MIT Center for Theoretical Physics – a Leinweber Institute

We introduce a new mechanism for the simultaneous generation of baryon and dark matter asymmetries through ultraviolet-dominated freeze-in scatterings. The mechanism relies on heavy Majorana neutrinos that connect the visible Standard Model sector to a dark sector through the neutrino portal. Following reheating of the visible sector to a temperature well below the heavy neutrino masses, we show that 2-to-2 scattering processes can populate the dark sector and generate both baryon and dark matter asymmetries. In some parameter regions, the dominant source of baryon asymmetry can be charge transfer from the dark sector, a process we call dark wash-in. We also demonstrate that annihilation of the dark matter to massless states within the dark sector can deplete the symmetric population without destroying the net baryon charge to leave only an asymmetric dark matter abundance today. Depending on the specific model parameters, the observed baryon and dark matter abundances can be attained with heavy neutrino masses $M_N \gtrsim 10^{10}$ GeV, and dark matter masses in the range 0.1 GeV $\lesssim m_\chi \lesssim 10^3$ GeV if the dark matter relic abundance is mainly asymmetric and even lower masses if it is symmetric.

We revisit perturbative unitarity in scalar field inflation with a nonminimal coupling, with Higgs inflation serving as the most prominent example. Although such models are phenomenologically successful, it is critical to examine whether or not unitarity violations spoil their theoretical self-consistency. The analysis of these issues has so far typically relied on order-of-magnitude estimates of scattering amplitudes, which are appropriate for generic parameters. It is not evident that these methods apply to scenarios relying on a near-critical inflationary potential, for which an interplay of both small scalar self-couplings and nonminimal couplings could partially alleviate the unitarity issues. To allow for an exploration of this possibility, we consider the full $S$-matrix for the relevant scattering processes, taking into account important phase space volume factors, leading to a precise evaluation of the cut-off scale. In the single-field case, we demonstrate that near-criticality raises the cut-off scale considerably, compared to previous estimates. In the multifield case, momentum-dependent self-interactions in the kinetic sector lower the cut-off compared to the single-field case to a value comparable to but slightly larger than previous estimates. We carefully study both the single-field and multifield cases in metric and metric-affine (Palatini) formulations of gravity, as well as introduce a new phenomenologically viable model with a canonical kinetic term and a significantly raised cut-off, and discuss the importance of background field effects.

Simulating generic quantum states and dynamics is practically intractable using classical computers. However, certain special classes -- namely Clifford and matchgate circuits -- permit efficient computation. They provide invaluable tools for studying many-body physics, quantum chemistry, and quantum computation. While both play foundational roles across multiple disciplines, the origins of their tractability seem disparate, and their relationship remain unclear. A deeper understanding of such tractable classes could expand their scope and enable a wide range of new applications. In this work, we make progress toward the unified understanding of the Clifford and matchgate -- these two classes are, in fact, distinct special cases of a single underlying structure. Specifically, we introduce the 2D Quon language, which combines Majorana worldlines with their underlying spacetime topology to diagrammatically represent quantum processes and tensor networks. In full generality, the 2D Quon language is universal -- capable of representing arbitrary quantum states, dynamics, or tensor networks -- yet they become especially powerful in describing Clifford and matchgate classes. Each class can be efficiently characterized in a visually recognizable manner using the Quon framework. This capability naturally gives rise to several families of efficiently computable tensor networks introduced in this work: punctured matchgates, hybrid Clifford-matchgate-MPS, and ansatze generated from factories of tractable networks. All of these exhibit high non-Cliffordness, high non-matchgateness, and large bipartite entanglement entropy. We discuss a range of applications of our approach, from recovering well-known results such as the Kramers-Wannier duality and the star-triangle relation of the Ising model, to enabling variational optimization with novel ansatz states.

We show that the honeycomb tight-binding model hosts an exact microscopic avatar of its low-energy SU(2) valley symmetry and parity anomaly. Specifically, the SU(2) valley symmetry arises from a collection of conserved, integer-quantized charge operators that obey the Onsager algebra. Along with lattice reflection and time-reversal symmetries, this Onsager symmetry has a Lieb-Schultz-Mattis (LSM) anomaly that matches the parity anomaly in the IR. Indeed, we show that any local Hamiltonian commuting with these symmetries cannot have a trivial unique gapped ground state. We study the phase diagram of the simplest symmetric model and survey various deformations, including Haldane's mass term, which preserves only the Onsager symmetry. Our results place the parity anomaly in 2+1D alongside Schwinger's anomaly in 1+1D and Witten's SU(2) anomaly in 3+1D as 't Hooft anomalies that can arise from the Onsager symmetry on the lattice.