Publications

We introduce the Loschmidt-amplitude as a powerful tool to perform spectroscopy of generic many-body wave functions. We use our machinery to interrogate the wave function obtained after (one or multiple) Kibble-Zurek ramps within the transverse field quantum Ising model. Known results for the scaling of defects or regarding the preference of the ramp to populate the lowest parts of the multi-magnon bands are confirmed explicitly. We obtain a more complete understanding of the population of defects on the level of the many-body wave function as well as of the effects of magnon-magnon interaction or finite size corrections. We add to the Kibble-Zurek picture the aspect of quantum coherence and its influence on the defect dynamics.

Luminous blue variables are massive, evolved stars that exhibit large variations in luminosity and size on timescales from months to years, with high associated rates of mass loss1,2,3,4,5. In addition to this on-going variability, these stars exhibit outburst phases, during which their size increases and as a result their effective temperature decreases, typically to about 9,000 kelvin3,6. Outbursts are believed to be caused by the radiation force on the cooler, more opaque, outer layers of the star balancing or even exceeding the force of gravity, although the exact mechanisms are unknown and cannot be determined using one-dimensional, spherically symmetric models of stars because such models cannot determine the physical processes that occur in this regime7. Here we report three-dimensional simulations of massive, radiation-dominated stars, which show that helium opacity has an important role in triggering outbursts and setting the observed effective temperature during outbursts of about 9,000 kelvin. It probably also triggers the episodic mass loss at rates of 10−7 to 10−5 solar masses per year. The peak in helium opacity is evident in our three-dimensional simulations only because the density and temperature of the stellar envelope (the outer part of the star near the photosphere) need to be determined self-consistently with convection, which cannot be done in one-dimensional models that assume spherical symmetry. The simulations reproduce observations of long-timescale variability, and predict that convection causes irregular oscillations in the radii of the stars and variations in brightness of 10–30 per cent on a typical timescale of a few days. The amplitudes of these short-timescale variations are predicted to be even larger for cooler stars (in the outburst phase). This short-timescale variability should be observable with high-cadence observations.

A variety of problems in acoustic and electromagnetic scattering require the evaluation of impedance or layered media Green's functions. Given a point source located in an unbounded half-space or an infinitely extended layer, Sommerfeld and others showed that Fourier analysis combined with contour integration provides a systematic and broadly effective approach, leading to what is generally referred to as the Sommerfeld integral representation. When either the source or target is at some distance from an infinite boundary, the number of degrees of freedom needed to resolve the scattering response is very modest. When both are near an interface, however, the Sommerfeld integral involves a very large range of integration and its direct application becomes unwieldy. Historically, three schemes have been employed to overcome this difficulty: the method of images, contour deformation, and asymptotic methods of various kinds. None of these methods make use of classical layer potentials in physical space, despite their advantages in terms of adaptive resolution and high-order accuracy. The reason for this is simple: layer potentials are impractical in layered media or half-space geometries since they require the discretization of an infinite boundary. In this paper, we propose a hybrid method which combines layer potentials (physical-space) on a finite portion of the interface together with a Sommerfeld-type (Fourier) correction. We prove that our method is efficient and rapidly convergent for arbitrarily located sources and targets, and show that the scheme is particularly effective when solving scattering problems for objects which are close to the half-space boundary or even embedded across a layered media interface.

The expressive variability in producing a musical note conveys information essential to the modeling of orchestration and style. As such, it plays a crucial role in computer-assisted browsing of massive digital music corpora. Yet, although the automatic recognition of a musical instrument from the recording of a single "ordinary" note is considered a solved problem, automatic identification of instrumental playing technique (IPT) remains largely underdeveloped. We benchmark machine listening systems for query-by-example browsing among 143 extended IPTs for 16 instruments, amounting to 469 triplets of instrument, mute, and technique. We identify and discuss three necessary conditions for significantly outperforming the traditional mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) baseline: the addition of second-order scattering coefficients to account for amplitude modulation, the incorporation of long-range temporal dependencies, and metric learning using large-margin nearest neighbors (LMNN) to reduce intra-class variability. Evaluating on the Studio On Line (SOL) dataset, we obtain a precision at rank 5 of 99.7\% for instrument recognition (baseline at 89.0\%) and of 61.0\% for IPT recognition (baseline at 44.5\%). We interpret this gain through a qualitative assessment of practical usability and visualization using nonlinear dimensionality reduction.

We study how a suspended liquid film is deformed by an external flow en route to forming a bubble through experiments and a model. We identify a family of nonminimal but stable equilibrium shapes for flow speeds up to a critical value beyond which the film inflates unstably, and the model accounts for the observed nonlinear deformations and forces. A saddle-node or fold bifurcation in the solution diagram suggests that bubble formation at high speeds results from the loss of equilibrium and at low speeds from the loss of stability for overly inflated shapes.

Two-dimensional arrays of periodically driven qubits can host inherently dynamical topological phases with anomalous chiral edge dynamics. These chiral Floquet phases are formally characterized by a dynamical topological invariant, the chiral unitary index. Introducing a quantity called the chiral mutual information, we show that this invariant can be precisely interpreted in terms of a quantized chiral transfer of quantum information along the edge of the system, and devise a physical setup to measure it.

The mammalian kidney develops through reciprocal interactions between the ureteric bud and the metanephric mesenchyme to give rise to the entire collecting system and the nephrons. Most of our knowledge of the developmental regulators driving this process arises from the study of gene expression and functional genetics in mice and other animal models. In order to shed light on human kidney development, we have used single-cell transcriptomics to characterize gene expression in different cell populations, and to study individual cell dynamics and lineage trajectories during development. Single-cell transcriptome analyses of 6414 cells from five individual specimens identified 11 initial clusters of specific renal cell types as defined by their gene expression profile. Further subclustering identifies progenitors, and mature and intermediate stages of differentiation for several renal lineages. Other lineages identified include mesangium, stroma, endothelial and immune cells. Novel markers for these cell types were revealed in the analysis, as were components of key signaling pathways driving renal development in animal models. Altogether, we provide a comprehensive and dynamic gene expression profile of the developing human kidney at the single-cell level.

It is well-known that by placing judiciously chosen image point forces and doublets to the Stokeslet above a flat wall, the no-slip boundary condition can be conveniently imposed on the wall [Blake, J. R. Math. Proc. Camb. Philos. Soc. 70(2), 1971: 303.]. However, to further impose periodic boundary conditions on directions parallel to the wall usually involves tedious derivations because single or double periodicity in Stokes flow may require the periodic unit to have no net force, which is not satisfied by the well-known image system. In this work we present a force-neutral image system. This neutrality allows us to represent the Stokes image system in a universal formulation for non-periodic, singly periodic and doubly periodic geometries. This formulation enables the black-box style usage of fast kernel summation methods. We demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of this new image method with the periodic kernel independent fast multipole method in both non-periodic and doubly periodic geometries. We then extend this new image system to other widely used Stokes fundamental solutions, including the Laplacian of the Stokeslet and the Rotne-Prager-Yamakawa tensor.

The Experiment to Detect the Global Epoch of Reionization Signature (EDGES) collaboration has reported the detection of an absorption feature in the sky-averaged spectrum at ≈78 MHz. This signal has been interpreted as the absorption of cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons at redshifts 15≲z≲20 by the 21cm hyperfine transition of neutral hydrogen, whose temperature is expected to be coupled to the gas temperature by the Wouthuysen-Field effect during this epoch. Because the gas is colder than the CMB, the 21cm signal is seen in absorption. However, the absorption depth reported by EDGES is more than twice the maximal value expected in the standard cosmological model, at ≈3.8σ significance. Here, we propose an explanation for this depth based on "early dark energy" (EDE), a scenario in which an additional component with equation of state w=−1 contributes to the cosmological energy density at early times, before decaying rapidly at a critical redshift, zc. For 20≲zc≲1000, the accelerated expansion due to the EDE can produce an earlier decoupling of the gas temperature from the radiation temperature than that in the standard model, giving the gas additional time to cool adiabatically before the first luminous sources form. We show that the EDE scenario can successfully explain the large amplitude of the EDGES signal. However, such models are strongly ruled out by observations of the CMB temperature power spectrum. Moreover, the EDE models needed to explain the EDGES signal exacerbate the current tension in low- and high-redshift measurements of the Hubble constant. We conclude that non-finely-tuned modifications of the background cosmology are unlikely to explain the EDGES signal while remaining consistent with other cosmological observations.

We study the field theory for the SU(Nc) symmetric antiferromagnetic quantum critical metal with a one-dimensional Fermi surface embedded in general space dimensions between two and three. The asymptotically exact solution valid in this dimensional range provides an interpolation between the perturbative solution obtained from the epsilon-expansion near three dimensions and the nonperturbative solution in two dimensions. We show that critical exponents are smooth functions of the space dimension. However, physical observables exhibit subtle crossovers that make it hard to access subleading scaling behaviors in two dimensions from the low-energy solution obtained above two dimensions. These crossovers give rise to noncommutativities, where the low-energy limit does not commute with the limits in which the physical dimensions are approached.