fermi gas in three dimensions. The temperature is varied across the superfluid transition allowing us to determine the temperature dependence of the chemical potential, the energy per particle and the contact density. Numerical artifacts due to finite volume and discretization are systematically studied, estimated, and reduced.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2015

Effect of spin-orbit interactions on the 0.7 anomaly in quantum point contacts

We study how the conductance of a quantum point contact is affected by spin-orbit interactions, for systems at zero temperature both with and without electron-electron interactions. In the presence of spin-orbit coupling, tuning the strength and direction of an external magnetic field can change the dispersion relation and hence the local density of states in the point contact region. This modifies the effect of electron-electron interactions, implying striking changes in the shape of the 0.7-anomaly and introducing additional distinctive features in the first conductance step.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗