Sufficient Conditions for Topological Order in Insulators

We prove the existence of low energy excitations in insulating systems at general filling factor under certain conditions, and discuss in which cases these may be identified as topological excitations. This proof is based on previously proven locality results. In the case of half-filling it provides a significantly shortened proof of the recent higher dimensional Lieb-Schultz-Mattis theorem.Comment: 7 pages, no figure

Quasi-Adiabatic Continuation in Gapped Spin and Fermion Systems: Goldstone's Theorem and Flux Periodicity

We apply the technique of quasi-adiabatic continuation to study systems with continuous symmetries. We first derive a general form of Goldstone's theorem applicable to gapped nonrelativistic systems with continuous symmetries. We then show that for a fermionic system with a spin gap, it is possible to insert $\pi$-flux into a cylinder with only exponentially small change in the energy of the system, a scenario which covers several physically interesting cases such as an s-wave superconductor or a resonating valence bond state.Comment: 19 pages, 2 figures, final version in press at JSTA

Systematic Series Expansions for Processes on Networks

We use series expansions to study dynamics of equilibrium and non-equilibrium systems on networks. This analytical method enables us to include detailed non-universal effects of the network structure. We show that even low order calculations produce results which compare accurately to numerical simulation, while the results can be systematically improved. We show that certain commonly accepted analytical results for the critical point on networks with a broad degree distribution need to be modified in certain cases due to disassortativity; the present method is able to take into account the assortativity at sufficiently high order, while previous results correspond to leading and second order approximations in this method. Finally, we apply this method to real-world data.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Fractal to Nonfractal Phase Transition in the Dielectric Breakdown Model

A fast method is presented for simulating the dielectric-breakdown model using iterated conformal mappings. Numerical results for the dimension and for corrections to scaling are in good agreement with the recent RG prediction of an upper critical $\eta_c=4$, at which a transition occurs between branching fractal clusters and one-dimensional nonfractal clusters.Comment: 5 pages, 7 figures; corrections to scaling include

A short proof of stability of topological order under local perturbations

Recently, the stability of certain topological phases of matter under weak perturbations was proven. Here, we present a short, alternate proof of the same result. We consider models of topological quantum order for which the unperturbed Hamiltonian $H_0$ can be written as a sum of local pairwise commuting projectors on a $D$-dimensional lattice. We consider a perturbed Hamiltonian $H=H_0+V$ involving a generic perturbation $V$ that can be written as a sum of short-range bounded-norm interactions. We prove that if the strength of $V$ is below a constant threshold value then $H$ has well-defined spectral bands originating from the low-lying eigenvalues of $H_0$. These bands are separated from the rest of the spectrum and from each other by a constant gap. The width of the band originating from the smallest eigenvalue of $H_0$ decays faster than any power of the lattice size.Comment: 15 page

QED corrections to isospin-related decay rates of charged and neutral B mesons

We estimate the isospin-violating QED radiative corrections to the charged-to-neutral ratios of the decay rates for B^+ and B^0 in non-leptonic B meson decays. In particular, these corrections are potentially important for precision measurement of the charged-to-neutral production ratio of B meson in e^+e^- annihilation. We calculate explicitly the QED corrections to the ratios of two different types of decay rates \Gamma(B^+ \to J/\psi K^+)/\Gamma(B^0 \to J/\psi K^0) and \Gamma(B^+ \to D^+_S \bar{D^0})/\Gamma(B^0 \to D^+_S D^-) taking into account the form factors of the mesons based on the vector meson dominance model, and compare them with the results obtained for the point-like mesons.Comment: 7 pages, 9 eps figure

Strong and weak thermalization of infinite non-integrable quantum systems

When a non-integrable system evolves out of equilibrium for a long time, local observables are expected to attain stationary expectation values, independent of the details of the initial state. However, intriguing experimental results with ultracold gases have shown no thermalization in non-integrable settings, triggering an intense theoretical effort to decide the question. Here we show that the phenomenology of thermalization in a quantum system is much richer than its classical counterpart. Using a new numerical technique, we identify two distinct thermalization regimes, strong and weak, occurring for different initial states. Strong thermalization, intrinsically quantum, happens when instantaneous local expectation values converge to the thermal ones. Weak thermalization, well-known in classical systems, happens when local expectation values converge to the thermal ones only after time averaging. Remarkably, we find a third group of states showing no thermalization, neither strong nor weak, to the time scales one can reliably simulate.Comment: 12 pages, 21 figures, including additional materia