Gaussian Many-Body States: Tachyonic Quenches and Conformal Blocks

April 13, 2018
11:30am to 1:00pm

IFT Seminar Room/Red Room

Specialist level
Speaker: 
Sebastián Montes
Location&Place: 

IFT Seminar Room/Red Room

Abstract: 

This thesis is divided into two independent parts:In Part I, we present a characterization of a bosonic field theory driven by a free (Gaussian) tachyonic Hamiltonian. Relevant physical quantities
such as correlators, entanglement entropies, and the mutual information of disconnected subregions are computed. We show that the causal structure resembles a critical (massless) quench. Some applications and extensions to other physical systems are outlined. In Part II, we present a characterization of the many-body lattice wave functions obtained from the conformal blocks of the Ising conformal field theory. The formalism is interpreted as a matrix product state using continuous ancillary degrees of freedom. We prove that the ground state of the finite-size critical Ising transverse field Hamiltonian can be obtained exactly with this construction. Finally, we study 2D configurations using an operator product expansion approximation. We associate these states to the weak pairing phase of the p+ip superconductor via the scaling of the pairing function and the entanglement spectrum.