Justin H. Wilson

293 Nicholson Hall,

Dept. of Physics & Astronomy,

Louisiana State University,

Baton Rouge, LA 70803

I am a theoretical and computational condensed matter theorist with a diverse set of interests from quantum materials to quantum information and analog gravity.

My general philosophy to physics is well summarized by the late Phil Anderson’s famous article More is Different. Fundamental to our understanding of the universe is how matter interacts to create materials and phases; quantum mechanics and field theory underpin this understanding and is a key point of study within condensed matter theory.

I received my Ph.D. in 2015 with Victor Galitski, did a first postdoc at Caltech with Gil Refael, and a second at Rutgers with Jed Pixley. In 2021, I joined the faculty at Louisiana State University as an Assistant Professor.

Some of my research interests include:

Quantum materials: The simulation of both toy- and real-models of quantum materials such as Weyl semimetals, topological insulators, and layered quasi-2d materials such as graphene. In particular, how can disorder and incommensuration fundamentally alter the physics in the system. The physics of non-interacting electrons as well as potential correlated phases implied by band reconstruction.
Dynamical phases of information: Two fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics, entanglement and measurement, can be used to reveal new phases that exist in a steady state far-from-equilibrium. I am trying to understand and characterize this new frontier of quantum phases and transitions with a variety of numerical and analytical techniques. This use of entanglement and measurements makes these phases potentially important to quantum computation and information: revealing phases that can retain information despite local measurements.
Topology out-of-equilibrium: Can the dynamics of systems reveal novel topological phases or completely new dynamical phases? I work with topological systems out-of-equililbrium to uncover (1) how topology can be understood when its not just a property of the filled, equilibrium bands and (2) what observable consequences this has.
Analog gravity: Quantum field theory in curved space famously has helped us understand quantum aspects of black holes and the inflationary universe, along with other phenomena. However, this same math can be used to understand phenomena in low-energy systems (including cold-atomic clouds, nonlinear optics, and the hydrodynamics of water). I am interested in understanding how we can understand new and old phenomena with the lens of analog gravity, and importantly, how quantum field theory works in a system which can be experimentally controlled and whose constituents we know precisely. For instance, the Hawking effect can be recast in a superfluid as the spontaneous creation of phonons (“quantum” sound waves) between regions of supersonic and subsonic fluid flow.

news

May 1, 2022	Analog spacetimes from nonrelativistic Goldstone modes in spinor condensates published in Physical Review A
Feb 3, 2022	Operator Scaling Dimensions and Multifractality at Measurement-Induced Transitions receives Editor's suggestion in Physical Review Letters
Dec 29, 2021	Magnetic Weyl Semimetallic Phase in Thin Films of Eu₂Ir₂O₇ published in Physical Review Letters
Dec 26, 2021	Put together a new website layout.

selected publications

AnnPhys

Rare Regions and Avoided Quantum Criticality in Disordered Weyl Semimetals and Superconductors

Pixley, J.H., and Wilson, Justin H.

Ann. Phys. (N. Y.) 435, 168455 (2021).

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Disorder in Weyl semimetals and superconductors is surprisingly subtle, attracting attention and competing theories in recent years. In this brief review, we discuss the current theoretical understanding of the effects of short-ranged, quenched disorder on the low energy-properties of three-dimensional, topological Weyl semimetals and superconductors. We focus on the role of non-perturbative rare region effects on destabilizing the semimetal phase and rounding the expected semimetal-to-diffusive metal transition into a cross over. Furthermore, the consequences of disorder on the resulting nature of excitations, transport, and topology are reviewed. New results on a bipartite random hopping model are presented that confirm previous results in a p+ip Weyl superconductor, demonstrating that particle–hole symmetry is insufficient to help stabilize the Weyl semimetal phase in the presence of disorder. The nature of the avoided transition in a model for a single Weyl cone in the continuum is discussed. We close with a discussion of open questions and future directions.
npj

Magic-Angle Semimetals

Fu, Yixing, König, Elio J., Wilson, Justin H., Chou, Yang-Zhi, and Pixley, Jedediah H.

npj Quantum Materials 5, 71 (2020). Shared under CC BY 4.0

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Breakthroughs in two-dimensional van der Waals heterostructures have revealed that twisting creates a moiré pattern that quenches the kinetic energy of electrons, allowing for exotic many-body states. We show that cold atomic, trapped ion, and metamaterial systems can emulate the effects of a twist in many models from one to three dimensions. Further, we demonstrate at larger angles (and argue at smaller angles) that by considering incommensurate effects, the magic-angle effect becomes a single-particle quantum phase transition (including in a model for twisted bilayer graphene in the chiral limit). We call these models “magic-angle semimetals”. Each contains nodes in the band structure and an incommensurate modulation. At magic-angle criticality, we report a nonanalytic density of states, flat bands, multifractal wave functions that Anderson delocalize in momentum space, and an essentially divergent effective interaction scale. As a particular example, we discuss how to observe this effect in an ultracold Fermi gas.
PRA

Analog Spacetimes from Nonrelativistic Goldstone Modes in Spinor Condensates

Wilson, Justin H., Curtis, Jonathan B., and Galitski, Victor M.

Phys. Rev. A 105, 043316 (2022).

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It is well established that linear dispersive modes in a flowing quantum fluid behave as though they are coupled to an Einstein-Hilbert metric and exhibit a host of phenomena coming from quantum field theory in curved space, including Hawking radiation. We extend this analogy to any nonrelativistic Goldstone mode in a flowing spinor Bose-Einstein condensate. In addition to showing the linear dispersive result for all such modes, we show that the quadratically dispersive modes couple to a special nonrelativistic spacetime called a Newton-Cartan geometry. The kind of spacetime (Einstein-Hilbert or Newton-Cartan) is intimately linked to the mean-field phase of the condensate. To illustrate the general result, we further provide the specific theory in the context of a pseudo-spin-1/2 condensate where we can tune between relativistic and nonrelativistic geometries. We uncover the fate of Hawking radiation upon such a transition: it vanishes and remains absent in the Newton-Cartan geometry despite the fact that any fluid flow creates a horizon for certain wave numbers. Finally, we use the coupling to different spacetimes to compute and relate various energy and momentum currents in these analog systems. While this result is general, present day experiments can realize these different spacetimes including the magnon modes for spin-1 condensates such as Rb-87, Li-7, K-41 (Newton-Cartan), and Na-23 (Einstein-Hilbert).
PRL

Operator Scaling Dimensions and Multifractality at Measurement-Induced Transitions

Zabalo, A., Gullans, M. J., Wilson, J. H., Vasseur, R., Ludwig, A. W. W., Gopalakrishnan, S., Huse, David A., and Pixley, J. H.

Phys. Rev. Lett. 128, 050602 (2022). © 2022 American Physical Society

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Repeated local measurements of quantum many-body systems can induce a phase transition in their entanglement structure. These measurement-induced phase transitions (MIPTs) have been studied for various types of dynamics, yet most cases yield quantitatively similar critical exponents, making it unclear how many distinct universality classes are present. Here, we probe the properties of the conformal field theories governing these MIPTs using a numerical transfer-matrix method, which allows us to extract the effective central charge, as well as the first few low-lying scaling dimensions of operators at these critical points for (1+1)-dimensional systems. Our results provide convincing evidence that the generic and Clifford MIPTs for qubits lie in different universality classes and that both are distinct from the percolation transition for qudits in the limit of large on-site Hilbert space dimension. For the generic case, we find strong evidence of multifractal scaling of correlation functions at the critical point, reflected in a continuous spectrum of scaling dimensions.