Electric-magnetic duality or S-duality, extending the symmetry of Maxwell’s equations by including the symmetry between Noether electric charges and topological magnetic monopoles, is one of the most fundamental concepts of modern physics. In two-dimensional systems harboring Cooper pairs, S-duality manifests in the emergence of superinsulation, a state dual to superconductivity, which exhibits an infinite resistance at finite temperatures. The mechanism behind this infinite resistance is the linear charge confinement by a magnetic monopole plasma. This plasma constricts electric field lines connecting the charge–anti-charge pairs into electric strings, in analogy to quarks within hadrons. However, the origin of the monopole plasma remains an open question. Here, we consider a two-dimensional Josephson junction array (JJA) and reveal that the magnetic monopole plasma arises as quantum instantons, thus establishing the underlying mechanism of superinsulation as two-dimensional quantum tunneling events. We calculate the string tension and the dimension of an electric pion determining the minimal size of a system capable of hosting superinsulation. Our findings pave the way for study of fundamental S-duality in desktop experiments on JJA and superconducting films.

Planar superconductors, emerging in thin films with thickness comparable to the superconducting coherence length, differ crucially from their bulk counterparts. Coulomb interactions between charges are logarithmic up to distances comparable to typical sample sizes and the Anderson-Higgs mechanism is ineffective to screen the infrared divergences of the resulting (2+1)-dimensional QED because the Pearl length screening the vortex interactions is also typically larger than the sample size. As a result, the system decomposes into superconducting droplets with the typical size of order of superconducting coherence length. We show that two possible phases of the film match the two known mechanisms for curing the (2+1)-dimensional QED infrared divergences, either by generating a mixed topological Chern-Simons mass or by magnetic monopole instantons. The former mechanism works in superconductors, the latter one governs mirror-dual superinsulators. Planar superconductors are thus described by a topological Chern-Simons gauge (TCSG) theory that replaces the Ginzburg-Landau model in two dimensions. In the TCSG model, the Higgs field is absent. Accordingly, in planar superconductors Abrikosov vortices do not form, and only Josephson vortices without normal core do exist.

By establishing a relation between information erasure and continuous phase transitions we generalize the Landauer bound to analog computing systems. The entropy production per degree of freedom during erasure of an analog variable (reset to standard value) is given by the logarithm of the configurational volume measured in units of its minimal quantum. As a consequence, every computation has to be carried on with a finite number of bits and infinite precision is forbidden by the fundamental laws of physics, since it would require an infinite amount of energy.

We propose a spin gauge field theory in which the curl of a Dirac fermion current density plays the role of the pseudovector charge density. In this field-theoretic model, spin interactions are mediated by a single scalar gauge boson in its antisymmetric tensor formulation. We show that these long range spin interactions induce a gauge invariant photon mass in the one-loop effective action. The fermion loop generates a coupling between photons and the spin gauge boson, which acquires thus charge. This coupling represents also an induced, gauge invariant, topological mass for the photons, leading to the Meissner effect. The one-loop effective equations of motion for the charged spin gauge boson are the London equations. We propose thus spin gauge interactions as an alternative, topological mechanism for superconductivity in which no spontaneous symmetry breaking is involved.

Qubit networks with long-range interactions inspired by the Hebb rule can be used as quantum associative memories. Starting from a uniform superposition, the unitary evolution generated by these interactions drives the network through a quantum phase transition at a critical computation time, after which ferromagnetic order guarantees that a measurement retrieves the stored pattern. The maximum memory capacity of these qubit networks is reached at a memory density $\alpha =p/n=1$.