Publications

Characterizing complex many-body phases of matter has been a central question in quantum physics for decades. Numerical methods built around approximations of the renormalization group (RG) flow equations have offered reliable and systematically improvable answers to the initial question -- what simple physics drives quantum order and disorder? The flow equations are a very high dimensional set of coupled nonlinear equations whose solution is the two particle vertex function, a function of three continuous momenta that describes particle-particle scattering and encodes much of the low energy physics including whether the system exhibits various forms of long ranged order. In this work, we take a simple and interpretable data-driven approach to the open question of compressing the two-particle vertex. We use PCA and an autoencoder neural network to derive compact, low-dimensional representations of underlying physics for the case of interacting fermions on a lattice. We quantify errors in the representations by multiple metrics and show that a simple linear PCA offers more physical insight and better out-of-distribution (zero-shot) generalization than the nominally more expressive nonlinear models. Even with a modest number of principal components (10 - 20), we find excellent reconstruction of vertex functions across the phase diagram. This result suggests that many other many-body functions may be similarly compressible, potentially allowing for efficient computation of observables. Finally, we identify principal component subspaces that are shared between known phases, offering new physical insight.

Carlo is a Monte Carlo simulation framework written in Julia. It provides MPI-parallel scheduling, organized storage of input, checkpoint, and output files, as well as statistical postprocessing. With a minimalist design, it aims to aid the development of high-quality Monte Carlo codes, especially for demanding applications in condensed matter and statistical physics. This hands-on user guide shows how to implement a simple code with Carlo and provides benchmarks to show its efficacy.

Graphene is a privileged 2D platform for hosting confined light-matter excitations known as surface plasmon-polaritons (SPPs), as it possesses low intrinsic losses with a high degree of optical confinement. However, the inherently isotropic optical properties of graphene limit its ability to guide and focus SPPs, making it less suitable than anisotropic elliptical and hyperbolic materials as a platform for polaritonic lensing and canalization. Here, we present the graphene/CrSBr heterostructure as an engineered 2D interface that hosts highly anisotropic SPP propagation over a wide range of frequencies in the mid-infrared and terahertz. Using a combination of scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy (s-SNOM), and first-principles calculations, we demonstrate mutual doping in excess of 1013 cm−2 holes/electrons between the interfacial layers of graphene/CrSBr heterostructures. SPPs in graphene activated by charge transfer interact with charge-induced anisotropic intra- and interband transitions in the interfacial doped CrSBr, leading to preferential SPP propagation along the quasi-1D chains that compose each CrSBr layer. This multifaceted proximity effect both creates SPPs and endows them with anisotropic transport and propagation lengths that differ by an order-of-magnitude between the two in-plane crystallographic axes of CrSBr.

Coherent manipulation of magnetism through the lattice provides unprecedented opportunities for controlling spintronic functionalities on the ultrafast timescale. Such nonthermal control conventionally involves nonlinear excitation of Raman-active phonons which are coupled to the magnetic order. Linear excitation, in contrast, holds potential for more efficient and selective modulation of magnetic properties. However, the linear channel remains uncharted, since it is conventionally considered forbidden in inversion symmetric quantum materials. Here, we harness strong coupling between magnons and Raman-active phonons to achieve both linear and quadratic excitation regimes of magnon-polarons, magnon-phonon hybrid quasiparticles. We demonstrate this by driving magnon-polarons with an intense terahertz pulse in the van der Waals antiferromagnet FePS3. Such excitation behavior enables a unique way to coherently control the amplitude of magnon-polaron oscillations by tuning the terahertz field strength and its polarization. The polarimetry of the resulting coherent oscillation amplitude breaks the crystallographic C2 symmetry due to strong interference between different excitation channels. Our findings unlock a wide range of possibilities to manipulate material properties, including modulation of exchange interactions by phonon-Floquet engineering.

For molecules and solids, we developed efficient MPI-parallel algorithms for evaluating the second-order exchange term with bare, statically screened, and dynamically screened interactions. We employ the resulting term in a fully self-consistent manner together with scGW, resulting in the following vertex-corrected scGW schemes: scGWSOX, scGWSOSEX, scGW2SOSEX, and scG3W2theories. We show that for the vertex evaluation, the reduction of scaling by tensor hypercontraction (THC) has two limiting execution regimes. We used the resulting code to perform the largest (by the number of orbitals) fully self-consistent calculations with the SOX term. We demonstrate that our procedure allows for a reliable evaluation of even small energy differences. Utilizing a broken-symmetry approach, we explore the influence of the SOX term on the effective magnetic exchange couplings. We show that the treatment of SOX has a significant impact on the obtained values of the effective exchange constants, which we explain through a self-energy dependence on an effective dielectric constant. We confirm this explanation by analyzing natural orbitals and local changes in charge transfer quantifying superexchange. Our analysis explains the structure of weak electron correlation responsible for the modulation of superexchange in both molecules and solids. Finally, for solids, we evaluate Neel temperatures utilizing the high-temperature expansion and compare the results obtained with experimental measurements.

The identification of novel mechanisms for superconductivity is a longstanding goal in theoretical physics. In this work, we argue that the combination of repulsive interactions and high magnetic fields can generate electron pairing, phase coherence and superconductivity. Inspired by the large lattice constants of moiré materials, which make large flux per unit cell accessible at laboratory fields, we study the triangular lattice Hofstadter-Hubbard model at one-quarter flux quantum per plaquette, where previous literature has argued that a chiral spin liquid separates a weak-coupling integer quantum Hall phase and a strong-coupling topologically-trivial Mott insulator. We argue that topological superconductivity emerges upon doping in the vicinity of the integer quantum Hall to chiral spin liquid transition. We employ exact diagonalization and density matrix renormalization group methods to examine this theoretical scenario and find that electronic pairing indeed occurs above the half-filled ground states not just near the putative critical point but over a remarkably broad range of coupling strengths on both sides of criticality. On the chiral spin liquid side, our results provide a concrete model realization of the storied mechanism of anyon superconductivity. Our study thus establishes a beyond-BCS mechanism for electron pairing in a well-controlled limit, relying crucially on the interplay between electron correlations and band topology.

Selective excitation of vibrational modes using strong laser pulses has emerged as a powerful material engineering paradigm. However, to realize deterministic control over material properties for device applications, it is desirable to have an analogous scheme without a drive, operating in thermal equilibrium. We here propose such an equilibrium analog of the light-driven paradigm, leveraging the strong coupling between lattice degrees of freedom and the quantum fluctuations of the electric field of a THz micro-cavity. We demonstrate this approach by showing, using

In materials with one-dimensional electronic bands, electron-electron interactions can produce intriguing quantum phenomena, including spin-charge separation and charge density waves (CDW). Most of these systems, however, are non-magnetic, motivating a search for anisotropic materials where the coupling of charge and spin may affect emergent quantum states. Here, electron doping the van der Waals magnetic semiconductor CrSBr induces an electronically driven quasi-1D CDW, which survives above room temperature. Lithium intercalation also increases the magnetic ordering temperature to 200 K and changes its interlayer magnetic coupling from antiferromagnetic to ferromagnetic. The spin-polarized nature of the anisotropic bands that give rise to this CDW enforces an intrinsic coupling of charge and spin. The coexistence and interplay of ferromagnetism and charge modulation in this exfoliatable material provides a promising platform for studying tunable quantum phenomena across a range of temperatures and thicknesses.

Sampling tasks are a natural class of problems for quantum computers due to the probabilistic nature of the Born rule. Sampling from useful distributions on noisy quantum hardware remains a challenging problem. A recent paper [Layden, D. et al. Nature 619, 282-287 (2023)] proposed a quantum-enhanced Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm where moves are generated by a quantum device and accepted or rejected by a classical algorithm. While this procedure is robust to noise and control imperfections, its potential for quantum advantage is unclear. Here we show that there is no speedup over classical sampling on a worst-case unstructured sampling problem. We present an upper bound to the Markov gap that rules out a speedup for any unital quantum proposal.

Due to the large-period superlattices emerging in moiré two-dimensional (2D) materials, electronic states in such systems exhibit low energy flat bands that can be used to simulate strongly correlated physics in a highly tunable setup. While many investigations have thus far focused on moiré flat bands and emergent correlated electron physics in triangular, honeycomb and quasi-one-dimensional lattices, tunable moiré realizations of square lattices subject to strong correlations remain elusive. Here we propose a feasible scheme to construct moire square lattice systems by twisting two layers of 2D materials in a rectangular lattice by 90 degrees. We demonstrate such scheme with twisted Ge/SnX (X=S,Se) moiré superlattices and theoretical calculate their electronic structures from first principles. We show that the lowest conduction flat band in these systems can be described by a square lattice Hubbard model with parameters which can be controlled by varying the choice of host materials, number of layers, and external electric fields. In particular, twisted double bilayer GeSe realizes a square lattice Hubbard model with strong frustration due to the next nearest neighbour hopping that could lead to unconventional superconductivity, in close analogy to the Hubbard model for copper-oxygen planes of cuprate high-temperature superconductors. The basic concept of using 90-degree twisted 2D materials with rectangular unit cell to realize the square lattice Hubbard model works in general and therefore we establish those systems as tunable platforms to simulate correlation physics in such a geometries.