Publications

Most vertebrates use active sensing strategies for perception, cognition and control of motor activity. These strategies include directed body/sensor movements or increases in discrete sensory sampling events. The weakly electric fish, \textit{Gymnotus sp.}, uses its active electric sense during navigation in the dark. Electric organ discharge rate undergoes transient increases during navigation to increase electrosensory sampling. \textit{Gymnotus} also use stereotyped backward swimming as an important form of active sensing that brings objects toward the electroreceptor dense fovea-like head region. We wirelessly recorded neural activity from the pallium of freely swimming \textit{Gymnotus}. Spiking activity was sparse and occurred only during swimming. Notably, most units tended to fire during backward swims and their activity was on average coupled to increases in sensory sampling. Our results provide the first characterization of neural activity in a hippocampal (CA3)-like region of a teleost fish brain and connects it to active sensing of spatial environmental features.

We present a hybrid asymptotic/numerical method for the accurate computation of single and double layer heat potentials in two dimensions. It has been shown in previous work that simple quadrature schemes suffer from a phenomenon called "geometrically-induced stiffness," meaning that formally high-order accurate methods require excessively small time steps before the rapid convergence rate is observed. This can be overcome by analytic integration in time, requiring the evaluation of a collection of spatial boundary integral operators with non-physical, weakly singular kernels. In our hybrid scheme, we combine a local asymptotic approximation with the evaluation of a few boundary integral operators involving only Gaussian kernels, which are easily accelerated by a new version of the fast Gauss transform. This new scheme is robust, avoids geometrically-induced stiffness, and is easy to use in the presence of moving geometries. Its extension to three dimensions is natural and straightforward, and should permit layer heat potentials to become flexible and powerful tools for modeling diffusion processes.

We investigate a model for a Mott insulator in presence of a time-periodic modulated interaction and a coupling to a thermal reservoir. The combination of drive and dissipation leads to non-equilibrium steady states with a large number of doublon excitations, well above the maximum thermal-equilibrium value. We interpret this effect as an enhancement of local pairing correlations, providing analytical arguments based on an effective Floquet Hamiltonian. Strikingly, this effective Hamiltonian shows a tendency to develop long-range staggered superconducting correlations. This suggests the intriguing possibility of realizing the elusive eta-pairing phase of the repulsive Hubbard model in driven-dissipative Mott Insulators.

We present a comprehensive angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy study of Ca1.8Sr0.2RuO4. Four distinct bands are revealed and along the Ru-O bond direction their orbital characters are identified through a light polarization analysis and comparison to dynamical mean-field theory calculations. Bands assigned to dxz,dyz orbitals display Fermi liquid behavior with fourfold quasiparticle mass renormalization. Extremely heavy fermions - associated with a predominantly dxy band character - are shown to display non-Fermi-liquid behavior. We thus demonstrate that Ca1.8Sr0.2RuO4 is a hybrid metal with an orbitally selective Fermi liquid quasiparticle breakdown.

We propose a systematic approach to the non-equilibrium dynamics of strongly interacting many-body quantum systems, building upon the standard perturbative expansion in the Coulomb interaction. High order series are derived from the Keldysh version of determinantal diagrammatic Quantum Monte Carlo, and the reconstruction beyond the weak coupling regime of physical quantities is obtained by considering them as analytic functions of a complex-valued interaction U. Our advances rely on two crucial ingredients: i) a conformal change of variable, based on the approximate location of the singularities of these functions in the complex U-plane; ii) a Bayesian inference technique, that takes into account additional known non-perturbative relations, in order to control the amplification of noise occurring at large U. This general methodology is applied to the strongly correlated Anderson quantum impurity model, and is thoroughly tested both in- and out-of-equilibrium. In the situation of a finite voltage bias, our method is able to extend previous studies, by bridging with the regime of unitary conductance, and by dealing with energy offsets from particle-hole symmetry. We also confirm the existence of a voltage splitting of the impurity density of states, and find that it is tied to a non-trivial behavior of the non-equilibrium distribution function. Beyond impurity problems, our approach could be directly applied to Hubbard-like models, as well as other types of expansions.

We propose a scaling theory for the many-body localization (MBL) phase transition in one dimension, building on the idea that it proceeds via a 'quantum avalanche'. We argue that the critical properties can be captured at a coarse-grained level by a Kosterlitz-Thouless (KT) renormalization group (RG) flow. On phenomenological grounds, we identify the scaling variables as the density of thermal regions and the lengthscale that controls the decay of typical matrix elements. Within this KT picture, the MBL phase is a line of fixed points that terminates at the delocalization transition. We discuss two possible scenarios distinguished by the distribution of rare, fractal thermal inclusions within the MBL phase. In the first scenario, these regions have a stretched exponential distribution in the MBL phase. In the second scenario, the near-critical MBL phase hosts rare thermal regions that are power-law distributed in size. This points to the existence of a second transition within the MBL phase, at which these power-laws change to the stretched exponential form expected at strong disorder. We numerically simulate two different phenomenological RGs previously proposed to describe the MBL transition. Both RGs display a universal power-law length distribution of thermal regions at the transition with a critical exponent $\alpha_c=2$, and continuously varying exponents in the MBL phase consistent with the KT picture.

The stellar mass binary black hole (sBBH) mergers presently detected by LIGO may originate wholly or in part from binary black hole mergers embedded in disks of gas around supermassive black holes. Determining the contribution of these active galactic nucleus (AGN) disks to the sBBH merger rate enables us to uniquely measure important parameters of AGN disks, including their typical density, aspect ratio, and lifetime, thereby putting unique limits on an important element of galaxy formation. For the first time, gravitational waves will allow us to reveal the properties of the hidden interior of AGN disks, while electromagnetic radiation (EM) probes the disk photosphere. The localization of sBBH merger events from LIGO is generally insufficient for association with a single EM counterpart. However, the contribution to the LIGO event rate from rare source types (such as AGNs) can be determined on a statistical basis. To determine the contribution to the sBBH rate from AGNs in the next decade requires: {\em 1) a complete galaxy catalog for the LIGO search volume, 2) strategic multi-wavelength EM follow-up of LIGO events and 3) significant advances in theoretical understanding of AGN disks and the behavior of objects embedded within them.}

The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will monitor ∼2 deg2 toward the Galactic bulge in a wide (∼1−2 μm) W149 filter at 15-minute cadence with exposure times of ∼50s for 6 seasons of 72 days each, for a total ∼41,000 exposures taken over ∼432 days, spread over the 5-year prime mission. This will be one of the deepest exposures of the sky ever taken, reaching a photon-noise photometric precision of 0.01 mag per exposure and collecting a total of ∼109 photons over the course of the survey for a W149AB∼21 star. Of order 4×107 stars will be monitored with W149AB<21, and 108 stars with W145AB<23. The WFIRST microlensing survey will detect ∼54,000 microlensing events, of which roughly 1% (∼500) will be due to isolated black holes, and ∼3% (∼1600) will be due to isolated neutron stars. It will be sensitive to (effectively) isolated compact objects with masses as low as the mass of Pluto, thereby enabling a measurement of the compact object mass function over 10 orders of magnitude. Assuming photon-noise limited precision, it will detect ∼105 transiting planets with sizes as small as ∼2 R⊕, perform asteroseismology of ∼106 giant stars, measure the proper motions to ∼0.3% and parallaxes to ∼10% for the ∼6×106 disk and bulge stars in the survey area, and directly detect ∼5×103 Trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) with diameters down to ∼10 km, as well as detect ∼103 occulations of stars by TNOs during the survey. All of this science will completely serendipitous, i.e., it will not require modifications of the WFIRST optimal microlensing survey design. Allowing for some minor deviation from the optimal design, such as monitoring the Galactic center, would enable an even broader range of transformational science.

Attosecond metrology sensitive to sub-optical-cycle electronic and structural dynamics is opening up new avenues for ultrafast spectroscopy of condensed matter. Using intense lightwaves to precisely control the fast carrier dynamics in crystals holds great promise for next-generation petahertz electronics and devices. The carrier dynamics can produce high-order harmonics of the driving field extending up into the extreme-ultraviolet region. Here, we introduce polarization-state-resolved high-harmonic spectroscopy of solids, which provides deeper insights into both electronic and structural sub-cycle dynamics. Performing high-harmonic generation measurements from silicon and quartz, we demonstrate that the polarization states of the harmonics are not only determined by crystal symmetries, but can be dynamically controlled, as a consequence of the intertwined interband and intraband electronic dynamics. We exploit this symmetry-dynamics duality to efficiently generate coherent circularly polarized harmonics from elliptically polarized pulses. Our experimental results are supported by ab-initio simulations, providing evidence for the microscopic origin of the phenomenon.