The fermionic signature operator is constructed in Rindler space-time. It is shown to be an unbounded self-adjoint operator on the Hilbert space of solutions of the massive Dirac equation. In two-dimensional Rindler space-time, we prove that the resulting fermionic projector state coincides with the Fulling-Rindler vacuum. Moreover, the fermionic signature operator gives a covariant construction of general thermal states, in particular of the Unruh state. The fermionic signature operator is shown to be well-defined in asymptotically Rindler space-times. In four-dimensional Rindler space-time, our construction gives rise to new quantum states.

Information theory is gaining popularity as a tool to characterize performance of biological systems. However, information is commonly quantified without reference to whether or how a system could extract and use it; as a result, information-theoretic quantities are easily misinterpreted. Here we take the example of pattern-forming developmental systems which are commonly structured a cascades of sequential gene expression steps. Such a multi-tiered structure appears to constitute sub-optimal use of the positional information provided by the input morphogen because noise is added at each tier. However, the conventional theory fails to distinguish between the total information in a morphogen and information that can be usefully extracted and interpreted by downstream elements. We demonstrate that quantifying the information that is accessible to the system naturally explains the prevalence of multi-tiered network architectures as a consequence of the noise inherent to the control of gene expression. We support our argument with empirical observations from patterning along the major body axis of the fruit fly embryo. Our results exhibit the limitations of the standard information-theoretic characterization of biological signaling and illustrate how they can be resolved.

We study chiral algebras associated with Argyres-Douglas theories engineered from M5 brane. For the theory engineered using 6d (2,0) type J theory on a sphere with a single irregular singularity (without mass parameter), its chiral algebra is the minimal model of W algebra of J type. For the theory engineered using an irregular singularity and a regular full singularity, its chiral algebra is the affine Kac-Moody algebra of J type. We can obtain the Schur index of these theories by computing the vacua character of the corresponding chiral algebra.

We continue our study of the chemical (graph) distance inside large critical percolation clusters in dimension two. We prove new estimates, which involve the three-arm probability, for the point-to-surface and point-to-point distances. We show that the point-to-point distance in Z 2 between two points in the same critical percolation cluster has infinite second moment. We also give quantitative versions of our previous results comparing the length of the shortest crossing to that of the lowest crossing of a box.

In this paper, we study the relation between topological orders and their gapped boundaries. We propose that the bulk for a given gapped boundary theory is unique. It is actually a consequence of a microscopic definition of a local topological order, which is a (potentially anomalous) topological order defined on an open disk. Using this uniqueness, we show that the notion of “bulk” is equivalent to the notion of center in mathematics. We achieve this by first introducing the notion of a morphism between two local topological orders of the same dimension, then proving that the bulk satisfying the same universal property as that of the center in mathematics. We propose a classification (formulated as a macroscopic definition of n+1D local topological orders by unitary multi-fusion n-categories, and explain that the notion of a morphism between two local topological orders is compatible with that of a unitary monoidal n-functor in a few low dimensional cases. We also explain in some low dimensional cases that this classification is compatible with the result of “bulk = center”. In the end, we explain that above boundary-bulk relation is only the first layer of a hierarchical structure which can be summarized by the functoriality of the bulk (or center). This functoriality also provides the physical meanings of some well-known mathematical results on fusion 1-categories. This work can also be viewed as the first step towards a systematic study of the category of local topological orders, and the boundary-bulk relation actually provides a useful tool for this study.