Topological Quantum Phase Transition in Synthetic Non-Abelian Gauge Potential

The method of synthetic gauge potentials opens up a new avenue for our understanding and discovering novel quantum states of matter. We investigate the topological quantum phase transition of Fermi gases trapped in a honeycomb lattice in the presence of a synthetic non- Abelian gauge potential. We develop a systematic fermionic effective field theory to describe a topological quantum phase transition tuned by the non-Abelian gauge potential and ex- plore its various important experimental consequences. Numerical calculations on lattice scales are performed to compare with the results achieved by the fermionic effective field theory. Several possible experimental detection methods of topological quantum phase tran- sition are proposed. In contrast to condensed matter experiments where only gauge invariant quantities can be measured, both gauge invariant and non-gauge invariant quantities can be measured by experimentally generating various non-Abelian gauges corresponding to the same set of Wilson loops

Discriminative Cooperative Networks for Detecting Phase Transitions

The classification of states of matter and their corresponding phase transitions is a special kind of machine-learning task, where physical data allow for the analysis of new algorithms, which have not been considered in the general computer-science setting so far. Here we introduce an unsupervised machine-learning scheme for detecting phase transitions with a pair of discriminative cooperative networks (DCN). In this scheme, a guesser network and a learner network cooperate to detect phase transitions from fully unlabeled data. The new scheme is efficient enough for dealing with phase diagrams in two-dimensional parameter spaces, where we can utilize an active contour model -- the snake -- from computer vision to host the two networks. The snake, with a DCN "brain", moves and learns actively in the parameter space, and locates phase boundaries automatically

Medium effects in the production and decay of vector mesons in pion-nucleus reactions

The $\omega$-, $\rho$- and $\phi$-resonance production and their dileptonic decay in $\pi^- A$ reactions at 1.1 - 1.7 GeV/c are calculated within the intranuclear cascade (INC) approach. The invariant mass distribution of the dilepton pair for each resonance can be decomposed in two components which correspond to their decay 'inside' the target nucleus and in the vacuum, respectively. The first components are strongly distorted by the nuclear medium due to resonance-nucleon scattering and a possible mass shift at finite baryon density. These medium modifications are compared to background sources in the dilepton spectrum from $\pi N$ bremsstrahlung as well as the Dalitz decays of $\omega$ and $\eta$ mesons produced in the reaction. Detailed predictions for $\pi^- Pb$ reactions at 1.3 and 1.7 GeV/c are made within several momentum bins for the lepton pair.Comment: 29 pages, LaTeX, including 12 postscript figures, UGI-97-07, Nucl. Phys. A., in pres

Probing the interactions of charmed mesons with nuclei in pˉ\bar p induced reactions

We study the perspectives of resonant and nonresonant charmed meson production in $\bar{p} + A$ reactions within the Multiple Scattering Monte Carlo (MSMC) approach. We calculate the production of the resonances $\Psi(3770), \Psi(4040)$ and $\Psi(4160)$ on various nuclei, their propagation and decay to $D, \bar{D}, D^*, \bar{D}^*, D_s, \bar{D}_s$ in the medium and vacuum, respectively. The modifications of the open charm vector mesons in the nuclear medium are found to be rather moderate or even small such that dilepton spectroscopy will require an invariant mass resolution of a few MeV. Furthermore, the elastic and inelastic interactions of the open charm mesons in the medium are taken into account, which can be related to $(u,d)$-, $s$- or $c$-quark exchange with nucleons. It is found that by studying the $D/\bar{D}$ ratio for low momenta in the laboratory ($\leq 2-2.2$ GeV/c) as a function of target mass $A$ stringent constraints on the $c$-quark exchange cross section can be obtained. On the other hand, the ratios $D^-_s/D^+_s$ as well as $D/D^-_s$ and $D/D^+_s$ at low momenta as a function of $A$ will permit to fix independently the strength of the $s$-quark exchange reaction in $D^-_s N$ scattering.Comment: 9 pages, LaTeX, including 9 postscript figures, submitted to Eur. Phys. J.