391 research outputs found
Superbalance of holographic entropy inequalities
The domain of allowed von Neumann entropies of a holographic field theory carves out a polyhedral cone — the holographic entropy cone — in entropy space. Such polyhedral cones are characterized by their extreme rays. For an arbitrary number of parties, it is known that the so-called perfect tensors are extreme rays. In this work, we constrain the form of the remaining extreme rays by showing that they correspond to geometries with vanishing mutual information between any two parties, ensuring the absence of Bell pair type entanglement between them. This is tantamount to proving that besides subadditivity, all non-redundant holographic entropy inequalities are superbalanced, i.e. not only do UV divergences cancel in the inequality itself (assuming smooth entangling surfaces), but also in the purification thereof
The eightfold way to dissipation
We provide a complete characterization of hydrodynamic transport consistent
with the second law of thermodynamics at arbitrary orders in the gradient
expansion. A key ingredient in facilitating this analysis is the notion of
adiabatic hydrodynamics, which enables isolation of the genuinely dissipative
parts of transport. We demonstrate that most transport is adiabatic.
Furthermore, of the dissipative part, only terms at the leading order in
gradient expansion are constrained to be sign-definite by the second law (as
has been derived before).Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure. v2: minor clarifications. v3: minor changes. title
in published version differ
Schwinger-Keldysh formalism II: Thermal equivariant cohomology
Causally ordered correlation functions of local operators in near-thermal
quantum systems computed using the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism obey a set of
Ward identities. These can be understood rather simply as the consequence of a
topological (BRST) algebra, called the universal Schwinger-Keldysh
superalgebra, as explained in our companion paper arXiv:1610.01940. In the
present paper we provide a mathematical discussion of this topological algebra.
In particular, we argue that the structures can be understood in the language
of extended equivariant cohomology. To keep the discussion self-contained, we
provide a basic review of the algebraic construction of equivariant cohomology
and explain how it can be understood in familiar terms as a superspace gauge
algebra. We demonstrate how the Schwinger-Keldysh construction can be
succinctly encoded in terms a thermal equivariant cohomology algebra which
naturally acts on the operator (super)-algebra of the quantum system. The main
rationale behind this exploration is to extract symmetry statements which are
robust under renormalization group flow and can hence be used to understand
low-energy effective field theory of near-thermal physics. To illustrate the
general principles, we focus on Langevin dynamics of a Brownian particle,
rephrasing some known results in terms of thermal equivariant cohomology. As
described elsewhere, the general framework enables construction of effective
actions for dissipative hydrodynamics and could potentially illumine our
understanding of black holes.Comment: 72 pages; v2: fixed typos. v3: minor clarifications and improvements
to non-equilbirum work relations discussion. v4: typos fixed. published
versio
Paradoxical signaling regulates structural plasticity in dendritic spines
Transient spine enlargement (3-5 min timescale) is an important event
associated with the structural plasticity of dendritic spines. Many of the
molecular mechanisms associated with transient spine enlargement have been
identified experimentally. Here, we use a systems biology approach to construct
a mathematical model of biochemical signaling and actin-mediated transient
spine expansion in response to calcium-influx due to NMDA receptor activation.
We have identified that a key feature of this signaling network is the
paradoxical signaling loop. Paradoxical components act bifunctionally in
signaling networks and their role is to control both the activation and
inhibition of a desired response function (protein activity or spine volume).
Using ordinary differential equation (ODE)-based modeling, we show that the
dynamics of different regulators of transient spine expansion including CaMKII,
RhoA, and Cdc42 and the spine volume can be described using paradoxical
signaling loops. Our model is able to capture the experimentally observed
dynamics of transient spine volume. Furthermore, we show that actin remodeling
events provide a robustness to spine volume dynamics. We also generate
experimentally testable predictions about the role of different components and
parameters of the network on spine dynamics
Thermal out-of-time-order correlators, KMS relations, and spectral functions
We describe general features of thermal correlation functions in quantum
systems, with specific focus on the fluctuation-dissipation type relations
implied by the KMS condition. These end up relating correlation functions with
different time ordering and thus should naturally be viewed in the larger
context of out-of-time-ordered (OTO) observables. In particular, eschewing the
standard formulation of KMS relations where thermal periodicity is combined
with time-reversal to stay within the purview of Schwinger-Keldysh functional
integrals, we show that there is a natural way to phrase them directly in terms
of OTO correlators. We use these observations to construct a natural causal
basis for thermal n-point functions in terms of fully nested commutators. We
provide several general results which can be inferred from cyclic orbits of
permutations, and exemplify the abstract results using a quantum oscillator as
an explicit example.Comment: 36 pages + appendices. v2: minor changes + refs added. v3: minor
changes, published versio
Comments on Hall transport from effective actions
We consider parity-odd transport in 2+1 dimensional charged fluids restricting attention to the class of non-dissipative fluids. We show that there is a two parameter family of such non-dissipative fluids which can be derived from an effective action, in contradistinction with a four parameter family that can be derived from an entropy current analysis. The effective action approach allows us to extract the adiabatic transport data, in particular the Hall viscosity and Hall conductivity amongst others, in terms of the thermodynamic functions that enter as ‘coupling constants’. Curiously, we find that Hall viscosity is forced to vanish, whilst the Hall conductivity is generically a non-vanishing function of thermodynamic data determined in terms of the hydrodynamic couplings
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