1:30 pm VAI ZOOM
Cornering the universal shape of fluctuations and entanglement
Understanding the fluctuations of observables is one of the main goals in physics. We investigate such fluctuations when a subregion of the full system can be observed, focusing on geometries with corners. We report that the dependence on the opening angle is super-universal: up to a numerical prefactor, this function does not depend on anything, provided the system under study is uniform, isotropic, and correlations do not decay too slowly. The prefactor contains important physical information: we show in particular that it gives access to the long-wavelength limit of the structure factor. We illustrate our findings with several examples: classical fluids, fractional quantum Hall (FQH) states, scale invariant quantum critical theories, and metals. Finally, we discuss connections with the entanglement entropy, including new results for Laughlin FQH states. Ref: arXiv:2102.06223