Daily Papers

We show how many-body effects associated with background spin dynamics control the high-harmonic generation (HHG) in Mott insulators by analyzing the two-leg ladder Hubbard model. Spin dynamics activated by the interchain hopping t_y drastically modifies the HHG features. When two chains are decoupled (t_y=0), HHG originates from the dynamics of coherent doublon-holon pairs because of spin-charge separation. With increasing t_y, the doublon-holon pairs lose their coherence due to their interchain hopping and resultant spin-strings. Furthermore, the HHG signal from spin-polarons -- charges dressed by spin clouds -- leads to an additional plateau in the HHG spectrum. For large t_y, we identify unconventional HHG processes involving three elementary excitations -- two polarons and one magnon. Our results demonstrate the nontrivial nature of HHG in strongly correlated systems, and its qualitative differences to conventional semiconductors.

We point out that there are two different chiral spin liquid states on the triangular lattice and discuss the conducting states that are expected on doping them. These states labeled CS1 and CS2 are associated with two distinct topological orders with different edge states, although they both spontaneously break time reversal symmetry and exhibit the same quantized spin Hall conductance. While CSL1 is related to the Kalmeyer-Laughlin state, CSL2 is the ν=4 member of Kitaev's 16 fold way classification. Both states are described within the Abrikosov fermion representation of spins, and the effect of doping can be accessed by introducing charged holons. On doping CSL2, condensation of charged holons leads to a topological d+id superconductor. However on doping CSL1 , in sharp contrast , two different scenarios can arise: first, if holons condense, a chiral metal with doubled unit cell and finite Hall conductivity is obtained. However, in a second novel scenario, the internal magnetic flux adjusts with doping and holons form a bosonic integer quantum Hall (BIQH) state. Remarkably, the latter phase is identical to a d+id superconductor. In this case the Mott insulator to superconductor transition is associated with a bosonic variant of the integer quantum Hall plateau transition for the holon. We connect the above two scenarios to two recent numerical studies of doped chiral spin liquids on triangular lattice. Our work clarifies the complex relation between topological superconductors, chiral spin liquids and quantum criticality .

Transitions among quantum Hall plateaux share a suite of remarkable experimental features, such as semi-circle laws and duality relations, whose accuracy and robustness are difficult to explain directly in terms of the detailed dynamics of the microscopic electrons. They would naturally follow if the low-energy transport properties were governed by an emergent discrete duality group relating the different plateaux, but no explicit examples of interacting systems having such a group are known. Recent progress using the AdS/CFT correspondence has identified examples with similar duality groups, but without the DC ohmic conductivity characteristic of quantum Hall experiments. We use this to propose a simple holographic model for low-energy quantum Hall systems, with a nonzero DC conductivity that automatically exhibits all of the observed consequences of duality, including the existence of the plateaux and the semi-circle transitions between them. The model can be regarded as a strongly coupled analog of the old `composite boson' picture of quantum Hall systems. Non-universal features of the model can be used to test whether it describes actual materials, and we comment on some of these in our proposed model.

The dynamic of holography between anti-de Sitter space holography and de Sitter holography is a very fascinating comparison, which provides many key insights into what we expect from holography in general. In this Essay, we highlight this dynamic with three examples: first, when taking Wheeler-DeWitt states to the asymptotic boundary, the dual interpretation is unclear in de Sitter. Second, what we make of bulk reconstruction and subregion duality in AdS/CFT is not trivially reflected in the dS/CFT scenario. Third, a way of formulating emergence and subregion-subalgebra duality in de Sitter space does not yet exist. With these examples, we provide some musings on this canvas of holography in the settings of (A)dS/CFT.

We determine the 4-point correlation function and amplitude in planar, maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory to 12 loops. We find that the recently-introduced 'double-triangle' rule in fact implies the previously described square and pentagon rules; and when applied to 12 loops, it fully determines the 11-loop correlator and fixes all but 3 of the (22,024,902) 12-loop coefficients; these remaining coefficients can be subsequently fixed using the '(single-)triangle' rule. Not only do we confirm the Catalan conjecture for anti-prism graphs, but we discover evidence for a greatly generalized Catalan conjecture for the coefficients of all polygon-framed fishnet graphs. We provide all contributions through 12 loops as ancillary files to this work.

A fully differential calculation in perturbative quantum chromodynamics is presented for the production of massive photon pairs at hadron colliders. All next-to-leading order perturbative contributions from quark-antiquark, gluon-(anti)quark, and gluon-gluon subprocesses are included, as well as all-orders resummation of initial-state gluon radiation valid at next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. The region of phase space is specified in which the calculation is most reliable. Good agreement is demonstrated with data from the Fermilab Tevatron, and predictions are made for more detailed tests with CDF and DO data. Predictions are shown for distributions of diphoton pairs produced at the energy of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Distributions of the diphoton pairs from the decay of a Higgs boson are contrasted with those produced from QCD processes at the LHC, showing that enhanced sensitivity to the signal can be obtained with judicious selection of events.

Optics and lenses are abstract categorical gadgets that model systems with bidirectional data flow. In this paper we observe that the denotational definition of optics - identifying two optics as equivalent by observing their behaviour from the outside - is not suitable for operational, software oriented approaches where optics are not merely observed, but built with their internal setups in mind. We identify operational differences between denotationally isomorphic categories of cartesian optics and lenses: their different composition rule and corresponding space-time tradeoffs, positioning them at two opposite ends of a spectrum. With these motivations we lift the existing categorical constructions and their relationships to the 2-categorical level, showing that the relevant operational concerns become visible. We define the 2-category 2-Optic(C) whose 2-cells explicitly track optics' internal configuration. We show that the 1-category Optic(C) arises by locally quotienting out the connected components of this 2-category. We show that the embedding of lenses into cartesian optics gets weakened from a functor to an oplax functor whose oplaxator now detects the different composition rule. We determine the difficulties in showing this functor forms a part of an adjunction in any of the standard 2-categories. We establish a conjecture that the well-known isomorphism between cartesian lenses and optics arises out of the lax 2-adjunction between their double-categorical counterparts. In addition to presenting new research, this paper is also meant to be an accessible introduction to the topic.

We give a simple, fully correct, and assumption-light replacement for the contested "domain-extension" in Step 9 of a recent windowed-QFT lattice algorithm with complex-Gaussian windows~chen2024quantum. The published Step~9 suffers from a periodicity/support mismatch. We present a pair-shift difference construction that coherently cancels all unknown offsets, produces an exact uniform CRT-coset state over Z_{P}, and then uses the QFT to enforce the intended modular linear relation. The unitary is reversible, uses poly(log M_2) gates, and preserves the algorithm's asymptotics. Project Page: https://github.com/yifanzhang-pro/quantum-lattice.

If h is a ring-valued function on a simplicial complex G we can define two matrices L and g, where the matrix entries are the h energy of homoclinic intersections. We know that the sum over all h values on G is equal to the sum of the Green matrix entries g(x,y). We also have already seen that that the determinants of L or g are both the product of the h(x). In the case where h(x) is the parity of dimension, the sum of the energy values was the standard Euler characteristic and the determinant was a unit. If h(x) was the unit in the ring then L,g are integral quadratic forms which are isospectral and inverse matrices of each other. We prove here that the quadratic energy expression summing over all pairs h(x)^* h(y) of intersecting sets is a signed sum of squares of Green function entries. The quadratic energy expression is Wu characteristic in the case when h is dimension parity. For general h, the quadratic energy expression resembles an Ising Heisenberg type interaction. The conjugate of g is the inverse of L if h takes unit values in a normed ring or in the group of unitary operators in an operator algebra.

We study numerically the 6D (2,0) superconformal bootstrap using the soft-Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm as a stochastic optimizer. We focus on the four-point functions of scalar superconformal primaries in the energy-momentum multiplet. Starting from the supergravity limit, we perform searches for adiabatically varied central charges and derive two curves for a collection of 80 CFT data (70 of these data correspond to unprotected long multiplets and 10 to protected short multiplets). We conjecture that the two curves capture the A- and D-series (2,0) theories. Our results are competitive when compared to the existing bounds coming from standard numerical bootstrap methods, and data obtained using the OPE inversion formula. With this paper we are also releasing our Python implementation of the SAC algorithm, BootSTOP. The paper discusses the main functionality features of this package.

We introduce the Mixed-Integer Quadratically Constrained Quadratic Programming framework for the quantum compilation problem and apply it in the context of topological quantum computing. In this setting, quantum gates are realized by sequences of elementary braids of quasiparticles with exotic fractional statistics in certain two-dimensional topological condensed matter systems, described by effective topological quantum field theories. We specifically focus on a non-semisimple version of topological field theory, which provides a foundation for an extended theory of Ising anyons and which has recently been shown by Iulianelli et al., Nature Communications {\bf 16}, 6408 (2025), to permit universal quantum computation. While the proofs of this pioneering result are existential in nature, the mixed integer programming provides an approach to explicitly construct quantum gates in topological systems. We demonstrate this by focusing specifically on the entangling controlled-NOT operation, and its local equivalence class, using braiding operations in the non-semisimple Ising system. This illustrates the utility of the Mixed-Integer Quadratically Constrained Quadratic Programming for topological quantum compilation.

We elaborate on the role of extremal surfaces probing the internal space in AdS/CFT. Extremal surfaces in AdS quantify the "geometric" entanglement between different regions in physical space for the dual CFT. This, however, is just one of many ways to split a given system into subsectors, and extremal surfaces in the internal space should similarly quantify entanglement between subsectors of the theory. For the case of AdS_5timesS^5, their area was interpreted as entanglement entropy between U(n) and U(m) subsectors of U(n+m) N=4 SYM. Making this proposal precise is subtle for a number of reasons, the most obvious being that from the bulk one usually has access to gauge-invariant quantities only, while a split into subgroups is inherently gauge variant. We study N=4 SYM on the Coulomb branch, where some of the issues can be mitigated and the proposal can be sharpened. Continuing back to the original AdS_5timesS^5 geometry, we obtain a modified proposal, based on the relation of the internal space to the R-symmetry group.

Gauging fermion parity and summing over spin structures are subtly distinct operations. We introduce 'bosonisation cohomology' groups H_B^{d+2}(X) to capture this difference, for theories in spacetime dimension d equipped with maps to some X. Non-trivial classes in H_B^{d+2}(X) contain theories for which (-1)^F is anomaly-free, but spin structure summation is anomalous. We formulate a sequence of cobordism groups whose failure to be exact is measured by H_B^{d+2}(X), and from here we compute it for X=pt. The result is non-trivial only in dimensions din 4Z+2, being due to the presence of gravitational anomalies. The first few are H_B^4=Z_2, probed by a theory of 8 Majorana-Weyl fermions in d=2, then H_B^8=Z_8, H_B^{12}=Z_{16}times Z_2. We rigorously derive a general formula extending this to every spacetime dimension. Along the way, we compile many general facts about (fermionic and bosonic) anomaly polynomials, and about spin and pin^- (co)bordism generators, that we hope might serve as a useful reference for physicists working with these objects. We briefly discuss some physics applications, including how the H_B^{12} class is trivialised in supergravity. Despite the name, and notation, we make no claim that H_B^bullet(X) actually defines a cohomology theory (in the Eilenberg-Steenrod sense).

An influential conjecture by Witten states that there is an instanton Floer homology of four-manifolds with corners that in certain situations is isomorphic to Khovanov homology of a given knot K. The Floer chain complex is generated by Nahm pole solutions of the Kapustin-Witten equations on R^3 times R^+_y with an additional monopole-like singular behaviour along the knot K inside the three-dimensional boundary at y=0. The Floer differential is given by counting solutions of the Haydys-Witten equations that interpolate between Kapustin-Witten solutions along an additional flow direction R_s. This article investigates solutions of a decoupled version of the Kapustin-Witten and Haydys-Witten equations on R_s times R^3 times R^+_y, which in contrast to the full equations exhibit a Hermitian Yang-Mills structure and can be viewed as a lift of the extended Bogomolny equations (EBE) from three to five dimensions. Inspired by Gaiotto-Witten's approach of adiabatically braiding EBE-solutions to obtain generators of the Floer homology, we propose that there is an equivalence between adiabatic solutions of the decoupled Haydys-Witten equations and non-vertical paths in the moduli space of EBE-solutions fibered over the space of monopole positions. Moreover, we argue that the Grothendieck-Springer resolution of the Lie algebra of the gauge group provides a finite-dimensional model of this moduli space of monopole solutions. These considerations suggest an intriguing similarity between Haydys-Witten instanton Floer homology and symplectic Khovanov homology and provide a novel approach towards a proof of Witten's gauge-theoretic interpretations of Khovanov homology.

Building on the iHopf algebra realization of quasi-split universal iquantum groups developed in a prequel, we construct the dual canonical basis for a universal iquantum group of arbitrary finite type, which are further shown to be preserved by the ibraid group action; this recovers the results of Lu-Pan in ADE type obtained earlier in a geometric approach. Moreover, we identify the dual canonical basis for the Drinfeld double quantum group of arbitrary finite type, which is realized via iHopf algebra on the double Borel, with Berenstein-Greenstein's double canonical basis, settling several of their conjectures.

In the 3-3-1 model with right-handed neutrinos, three triplets of scalars engender the correct sequence of symmetry breaking, SU(3)_C times SU(3)_L times U(1)_X rightarrow SU(3)_C times SU(2)_L times U(1)_Y rightarrow SU(3)_C times U(1)_{EM}, generating mass for all fermions, except neutrinos. Tiny neutrino masses may be achieved by adding one sextet of scalars to the original scalar content. As consequence, it emerges a very complex scalar sector, involving terms that violate lepton number explicitly, too. The main obstacle to the development of the phenomenology of such scenario is the knowledge of its spectrum of scalars since, now, there are 15 massive scalar particles on it. The proposal of this work is to do an exhaustive analysis of such scalar sector with lepton number being explicitly violated at low, electroweak and high energy scales by means of trilinear terms in the potential. The first case can be addressed analytically and, as a nice result, we have observed that the scalar content of such case is split into two categories: One belonging to the 331 energy scale and the other belonging to the EWSB energy scale, with the last recovering the well known THDM+triplet. For the other cases, the scalar sector can be addressed only numerically. Hence, we proposed a very general approach for the numerical study of the potential, avoiding simplifications that can make us reach conclusions without foundation. We show that, in the case of lepton number being explicitly violated at electroweak scale, it is possible to recover the same physics of the THDM+triplet, as the previous case. Among all the possibilities, we call the attention to one special case which generates the 3HDM+triplet scenario. For the last case, when lepton number is violated at high energy scale, the sextet become very massive and decouples from the original scalar content of the 3-3-1 model.

Colloids play an important role in fundamental science as well as in nature and technology. They have had a strong impact on the fundamental understanding of statistical physics. For example, colloids have helped to obtain a better understanding of collective phenomena, ranging from phase transitions and glass formation to the swarming of active Brownian particles. Yet the success of colloidal systems hinges crucially on the specific physical and chemical properties of the colloidal particles, i.e. particles with the appropriate characteristics must be available. Here we present an idea to create particles with freely selectable properties. The properties might depend, for example, on the presence of other particles (hence mimicking specific pair or many-body interactions), previous configurations (hence introducing some memory or feedback), or a directional bias (hence changing the dynamics). Without directly interfering with the sample, each particle is fully controlled and can receive external commands through a predefined algorithm that can take into account any input parameters. This is realized with computer-controlled colloids, which we term cybloids - short for cybernetic colloids. The potential of cybloids is illustrated by programming a time-delayed external potential acting on a single colloid and interaction potentials for many colloids. Both an attractive harmonic potential and an annular potential are implemented. For a single particle, this programming can cause subdiffusive behavior or lend activity. For many colloids, the programmed interaction potential allows to select a crystal structure at wish. Beyond these examples, we discuss further opportunities which cybloids offer.

The decays of pseudoscalar mesons to real and virtual photons as well as neutrino-antineutrino pairs are considered in the framework of the dispersive method based on Anomaly Sum Rules. The contribution of singlet channel involving the new non-perturbative gluon form factor of virtual photon B(q^2) is systematically taken into account. The detailed analysis of its dependence on photon virtuality q^2 relying on the available data for meson transition fomfactors is performed. It is shown that B has quite a nontrivial structure at q^2 sim 1 GeV^2 which may be a signal of the existence of pseudoscalar glueball with a mass about 1.5-2 GeV. The calculation of the decay to νbar ν pairs leads to the compatibility with the result of Arnellos, Marciano and Parsa of 1982, when pion decay is considered neglecting the mixing effects. The account for these effects results, however, in the enhancement of pion branching ratio by a factor of 3, while that for eta decay is larger by several orders of magnitude. It is stressed, that dependence on the pair invariant mass is entirely defined by QCD and coincides with that of the meson transition form factor. The role of obtained results for the physics at HHaS detector at HIAF is discussed.

Collider-testable type I seesaw extensions of the Standard Model are generally protected by an approximate lepton number (LN) symmetry. Consequently, they predict pseudo-Dirac heavy neutral leptons (HNLs) composed of two nearly degenerate Majorana fields. The interference between the two mass eigenstates can induce heavy neutrino-antineutrino oscillations (NNOs) leading to observable lepton number violation (LNV), even though the LN symmetry is approximately conserved. These NNOs could be resolved in long-lived HNL searches at collider experiments, such as the proposed Future Circular e^+e^- Collider (FCC-ee) or Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC). However, during their Z-pole runs, the LN carried away by the light (anti)neutrinos produced alongside the HNLs prevents LNV from being observed directly. Nevertheless, NNOs materialise as oscillating signatures in final state distributions. We discuss and compare a selection of such oscillating observables, and perform a Monte Carlo simulation to assess the parameter space in which NNOs could be resolved.

We show how the Schur-Weyl duality that exists between the partition algebra and the symmetric group results in a stronger theoretical foundation for characterising all of the possible permutation equivariant neural networks whose layers are some tensor power of the permutation representation M_n of the symmetric group S_n. In doing so, we unify two separate bodies of literature, and we correct some of the major results that are now widely quoted by the machine learning community. In particular, we find a basis of matrices for the learnable, linear, permutation equivariant layer functions between such tensor power spaces in the standard basis of M_n by using an elegant graphical representation of a basis of set partitions for the partition algebra and its related vector spaces. Also, we show how we can calculate the number of weights that must appear in these layer functions by looking at certain paths through the McKay quiver for M_n. Finally, we describe how our approach generalises to the construction of neural networks that are equivariant to local symmetries.

We give a complete characterization of the holonomies of strictly convex cusps and of round cusps in convex projective geometry. We build families of generalized cusps of non-maximal rank associated to each strictly convex or round cusp. We also extend Ballas-Cooper-Leitner's definition of generalized cusp to allow for virtually solvable fundamental group, and we produce the first such example with non-virtually nilpotent fundamental group. Along with a companion paper, this allows to build strictly convex cusps and generalized cusps whose fundamental group is any finitely generated virtually nilpotent group. This also has interesting consequences for the theory of relatively Anosov representations.

SO(3)-equivariant networks are the dominant models for machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs). The key operation of such networks is the Clebsch-Gordan (CG) tensor product, which is computationally expensive. To accelerate the computation, we develop tensor decomposition networks (TDNs) as a class of approximately equivariant networks in which CG tensor products are replaced by low-rank tensor decompositions, such as the CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition. With the CP decomposition, we prove (i) a uniform bound on the induced error of SO(3)-equivariance, and (ii) the universality of approximating any equivariant bilinear map. To further reduce the number of parameters, we propose path-weight sharing that ties all multiplicity-space weights across the O(L^3) CG paths into a single shared parameter set without compromising equivariance, where L is the maximum angular degree. The resulting layer acts as a plug-and-play replacement for tensor products in existing networks, and the computational complexity of tensor products is reduced from O(L^6) to O(L^4). We evaluate TDNs on PubChemQCR, a newly curated molecular relaxation dataset containing 105 million DFT-calculated snapshots. We also use existing datasets, including OC20, and OC22. Results show that TDNs achieve competitive performance with dramatic speedup in computations. Our code is publicly available as part of the AIRS library (https://github.com/divelab/AIRS/tree/main/OpenMol/TDN{https://github.com/divelab/AIRS/}).

For any given dimension d, all reflexive d-polytopes can be found (in principle) as subpolytopes of a number of maximal polyhedra that are defined in terms of (d+1)-tuples of integers (weights), or combinations of k-tuples of weights with k<d+1. We present the results of a complete classification of sextuples of weights pertaining to the construction of all reflexive polytopes in five dimensions. We find 322 383 760 930 such weight systems. 185 269 499 015 of them give rise directly to reflexive polytopes and thereby to mirror pairs of Calabi-Yau fourfolds. These lead to 532 600 483 distinct sets of Hodge numbers.

We introduce a dark photon considering a U(1) gauge extension of the standard model in particle physics. Provided that the extra U(1) symmetry is unbroken, the dark photon is massless and has no coupling to the standard electromagnetic current. Higher-dimensional operators describe interactions of the massless dark photon with particles in the standard model. We investigate the interactions of the massless dark photon with charged leptons via dipole operators, mainly focusing on the lepton family-violating processes. We present an improved constraint in the polarized two-body muon decay and a set of new bounds in tau decays. We also examine possible lepton family-violating signals of the massless dark photon in future lepton colliders.

We generalize the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo algorithm with a stack of neural network layers and evaluate its ability to sample from different topologies in a two dimensional lattice gauge theory. We demonstrate that our model is able to successfully mix between modes of different topologies, significantly reducing the computational cost required to generated independent gauge field configurations. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/saforem2/l2hmc-qcd .

Using two benchmark models containing extended scalar sectors beyond the Standard Model, we study deep learning techniques to enhance the sensitivity of resonant triple Higgs boson searches in the fully hadronic 6b channel, which suffers from the combinatorial challenge of reconstructing the Higgs bosons correctly from the multiple b-jets. More specifically, we employ the framework of Symmetry Preserving Attention Network (Spa-Net), which takes into account the permutational symmetry when a correct pairing of b-jets is achieved, to tackle both jet pairing and event classification. Significantly improved efficiency is achieved in signal and background discrimination. When comparing with the conventional Dense Neural Networks, Spa-Net results in up to 40\% more stringent limits on resonant production cross-sections. These results highlight the potential of using advanced machine learning techniques to significantly improve the sensitivity of triple Higgs boson searches in the fully hadronic channel.

We use the AdS/CFT correspondence to study the thermodynamics of massive N=2 supersymmetric hypermultiplets coupled to N=4 supersymmetric SU(Nc) Yang-Mills theory in the limits of large Nc and large 't Hooft coupling. In particular, we study the theory at finite baryon number density. At zero temperature, we present an exact expression for the hypermultiplets' leading-order contribution to the free energy, and in the supergravity description we clarify which D-brane configuration is appropriate for any given value of the chemical potential. We find a second-order phase transition when the chemical potential equals the mass. At finite temperature, we present an exact expression for the hypermultiplets' leading-order contribution to the free energy at zero mass.

This thesis is divided into three parts. The first part deals with cylindric plane partitions. The second with lambda-determinants and the third with commutators in semi-circular systems. For more detailed abstract please see inside. Cylindric plane partitions may be thought of as a natural generalization of reverse plane partitions. A generating series for the enumeration of cylindric plane partitions was recently given by Borodin. The first result of section one is a new bijective proof of Borodin's identity which makes use of Fomin's growth diagram framework for generalized RSK correspondences. The second result is a (q,t)-analog of Borodin's identity which extends previous work by Okada in the reverse plane partition case. The third result is an explicit combinatorial interpretation of the Macdonald weight occurring in the (q,t)-analog using the non-intersecting lattice path model for cylindric plane partitions. Alternating sign matrices were discovered by Robbins and Rumsey whilst studying λ-determinants. In the second part of this thesis we prove a multi-parameter generalization of the λ-determinant, generalizing a recent result by di Francesco. Like the original λ-determinant, our formula exhibits the Laurent phenomenon. Semicircular systems were first introduced by Voiculescu as a part of his study of von Neumann algebras. In the third part of this thesis we study certain commutator subalgebras of the semicircular system. We find a projection matrix with an interesting self-similar structure. Making use of our projection formula we given an alternative, elementary proof that the semicircular system is a factor.

We establish explicit means via which natural dilations of completely positive (CP) maps can be constructed à la Kraus's IInd representation theorem. To obtain this, we rely on the Choi-Jamiołkowski correspondence and develop a Cholesky algorithm for bi-partite systems. This enables a canonical construction of adjoint actions which recover the behaviour of the original CP-maps. Our results hold under separability assumptions and the requirement that the maps are completely bounded and preserve the subideal of finite rank operators.

Mott insulators with large and active (or multiflavor) local Hilbert spaces widely occur in quantum materials and ultracold atomic systems, and are dubbed "multiflavor Mott insulators". For these multiflavored Mott insulating materials, the spin-only description with the quadratic spin interactions is often insufficient to capture the major physical processes. In the situation with active orbitals, the Kugel-Khomskii superexchange model was then proposed. We briefly review this historical model and discuss the modern developments beyond the original spin-orbital context. These include and are not restricted to the 4d/5d transition metal compounds with the spin-orbit-entangled J=3/2 quadruplets, the rare-earth magnets with two weakly-separated crystal field doublets, breathing magnets and/or the cluster and molecular magnets, et al. We explain the microscopic origin of the emergent Kugel-Khomskii physics in each realization with some emphasis on the J=3/2 quadruplets, and refer the candidate multiflavor Mott insulators as "J=3/2 Mott insulators". For the ultracold atoms, we review the multiflavor Mott insulator realization with the ultracold alkaline and alkaline-earth atoms on the optical lattices. Despite a large local Hilbert space from the atomic hyperfine spin states, the system could naturally realize a large symmetry group such as the Sp(N) and SU(N) symmetries. These ultracold atomic systems lie in the large-N regime of these symmetry groups and are characterized by strong quantum fluctuations. The Kugel-Khomskii physics and the exotic quantum ground states with the "baryon-like" physics can appear in various limits. We conclude with our vision and outlook on this subject.

We show that a simple gravitational theory can provide a holographically dual description of a superconductor. There is a critical temperature, below which a charged condensate forms via a second order phase transition and the (DC) conductivity becomes infinite. The frequency dependent conductivity develops a gap determined by the condensate. We find evidence that the condensate consists of pairs of quasiparticles.

The last decade has seen a marked shift in how the internal structure of hadrons is understood. Modern experimental facilities, new theoretical techniques for the continuum bound-state problem and progress with lattice-regularised QCD have provided strong indications that soft quark+quark (diquark) correlations play a crucial role in hadron physics. For example, theory indicates that the appearance of such correlations is a necessary consequence of dynamical chiral symmetry breaking, viz. a corollary of emergent hadronic mass that is responsible for almost all visible mass in the universe; experiment has uncovered signals for such correlations in the flavour-separation of the proton's electromagnetic form factors; and phenomenology suggests that diquark correlations might be critical to the formation of exotic tetra- and penta-quark hadrons. A broad spectrum of such information is evaluated herein, with a view to consolidating the facts and therefrom moving toward a coherent, unified picture of hadron structure and the role that diquark correlations might play.

We explore the consequences of multi-trace deformations in applications of gauge-gravity duality to condensed matter physics. We find that they introduce a powerful new "knob" that can implement spontaneous symmetry breaking, and can be used to construct a new type of holographic superconductor. This knob can be tuned to drive the critical temperature to zero, leading to a new quantum critical point. We calculate nontrivial critical exponents, and show that fluctuations of the order parameter are `locally' quantum critical in the disordered phase. Most notably the dynamical critical exponent is determined by the dimension of an operator at the critical point. We argue that the results are robust against quantum corrections and discuss various generalizations.

These lectures give an introduction to the theory of holographic superconductors. These are superconductors that have a dual gravitational description using gauge/gravity duality. After introducing a suitable gravitational theory, we discuss its properties in various regimes: the probe limit, the effects of backreaction, the zero temperature limit, and the addition of magnetic fields. Using the gauge/gravity dictionary, these properties reproduce many of the standard features of superconductors. Some familiarity with gauge/gravity duality is assumed. A list of open problems is included at the end.