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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 199 records · Page 11
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2017

Extending the Universal One-Loop Effective Action: heavy-light coefficients

The Universal One-Loop Effective Action (UOLEA) is a general expression for the effective action obtained by evaluating in a model-independent way the one-loop expansion of a functional path integral. It can also be used to match UV theories to their low-energy EFTs more efficiently by avoiding redundant steps in the application of functional methods, simplifying the process of obtaining Wilson coefficients of operators up to dimension six. In addition to loops involving only heavy fields, matching may require the inclusion of loops containing both heavy and light particles. Here we use the recently-developed covariant diagram technique to extend the UOLEA to include heavy-light terms which retain the same universal structure as the previously-derived heavy-only terms. As an example of its application, we integrate out a heavy singlet scalar with a linear coupling to a light doublet Higgs. The extension presented here is a first step towards completing the UOLEA to incorporate all possible structures encountered in a covariant derivative expansion of the one-loop path integral.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2013

Three-manifold invariant from functional integration

We give a precise definition and produce a path-integral computation of the normalized partition function of the Abelian U(1) Chern-Simons field theory defined in a general closed oriented 3-manifold. We use the Deligne-Beilinson formalism, we sum over the inequivalent U(1) principal bundles over the manifold and, for each bundle, we integrate over the gauge orbits of the associated connection 1-forms. The result of the functional integration is compared with the Abelian U(1) Reshetikhin-Turaev surgery invariant.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2018

Local gravity theories in conformal superspace

The conformal method for the initial value formulation of GR is one of the most powerful and widely usedtools in both analytical studies and numerical simulations of solutions. As is well-known, it exploits a hidden spatial conformal symmetry that can be extracted from the equations. But why conformal symmetry? Motivated by these questions and by well-known obstacles to quantum gravity, I look for the most general geometrodynamical symmetries compatible with a reduced physical configuration space for metric gravity. I argue that they are indeed spatial conformal diffeomorphisms. The next question is: what sort of theories most naturally incorporate this symmetry? Demanding locality for an action for metric gravity compatible with these principles determines the allowed operators, both for the purely gravitational part as well as matter couplings. The symmetries guarantee that there are two gravitational propagating physical degrees of freedom, but no explicit refoliation-invariance. The simplest such system has a geometric interpretation as a geodesic model in infinite-dimensional conformal superspace. One example of solution to the equations of motion corresponds to a static Bianchi IX spatial ansatz. The unique coupling to electromagnetism forces the electromagnetic equations to be hyperbolic, enabling us to “build” a standard space–time causal structure. There are, however, deviations from the standard Maxwell equations when space–time anisotropies become too large. Regarding quantization, with the geometric interpretation and the lack of refoliation invariance, the path integral treatment of the symmetries becomes much less involved than the similar approaches to GR. The symmetries form an (infinite-dimensional) Lie algebra, and no BFV treatment is necessary. Moreover, one can use gauge-invariant variational principles for selecting the boundary conditions of the path integral. We find that the propagator around the homogeneous solution has up to 6th order spatial derivatives, giving it plausible regularization properties as in Horava–Lifschitz.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Spectral form factor of a quantum spin glass

It is widely expected that systems which fully thermalize are chaotic in the sense of exhibiting random-matrix statistics of their energy level spacings, whereas integrable systems exhibit Poissonian statistics. In this paper, we investigate a third class: spin glasses. These systems are partially chaotic but do not achieve full thermalization due to large free energy barriers. We examine the level spacing statistics of a canonical infinite-range quantum spin glass, the quantum p-spherical model, using an analytic path integral approach. We find statistics consistent with a direct sum of independent random matrices, and show that the number of such matrices is equal to the number of distinct metastable configurations — the exponential of the spin glass “complexity” as obtained from the quantum Thouless-Anderson-Palmer equations. We also consider the statistical properties of the complexity itself and identify a set of contributions to the path integral which suggest a Poissonian distribution for the number of metastable configurations. Our results show that level spacing statistics can probe the ergodicity-breaking in quantum spin glasses and provide a way to generalize the notion of spin glass complexity beyond models with a semi-classical limit.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2025

Do holographic CFT states have unique semiclassical bulk duals?

Here, we discuss a situation where a holographic CFT state has multiple semiclassical bulk duals. In our example, a given holographic state has two simple, semiclassical descriptions, one with a closed universe, constructed using the gravitational path integral, and one without a closed universe, constructed using the extrapolate dictionary. This highlights an ambiguity in the AdS/CFT dictionary. We propose various options for resolving this tension although none is perfectly satisfactory. We also discuss what this implies for the black hole interior and the gravitational path integral.

AdS/CFT correspondence↗
DOE OSTI2014

Fast and accurate quantum molecular dynamics of dense plasmas across temperature regimes

Here, we develop and implement a new quantum molecular dynamics approximation that allows fast and accurate simulations of dense plasmas from cold to hot conditions. The method is based on a carefully designed orbital-free implementation of density functional theory. The results for hydrogen and aluminum are in very good agreement with Kohn-Sham (orbital-based) density functional theory and path integral Monte Carlo calculations for microscopic features such as the electron density as well as the equation of state. The present approach does not scale with temperature and hence extends to higher temperatures than is accessible in the Kohn-Sham method and lower temperatures than is accessible by path integral Monte Carlo calculations, while being significantly less computationally expensive than either of those two methods.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2024

Logarithmic Corrections to Kerr Thermodynamics

Recent work has shown that loop corrections from massless particles generate $\frac{3}{2}$ ⁢log⁡𝑇 Hawking corrections to black hole entropy which dominate the thermodynamics of cold near-extreme charged black holes. Here we adapt this analysis to near-extreme Kerr black holes. Like AdS 2 ×𝑆 2 , the near-horizon extreme Kerr (NHEK) metric has a family of normalizable zero modes corresponding to reparametrizations of boundary time. The path integral over these zero modes leads to an infrared divergence in the one-loop approximation to the Euclidean NHEK partition function. We regulate this divergence by retaining the leading finite temperature correction in the NHEK scaling limit. This “not-NHEK” geometry lifts the eigenvalues of the zero modes, rendering the path integral infrared finite. The quantum-corrected near-extremal entropy exhibits $\frac{3}{2}$ ⁢log⁡𝑇 Hawking behavior characteristic of the Schwarzian model and predicts a lifting of the ground state degeneracy for the extremal Kerr black hole.

General relativity↗
DOE OSTI2022

Axion anomalies

We study fermions derivatively coupled to axion-like or pseudoscalar fields, and show that the axial vector current of the fermions is not conserved in the limit where the fermion is massless. This apparent violation of the classical chiral symmetry is due to the background axion field. We compute the contributions to this anomalous Ward identity due to the pseudoscalar field alone, which arise in Minkowski space, as well as the effects due to an interaction with an external gravitational field. For the case of massless fermions, these interactions induce terms in the axion effective action that can be removed by the addition of local counterterms. We demonstrate that these counterterms are generated by the transformation of the path integral measure when transforming the theory from a form where the chiral symmetry is manifest to one where the symmetry is only apparent after using the classical equations of motion. We work perturbatively in Minkowski space and include the effects of interactions with a linearized gravitational field. Using the heat kernel method, we study the transformation properties of the path integral measure, and include the effects of non-linear gravity as well as interactions with gauge fields. Finally, we verify our relation by considering derivatively coupled fermions during pseudoscalar-driven inflation and computing the divergence of the axial current in de Sitter spacetime.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2021

Replica wormholes for an evaporating 2D black hole

Quantum extremal islands reproduce the unitary Page curve of an evaporating black hole. This has been derived by including replica wormholes in the gravitational path integral, but for the transient, evaporating black holes most relevant to Hawking’s paradox, these wormholes have not been analyzed in any detail. In this paper we study replica wormholes for black holes formed by gravitational collapse in Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity, and confirm that they lead to the island rule for the entropy. The main technical challenge is that replica wormholes rely on a Euclidean path integral, while the quantum extremal islands of an evaporating black hole exist only in Lorentzian signature. Furthermore, the Euclidean equations for the Schwarzian mode are non-local, so it is unclear how to connect to the local, Lorentzian dynamics of an evaporating black hole. We address these issues with Schwinger-Keldysh techniques and show how the non-local equations reduce to the local ‘boundary particle’ description in special cases.

2D gravity↗
DOE OSTI2023

Linear growth of circuit complexity from Brownian dynamics

How rapidly can a many-body quantum system generate randomness? Using path integral methods, we demonstrate that Brownian quantum systems have circuit complexity that grows linearly with time. In particular, we study Brownian clusters of N spins or fermions with time-dependent all-to-all interactions, and calculate the Frame Potential to characterize complexity growth in these models. In both cases the problem can be mapped to an effective statistical mechanics problem which we study using path integral methods. Within this framework it is straightforward to show that the kth Frame Potential comes within ϵ of the Haar value after a time of order t ~ kN + k log k + log ϵ –1 . Using a bound on the diamond norm, this implies that such circuits are capable of coming very close to a unitary k-design after a time of order t ~ kN. We also consider the same question for systems with a time-independent Hamiltonian and argue that a small amount of time-dependent randomness is sufficient to generate a k-design in linear time provided the underlying Hamiltonian is quantum chaotic. These models provide explicit examples of linear complexity growth that are analytically tractable and are directly applicable to practical applications calling for unitary k-designs.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Toward quantum tunneling from excited states: Recovering imaginary-time instantons from a real-time analysis

We revisit the path integral description of quantum tunneling and its generalization to excited states. For clarity, we focus on the simple toy model of a point particle in a double-well potential, for which we perform all steps explicitly. Instead of performing the familiar Wick rotation from physical to imaginary time—which is inconsistent with the requisite boundary conditions when treating tunneling from excited states—we regularize the path integral by adding an infinitesimal complex contribution to the Hamiltonian, while keeping time strictly real. We find that this gives rise to a complex stationary-phase solution, in agreement with recent insights from Picard-Lefshetz theory. We then show that there exists a class of analytic solutions for the corresponding equations of motion, which can be made to match the appropriate boundary conditions in the physically relevant limits of a vanishing regulator and an infinite physical time. We provide a detailed discussion of this nontrivial limit. We find that, for systems without an explicit time-dependence, our approach reproduces the picture of an instantonlike solution defined on a finite Euclidean-time interval. Lastly, we discuss the generalization of our approach to broader classes of systems, for which it serves as a reliable framework for high-precision calculations. Published by the American Physical Society 2025

Steingasser, Thomas (ORCID:0000000217262117)↗
DOE OSTI2019

Mean-field construction for spectrum of one-dimensional Bose polaron

Highlights: •An efficient path-integral formulation of the Bose polaron problem is proposed. •The spectrum of an impurity moving in 1D Bose gas is given by analytic formula. •The effective-mass approximation reproduces well the exact Bose polaron spectrum. -- Abstract: The full momentum dependence of spectrum of a point-like impurity immersed in a dilute one-dimensional Bose gas is calculated on the mean-field level. In particular we elaborate, to the finite-momentum Bose polaron, the path-integral approach whose semi-classical approximation leads to the conventional mean-field treatment of the problem while quantum corrections can be easily accounted by standard loop expansion techniques. The extracted low-energy parameters of impurity spectrum, namely, the binding energy and the effective mass of particle, are shown to be in qualitative agreement with the results of quantum Monte Carlo simulations.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2018

Natural Gas Fugitive Leak Detection Using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle: Localization and Quantification of Emission Rate

We describe a set of methods for locating and quantifying natural gas leaks using a small unmanned aerial system equipped with a path-integrated methane sensor. The algorithms are developed as part of a system to enable the continuous monitoring of methane, supported by a series of over 200 methane release trials covering 51 release location and flow rate combinations. The system was found throughout the trials to reliably distinguish between cases with and without a methane release down to 2 standard cubic feet per hour (0.011 g/s). Among several methods evaluated for horizontal localization, the location corresponding to the maximum path-integrated methane reading performed best with a mean absolute error of 1.2 m if the results from several flights are spatially averaged. Additionally, a method of rotating the data around the estimated leak location according to the wind is developed, with the leak magnitude calculated from the average crosswind integrated flux in the region near the source location. The system is initially applied at the well pad scale (100–1000 m2 area). Validation of these methods is presented including tests with unknown leak locations. Sources of error, including GPS uncertainty, meteorological variables, data averaging, and flight pattern coverage, are discussed. The techniques described here are important for surveys of small facilities where the scales for dispersion-based approaches are not readily applicable.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗
DOE OSTI2022

Baby universes and worldline field theories

The quantum gravity path integral involves a sum over topologies that invites comparisons to worldsheet string theory and to Feynman diagrams of quantum field theory. However, the latter are naturally associated with the non-abelian algebra of quantum fields, while the former has been argued to define an abelian algebra of superselected observables associated with partition-function-like quantities at an asymptotic boundary. We resolve this apparent tension by pointing out a variety of discrete choices that must be made in constructing a Hilbert space from such path integrals, and arguing that the natural choices for quantum gravity differ from those used to construct QFTs. We focus on one-dimensional models of quantum gravity in order to make direct comparisons with worldline QFT. Finally, we also restrict attention to models in which worldlines do not split apart or join together.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2026

Quantum mechanics and observers for gravity in a closed universe

Recent arguments based on the quantum extremal surface formula or the gravitational path integral have given fairly compelling evidence that the Hilbert space of quantum gravity in a closed universe is one-dimensional and real. How can this be consistent with the complexity of our own experiences? In this paper we propose that the experiences of any observer Ob in a closed universe can be approximately described by a quantum mechanical theory with a Hilbert space whose dimension is roughly e S Ob , where S Ob is the number of degrees of freedom of Ob. Moreover we argue that the errors in this description are exponentially small in S Ob . We give evidence for this proposal by incorporating it into the gravitational path integral and the coding interpretation of holography in simple models and seeing that it works, and we explain how similar effects arise in black hole physics in appropriate circumstances.

AdS-CFT Correspondence↗
DOE OSTI2014

Demonstration of x-ray fluorescence imaging of a high-energy-density plasma

Experiments at the Trident Laser Facility have successfully demonstrated the use of x-ray fluorescence imaging (XRFI) to diagnose shocked carbonized resorcinol formaldehyde (CRF) foams doped with Ti. One laser beam created a shock wave in the doped foam. A second laser beam produced a flux of vanadium He-α x-rays, which in turn induced Ti K-shell fluorescence within the foam. Spectrally resolved 1D imaging of the x-ray fluorescence provided shock location and compression measurements. Additionally, experiments using a collimator demonstrated that one can probe specific regions within a target. These results show that XRFI is a capable alternative to path-integrated measurements for diagnosing hydrodynamic experiments at high energy density.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2018

Unraveling electronic absorption spectra using nuclear quantum effects: Photoactive yellow protein and green fluorescent protein chromophores in water

Many physical phenomena must be accounted for to accurately model solution-phase optical spectra line shapes, from the sampling of chromophore-solvent configurations to the electronic-vibrational transitions leading to vibronic fine structure. Here we thoroughly explore the role of nuclear quantum effects, direct and indirect solvent effects, and vibronic effects in the computation of the optical spectrum of the aqueously solvated anionic chromophores of green fluorescent protein (GFP) and photoactive yellow protein (PYP). By analyzing the chromophore and solvent configurations, the distributions of vertical excitation energies, the absorption spectra computed within the ensemble approach, and the absorption spectra computed within the ensemble plus zero-temperature Franck-Condon approach, we introduce how solvent, nuclear quantum effects, and vibronic transitions alter the optical absorption spectra. We discover that including nuclear quantum effects in the sampling of chromophore-solvent configurations using ab initio path integral molecular dynamics simulations leads to improved spectral shapes through three mechanisms. The three mechanisms that lead to line shape broadening and a better description of the high-energy tail are softening of heavy atom bonds in the chromophore that couple to the optically bright state, widening the distribution of vertical excitation energies from more diverse solvation environments, and redistributing spectral weight from the 0-0 vibronic transition to higher energy vibronic transitions when computing the Franck-Condon spectrum in a frozen solvent pocket. The absorption spectra computed using the combined ensemble plus zero-temperature Franck-Condon approach yield significant improvements in spectral shape and width compared to spectra computed with the ensemble approach. Using the combined approach with configurations sampled from path integral molecular dynamics trajectories presents a significant step forward in accurately modeling the absorption spectra of aqueously solvated chromophores.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2018

Quantum distillation of Hilbert spaces, semi-classics and anomaly matching

A symmetry-twisted boundary condition of the path integral provides a suitable framework for the semi-classical analysis of nonperturbative quantum field theories (QFTs), and we reinterpret it from the viewpoint of the Hilbert space. An appropriate twist with the unbroken symmetry can potentially produce huge cancellations among excited states in the state-sum, without affecting the ground states; we call this effect “quantum distillation”. Quantum distillation can provide the underlying mechanism for adiabatic continuity, by preventing a phase transition under S 1 compactification. We revisit this point via the ’t Hooft anomaly matching condition when it constrains the vacuum structure of the theory on $\mathbb{R} $ d and upon compactification. We show that there is a precise relation between the persistence of the anomaly upon compactification, the Hilbert space quantum distillation, and the semi-classical analysis of the corresponding symmetry-twisted path integrals. We motivate quantum distillation in quantum mechanical examples, and then study its non-trivial action in QFT, with the example of the 2D Grassmannian sigma model Gr(N, M). We also discuss the connection of quantum distillation with large-N volume independence and flavor-momentum transmutation.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗