May-4-2025:
The lecture notes for my lectures on "Introduction to 2+1D conformal field theories" can be found here. The notes are under construction. Please be aware that it may contain typos, and references are incomplete.
Apr-16-2025:
The ITensor package is super powerful and super easy to use. Here is an example code to calculate the entanglement entropy, 2pt and 3pt functions of the critical transverse field Ising model.
Feb-28-2025:
A popular science article for the WeChat account "返朴","热量会破坏一切,但物理学家找到例外"
Feb-14-2025:
I found ChatGPT more and more useful in my daily research. It can help me solve research-level problems. The way it works is actually very much like the human brain. You have to ask a few preparatory questions so that chatGPT knows the background of the problem. When you feel that it knows the problem as well as you, you can then ask about your research problem. Here is a conversation between me and ChatGPT about the lattice realization of a deformation of tricritical Ising CFT that preserves a certain non-invertible symmetry. I am genuinely amazed, and I do not know what the world will be like in 20 years.
Jan-28-2025:
There is a paper on Arxiv titled "Phase Transitions in Large Language Models and the O(N) Model". I am very curious about what this is.
Jan-02-2025:
Today I watched the movie "Her Story" by Yihui Shao. Amazing movie!
Dec-20-2024:
I recently watched two videos by Phymaths, one of Zohar Komargodski, and another of John Donoghue. The former contains various thoughts on many deep topics in theoretical physics. The latter, on the other hand, discussed more on the traditional approach to quantum gravity. I highly recommend both interviews!
Dec-20-2024:
Renormalization group flow has been the center of my research for many years. The site Physics of Scale collects the interviews of many early heroes of critical phenomena. The interview with Alexander Patashinski contains some interesting stories about the communication between physicists from the West and the Soviet Union during the time of the Cold War.
Dec-20-2024:
There are many interesting articles in Quanta Magazine, such as "A Fundamental Theory to Model the Mind" and "When Does the Brain Operate at Peak Performance?". The articles are about the hypothesis that the human brain is a system of so-called self-organized criticality. Self-organized criticality is nothing more than a CFT without relevant operators.
Other things to read for fun:
1 Quanta Magazine is the place to catch the latest news of science.
2 Journal Club for Condensed Matter Physics
3 Notices of the American Physics Society
4 To watch a movie? see L'Officiel des Spectacles