Majorana Edge States in Interacting Two-chain Ladders of Fermions

In this work we study interacting spinless fermions on a two-chain ladder with inter-chain pair tunneling while single-particle tunneling is suppressed at low energy. The model embodies a $\mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry associated with the fermion parity on each chain. We find that when the system is driven to the strong-coupling phase by the pair tunneling, Majorana excitations appear on the boundary. Such Majorana edge states correspond to two-fold degeneracy of ground states distinguished by different fermion parity on each chain, thus representing a generalization of one-dimensional topological superconductors. We also characterize the stability of the ground state degeneracy against local perturbations. Lattice fermion models realizing such effective field theory are discussed.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur

Joint Video and Text Parsing for Understanding Events and Answering Queries

We propose a framework for parsing video and text jointly for understanding events and answering user queries. Our framework produces a parse graph that represents the compositional structures of spatial information (objects and scenes), temporal information (actions and events) and causal information (causalities between events and fluents) in the video and text. The knowledge representation of our framework is based on a spatial-temporal-causal And-Or graph (S/T/C-AOG), which jointly models possible hierarchical compositions of objects, scenes and events as well as their interactions and mutual contexts, and specifies the prior probabilistic distribution of the parse graphs. We present a probabilistic generative model for joint parsing that captures the relations between the input video/text, their corresponding parse graphs and the joint parse graph. Based on the probabilistic model, we propose a joint parsing system consisting of three modules: video parsing, text parsing and joint inference. Video parsing and text parsing produce two parse graphs from the input video and text respectively. The joint inference module produces a joint parse graph by performing matching, deduction and revision on the video and text parse graphs. The proposed framework has the following objectives: Firstly, we aim at deep semantic parsing of video and text that goes beyond the traditional bag-of-words approaches; Secondly, we perform parsing and reasoning across the spatial, temporal and causal dimensions based on the joint S/T/C-AOG representation; Thirdly, we show that deep joint parsing facilitates subsequent applications such as generating narrative text descriptions and answering queries in the forms of who, what, when, where and why. We empirically evaluated our system based on comparison against ground-truth as well as accuracy of query answering and obtained satisfactory results

Criticality in Translation-Invariant Parafermion Chains

In this work we numerically study critical phases in translation-invariant $\mathbb{Z}_N$ parafermion chains with both nearest- and next-nearest-neighbor hopping terms. The model can be mapped to a $\mathbb{Z}_N$ spin model with nearest-neighbor couplings via a generalized Jordan-Wigner transformation and translation invariance ensures that the spin model is always self-dual. We first study the low-energy spectrum of chains with only nearest-neighbor coupling, which are mapped onto standard self-dual $\mathbb{Z}_N$ clock models. For $3\leq N\leq 6$ we match the numerical results to the known conformal field theory(CFT) identification. We then analyze in detail the phase diagram of a $N=3$ chain with both nearest and next-nearest neighbor hopping and six critical phases with central charges being $4/5$, 1 or 2 are found. We find continuous phase transitions between $c=1$ and $c=2$ phases, while the phase transition between $c=4/5$ and $c=1$ is conjectured to be of Kosterlitz-Thouless type.Comment: published versio

Topology and Criticality in Resonating Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki loop Spin Liquid States

We exploit a natural Projected Entangled-Pair State (PEPS) representation for the resonating Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki loop (RAL) state. By taking advantage of PEPS-based analytical and numerical methods, we characterize the RAL states on various two-dimensional lattices. On square and honeycomb lattices, these states are critical since the dimer-dimer correlations decay as a power law. On kagome lattice, the RAL state has exponentially decaying correlation functions, supporting the scenario of a gapped spin liquid. We provide further evidence that the RAL state on the kagome lattice is a $\mathbb{Z}_2$ spin liquid, by identifying the four topological sectors and computing the topological entropy. Furthermore, we construct a one-parameter family of PEPS states interpolating between the RAL state and a short-range Resonating Valence Bond state and find a critical point, consistent with the fact that the two states belong to two different phases. We also perform a variational study of the spin-1 kagome Heisenberg model using this one-parameter PEPS.Comment: 10 pages, 14 figures, published versio

Description of 178^{178}Hfm2^{m2} in the constrained relativistic mean field theory

The properties of the ground state of $^{178}$Hf and the isomeric state $^{178}$Hf$^{m2}$ are studied within the adiabatic and diabatic constrained relativistic mean field (RMF) approaches. The RMF calculations reproduce well the binding energy and the deformation for the ground state of $^{178}$Hf. Using the ground state single-particle eigenvalues obtained in the present calculation, the lowest excitation configuration with $K^\pi=16^+$ is found to be $\nu(7/2^-[514])^{-1}(9/2^+[624])^{1}$ $\pi(7/2^+[404])^{-1}(9/2^-[514])^{1}$. Its excitation energy calculated by the RMF theory with time-odd fields taken into account is equal to 2.801 MeV, i.e., close to the $^{178}$Hf$^{m2}$ experimental excitation energy 2.446 MeV. The self-consistent procedure accounting for the time-odd component of the meson fields is the most important aspect of the present calculation.Comment: 12 pages(preprint), 2 figures, 1 tabl