Disorder Operator and Rényi Entanglement Entropy of Symmetric Mass Generation.

The "symmetric mass generation" (SMG) quantum phase transition discovered in recent years has attracted great interest from both condensed matter and high energy theory communities. Here, interacting Dirac fermions acquire a gap without condensing any fermion bilinear mass term or any concomitant spontaneous symmetry breaking. It is hence beyond the conventional Gross-Neveu-Yukawa-Higgs paradigm. One important question we address in this Letter is whether the SMG transition corresponds to a true unitary conformal field theory. We employ the sharp diagnosis including the scaling of disorder operator and Rényi entanglement entropy in large-scale lattice model quantum Monte Carlo simulations. Our results strongly suggest that the SMG transition is indeed an unconventional quantum phase transition and it should correspond to a true (2+1)d unitary conformal field theory.

Symmetric Mass Generation in the 1+1 Dimensional Chiral Fermion 3-4-5-0 Model.

Lattice regularization of chiral fermions has been a long-standing problem in physics. In this Letter, we present the density matrix renormalization group simulation of the 3-4-5-0 model of (1+1)D chiral fermions with an anomaly-free chiral U(1) symmetry, which contains two left-moving and two right-moving fermions carrying U(1) charges 3,4 and 5,0, respectively. Following the Wang-Wen chiral fermion model, we realize the chiral fermions and their mirror partners on the opposite boundaries of a thin strip of (2+1)D lattice model of multilayer Chern insulator, whose finite width implies the quantum system is effectively (1+1)D. By introducing two sets of carefully designed six-fermion local interactions to the mirror sector only, we demonstrate that the mirror fermions can be gapped out by the interaction beyond a critical strength without breaking the chiral U(1) symmetry, via the symmetric mass generation mechanism. We show that the interaction-driven gapping transition is in the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless universality class. We determine the evolution of Luttinger parameters before the transition, which confirms that the transition happens exactly at the point when the interaction term becomes marginal. As the mirror sector is gapped after the transition, we check that the fermions in the light chiral fermion sector remain gapless, which provides the desired lattice regularization of chiral fermions.

Strong Correlation Between Superconductivity and Ferromagnetism in an Fe-Chalcogenide Superconductor.

The interplay among topology, superconductivity, and magnetism promises to bring a plethora of exotic and unintuitive behaviors in emergent quantum materials. The family of Fe-chalcogenide superconductors FeTexSe1-x are directly relevant in this context due to their intrinsic topological band structure, high-temperature superconductivity, and unconventional pairing symmetry. Despite enormous promise and expectation, the local magnetic properties of FeTexSe1-x remain largely unexplored, which prevents a comprehensive understanding of their underlying material properties. Exploiting nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers in diamond, here we report nanoscale quantum sensing and imaging of magnetic flux generated by exfoliated FeTexSe1-x flakes, demonstrating strong correlation between superconductivity and ferromagnetism in FeTexSe1-x. The coexistence of superconductivity and ferromagnetism in an established topological superconductor opens up new opportunities for exploring exotic spin and charge transport phenomena in quantum materials. The demonstrated coupling between NV centers and FeTexSe1-x may also find applications in developing hybrid architectures for next-generation, solid-state-based quantum information technologies.

Information Scrambling in Quantum Neural Networks.

The quantum neural network is one of the promising applications for near-term noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers. A quantum neural network distills the information from the input wave function into the output qubits. In this Letter, we show that this process can also be viewed from the opposite direction: the quantum information in the output qubits is scrambled into the input. This observation motivates us to use the tripartite information-a quantity recently developed to characterize information scrambling-to diagnose the training dynamics of quantum neural networks. We empirically find strong correlation between the dynamical behavior of the tripartite information and the loss function in the training process, from which we identify that the training process has two stages for randomly initialized networks. In the early stage, the network performance improves rapidly and the tripartite information increases linearly with a universal slope, meaning that the neural network becomes less scrambled than the random unitary. In the latter stage, the network performance improves slowly while the tripartite information decreases. We present evidences that the network constructs local correlations in the early stage and learns large-scale structures in the latter stage. We believe this two-stage training dynamics is universal and is applicable to a wide range of problems. Our work builds bridges between two research subjects of quantum neural networks and information scrambling, which opens up a new perspective to understand quantum neural networks.

Role of Noether's Theorem at the Deconfined Quantum Critical Point.

Noether's theorem is one of the fundamental laws of physics, relating continuous symmetries and conserved currents. Here we explore the role of Noether's theorem at the deconfined quantum critical point (DQCP), which is a quantum phase transition beyond the Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson paradigm. It was expected that a larger continuous symmetry could emerge at the DQCP, which, if true, should lead to conserved current at low energy. By identifying the emergent current fluctuation in the spin excitation spectra, we can quantitatively study the current-current correlation in large-scale quantum Monte Carlo simulations. Our results reveal the conservation of the emergent current, as signified by the vanishing anomalous dimension of the current operator, and hence provide supporting evidence for the emergent symmetry at the DQCP. Our study demonstrates an elegant yet practical approach to detect emergent symmetry by probing the spin excitation, which could potentially guide the ongoing experimental search for the DQCP in quantum magnets.

Bilayer Graphene as a Platform for Bosonic Symmetry-Protected Topological States.

Bosonic symmetry protected topological (BSPT) states, the bosonic analogue of topological insulators, have attracted enormous theoretical interest in the last few years. Although BSPT states have been classified by various approaches, there is so far no successful experimental realization of any BSPT state in two or higher dimensions. In this paper, we propose that a two-dimensional BSPT state with U(1)×U(1) symmetry can be realized in bilayer graphene in a magnetic field. Here the two U(1) symmetries represent total spin S^{z} and total charge conservation, respectively. The Coulomb interaction plays a central role in this proposal-it gaps out all the fermions at the boundary, so that only bosonic charge and spin degrees of freedom are gapless and protected at the edge. Based on the above conclusion, we propose that the bulk quantum phase transition between the BSPT and trivial phase, which can be driven by applying both magnetic and electric fields, can become a "bosonic phase transition" with interactions. That is, only bosonic modes close their gap at the transition, which is fundamentally different from all the well-known topological insulator to trivial insulator transitions that occur for free fermion systems. We discuss various experimental consequences of this proposal.

Low-Energy Spin Dynamics of the Honeycomb Spin Liquid Beyond the Kitaev Limit.

We investigate the generic features of the low energy dynamical spin structure factor of the Kitaev honeycomb quantum spin liquid perturbed away from its exact soluble limit by generic symmetry-allowed exchange couplings. We find that the spin gap persists in the Kitaev-Heisenberg model, but generally vanishes provided more generic symmetry-allowed interactions exist. We formulate the generic expansion of the spin operator in terms of fractionalized Majorana fermion operators according to the symmetry enriched topological order of the Kitaev spin liquid, described by its projective symmetry group. The dynamical spin structure factor displays power-law scaling bounded by Dirac cones in the vicinity of the Γ, K, and K^{'} points of the Brillouin zone, rather than the spin gap found for the exactly soluble point.

Wave function and strange correlator of short-range entangled states.

We demonstrate the following conclusion: If |Ψ⟩ is a one-dimensional (1D) or two-dimensional (2D) nontrivial short-range entangled state and |Ω⟩ is a trivial disordered state defined on the same Hilbert space, then the following quantity (so-called "strange correlator") C(r,r('))=⟨Ω|ϕ(r)ϕ(r('))|Ψ⟩/⟨Ω|Ψ⟩ either saturates to a constant or decays as a power law in the limit |r-r(')|→+∞, even though both |Ω⟩ and |Ψ⟩ are quantum disordered states with short-range correlation; ϕ(r) is some local operator in the Hilbert space. This result is obtained based on both field theory analysis and an explicit computation of C(r,r(')) for four different examples: 1D Haldane phase of spin-1 chain, 2D quantum spin Hall insulator with a strong Rashba spin-orbit coupling, 2D spin-2 Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki state on the square lattice, and the 2D bosonic symmetry-protected topological phase with Z(2) symmetry. This result can be used as a diagnosis for short-range entangled states in 1D and 2D.

Superfluidity of bosons in kagome lattices with frustration.

In this Letter we consider spinless bosons in a kagome lattice with nearest-neighbor hopping and on-site interaction, and the sign of hopping is inverted by insetting a π flux in each triangle of the kagome lattice so that the lowest single particle band is perfectly flat. We show that in the high-density limit, despite the infinite degeneracy of the single particle ground states, interaction will select out the Bloch state at the K point of the Brillouin zone for boson condensation at the lowest temperature. As the temperature increases, the single-boson superfluid order can be easily destroyed, while an exotic triple-boson paired superfluid order will remain. We establish that this trion superfluid exists in a broad temperature regime until the temperature is increased to the same order of hopping and then the system turns into normal phases. Finally, we show that time-of-flight measurement of the momentum distribution and its noise correlation can be used to distinguish these three phases.

Phase diagram and a possible unified description of intercalated iron selenide superconductors.

We propose a theoretical description of the phase diagram and physical properties in A(2)Fe(4)Se(5)-type (A=K, Tl) compounds based on a coexistent local moment and itinerant electron picture. Using neutron scattering and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements to fix the general structure of the local moment and itinerant Fermi pockets, we find a superconducting phase with s-wave pairing at the M pockets and an incipient sign-change s wave near the Γ point, which is adjacent to the insulating phases. The uniform susceptibility and resistivity are found to be consistent with the experiment. The main distinction with iron pnictide superconductors is also discussed.

Emergent Schrödinger equation in an introspective machine learning architecture.

Can physical concepts and laws emerge in a neural network as it learns to predict the observation data of physical systems? As a benchmark and a proof-of-principle study of this possibility, here we show an introspective learning architecture that can automatically develop the concept of the quantum wave function and discover the Schrödinger equation from simulated experimental data of the potential-to-density mappings of a quantum particle. This introspective learning architecture contains a machine translator to perform the potential to density mapping, and a knowledge distiller auto-encoder to extract the essential information and its update law from the hidden states of the translator, which turns out to be the quantum wave function and the Schrödinger equation. We envision that our introspective learning architecture can enable machine learning to discover new physics in the future.