Equilibrium Statistical Physics: Phases, Phase Transitions, and Topological Phases

Clément Cosco, Assaf Shapira

Non-trivial topological behavior appears in many different contexts in statistical physics, perhaps the most known one being the Kosterlitz–Thouless phase transition in the two-dimensional XY model. We study the behavior of a simpler, one dimensional, XY chain with periodic boundary and strong interactions, but rather than concentrating on the equilibrium measure, we try to understand its dynamics. The equivalent of the Kosterlitz–Thouless transition in this one-dimensional case happens when the interaction strength scales like the size of system N, yet we show that a sharp transition for the dynamics occurs at the scale of log N. When the interactions are weaker than a certain threshold, topological phases could not be observed over long times, while for interactions that are stronger than that threshold, topological phases become metastable, surviving for diverging time scales.

Lorenza Saitta, Attilio Giordana, Antoine Cornuéjols

Ricardo Puebla

Tieyan Si

Phase transition is a war game. It widely exists in different kinds of complex system beyond physics. Where there is revolution, there is phase transition. The renormalization group transformation, which was proved to be a powerful tool to study the critical phenomena, is actually a game process. The phase boundary between the old phase and new phase is the outcome of many rounds of negotiation between the old force and new force. The order of phase transition is determined by the cutoff of renormalization group transformation. This definition unified Ehrenfest's definition of phase transition in thermodynamic physics. If the strategy manifold has nontrivial topology, the topological relation would put a constrain on the surviving strategies, the transition occurred under this constrain may be called a topological one. If the strategy manifold is open and noncompact, phase transition is simply a game process, there is no table for topology. An universal phase coexistence equation is found, it sits at the Nash equilibrium point. Inspired by the fractal space structure demonstrated by renormalization group theory, a conjecture is proposed that the universal scaling law of a general phase transition in a complex system comes from the coexistence equation around Nash equilibrium point. Game theory also provide us new understanding to pairing mechanism and entanglement in many body physics.

Jakub Mildner

Mertz, Thomas

Topological phases set themselves apart from other phases since they cannot be understood in terms of the usual Landau theory of phase transitions. This fact, which is a consequence of the property that topological phase transitions can occur without breaking symmetries, is reflected in the complicated form of topological order parameters. While the mathematical classification of phases through homotopy theory is known, an intuition for the relation between phase transitions and changes to the physical system is largely inhibited by the general complexity. In this thesis we aim to get back some of this intuition by studying the properties of the Chern number (a topological order parameter) in two scenarios. First, we investigate the effect of electronic correlations on topological phases in the Green's function formalism. By developing a statistical method that averages over all possible solutions of the manybody problem, we extract general statements about the shape of the phase diagram and investigate the stability of topological phases with respect to interactions. In addition, we find that in many topological models the local approximation, which is part of many standard methods for solving the manybody lattice model, is able to produce qualitatively correct phase transitions at low to intermediate correlations. We then extend the statistical method to study the effect of the lattice, where we evaluate possible applications of standard machine learning techniques against our information theoretical approach. We define a measure for the information about particular topological phases encoded in individual lattice parameters, which allows us to construct a qualitative phase diagram that gives a more intuitive understanding of the topological phase. Finally, we discuss possible applications of our method that could facilitate the discovery of new materials with topological properties.