Cornering the universal shape of fluctuations

TL;DR

This paper reveals a super-universal geometric dependence of fluctuations in systems with sharp corners, linking the opening angle to fundamental physical properties across various quantum and classical systems.

Contribution

It uncovers a super-universal angle dependence of fluctuations in subregions with corners, independent of system specifics, and relates the prefactor to the structure factor.

Findings

Dependence on corner angle is super-universal across systems.

Prefactor encodes the long-wavelength structure factor.

Examples include quantum Hall states, critical theories, and metals.

Abstract

Understanding the fluctuations of observables is one of the main goals in science, be it theoretical or experimental, quantum or classical. We investigate such fluctuations when only a subregion of the full system can be observed, focusing on geometries with sharp 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, including fractional quantum Hall states, scale invariant quantum critical theories, and metals. Finally, we discuss connections with quantum entanglement, extensions to three dimensions, as well as experiments to probe the geometry of fluctuations.