About Me

Having completed my PhD in Theoretical Physics at the University of St Andrews, I am now a software engineer at AttoCore.

During my doctorate I had the pleasure of working under the supervision of Dr Bernd Braunecker. My research focussed on non-Markovian open system dynamics in correlated quantum materials. This work proved to be theoretically rich, involving ventures into topics such as finite temperature quantum field theory, Luttinger liquid theory, and quantum thermodynamics.

Prior to this, I received a 1st class MSci (Hons) in Theoretical Physics with Mathematics from Lancaster University. My project, carried out under the supervision of Dr Alessandro Romito and Prof. Henning Schomerus in collaboration with Dr Marcin Szyniszewski, focussed on many-body localisation transitions in disordered quantum systems and won the Research Academy Prize awarded in recognition of an outstanding research project.

Scientific Publications

Exact results, transient generalized Gibbs ensembles, and analytic approximations for spacetime propagators of massive, real scalar fields in one spatial dimension (2024)

T. Boorman and B. Braunecker

[arXiv:2405.19002]

The massive, real scalar field described by the Klein-Gordon equation in one spatial dimension is the most elementary example of a bosonic quantum field theory, and has been investigated for many decades either as a simple academic theory or as a realistic emergent many-body theory in low-dimensional systems. Despite this, the space and time behavior of its propagators have rarely been in the foreground, and although exact results are known, there remain gaps in the description and a lack of an in-depth physical analysis. The aim of this paper is to address the deficits by providing a comprehensive discussion of the results, and to show that this old theory still allows for several new results and insights. To start, known results are rederived in full detail, with an added discussion on how exactly space and time variables need to be extended to complex values to ensure analyticity throughout spacetime. This procedure shows also how singularities on the lightcone need to be regularized to remain compatible with the analyticity and the physical limit of a vanishing mass. An extension to nonzero temperatures is provided by considering the contact of the field to a nonrelativistic thermal reservoir, such as is necessary for emerging field theories in condensed matter systems. Subsequently, it is shown that the transient, short spacetime propagation can be understood in the context of the modern development of a generalized Gibbs ensemble, which describes a massless theory with an effective temperature that is set by the Klein-Gordon mass and the physical temperature. Finally, an approximation scheme is presented that captures the non-trivial mass dependence of the propagators throughout all spacetime but involves only elementary functions.

Diagnostics of entanglement dynamics in noisy and disordered spin chains via the measurement-induced steady-state entanglement transition (2022)

T. Boorman, M. Szyniszewski, H. Schomerus, and A. Romito

[PhysRevB.105.144202] [arXiv:2107.11354]

We utilize the concept of a measurement-induced entanglement transition to analyze the interplay and competition of processes that generate and destroy entanglement in a one-dimensional quantum spin chain evolving under a locally noisy and disordered Hamiltonian. We employ continuous measurements of variable strength to induce a transition from volume to area-law scaling of the steady-state entanglement entropy. While static background disorder systematically reduces the critical measurement strength, this critical value depends nonmonotonically on the strength of nonstatic noise. According to the extracted finite-size scaling exponents, the universality class of the transition is independent of the noise and disorder strength. We interpret the results in terms of the effect of static and nonstatic disorder on the intricate dynamics of the entanglement generation rate due to the Hamiltonian in the absence of measurement, which is fully reflected in the behavior of the critical measurement strength. Our results establish a firm connection between this entanglement growth and the steady-state behavior of the measurement-controlled systems, which therefore can serve as a tool to quantify and investigate features of transient entanglement dynamics in complex many-body systems via a steady-state phase transition.

A lovely picture of my face

Software Engineer | PhD Theoretical Physics