arXiv subjects

Salvatore Marco Giampaolo

Publications and source records attributed to Salvatore Marco Giampaolo.

33 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Resilience of the topological phases to frustration

Recently it was highlighted that one-dimensional antiferromagnetic spin models with frustrated boundary conditions, i.e. periodic boundary conditions in a ring with an odd number of elements, may show very peculiar behavior. Indeed the presence of frustrated boundary conditions can destroy the local magnetic orders presented by the models when different boundary conditions are taken into account and induce novel phase transitions. Motivated by these results, we analyze the effects of the introduction of frustrated boundary conditions on several models supporting (symmetry protected) topological orders, and compare our results with the ones obtained with different boundary conditions. None of the topological order phases analyzed are altered by this change. This observation leads naturally to the conjecture that topological phases of one-dimensional systems are in general not affected by topological frustration.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2021

Effects of defects in the XY chain with frustrated boundary conditions

It has been recently proven that new types of bulk, local order can ensue due to frustrated boundary condition, that is, periodic boundary conditions with an odd number of lattice sites and anti-ferromagnetic interactions. For the quantum XY chain in zero external fields, the usual antiferromagnetic order has been found to be replaced either by a mesoscopic ferromagnet or by an incommensurate AFM order. In this work we examine the resilience of these new types of orders against a defect that breaks the translational symmetry of the model. We find that, while a ferromagnetic defect restores the traditional, staggered order, an AFM one stabilizes the incommensurate order. The robustness of the frustrated order to certain kinds of defects paves the way for its experimental observability.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2021

The fate of local order in topologically frustrated spin chains

It has been recently shown that the presence of topological frustration, induced by periodic boundary conditions in an antiferromagnetic $XY$ chain made of an odd number of spins, prevents the realization of a perfectly staggered local order. Starting from this result and exploiting a recently introduced approach which enables the direct calculation of the expectation value of any operator with support over a finite range of lattice sites, in this work we investigate the possible fates of local orders. We show that, regardless of the variety of possible situations, they can be all arranged in two different cases. A system admits a finite local order only if the ground state is degenerate, with at least two elements whose momenta differ, in the thermodynamic limit, by $π$, and this order breaks translational symmetry. In all other cases, any local order decays to zero, algebraically (or faster) in the chain length. Moreover, we show that, in some cases, which of the two possibilities is realized, may depend on the sequence of chain lengths with which the thermodynamic limit is reached. These results are established both analytically and by exact diagonalization and illustrated through examples.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2021

Topological Frustration can modify the nature of a Quantum Phase Transition

Ginzburg-Landau theory of continuous phase transitions implicitly assumes that microscopic changes are negligible in determining the thermodynamic properties of the system. In this work we provide an example that clearly contrasts with this assumption. We show that topological frustration can change the nature of a second order quantum phase transition separating two different ordered phases. Even more remarkably, frustration is triggered simply by a suitable choice of boundary conditions in a 1D chain. While with every other BC each of two phases is characterized by its own local order parameter, with frustration no local order can survive. We construct string order parameters to distinguish the two phases, but, having proved that topological frustration is capable of altering the nature of a system's phase transition, our results pose a clear challenge to the current understanding of phase transitions in complex quantum systems.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2021

Beyond the MSW effect: Neutrinos in a dense medium

We present a theory of neutrino oscillations in a dense medium which goes beyond the effective matter potential used in the description of the MSW effect. We show how the purity of the neutrino state is degraded by neutrino interactions with the environment and how neutrino--matter interactions can be a source of decoherence. We present new oscillation formulae for neutrinos interacting with leptons and carry out a numerical analysis which exhibits deviations from the MSW formulae for propagation through the Earth of ultra-high energy neutrinos. In particular, we show that at high density and/or high neutrino energy, the vanishing transition probabilities derived for MSW effect, are non zero when the scattering is taken into account.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2021

Neutron Interferometry and axion like particles

We propose a method to reveal axions and axion-like particles based on interferometric measurement of neutron beams. We consider an interferometer in which the neutron beam is split in two sub-beams propagating in regions with differently oriented magnetic fields. The beam paths and the strength of the magnetic fields are set in such a way that all the contributions to the phase difference but the one due to axion-induced interactions are removed. The resulting phase difference is directly related to the presence of axions. Our results show that such a phase is in principle detectable with neutron interferometry, possibly proving the existence of axions and axion-like particles.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2021

Testing CPT violation, entanglement and gravitational interactions in particle mixing with trapped ions

By analyzing the analogies between the effective system of $N$ spins described by the Ising Hamiltonian and the phenomenon of the self--gravity in mixed particle systems, we show that cooled ions held in a segmented ion trap and exposed to a magnetic field gradient can simulate the proposed mechanism of mutual interaction in mixed neutrino system. We show that with trapped ions one can reproduce the expected corrections to the flavor transitions and the $CPT$ violation induced by gravity on flavor fields, which may have played an important role in the early stages of the universe. The results presented are experimentally testable. They indicate that ions confined in microtraps can represent a new tool to test fundamental phenomena of nature.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2020

Quantum Phase Transition induced by Topological Frustration

In quantum many-body systems with local interactions, the effects of boundary conditions are considered to be negligible, at least for sufficiently large systems. Here we show an example of the opposite. We consider a spin chain with two competing interactions, set on a ring with an odd number of sites. When only the dominant interaction is antiferromagnetic, and thus induces topological frustration, the standard antiferromagnetic order (expressed by the magnetization) is destroyed. When also the second interaction turns from ferro to antiferro, an antiferromagnetic order characterized by a site-dependent magnetization which varies in space with an incommensurate pattern, emerges. This modulation results from a ground state degeneracy, which allows to break the translational invariance. The transition between the two cases is signaled by a discontinuity in the first derivative of the ground state energy and represents a quantum phase transition induced by a special choice of boundary conditions.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2020

The Frustration of being Odd: How Boundary Conditions can destroy Local Order

A central tenant in the classification of phases is that boundary conditions cannot affect the bulk properties of a system. In this work, we show striking, yet puzzling, evidence of a clear violation of this assumption. We use the prototypical example of an XYZ chain with no external field in a ring geometry with an odd number of sites and both ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic interactions. In such a setting, even at finite sizes, we are able to calculate directly the spontaneous magnetizations that are traditionally used as order parameters to characterize the system's phases. When ferromagnetic interactions dominate, we recover magnetizations that in the thermodynamic limit lose any knowledge about the boundary conditions and are in complete agreement with standard expectations. On the contrary, when the system is governed by antiferromagnetic interactions, the magnetizations decay algebraically to zero with the system size and are not staggered, despite the AFM coupling. We term this behavior {\it ferromagnetic mesoscopic magnetization}. Hence, in the antiferromagnetic regime, our results show an unexpected dependence of a local, one--spin expectation values on the boundary conditions, which is in contrast with predictions from the general theory.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2020

Probing axion mediated fermion--fermion interaction by means of entanglement

We propose a new approach in the investigation and detection of axion and axion-like particles based on the study of the entanglement for two interacting fermions. We study a system made of two identical fermions with spin-1/2, and we show that fermion-fermion interaction mediated by axions leads to a non-zero entanglement between the fermions. An entanglement measurement can reveal the interaction, providing an indirect evidence of the existence of axions. We discuss how the other interactions affect the entanglement, and how to isolate the axion contribution. Particular care is devoted to the analysis of the magnetic dipole-dipole interaction, which turns out to be, apart from axions, the most relevant contribution to the entanglement, and we show that it can be suppressed by setting opportunely the duration of the observation. We also introduce a two-body correlation function, which could be directly observed in an experiment, and plays the role of an entanglement witness.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2019

Gravity, entanglement and CPT-symmetry violation in particle mixing

We study the probability oscillations of mixed particles in the presence of self-gravitational interaction. We show a breaking of the CPT-symmetry due to the contemporary violation of the T-symmetry and the CP-symmetry preservation. This violation is directly associated to the rising of the entanglement among the elements of the system that can be seen as a pure many-body effect scaling with the number of the elements in the system. This effect could have played a relevant role in the first stages of the Universe or in core of very dense systems. Experiments based on Rydberg atoms confined in microtraps can simulate the mixing and the mutual interaction and could allow to test the mechanism here presented.

hep-th↗

arXiv2019

The Frustration of being Odd: Universal Area Law violation in local systems

At the core of every frustrated system, one can identify the existence of frustrated rings that are usually interpreted in terms of single--particle physics. We check this point of view through a careful analysis of the entanglement entropy of both models that admit an exact single--particle decomposition of their Hilbert space due to integrability and those for which the latter is supposed to hold only as a low energy approximation. In particular, we study generic spin chains made by an odd number of sites with short-range antiferromagnetic interactions and periodic boundary conditions, thus characterized by a weak, i.e. nonextensive, frustration. While for distances of the order of the correlation length the phenomenology of these chains is similar to that of the non-frustrated cases, we find that correlation functions involving a number of sites scaling like the system size follow different rules. We quantify the long-range correlations through the von Neumann entanglement entropy, finding that indeed it violates the area law, while not diverging with the system size. This behavior is well fitted by a universal law that we derive from the conjectured single--particle picture.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2018

Many-Body Atomic Speed Sensor in Lattices

We study the properties of transmissivity of a beam of atoms traversing an optical lattices loaded with ultracold atoms. The transmission properties as function of the energy of the incident particles are strongly dependent on the quantum phase of the atoms in the lattice. In fact, in contrast to the Mott-insulator regime, the absence of an energetic gap in the spectrum of the superfluid phase enables the atoms in the optical lattice to adapt to the presence of the beam. This induces a feedback process that has a strong impact on the transmittivity of the atoms. Based on the corresponding strong dependency we propose the implementation of a speed sensor with and estimated sensitivity of $10^8 - 10^9$m/s/$\sqrt{\rm Hz}$, which we characterize via the Fisher information. We apply our findings to a bosonic $Li-Rb$ mixture, which is relevant for experiments with ultracold atoms. Applications of the presented scheme are discussed.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2017

Geometric phase of quenched spin models

We consider a spin belonging to a many body system in a magnetically ordered phase, which initial state is a symmetry broken ground state. We assume that in this system a sudden quench of the Hamiltonian induces an evolution. We show that the long time behavior of the spin state, can be approximated by the one of an open two level system in which the evolution preserves all the symmetries of the Hamiltonian. Exploiting such a result we analyze the geometric phase associated with the evolution of the single spin state and we prove analytically that its long time behavior depends on the physical phase realized after the quench. When the system arrives in a paramagnetic phase, the geometric phase shows a periodic behavior that is absent in the case in which the system remains in the initial ordered phase. Such a difference also survives in finite size systems until boundary effects come into play. We also discuss the effects of a explicit violation of the parity symmetry of the Hamiltonian and possible applications to the problem of the entanglement thermalization.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2016

Quench of symmetry broken ground states

We analyze the problem of how different ground states associated to the same set of the Hamiltonian parameters evolve after a sudden quench. To realize our analysis we define a quantitative approach to the local distinguishability between different ground states of a magnetically ordered phase in terms of the trace distance between the reduced density matrices obtained projecting two ground states in the same subset. Before the quench, regardless the particular choice of the subset, any system in a magnetically ordered phase is characterized by ground states that are locally distinguishable. On the other hand, after the quench, the maximum of the distinguishability shows an exponential decay in time. Hence, in the limit of very large time, all the informations about the particular initial ground state are lost even if the systems are integrable. We prove our claims in the framework of the magnetically ordered phases that characterize both the $XY$ model and $N$-cluster Ising models. The fact that we find similar behavior in models within different classes of symmetry makes us confident about the generality of our results.

quant-ph↗