Intertwined Orders in Holography: Pair and Charge Density Waves

Building on [1], we examine a holographic model in which a U(1) symmetry and translational invariance are broken spontaneously at the same time. The symmetry breaking is realized through the St\"{u}ckelberg mechanism, and leads to a scalar condensate and a charge density which are spatially modulated and exhibit unidirectional stripe order. Depending on the choice of parameters, the oscillations of the scalar condensate can average out to zero, with a frequency which is half of that of the charge density. In this case the system realizes some of the key features of pair density wave order. The model also admits a phase with co-existing superconducting and charge density wave orders, in which the scalar condensate has a uniform component. In our construction the various orders are intertwined with each other and have a common origin. The fully backreacted geometry is computed numerically, including for the case in which the theory contains axions. The latter can be added to explicitly break translational symmetry and mimic lattice-type effects.Comment: 37 pages, 17 figure

Holographic Fermions in Striped Phases

We examine the fermionic response in a holographic model of a low temperature striped phase, working for concreteness with the setup we studied in [Cremonini:2016rbd,Cremonini:2017usb], in which a U(1) symmetry and translational invariance are broken spontaneously at the same time. We include an ionic lattice that breaks translational symmetry explicitly in the UV of the theory. Thus, this construction realizes spontaneous crystallization on top of a background lattice. We solve the Dirac equation for a probe fermion in the associated background geometry using numerical techniques, and explore the interplay between spontaneous and explicit breaking of translations. We note that in our model the breaking of the U(1) symmetry doesn't play a role in the analysis of the fermionic spectral function. We investigate under which conditions a Fermi surface can form and focus in particular on how the ionic lattice affects its structure. When the ionic lattice becomes sufficiently strong the spectral weight peaks broaden, denoting a gradual disappearance of the Fermi surface along the symmetry breaking direction. This phenomenon occurs even in the absence of spontaneously generated stripes. The resulting Fermi surface appears to consist of detached segments reminiscent of Fermi arcs.Comment: v2: 43 pages, 20 figures. Major revision, title and abstract modified, new discussion added, conclusions unchanged. To appear in JHE

Multilevel refinable triangular PSP-splines (Tri-PSPS)

A multi-level spline technique known as partial shape preserving splines (PSPS) (Li and Tian, 2011) has recently been developed for the design of piecewise polynomial freeform geometric surfaces, where the basis functions of the PSPS can be directly built from an arbitrary set of polygons that partitions a giving parametric domain. This paper addresses a special type of PSPS, the triangular PSPS (Tri-PSPS), where all spline basis functions are constructed from a set of triangles. Compared with other triangular spline techniques, Tri-PSPS have several distinctive features. Firstly, for each given triangle, the corresponding spline basis function for any required degree of smoothness can be expressed in closed-form and directly written out in full explicitly as piecewise bivariate polynomials. Secondly, Tri-PSPS are an additive triangular spline technique, where the spline function built from a given triangle can be replaced with a set of refined spline functions built on a set of smaller triangles that partition the initial given triangle. In addition, Tri-PSPS are a multilevel spline technique, Tri-PSPS surfaces can be designed to have a continuously varying levels of detail, achieved simply by specifying a proper value for the smoothing parameter introduced in the spline functions. In terms of practical implementation, Tri-PSPS are a parallel computing friendly spline scheme, which can be easily implemented on modern programmable GPUs or on high performance computer clusters, since each of the basis functions of Tri-PSPS can be directly computed independent of each other in parallel

Thermodynamic stability of small-world oscillator networks: A case study of proteins

We study vibrational thermodynamic stability of small-world oscillator networks, by relating the average mean-square displacement $S$ of oscillators to the eigenvalue spectrum of the Laplacian matrix of networks. We show that the cross-links suppress $S$ effectively and there exist two phases on the small-world networks: 1) an unstable phase: when $p\ll1/N$, $S\sim N$; 2) a stable phase: when $p\gg1/N$, $S\sim p^{-1}$, \emph{i.e.}, $S/N\sim E_{cr}^{-1}$. Here, $p$ is the parameter of small-world, $N$ is the number of oscillators, and $E_{cr}=pN$ is the number of cross-links. The results are exemplified by various real protein structures that follow the same scaling behavior $S/N\sim E_{cr}^{-1}$ of the stable phase. We also show that it is the "small-world" property that plays the key role in the thermodynamic stability and is responsible for the universal scaling $S/N\sim E_{cr}^{-1}$, regardless of the model details.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, accepted by Physical Review