Generalized eigenproblem without fermion doubling for Dirac fermions on a lattice

The spatial discretization of the single-cone Dirac Hamiltonian on the surface of a topological insulator or superconductor needs a special ``staggered’’ grid, to avoid the appearance of a spurious second cone in the Brillouin zone. We adapt the Stacey discretization from lattice gauge theory to produce a generalized eigenvalue problem, of the form \bm{\mathcal H}\bm{\psi}=\bm{E}\bm{\mathcal P}\bm{\psi}ℋ𝛙=𝐄𝒫𝛙, with Hermitian tight-binding operators \bm{\mathcal H}ℋ, \bm{\mathcal P}𝒫, a locally conserved particle current, and preserved chiral and symplectic symmetries. This permits the study of the spectral statistics of Dirac fermions in each of the four symmetry classes A, AII, AIII, and D.

Barrier billiard and random matrices

The barrier billiard is the simplest example of pseudo-integrable models with interesting and intricate classical and quantum properties. Using the Wiener-Hopf method it is demonstrated that quantum mechanics of a rectangular billiard with a barrier in the centre can be reduced to the investigation of a certain unitary matrix. Under heuristic assumptions this matrix is substituted by a special low-complexity random unitary matrix of independent interest. The main results of the paper are (i) spectral statistics of such billiards is insensitive to the barrier height and (ii) it is well described by the semi-Poisson distributions.

On the asymptotic behavior of the eigenvalue distribution of block correlation matrices of high-dimensional time series

We consider linear spectral statistics built from the block-normalized correlation matrix of a set of [Formula: see text] mutually independent scalar time series. This matrix is composed of [Formula: see text] blocks. Each block has size [Formula: see text] and contains the sample cross-correlation measured at [Formula: see text] consecutive time lags between each pair of time series. Let [Formula: see text] denote the total number of consecutively observed windows that are used to estimate these correlation matrices. We analyze the asymptotic regime where [Formula: see text] while [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text]. We study the behavior of linear statistics of the eigenvalues of this block correlation matrix under these asymptotic conditions and show that the empirical eigenvalue distribution converges to a Marcenko–Pastur distribution. Our results are potentially useful in order to address the problem of testing whether a large number of time series are uncorrelated or not.

Onset of universality in the dynamical mixing of a pure state

We study the time dynamics of random density matrices generated by evolving the same pure state using a Gaussian orthogonal ensemble (GOE) of Hamiltonians. We show that the spectral statistics of the resulting mixed state is well described by random matrix theory (RMT) and undergoes a crossover from the Gaussian orthogonal ensemble to the Gaussian unitary ensemble (GUE) for short and large times, respectively. Using a semi-analytical treatment relying on a power series of the density matrix as a function of time, we find that the crossover occurs in a characteristic time that scales as the inverse of the dimension. The RMT results are contrasted with a paradigmatic model of many-body localization in the chaotic regime, where the GUE statistics is reached at large times, while for short times the statistics strongly depends on the peculiarity of the considered subspace.