Wilson's renormalization group applied to 2D lattice electrons in the presence of van Hove singularities

The weak coupling instabilities of a two dimensional Fermi system are investigated for the case of a square lattice using a Wilson renormalization group scheme to one loop order. We focus on a situation where the Fermi surface passes through two saddle points of the single particle dispersion. In the case of perfect nesting, the dominant instability is a spin density wave but d-wave superconductivity as well as charge or spin flux phases are also obtained in certain regions in the space of coupling parameters. The low energy regime in the vicinity of these instabilities can be studied analytically. Although saddle points play a major role (through their large contribution to the single particle density of states), the presence of low energy excitations along the Fermi surface rather than at isolated points is crucial and leads to an asymptotic decoupling of the various instabilities. This suggests a more mean-field like picture of these instabilities, than the one recently established by numerical studies using discretized Fermi surfaces.Comment: gzipped tar file, 31 pages including 10 figures, minor correction of misprint

Voltage-Current curves for small Josephson junction arrays

We compute the current voltage characteristic of a chain of identical Josephson circuits characterized by a large ratio of Josephson to charging energy that are envisioned as the implementation of topologically protected qubits. We show that in the limit of small coupling to the environment it exhibits a non-monotonous behavior with a maximum voltage followed by a parametrically large region where $V\propto 1/I$. We argue that its experimental measurement provides a direct probe of the amplitude of the quantum transitions in constituting Josephson circuits and thus allows their full characterization.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Exact solution of Z_2 Chern-Simons model on a triangular lattice

We construct the Hamiltonian description of the Chern-Simons theory with Z_n gauge group on a triangular lattice. We show that the Z_2 model can be mapped onto free Majorana fermions and compute the excitation spectrum. In the bulk the spectrum turns out to be gapless but acquires a gap if a magnetic term is added to the Hamiltonian. On a lattice edge one gets additional non-gauge invariant (matter) gapless degrees of freedom whose number grows linearly with the edge length. Therefore, a small hole in the lattice plays the role of a charged particle characterized by a non-trivial projective representation of the gauge group, while a long edge provides a decoherence mechanism for the fluxes. We discuss briefly the implications for the implementations of protected qubits.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

Shot-noise statistics in diffusive conductors

We study the full probability distribution of the charge transmitted through a mesoscopic diffusive conductor during a measurement time T. We have considered a semi-classical model, with an exclusion principle in a discretized single-particle phase-space. In the large T limit, numerical simulations show a universal probability distribution which agrees very well with the quantum mechanical prediction of Lee, Levitov and Yakovets [PRB {51} 4079 (1995)] for the charge counting statistics. Special attention is given to its third cumulant, including an analysis of finite size effects and of some experimental constraints for its accurate measurement.Comment: Submitted to Eur. Phys. J. B (Jan. 2002

A semiclassical study of the Jaynes-Cummings model

We consider the Jaynes-Cummings model of a single quantum spin $s$ coupled to a harmonic oscillator in a parameter regime where the underlying classical dynamics exhibits an unstable equilibrium point. This state of the model is relevant to the physics of cold atom systems, in non-equilibrium situations obtained by fast sweeping through a Feshbach resonance. We show that in this integrable system with two degrees of freedom, for any initial condition close to the unstable point, the classical dynamics is controlled by a singularity of the focus-focus type. In particular, it displays the expected monodromy, which forbids the existence of global action-angle coordinates. Explicit calculations of the joint spectrum of conserved quantities reveal the monodromy at the quantum level, as a dislocation in the lattice of eigenvalues. We perform a detailed semi-classical analysis of the associated eigenstates. Whereas most of the levels are well described by the usual Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization rules, properly adapted to polar coordinates, we show how these rules are modified in the vicinity of the critical level. The spectral decomposition of the classically unstable state is computed, and is found to be dominated by the critical WKB states. This provides a useful tool to analyze the quantum dynamics starting from this particular state, which exhibits an aperiodic sequence of solitonic pulses with a rather well defined characteristic frequency.Comment: pdfLaTeX, 51 pages, 19 figures, references added and improved figure captions. To appear in J. Stat. Mec

Electron interactions in graphene in a strong magnetic field

Graphene in the quantum Hall regime exhibits a multi-component structure due to the electronic spin and chirality degrees of freedom. While the applied field breaks the spin symmetry explicitly, we show that the fate of the chirality SU(2) symmetry is more involved: the leading symmetry-breaking terms differ in origin when the Hamiltonian is projected onto the central (n=0) rather than any of the other Landau levels. Our description at the lattice level leads to a Harper equation; in its continuum limit, the ratio of lattice constant a and magnetic length l_B assumes the role of a small control parameter in different guises. The leading symmetry-breaking terms are direct (n=0) and exchange (n different from 0) terms, which are algebraically small in a/l_B. We comment on the Haldane pseudopotentials for graphene, and evaluate the easy-plane anisotropy of the graphene ferromagnet.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure; revised version contains a more detailed comparison with experimental results; accepted for publication in PR

Universal Quantum Computation with ideal Clifford gates and noisy ancillas

We consider a model of quantum computation in which the set of elementary operations is limited to Clifford unitaries, the creation of the state $|0>$, and qubit measurement in the computational basis. In addition, we allow the creation of a one-qubit ancilla in a mixed state $\rho$, which should be regarded as a parameter of the model. Our goal is to determine for which $\rho$ universal quantum computation (UQC) can be efficiently simulated. To answer this question, we construct purification protocols that consume several copies of $\rho$ and produce a single output qubit with higher polarization. The protocols allow one to increase the polarization only along certain ``magic'' directions. If the polarization of $\rho$ along a magic direction exceeds a threshold value (about 65%), the purification asymptotically yields a pure state, which we call a magic state. We show that the Clifford group operations combined with magic states preparation are sufficient for UQC. The connection of our results with the Gottesman-Knill theorem is discussed.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, revtex