We have analytically determined the attenuation constant of the Drude metal for the entire range of frequency ($0<\omega<\infty$) of an electromagnetic (plane) wave incident on it within a single framework of classical electrodynamics. Here, by the Drude metal, we mean an electrical conductor that obeys the Drude model for the conduction electrons. We further consider the conductor to have linear dielectric and magnetic properties (i.e. permittivity $\epsilon>\epsilon_0$ and permeability $\mu>\mu_0$) due to the bound charges and bound currents in the background. Interestingly, for such a conductor with a high carrier concentration ($\omega_p\tau\gg1$), we have obtained a simple form of the attenuation constant $k_-\simeq+\sqrt{\frac{\mu\epsilon}{2}}\sqrt{\omega_p^2-\omega^2+|\omega_p^2-\omega^2|}$ for a wide range of high frequencies below and above plasma frequency $\omega_p$. Such a result gives rise to criticality in the conductor's optical properties, such as -- the attenuation constant, group velocity, and complex dielectric constant near around $\omega=\omega_p$. We have obtained the critical exponents for these quantities. We also have obtained a quantum correction to the optical properties within the Drude-Sommerfeld model with the Thomas-Fermi screening.

We leverage 3D numerical simulations to study phase change materials (PCMs) cells under the effect of buoyancy forces. The solid PCM is heated from a source boundary, triggering melting. The source features multiple solid fins that protrude into the PCM cell; the impact of the fins and their number is investigated by designing and testing equivalent (in terms of heating power) finless and single fin simulations. For each configuration, the performance is quantified via the total molten substance in time. The designs were also tested for different values of the non-dimensional numbers encoding relevant properties. We confirm that fins increase the melting performance and find that single fin configurations are sub-optimal since a layout with multiple fins takes advantage of interstitial spaces, melting the substance more efficiently. The results also indicate that fins should be properly spaced, as closeness can result in overlapping, thus interfering, molten areas.

Understanding heat transport in low-dimensional and nano-architectured materials remains a central challenge in nonequilibrium statistical physics due to persistent deviations from Fourier's law. These deviations are driven by anharmonicity, reduced dimensionality, and the emergence of long-lived coherent excitations. In this work, we develop a unified theoretical framework for two-dimensional thermal metamaterials that combines nonlinear lattice dynamics, soliton-based effective field theories, and geometrically organized defect networks as guiding structures for energy flow. We introduce minimal discrete and continuum-inspired models suitable for controlled benchmarking of thermal transport in patterned two-dimensional architectures and identify a two-channel transport mechanism in which coherent nonlinear excitations coexist with incoherent hydrodynamic modes. The interplay between these channels is shown to be highly sensitive to geometry, nonlinearity, and temperature, offering new avenues for thermal management. We establish rigorous connections between microscopic nonlinearity, geometry-driven channeling of heat in two dimensions, and quantum-enabled exploration of both high-occupation classical regimes and genuinely quantum regimes beyond the reach of standard simulation strategies. The theoretical predictions are corroborated by recent experimental and computational results in Stone-Wales-defected PdSSe monolayers and silicon phononic crystal nanostructures, which exhibit ultra-low thermal conductivity coexisting with high carrier mobility and strong anisotropy -- direct manifestations of the two-channel mechanism. This synthesis provides actionable guidance for the design of engineered heat-spreading architectures and positions quantum simulation as a transformative tool for advancing the theory of nonlinear heat transport.

Current-induced phenomena are often obscured by Joule heating, and their steady states are difficult to analyze in large open systems. We introduce a translationally invariant asymmetric-hopping model as an effective bulk description of boundary-driven systems under current. In a minimal case, it corresponds to an open-system Hatano--Nelson model. We find that the effective temperature rises linearly with current density, as observed experimentally. The model provides a useful tool for separating intrinsic current-induced effects from heating.

Two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) interfaces offer a versatile platform for studying emergent quantum phenomena and enabling novel device functionalities. When distinct TMD monolayers are stacked vertically or laterally stitched, their interfaces can exhibit unique electronic band alignments, giving rise to long-lived interlayer excitons, charge transfer effects, and moiré superlattices with correlated states. Here, we demonstrate that the interface between a large variety of two different epitaxially grown TMD monolayers controls the intensity and sign of the Rashba spin splitting, which is probed using THz spintronic emission. Optimized TMD heterobilayers, such as HfSe$_2$/PtSe$_2$, show enhanced THz emission that surpass the spin-to-charge conversion efficiency of bulk TMDs, confirming the presence of Rashba states with large spin splitting at the interface. By combining spin- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy with density functional theory, we reveal that the electronic hybridization between the two different TMD monolayers gives rise to extended in-gap states with strong Rashba spin-orbit coupling. The choice of TMD layers enables to engineer the sign and strength of spin-to-charge conversion in van der Waals heterobilayers opening up perspectives to build efficient and tunable THz spintronic emitters.

Topological non-trivial band structures are the core problem in the field of topological materials. In this paper, we investigate the topological band structure in a system with controllable Dirac points from the perspective of wave packet dynamics. By adding a third-nearest-neighboring coupling to the graphene model, additional pairs of Dirac points emerge. The emergence and annihilation of Dirac points result in hybrid and parabolic points, and we show that these band structures can be revealed by the dynamical behaviors of wave packets. Particularly, for the gapped hybrid point, the motion of the wave packet shows a one-dimensional \emph{Zitterbewegung} motion. Furthermore, we also show that the winding number associated with the Dirac point and parabolic point can be determined via the center-of-mass and spin texture of wave packets, respectively. The results of this work could motivate new experimental methods to characterize the system's topological signatures through wave packet dynamics, which may also find application in systems of other exotic topological materials.

Dynamic reconfiguration of charge carriers in confined ion-channels under electrical stimulation produces memory effects, where the internal resistance depends on history of the electric field. Vermiculite nanofluidic devices harness this effect to store and process information within a single component. We report switching between distinct memory loops by tuning ion transport pathways, governed by asymmetrical device architecture and intrinsic surface-charge. Polarity-dependent memory switching between crossing-1 and crossing-2 loops is achieved solely by altering electrode configurations, without modifying electrolyte, channel surface chemistry or device structure: providing mechanistic insights into ionic memristors through a straightforward, experimentally validated strategy. The memristive characteristics are demonstrated in both in-plane and out-of-plane channel configurations with channel lengths spanning from centimeters to micrometers length scales using re-stacked vermiculite membranes and further investigated for miniaturization with devices having nanometer scale channel lengths, fabricated via ultramicrotomy method. Furthermore, we demonstrate neuromorphic functionalities, including synaptic potentiation-depression and programmable memory retention, highlighting potential for bio-inspired computing systems. Cost-effective and scalable fabrication solution processed vermiculite membrane memristors pave the way for practical integration of nanofluidic memristors for neuromorphic computing applications.

Crystal generative models have shown rapid progress for accelerating the discovery of bulk, periodic materials. However, many material systems such as 2D superconductors, thin film semiconductors, and catalytic surfaces are diperiodic, i.e., aperiodic along one of the lattice directions. These systems are invariant under the layer groups, which are known to influence materials properties yet not considered by existing models. In this paper, we propose SLayerGen, a generative model that produces crystals constrained to be invariant to any space or layer group. SLayerGen consists of coarse-to-fine discrete autoregressive lattice generation; transformer-based autoregressive sampling of Wyckoff positions, elements, and numbers of symmetrically unique atoms; and space or layer group equivariant diffusion of atomic coordinates. For the diffusion component, we corrected an inconsistency in the loss from prior work arising from hexagonal groups being non-orthogonal in fractional coordinates. To facilitate progress in generative modeling of diperiodic materials, we assembled and filtered datasets of monolayers and bilayers, propose relevant evaluation metrics, and developed novel representations for layer group symmetries. For de novo generation of diperiodic materials, SLayerGen achieves consistent performance gains over bulk crystal generative models and is competitive when training jointly on bulk and diperiodic materials.

Cu based ternary chalcogenides are gathering attention for sustainable energy applications due to their reduced complexity compared to quaternary alternatives. We used drift diffusion modeling to evaluate the feasibility of photovoltaics employing ternary chalcogenide absorbers based on Cu2SiSe3 and Cu2SnS3. The device metrics are evaluated by analyzing absorber layer thickness intrinsic carrier concentration defect density and energy band alignment at interfacial junctions. The optimized single junction Cu2SiSe3 based device configuration achieves a power conversion efficiency of 18.13 percent exhibiting a short circuit current density of 38 mA cm^-2 and an open circuit voltage of 0.64 V. The Cu2SnS3 based device achieves an efficiency of 15.59 percent with a short circuit current density of 48.8 mA cm^-2 and an open circuit voltage of 0.42 V. We examined the impact of the buffer layer on device parameters uncovering further avenues for performance improvement. Additionally we simulated a two terminal tandem solar cell using Cu2SiSe3 Eg 1.44 eV in the upper cell to capture photons from the visible spectrum and Cu2SnS3 Eg 0.91 eV in the lower cell to absorb from the infrared spectrum. The simulated tandem architecture, featuring a VOC of 1.24 V a JSC of 24.6 mA cm^-2 a fill factor (FF) of 79.2 percent and an efficiency of 24.1 percent markedly surpassed conventional single junction devices demonstrating the viability of Cu2SiSe3-Cu2SnS3 absorber-based tandem solar cells for next generation high-efficiency solar technologies.

We investigate the impact of line-edge roughness on current-driven domain wall dynamics in ferromagnetic racetracks. Modeling the edge disorder as a spatially correlated Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, we demonstrate that even minimal experimentally relevant roughness induces pronounced stochastic pinning of domain walls. Notably, this stochasticity of the current-driven motion arises purely from spatial disorder, even in the absence of thermal fluctuations. The probability of a domain wall to reach a given position exhibits a robust sigmoidal dependence on the applied current, reflecting an effective distribution of depinning thresholds. At the same time, the underlying dynamics is highly nontrivial: the mean velocity exhibits a nonlinear dependence on both time and current, while the mean-square displacement exhibits a ballistic regime at short times followed by saturation due to trapping at pinning sites. These results demonstrate that line-edge roughness provides a controllable source of stochasticity and enables p-bit-like functionality in racetrack systems, offering a pathway toward hardware implementations of probabilistic and neuromorphic computing.

Diffusion with an incorporated resetting mechanism provides a reference framework for modeling a wide range of natural phenomena. Within this framework, the optimal resetting rate is a key quantity that arises from the optimization of the mean first-passage time. While substantial work has focused on the study of the optimal resetting rate in unbounded one dimensional domains, little is still known about the optimization of the mean first-passage time in bounded systems, in particular when multiple resetting sites are available. In this work, we consider a particle diffusing along a circular circumference and under resetting, with an absorbing target site at a fixed location. Using the appropriate free propagator for this system, we compute the Laplace transform of the survival probability when resetting occurs to multiple sites drawn from an arbitrary probability density function. We also calculate the mean first-passage time at the target site, and study the dependence of the optimal resetting rate in terms of the relevant parameters of the system in a two-resetting site configuration. Depending on the arc length between one of the resetting sites and the absorbing target site, and the weight of the remaining resetting site, the optimal resetting rate can exhibit abrupt ("first order'') and continuous ("second order'') transitions. Moreover, the behavior of the mean first-passage time is rich enough to allow both critical and tri-critical points to exist in the parameter space. All the transitions have "mirror symmetry'' around the selected target site and its corresponding diametrically opposite site.

Multiscale modeling is essential for understanding the complex behavior of materials. However, accurately transferring all relevant information from one scale to another has remained an outstanding challenge. Neural operators, discretization-independent generalizations of neural networks, is proving to be a powerful tool in addressing this challenge. This article provides an introduction to neural operators, and illustrates their use in multiscale modeling of materials through three selected examples.

Chiral phonons provide a route to couple lattice motion to magnetic order, but conventional chiral phonons carry a net angular momentum and thus couple naturally to net magnetization rather than to compensated Néel order. Here we show that $\mathcal{P}\mathcal{T}$-symmetric antiferromagnets can host \emph{antiferro-chiral phonons} (AFCPs): phonon modes with vanishing total angular momentum but finite sublattice-staggered angular momentum. Symmetry enforces this distinction because $\mathcal{P}\mathcal{T}$ forbids a net phonon angular momentum while allowing counter-rotating local motion on inversion-related sublattices. AFCPs arise from a Néel-vector-locked coupling between Raman and infrared-active phonons. The coupling is odd under both $\mathcal{P}$ and $\mathcal{T}$ while preserving their product. Through this hybridization, the normal modes acquire both Raman and infrared character and carry a sublattice-staggered phonon angular momentum that acts as a conjugate field to the Néel vector. This coupling is microscopically generated by the molecular Berry curvature, which is demonstrated in a prototype lattice model. Reversing the Néel vector reverses the staggered phonon chirality. These results indicate AFCPs as probes of antiferromagnetic order and suggest coherent phonon excitation as a route to its dynamical control.

We develop a reduced stochastic framework for thermally assisted octupole moment dynamics in Mn3Sn by combining the reduced Landau--Lifshitz--Gilbert (LLG) equation with the Fokker--Planck formalism. The reduced model is benchmarked against the complete three-sublattice octupole dynamics and is shown to capture the essential switching behavior with good accuracy. We then derive the corresponding Fokker--Planck equation, which is implemented and solved via a CUDA-accelerated solver. The analysis shows that the octupole dynamics are highly sensitive to the out-of-plane grid resolution because ultrafast rotation of the octupole is controlled by its very small deviations from the basal plane. The solver is validated against Monte Carlo simulations through equilibrium distributions, relaxation trajectories, and switching times. Finally, we apply the method to thermally assisted field-driven switching and demonstrate efficient access to ultra-low error probabilities beyond the practical reach of direct Monte Carlo simulations.

The performance of superconducting resonators underpins a wide range of modern quantum technologies, yet their quality factor often deviates at low temperatures from standard Mattis-Bardeen predictions. This discrepancy is often attributed to nonthermal quasiparticles generated by microwave readout power, which limits the sensitivity of superconducting devices. We present a macroscopic model based on modified Rothwarf-Taylor equations that incorporates a power-dependent phonon generation term, providing an explicit relationship between quality factor, bath temperature and readout power. The model shows excellent agreement with temperature sweep measurements of NbN microstrip resonators with \b{eta}-Ta terminations over a wide dynamic range of readout power levels, accurately capturing the transition between thermally-dominated and microwave-induced loss regimes. This framework provides a predictive tool for optimizing superconducting resonators and advancing the design of high-Q devices for quantum sensing and quantum information processing.

Based on classical concept, solidification of alloys is a direct transition from liquid phase to solid phase, by which dendrites and dendritic segregation are produced. Through in-situ and real time morphology observation and XRD test during solidification of three steels, a new superite phase featured as statistically oriented tiny structures was identified, and a general liquid-superite-solid phase transformation process is revealed. In the early solidification stage, the liquid alloys transit to dendrites composed of superite phase. Initiated from the boundaries of dendritic arms or dendrite grains, the superite phase transits to austenite grains within an initial dendritic arm, and expels solute elements to the residual superite phase. Mixed multi-phase microstructures are subsequently produced from the residual enriched superite phase. Here, although three steels exhibit different phase proportion and phase constitution in the superite-solid transition, they all follow above general transition mode. Multiscale microstructures and segregations are produced in the transition from superite to solid. These new findings change the basic understanding about the solidification of alloys, rediscover the formation mechanism on segregations and multiscale solidification microstructures, including dendrite pattern, solid dendritic arm, dendritic segregation, the mixed multi-phase microstructures, eutectic, inclusions and precipitate. These new findings are also crucial to the control of solidification microstructures and segregation in metals.

Injection and shift currents are generally regarded as distinct nonlinear optical responses with separate microscopic origins. Here, we uncover a general hidden connection between them through interband Berry-curvature and quantum-metric dipoles. In systems with approximately linear electronic dispersion near the Fermi level and at low photon energies, this relation sharpens into an emergent equivalence, with injection and shift currents governed by the same interband quantum-geometric dipole. This regime is naturally realized in Dirac and Weyl semimetals, as well as in strained graphene, where measurements of injection and shift currents probe a unified geometric property of the electronic wavefunctions rather than distinct dynamical processes. Our results establish a new framework for interpreting nonlinear optical experiments and suggest that quantum geometry may provide a broader organizing principle linking seemingly distinct nonlinear optical responses in solids.

High-entropy MBenes (HE-MBenes) represent a promising, unexplored class of 2D materials for electrocatalysis. In this work, we present a systematic computational screening of 56 equiatomic quinary HE-MBene compositions from the {Ti, V, Cr, Mo, Nb, Ta, Zr, Hf} pool for CO$_2$ adsorption and electroreduction. Using the Monte Carlo Special Quasirandom Structure (MCSQS) algorithm, we generated disordered M$_1B_1$-type supercells and assessed structural stability via DFT (PBE+D3) in VASP. Of the 56 candidates, 55 passed relaxation, with 45 exhibiting negative formation energies, confirming thermodynamic stability. To efficiently screen CO$_2$ adsorption across disordered surfaces, we developed a machine-learning interatomic potential (MLIP) using the MACE architecture. Fine-tuned on our DFT dataset, the model achieved energy RMSEs of 3.49 and 3.0 meV/atom for adsorbed and pristine sets, respectively. Active sites were identified via PDOS analysis, matching metal d-orbital signatures with CO$_2$ molecular orbitals. The rate-determining step of the CO$_2$-to-CO pathway was evaluated using the computational hydrogen electrode (CHE) model. Short-time structural integrity was assessed via AIMD at 500 K over 2.5 ps; phonon-based stability remains a priority for future work. Our results establish an integrated DFT-MLIP-AIMD framework for the rational design of high-entropy 2D materials tailored for CO$_2$ conversion.

How do solute concentration and molecular chemistry govern the transition from membrane saturation to destabilization? We address this using microsecond-scale molecular dynamics simulations of dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine (DPPC) bilayers with chloroform (CHCl$_3$) and a homologous series of alkanols (methanol, ethanol, octanol) over $0-50\%$ concentrations. Although complete membrane melting is not observed within $1000\, ns$, all systems exhibit clear precursors of destabilization, including enhanced thickness fluctuations, reduced lipid order, and mechanical softening. Chloroform induces pronounced thinning and large fluctuations, consistent with deep, transient insertion. Methanol perturbs primarily the headgroup region, while ethanol shows intermediate behavior with partial insertion. Octanol preserves bilayer thickness at high concentrations due to lipid-like insertion but significantly increases fluctuations and interdigitation. Across all systems, increasing concentration decreases the area compressibility modulus and deuterium order parameter, accompanied by smoothing of lateral pressure profiles, indicating stress redistribution. Free energy analysis reveals increased membrane partitioning and reduced translocation barriers with concentration, strongest for octanol and weakest for methanol. These results demonstrate that membrane destabilization is governed by the interplay of insertion depth, interfacial crowding, and lipid packing disruption.

The rapid progress of electron spin resonance scanning tunneling microscopy experiments has enabled the manipulation of individual adsorbate spin states physisorbed on ultrathin oxide layers supported on metal substrates. Electron resonance requires unpaired spin density on the adsorbate, which can be achieved, for instance, through charge transfer from the supporting substrate. This requires the correct energy-level alignment between the energy levels of the adsorbate and the Fermi energy of the substrate. Experiments on molecules and single atoms adsorbed on metal-insulator systems have revealed complex phenomena, including electronic bandgap narrowing, charge transfer, Fermi-level pinning, and the re-ordering of adsorbate orbitals after charge transfer. Despite these advances, a predictive first-principles approach based on accurate methods such as quasiparticle GW, capable of capturing these effects without the prohibitive cost of full adsorbate/oxide/metal simulations, remains an open challenge. In this work, we present a theoretical approach to determine the energy-level alignment of adsorbates on oxide/metal substrates. Our method transparently exposes all physical processes and strikes a balance between computational cost and accuracy. Ionization potentials and electron affinities of the isolated adsorbates are obtained using GW calculations, electronic bandgap polarization is quantified through the quasiparticle renormalization caused by the substrate, Fermi-level pinning is evaluated within the integer charge transfer model, and work function shifts arising from Pauli pushback or from the adsorbate-metal dipole are determined from the local variations of the electrostatic potential. This computationally efficient framework paves the way for highthroughput screening of molecular qubits and organic electronic interfaces.

The thermal-equilibrium canonical distribution is currently obtained by maximizing the Boltzmann-Gibbs-von Neumann-Shannon entropy $S_{BG}(p)=k\sum^{W}_{i=1}p_{i}\ln 1/p_{i}$ constrained to $\sum^{W}_{i=1}p_{i}=1$ and $\sum^{W}_{i=1}p_{i}\,e_{i}=U$, $e_{1}\leq\ldots\leq e_{W}$ being the energies of the $W$ possible states and $U\in[e_{1},e_{W}]$ their mean value. We revisit a generalized version of this optimization problem grounded in the nonadditive entropy $S_{q}(p)=k\,(\sum^{W}_{i=1}p_{i}^{q}-1)/(1-q)$ (frequently, though not necessarily, $q\in(0,1)$; $S_1=S_{BG}$), and the constraint $\sum^{W}_{i=1} p_{i}^{q^{\prime}}e_{i} / \sum^{W}_{i=1}p_{i}^{q^{\prime}}=U$, $q^{\prime}>0$. Sufficient conditions for existence, strict positivity, and uniqueness of solutions are derived, along with a theorem that enables their closed-form calculation. We apply these results to deepen the understanding of the two standard cases in the literature ($q^{\prime}=1$ and $q^{\prime}=q$), as well as of a new one ($q^{\prime}=2-q$). We prove that these standard cases are the only ones yielding optimizing probability distributions of $q$-exponential form. Furthermore, we define an effective temperature $T_{q,q^{\prime}}$ through a Clausius-like relation $1/T_{q,q^{\prime}}=\partial S_{q} / \partial U$ and derive a Helmholtz-like energy $F_{q,q^{\prime}}=U-T_{q,q^{\prime}}S_{q}$, with the former grounding the validity of the $0^{th}$ Principle of Thermodynamics within this generalized statistical mechanics. Finally, we show that the case with a linear constraint (i.e., $q^{\prime}=1$) with $q\in(0,1)$ (i) preserves the Third Law of Thermodynamics; (ii) can be used to model classical many-body Hamiltonian systems with arbitrarily-ranged interactions; and (iii) resembles features of low-dimensional nonlinear dynamical systems at the edge of chaos.

Ferromagnetic solids acquire nontrivial magnetic and caloric properties when the temperature of the structural phase transition approaches the Curie point. Deciphering magneto-structural transitions, i.e. determining their characteristic temperatures and elucidating the related properties, remains challenging. In the present paper, three types of transformational behaviour of Ni50Mn25-xCuxGa25 (x = 6.25, 6.5, 6.75, 7) and Ni50.5Mn18.5Cu6.5Ga24.5 alloys have been identified, arising from small variations in chemical composition: (i) structural martensitic transformation (MT) in the ferromagnetic phase; (ii) magneto-structural phase transition from paramagnetic austenite to ferromagnetic martensite; (iii) MT in paramagnetic phase. The temperature-dependent values of magnetization, M(T), and of magnetic susceptibility, $\chi(T)$, were measured for each alloy. A novel thermodynamic analysis was used to determine the Curie points and MT temperatures. The novelty lies in considering the interplay between structural and magnetic characteristics of the alloys through the impact of the structural transition on the spin-exchange parameter. The theoretical analysis of experimental data revealed that this impact results in a large difference ($\geq$ 50 K) between the Curie temperatures computed for the austenitic and martensitic states of each alloy. The characteristic temperatures, corresponding to the extrema of the dM(T)/dT and $\chi(T)$ functions, were calculated. The correlation of these temperatures with the Curie temperatures and the MT temperatures is not straightforward and depends strongly on the type of transformational behaviour (i) - (iii). The proposed approach provides a robust framework for extracting unmeasurable characteristic temperatures from standard magnetization data, applicable to ferromagnetic Heusler systems and other multiferroic ferromagnetic materials.

We introduce a Wannier-type formulation of periodic local vibrational mode theory that yields real-space-localized vibrational modes associated with individual internal coordinates in crystalline solids. These modes are constructed as locally coherent superpositions of wavevector-resolved local modes, yielding a smooth and gauge-consistent real-space representation without the need for additional phase-fixing procedures. The resulting Wannier-type local modes provide well-defined force constants and frequencies that enable robust, chemically interpretable measures of bond and interaction strengths in periodic systems. Moreover, our framework demonstrates that phonon dispersion behavior makes important contributions to the bond and interaction strengths calculated via local vibrational mode theory. We demonstrate the method for representative ionic and covalent systems, including MgO, tetrahedrally-coordinated C, Si, SiC, and two polymorphs of CaCO3. Our framework establishes a direct analog of molecular local modes for fully periodic systems and opens new avenues for quantitative bonding analysis in crystalline materials.

Crystal generative models mainly learn what stable crystals look like, with little explicit supervision for what makes them stable. We reveal a substantial representation gap between state-of-the-art crystal generative models and pretrained universal machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) via energy probing, and show this gap can be closed by a simple training-time alignment. We propose Crystal REPresentation Alignment (CrystalREPA), a plug-and-play framework that aligns the atom-wise hidden states of generative encoders with frozen MLIP representations through an element-aware contrastive objective, transferring stability-aware atomistic priors with marginal training overhead and no additional inference cost. Across three generative frameworks, ten MLIP teachers, and two benchmark datasets, CrystalREPA consistently improves the thermodynamic stability, structural validity, and structural fidelity of generated crystals. Equally important, we find that an MLIP's transfer effectiveness is poorly predicted by its accuracy on standard leaderboards (e.g., Matbench Discovery) but strongly predicted by the distinguishability of its atom-wise representation space, yielding a practical, accuracy-independent criterion for selecting MLIP teachers for generative transfer.

The organization of high-dimensional probability spaces is a fundamental problem at the intersection of statistical physics and information theory. Here, we analyze the distributions populating level surfaces of the probability simplex $\Delta_{K-1}$ defined by a fixed Shannon entropy. We introduce a discretization strategy that assigns equal statistical weight to distinct microstate distributions and enables a combinatorial analysis of the simplex. A condensation phase transition is shown to take place below a critical entropy that scales as $H_c \simeq \log K - 1 + \gamma$ in the thermodynamic limit. For entropy values $H_0 < H_c$, the overwhelming majority of distributions are found in a condensed state, in which a single component captures a macroscopic fraction of the total probability mass while the remaining components form a homogeneous fluid background. These results provide a framework for understanding phenomena such as overconfident predictions in machine learning and the emergence of dominant species in ecology, and suggest that sparsity can arise naturally from entropic constraints in high-dimensional manifolds.

We used angle-resolved Brillouin-Mandelstam light-scattering spectroscopy to monitor surface and bulk acoustic phonons in diamond along the <100> and <110> crystallographic directions across a temperature range from 10 K to 300 K. The frequencies and phase velocities were measured for three types of surface acoustic phonons: Rayleigh waves, shear horizontal waves, and high-frequency pseudo-longitudinal waves. All surface acoustic phonons exhibit weak temperature dependence, with the largest observed change of 1.6% across the examined temperature range. The frequencies of all three types of surface acoustic phonons agree with the theoretical values within the experimental uncertainty. Cryogenic surface-acoustic-phonon data are important for diamond-based quantum sensors, surface acoustic wave devices, and other electronic technologies. Knowledge of surface acoustic phonons can also be used for developing accurate models for thermal transport between interfaces.

Magnetic skyrmions are topologically protected spin textures in ferromagnetic materials that hold great promise for both classical information storage and processing, as well as for fault-tolerant quantum computing. Realizing practical skyrmion-based devices demands an energy-efficient and precise method for their flexible manipulation. In this paper, we theoretically propose such a tool, leveraging the magnetoelectric effect induced by a localized electric field generated by one or several charged tips. Combining complementary numerical simulations and analytical approaches, we develop a consistent theory describing the stability and dynamics of Néel-type skyrmions under the influence of the electric field from a charged tip. Specifically, we demonstrate that the electric field can create, drive, and annihilate skyrmions of both chiralities, as well as more complex textures such as skyrmioniums and target skyrmions. We identify several distinct dynamical regimes of skyrmion motion near the tip and map them onto a phase diagram. Finally, we discuss the feasibility of a practical device capable of controlled skyrmion manipulation based on this principle.

We present a theoretical analysis of valley pseudospin control in the transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) monolayer by utilizing the magnetic proximity effect of 2D magnetic layer and, propose self-consistent analysis of photoluminescence (PL) polarization peculiarities in TMD/magnetic material van der Waals heterostructures. We attribute observed peculiarities to the interplay between spin-dependent interlayer charge transfer and intervalley scattering of excitons and trions. The ratio between the electron tunneling timescale and the exciton and trion intervalley scattering lifetimes and radiative lifetimes determine the PL dynamics. A possibility to switch PL polarization sign due to the quasi-particles dynamics under circularly polarized laser excitations is revealed. We also discuss generalization of the proposed model due to the careful analysis of both intervalley and intravalley scattering processes between bright and dark excitons. Obtained results allow a long-distance manipulation of exciton and trion behaviors and open the possibilities for the effective control under spin and valley pseudospin in multilayer magnetic-semiconductor van der Waals heterostructures.

Modeling the dynamical flows on networks of biomolecular machines often entails computing node populations and edge fluxes with Master Equations and correlating machine performance with entropy production. But this alone is not sufficient for design, optimization and evolution because it doesn't treat cost-benefit tradeoffs, or small-system misflows (backsteps, futile cycles, ineffective actions), or differential properties for flow design. Here we develop CFT Design, based on the recently developed Caliber Force Theory (CFT). We apply it to: designing faster molecular motors through ``traffic control''; optimizing speed, energy, and accuracy in kinetic proofreaders; and designing better enzyme inhibitors. CFT Design provides a general framework for optimizing nonequilibrium flow networks.

Diamond and gallium nitride are complementary semiconductors for forming p-n junctions because of their respective doping limitations. Understanding the band alignment of grafted diamond/GaN heterojunctions is therefore essential for optimizing diode performance. In this study, the band alignment of diamond/Al2O3/GaN and diamond/Al2O3/SiNx/GaN heterostructures was determined by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Both structures exhibit type-II band alignment, but with different band offsets. The band offsets of the diamond/Al2O3/SiNx/GaN heterojunction are larger by 0.42 eV than those of diamond/Al2O3/GaN. This difference is attributed to a modification of the interfacial electrostatic potential, which may arise from a reduced density of positive fixed charges in the interfacial dielectric near the diamond/Al2O3 interface after insertion of the SiNx layer. These results demonstrate that interfacial-layer engineering provides an effective strategy for tailoring the band alignment of grafted diamond/GaN heterojunctions, offering guidance for the design of p-n diodes with tunable rectifying characteristics.

Magnetic interactions have long served as the most robust and widely used approach for realizing nonreciprocity, with an externally applied magnetic field breaking time-reversal symmetry (TRS) and chiral photon-magnon interactions introducing spatial asymmetry. In this work, we investigate the chirality mechanisms essential for magnetic nonreciprocity from a unified experimental and theoretical perspective. We begin by examining conventional chiral interactions that generate chiral electromagnetic fields through specially designed structures, and then place particular emphasis on synthetic chirality enabled by nontrivial phase accumulation in traveling-wave-mediated coupling systems. We establish a microscopic theoretical framework that maps field polarization onto the phase of a complex coupling strength and validate it with systematic experiments, thereby providing a consistent formalism that describes both conventional and synthetic chirality. Notably, we highlight the symmetry properties and the unique features of synthetic chirality that distinguish it from conventional nonreciprocal mechanisms.

Molecular motors and other complex nonequilibrium systems are controlled by large sets of design parameters, and optimizing those parameters requires computing sensitivities -- derivatives of dynamical observables with respect to the parameters. When the system's dynamics involves rare events, both the observable and its sensitivity are difficult to estimate from direct simulation. We present a practical computational pipeline that addresses both challenges by combining importance sampling with a Markov state model (MSM). The MSM separately captures the slow, rare-event dynamics and the fast, local dynamics, and the chain rule connects those two pieces to yield an efficient sensitivity estimator. An iterative reweighting procedure based on the RiteWeight algorithm substantially reduces approximation errors from the MSM coarse-graining. We validate the approach on diffusion in the Müller-Brown potential, where the sensitivity of a transition rate to landscape parameters can be computed exactly. We then use sensitivies to optimize the directional bias of a particle-based model of a catalysis-driven molecular motor.

Non Newtonian flows are typically governed by intrinsic bulk rheology, which imposes strong constraints on transport through confined geometries. Here, we show that stable boundary lubrication can fundamentally alter this behavior by localizing shear within a thin, low-viscosity interfacial layer. As a result, the nonlinear rheological response of a broad class of complex materials, including yield-stress, shear-dependent, and thixotropic materials, is strongly suppressed during flow. Using analytical solutions of Stokes flow and numerical simulations, we demonstrate that lubrication-induced shear localization leads to an apparent Newtonianization of transport, in which the macroscopic flow response becomes primarily controlled by the lubricating layer and geometric confinement rather than the intrinsic material properties. In this regime, materials that would otherwise require large pressure gradients can be transported at substantially lower driving forces. Notably, this boundary-dominated transport enables gravity-driven passive flow with orders-of-magnitude enhancement in throughput compared to rigid-wall conduits. These results establish lubrication as a powerful mechanism for tuning and simplifying complex fluid transport, with implications for biological systems, soft and jammed materials, and energy-efficient fluids.

Direct ink writing (DIW) using frontal ring-opening metathesis polymerization (FROMP) offers a compelling route to the rapid and energy-efficient fabrication of thermoset and elastomeric polymer architectures, leveraging a self-propagating exothermic curing reaction. While FP-DIW excels at freestanding path printing due to the rapid solidification, it is constrained by stringent rheological requirements, a lower bound on achievable feature size due to quenching, and the need for the reaction front to closely follow the nozzle during printing. Here, we overcome these constraints by leveraging embedded 3D printing to implement FP-DIW with delayed solidification, thereby decoupling shape retention and solidification from ink chemistry and rheology. The use of a yield-stress support medium enables extrusion of low-viscosity inks by suppressing gravitational and capillary instabilities, mitigating front quenching at small diameters, and allowing time-delayed solidification to fuse complex, overlapping, and mechanically interlinked features after deposition. Two complementary thermal initiation strategies are introduced:\ volumetric dielectric heating via microwaves and surface heating at the boundary of the support bath. Formulations based on dicyclopentadiene (DCPD), cyclooctadiene (COD), and mixtures thereof, result in tunable final mechanical properties with glass transition temperatures spanning $-50$ to $160 $$^\text{o}$C. The versatility of this approach is demonstrated through the fabrication of lattices, springs, mechanically interlocked, and multimaterial architectures. Compared to printing in air, this embedded approach introduces a substantially broader range of possible formulations, material properties, feature sizes, and architectures.

Reliable operation of perpendicular spin-transfer-torque magnetic random-access memory (p-STT-MRAM) requires control of magnetic alignment within the synthetic antiferromagnet (SAF) reference layer. At nanopillar dimensions, however, devices can exhibit magnetic states that are absent in extended thin films. We present a systematic micromagnetic study of 30 nm-diameter three-layer p-STT-MRAM nanopillars using experimentally motivated material parameters, and map equilibrium states as functions of bilinear and biquadratic interlayer exchange coupling. Phase diagrams show that introducing asymmetry between the SAF layers in saturation magnetization, anisotropy, and thickness reduces the coupling strength required to stabilize antiparallel SAF states and suppress competing configurations. Minimum-energy path calculations show that, for noncollinear antiparallel SAF states, increasing SAF asymmetry can raise SAF reversal barriers while lowering the free-layer barrier; this trade-off is absent for collinear antiparallel SAF states. Stray fields also significantly modify both SAF and free-layer energy barriers. To support the design of p-STT-MRAM devices with either collinear or noncollinear antiparallel SAF reference states, we publicly release the simulation dataset covering 4374 distinct device configurations.

Elasticity shapes our world. For centuries, it has been regarded as a property exclusive to ordinary matter. Here we uncover its hidden existence in the spin degree of freedom. We introduce spin elasticity-a framework linking spin torque to spin morpgology. This reveals a topological Hooke's law, uncovers spontaneous oscillations and resonance, and predicts a new class of collective excitations:spin stress waves. By establishing a unfied tau-D theory bridging classical elasticity and topological spin physics, this work completes the elastic picture and opens a new frontier for spintronics-spinelastronics.

We study the ground state of the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ Bose-Hubbard chain in the adiabatic hard-core limit at half filling using variational Monte Carlo with a shallow restricted Boltzmann machine as the variational ansatz. In this context, the neural quantum state is compared with the established adiabatic description of the model. The variational results reproduce the overall structure of the phase diagram obtained from magnetization observables, distinguish the polarized and Néel-ordered regions, and capture representative spin patterns and site occupations for the staggered insulating configurations selected by a weak symmetry-breaking field. Taken together, these results show that a shallow restricted Boltzmann machine reproduces the main adiabatic phase structure of the one-dimensional $\mathbb{Z}_2$ Bose-Hubbard chain and captures the selected symmetry-broken insulating configurations at half filling.

We investigate a Dirac-type equation in (2+1) dimensions modified by Lifshitz spatial derivatives with dynamical exponent $z=2$, focusing on the spectral properties of bound states under radial confinement. Analytical solutions are obtained for constant backgrounds, hard-wall confinement, and harmonic potentials, while logarithmic confinement is treated numerically via the Numerov method and complemented by a semiclassical WKB analysis. The resulting spectra exhibit characteristic scaling laws governed by the Lifshitz parameter $b$, including $E - M \propto b/R_0^2$ for hard-wall confinement, $E - M \propto \sqrt{2b}\,\omega$ for harmonic trapping, and $E - M \sim \alpha \ln\sqrt{b}$ in the semiclassical regime of logarithmic confinement. These results provide a consistent characterization of how higher-order spatial derivatives modify bound-state spectra in two-dimensional Dirac systems and may be relevant for effective descriptions of materials with quadratic low-energy dispersion, such as bilayer graphene and related anisotropic 2D systems.

We report that the quantum-confined Stark effect spectrum exhibits a nearly rigid redshift while preserving its characteristic peak spacing patterns when increasing the electric field strength F. Using InGaN as a model system, we uncover two electric-field-independent scaling laws for the spectral peaks in both the sub-bandgap and above-bandgap regions and the coefficient ratio is near 3:1. With a novel three-dimensional (3D) visualization, we reveal that the sub-bandgap peak spacings scale as $\frac{12\pi\hbar^2}{L^2\sqrt{m_em_h}}$ while the above-bandgap peak spacings scale as $\frac{4\pi\hbar^2}{L^2\sqrt{m_em_h}}$, explaining the origin of the 3:1 ratio. This scaling behavior, validated in both InGaN and GaAs systems and at electroluminescence working conditions, shows that increasing F only expands the energy range and increases the number of peaks without altering the spacing. Beyond these laws, the 3D profile offers new insights into the Tauc background, Franz-Keldysh oscillations and coherence length, providing a powerful tool for the design and diagnostics of electro-optic devices.

We develop a microscopic theory for how slow Liouvillian sectors are selected in an open correlated lattice. The starting point is not a postulated non-Hermitian band, but a local interacting resonance between an on-site doublon and a branch-resolved nearest-neighbor bond. This resonance defines a composite shell orbital whose doublon weight controls reservoir visibility and whose mixed doublon-bond character controls shell mobility. Projecting the microscopic hopping onto the selected shell yields a branch-selective dimerized channel. In the dilute regime, a boundary doublon-loss channel yields an exponentially slow edge-memory pole through a Zeno-type return. At the shell-critical point, the edge pole is replaced by a near-zero standing-wave doublet with an algebraic coherent spacing. At finite shell filling, the same local shell becomes density dressed. A number-conserving phase-locking jump removes a bright mismatch sector, leaving defects as the asymptotic slow variables and producing a diffusive finite-size gap. We derive the local shell, the projected branch topology, the edge-memory law, the shell-critical doublet, the density-dressed shell Hamiltonian, and the defect generator within one Schur-projection framework. The resulting mechanism identifies the reservoir-engineered fast block as the selector of the observable slow sector, while the microscopic parent shell remains fixed.

When subjected to specific prestresses, continuum elastic shells can exhibit geometric zero modes: complex motions that require vanishing elastic energy to excite, enabling them to be driven by weak and generic energy inputs. Despite recent interest in these modes, we understand very little about their dynamical properties. Non-Euclidean plates modeled on minimal surfaces are one example in which prestresses and geometry combine to produce a continuum of ground states that the plate can explore through a geometric zero mode. We demonstrate that a non-Euclidean plate with metric corresponding to Enneper's minimal surface exhibits the predicted continuous stability, but this degeneracy is ultimately lifted by aging. Despite developing a preferred configuration, the zero mode remains the softest mode. Using a combination of analytical theory and experiments, we show that the elastodynamics of this soft mode is captured by the dynamics of a damped pendulum. A periodic driving uncovers resonance phenomena in this pendulum mode, such as small oscillations and steady rotations, but mixes with an additional flapping mode at high frequencies.

In this work, we investigate the temperature-dependent behavior of the pure (undoped) Cu(100) surface using first-principles calculations within the Density Functional Theory framework. One of the main objectives is to determine whether the linear dependence of the predicted electric-field gradient (EFG) tensor on the outermost Cu atom on the Cu(100) surface arises from the same generation of the surface or from the reconstruction of the surface. To this end, we perform here a comprehensive $\it{ab}$ $\it{initio}$ study of the Cu(100) surface reconstruction and its associated structural, electronic, and hyperfine properties as a function of temperature, not only at the outermost atomic layer (i.e., the topmost Cu atom) but also as a function of atomic depth relative to the reconstructed surface. To study the temperature dependence of the EFG, we use experimentally determined temperature-dependent lattice parameters for bulk copper in our calculations. The anisotropic relaxation that arises when bulk symmetry is broken helps unravel the potential sources of EFG temperature dependence at the surface. Studying the electron density of conduction electrons $\rho$($\bf{r}$) at the atomic scale near the Cu nucleus and the atom-resolved partial density of states at the topmost Cu atom allows us to correlate the surface effect on the EFG with the bulk value. Finally, we correlate the temperature dependence of the EFG on the undoped Cu(100) surface with the linear behavior of the ''ionic'' contribution to the EFG.

Olivine is the dominant mineral in Earth's upper mantle and therefore controls mantle rheology and the mechanics of plate tectonics. The constitutive laws for dislocation-mediated deformation of olivine depend on the nature, density, and arrangements of dislocations within crystals. Hence, imaging and characterizing these defects is important, albeit challenging. Traditional imaging approaches involve (1) transmission electron microscopy (TEM), which samples small areas and requires extensive preparation and (2) oxidation decoration methods that have low spatial resolution and cannot distinguish dislocations of opposite Burgers vectors. Here, we apply electron channeling contrast imaging (ECCI) to unlock insight into the deformation structures within olivine, and combined with electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) and weighted Burgers vector (WBV) mapping as an informative route to characterize dislocation substructures in bulk materials. Specifically, we have used an ECCI workflow based on selected-area electron channeling patterns (SA-ECPs) and we apply this workflow to a single crystal of San Carlos olivine that was deformed by creep at high temperature. ECCI micrographs reveal subgrain boundaries, surface threading dislocations, and dislocation loops across representative areas. The observations demonstrate that this workflow can reliably reveal the complexity of subgrain boundaries in olivine, which can host multiple dislocation types and exhibit non-planar geometries. Despite the limited number of slip systems in olivine, subgrain boundaries can form complex, mixed assemblies. Overall, such observations can provide a variety of constraints on dislocation types, morphologies, and distributions, which are required to parameterize and calibrate models of transient and steady-state dislocation creep in olivine and other materials.

The power spectral density (PSD) is a central frequency-domain descriptor of stochastic processes. While PSDs have been studied for Brownian motion and a few anomalous diffusion processes, the spectral densities of active nonequilibrium processes remain almost unexplored. Here, we present an exact theory for the PSDs of active diffusion using the model of active Ornstein-Uhlenbeck particles (AOUPs). We investigate the spectral densities of AOUPs in free space and under harmonic confinement. In free space, active motion does not alter the Brownian $f^{-2}$ spectrum, but only modifies its amplitude and introduces a crossover at the persistence frequency. Under confinement, the spectrum exhibits a rich variety of features depending on the persistence, trap relaxation, and activity strength, including two characteristic signatures that are absent in both thermal systems and free AOUPs. These are a two-plateau structure from a double-trapping mechanism due to two noise sources, and the new $f^{-4}$ spectral scaling associated with transient ballistic motion. We also investigate the finite time effects through the finite-time PSD, and find that the low-frequency plateau and high frequency oscillation exhibit distinct dependences on the observation time $T$ in free and confined systems. Finally, we discuss our results in connection with previously reported experimental studies of active systems. Our results provide an analytically tractable framework for interpreting such systems.

We proposed a non-analytic model to explain the microscopic origin of the anomalous vibrational density of states (DOS), the Boson peak (BP), in amorphous solids based on the scalar dynamical matrix of a network with springs and nodes. We argue that disorder can be classified into two factors: fluctuation of spring strength and fluctuation of coordination numbers (the number of springs connected to a node). The results suggest that BP originates solely from fluctuation of coordination numbers, while the fluctuation of spring strength only contributes to the effect of damping and has very limited effect on low frequency DOS. This work converts complexity into simplicity and provides a direct answer to the puzzle of the microscopic origin of BP in amorphous solids.

The Ashkin-Teller (AT) model is a classic spin model in statistical mechanics. For traditional homogeneous lattices like triangular and kagome lattices, even when frustration exists, the model only has one ferromagnetic-paramagnetic critical line in the $J>0$ and $K<0$ region. However, in this paper, for the Union Jack lattice, where the lattice coordination numbers are 4, 8, and 8 and which also contains a large number of small triangular units, using Metropolis Monte Carlo method, we find that, the critical line of the AT model splits into two Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless(BKT) boundaries, and a critical phase emerges in the intermediate region. This phenomenon is the combined result of frustration, lattice inhomogeneity and the two coupled spin degrees of freedom inherent to the AT model. In detail, the novel critical phase characterized by a power-law decay of magnetization with system size, where the correlation length ratio $\xi/L$ remains finite even in the thermodynamic limit. We also introduce the susceptibility $\widetilde{\chi} = \text{d}\langle m \rangle /\text{d}J$ as a key probe, and through this probe, pseudo-critical points $J_c(L)$ are observed to scale proportionally to $(\ln L)^{-2}$, a behavior consistent with BKT criticality. Since superfluids, superconductors, and supersolids all possess quasi-long-range order and fall into the category of critical phases, our results could also inspire the exploration of such quantum phases.

We report direct evidence for macroscopic coherence in a condensate of dark dipolar excitons in coupled quantum wells and show that its formation follows a non-equilibrium, driven-dissipative mechanism. The condensation transition is governed by gain-loss competition, in which the exceptionally long lifetime of dark excitons enables their dominance in mode selection. Condensate formation is revealed by photoluminescence darkening, changes in radiative recombination channels, and the emergence of long-range hydrodynamic transport manifested by propagation of density (sound) modes over millimeter-scale distances. The buildup of dark exciton density induces dynamic nuclear polarization, which closes the dark-bright exciton gap, \Delta, via the Overhauser field. This leads to nuclear spin polarization across the entire mesa, far beyond the optically excited region, and produces pronounced hysteresis behavior. At \Delta ~ 0 the gap is locked and the condensate loss are minimal, resulting in a second threshold manifested as a photoluminescence blueshift. Coherence is revealed through interference between incident and boundary-reflected exciton currents, producing spatial modulation of the photoluminescence from the radiative reservoir and enabling extraction of the condensate coherence length. These results establish dark excitons as a platform for coherent quantum fluids in a driven-dissipative, strongly interacting regime with electrical tunability, bridging the physics of polariton condensates and matter-like excitonic systems.

Unconventional magnetism represents a class of metallic states whose Fermi surfaces exhibit spin-dependent splittings under the non-trivial representations of the rotation group. The $d$-wave $\alpha$-phase unconventional magnetic state, commonly known as altermagnet, recently, has attracted significant attention. While these systems exhibit distinct anisotropic $d$-wave characteristics in momentum space, how this microscopic topology translates into the spin distributions in real space remains a question. In this work, we bridge the intrinsic spin quadrupolar ordering in momentum space to the real-space staggered magnetic distribution. By introducing a weak, non-magnetic periodic crystal potential into a $d$-wave unconventional magnetic state, the spin-charge cross susceptibility is calculated by using the linear response theory. We reveal that the interplay between the crystal potential and the intrinsic $d$-wave spin-splitting naturally induces a spatial spin quadrupole distribution without enlarging the unit cell. Our study thus provides a physical connection between momentum-space multipoles in the even partial wave channel and real-space spin multipole orders.

We examine the instabilities of a confined active nematic subjected to an orienting field using a low Reynolds number Ericksen-Leslie framework with active stresses and field-induced torques. Linear analysis reveals two distinct modes, with odd and even director symmetry, the instabilities of which depend on the interplay between activity and field strength. We derive exact and approximate analytic forms of the stability boundaries and show that an orienting field that aligns the director perpendicular to the substrate anchoring direction cooperatively lowers activity thresholds and enables a field-driven even symmetry mode instability, while an orienting field that aligns the director parallel to the substrate anchoring tends to stabilise the system. Numerical solutions of the full nonlinear equations show that the linear stability analysis correctly identifies the symmetries of long-time states. These results demonstrate how orienting fields can promote an instability below the classical critical activity and can be used to both tune the instability onset and control the mode selection in confined active nematics.

The topological degeneracy is a characteristic of quantum phase diagram in an Ising chain with transverse field. We revisit the phase diagram at nonzero temperature of an Ising chain with two types of open boundary conditions. In this work, we focus on an alternative boundary condition that not only removes the coupling between the two end sites but also eliminates the transverse field on them. We show that such a system can be exactly mapped onto two independent Kitaev chains, where spinless fermions correspond to domain-wall excitations. This results in a switch in the existence of the topological Kramers-like degeneracy in the phase diagram. The underlying mechanism is analyzed within the Majorana representation, which indicates that such a switch arises from the gauge dependence of the winding number in an SSH chain. The manifestation of bulk-boundary correspondence at nonzero temperature is demonstrated by numerical simulations on finite-size systems. This finding provides insight into the quantum spin chain.

Stacking polymorphism is a common characteristic of van der Waals layered materials and can substantially modify their physical properties. Here, based on first-principles calculations combined with electron and phonon transport theories, we systematically investigate the thermodynamic stability, electronic structure, lattice dynamics, and thermoelectric performance of Sc_2Si_2Te_6 with three high-symmetry stacking sequences, namely, AA, AB, and ABC. We find that the AA- and AB-stacked structures are nearly degenerate in energy with the experimentally reported ABC phase, and that the maximum sliding barrier among these stacking sequences is only about 10~meV/atom, thereby accounting for the stacking faults observed experimentally. These three stacking sequences exhibit distinct electronic structures, with the conduction-band minimum being highly sensitive to the stacking sequence. As a consequence, the conduction-band degeneracies are 12, 2, and 8 for the ABC, AA, and AB stackings, respectively, leading to markedly different electronic transport properties near the band edge. The lattice thermal conductivity is governed primarily by three-phonon scattering, whereas four-phonon scattering provides an additional reduction, particularly in the ABC stacking. Among the three structures, the AB stacking exhibits the lowest lattice thermal conductivity owing to its stronger three-phonon scattering and lower phonon group velocity. As a result, the maximum thermoelectric figure of merit, ZT, is achieved in the ABC structure, followed closely by the AB structure, whereas the AA structure shows a substantially reduced value. These results demonstrate that the stacking sequence exerts a non-negligible influence on the thermoelectric performance of Sc_2Si_2Te_6 and suggest that suppressing the formation of the AA stacking is important for achieving high thermoelectric performance.

Recent measurements of microsphere interactions in diverse media suggest that the standard dielectric-continuum models of solution-phase interactions are fundamentally incomplete. Experiments indicate that the interactions of charged particles in liquids can be dominated by solvent structuring at interfaces, thereby motivating the concept of electrosolvation. While interfacial spectroscopy and molecular simulations have established that solvent molecules can exhibit net orientation at interfaces, conventional theoretical frameworks treat the fluid as a structureless medium described by a constant dielectric permittivity. This view does not envisage a contribution of interfacial polarization to interactions at longer range. Here, we employ nonlocal dielectric theory accounting for spatial correlations in polarization to describe interactions in solution. This model permits both charge and polarization to govern interactions, leading to dramatic departures from classical expectations. Specifically, the balance between charge and polarization generates a framework of symmetric (repulsive) and antisymmetric (attractive) interactions, wherein: (i) like-charged surfaces can attract at long range, (ii) oppositely charged objects can repel, and (iii) neutral matter can acquire effective electrical mobility and display long-range forces-potentially explaining long-range hydrophobic attraction. Further, like-charged biomolecules can attract in aqueous electrolytes even for modest polarization correlation lengths ($\xi=2$ Å). Our results also suggest that electrosolvation effects may underpin flocculation in suspended matter, which has traditionally been attributed to attractive dispersion forces. These findings indicate how solvent structuring and correlations may play a dominant, complex role in fluid-phase physics.

We investigate the thermal and structural properties of knotted diblock copolymer rings using a coarse-grained lattice model in an implicit solvent. The system is studied by means of the Wang--Landau Monte Carlo algorithm, allowing us to analyze thermodynamic and conformational responses over a wide temperature range. Different knot topologies, including the unknot, trefoil, figure-eight, and pentafoil knots, are considered for both symmetric and asymmetric monomer compositions. In the AB model employed here, A-type monomers are self-repulsive, B-type monomers are self-attractive, and A-B interactions are neutral, such that the solvent is effectively good for A-type monomers and poor for B-type monomers at low temperatures. We analyze several key observables, including the heat capacity, the radius of gyration, and its temperature derivative for both the entire copolymer ring and the individual blocks, and the probability that a monomer belongs to the knotted region. Our results show that the interplay between knot topology, monomer composition, and temperature strongly influences polymer conformations. Small variations in the B-block length induce nonmonotonic, reentrant-like conformational behavior as a function of temperature, including transitions between knot localization and delocalization at low temperatures. These effects arise from the competition between energetic and entropic contributions imposed by topological constraints.

The realization of $p$-type doping in wide-band-gap oxide semiconductors remains a major challenge, particularly in $\beta-Ga_2O_3$ where nitrogen has long been considered a potential acceptor dopant but has consistently failed to produce hole conductivity. Here we investigate the microscopic configuration of implanted nitrogen in (100) $\beta-Ga_2O_3$ using temperature-dependent $N$ $K$-edge x-ray absorption spectroscopy. The spectra reveal a pronounced $\pi^*$ resonance characteristic of molecular nitrogen, which becomes increasingly dominant upon thermal annealing. First-principles calculations and multiple-scattering simulations reveal a pronounced tendency for nitrogen atoms to form $N-N$ bonded configurations in the $Ga_2O_3$ matrix, particularly in defect-rich environments created by ion implantation, reproducing the characteristic spectral features observed in the $N$ $K$-edge XANES spectra. Structural analysis further indicates that implantation induces a defect-rich near-surface layer with local $\beta$-to-$\gamma$-like structural motifs, highlighting the strongly nonequilibrium structural environment in which nitrogen incorporation occurs. Reported results show that implanted nitrogen preferentially forms molecular $N_2$-like configurations rather than substitutional acceptors. Our results provide a microscopic explanation for the long-standing failure of nitrogen acceptor doping in $\beta-Ga_2O_3$ and reveal dopant molecularization as a previously overlooked pathway for impurity incorporation under strongly nonequilibrium implantation conditions.

Effective field theories provide a suitable framework for both particle physics and statistical physics. We delve deeper into the study of the effective three-dimensional scalar field theory for its application to statistical physics, especially considering the role of the sextic coupling in the tricritical-to-critical crossover. The three-loop renormalization of the mass and the two coupling constants that we perform allows us to obtain, for the first time, the complete renormalization group flow of the couplings in that order. We analyze what universality means in this problem and how we can recover non-universal terms from the renormalization group beta functions. The crossover is realized by the convergence of the renormalization group flow towards the line connecting the tricritical and critical fixed points.

Hybrid integration of layered van der Waals (vdW) semiconductors with dielectric resonant structures provides an effective approach for controlling excitonic emission dynamics. Here, we demonstrate Purcell-enhanced spontaneous emission from a thin InSe flake integrated with a Mie-resonant Si$_3$N$_4$ waveguide. The structure is designed to spectrally overlap with the InSe photoluminescence band and enhance coupling of excitonic emission to the guided mode. Time-resolved photoluminescence shows a reduction of the excitonic decay time by up to a factor of three relative to planar InSe. The extracted Purcell factors are approximately 3 for out-of-plane excitons and 2.1 for in-plane excitons. These results demonstrate resonator-induced control of excitonic recombination in layered InSe and highlight vdW-dielectric interfaces as a platform for integrated excitonic and quantum photonic devices.

Chalcogen-terminated van der Waals MXenes (M2CX2; M = Nb, Ta; X = S, Se) provide a robust platform for exploring strong spin-orbit coupling and proximity engineering. To probe their tunability and guide optimization of emergent properties, we systematically examine sister compounds and propose M2CS2/CrBr3 heterostructures that break time-reversal symmetry via proximity exchange coupling, enabling combined intrinsic magnetic and mechanical control. First-principles calculations reveal Rashba splitting up to 2.53 eV A and valley-contrasting spin polarization in monolayers. These features drive strong second-order nonlinear responses, with pristine bilayer Ta2CS2 reaching a shift current of |sigma|_max approx 5 A mA/V^2 and Nb2CS2/CrBr3 attaining |D|_max approx 18.44 A. In M2CS2/CrBr3 heterostructures, the ferromagnetic substrate induces a magnetization-reversible proximity exchange field with valley-selective conduction-band renormalization (Delta_val approx 50 meV). Crucially, interfacial geometry, controlled by stacking inversion and lateral sliding, acts as a mechanical knob that continuously tunes the exchange-SOC interplay and bandgap, driving an emergent quantum anomalous Hall phase in the bilayer.

Carbon schwarzites are negative-curvature carbon networks with electronic structures distinct from graphene, fullerenes, and conventional carbon allotropes. Here we report a spin-polarized first-principles screening study of D-type C136 carbon schwarzite focused on the competition between magnetism, doping, and high-DOS metallic behavior. Neutral C136 has a robust competing magnetic branch, with total magnetization of about 11.01-11.03 Bohr magnetons per 136-atom cell. Charged-cell calculations reveal a clear electron-hole asymmetry: adding two electrons per cell increases the total magnetization to 12.11 Bohr magnetons per cell, while removing two electrons reduces it to 9.61. Further hole doping suppresses the magnetic branch monotonically, giving 8.02, 6.34, and 4.76 Bohr magnetons per cell for removal of 4, 6, and 8 electrons, respectively. The most strongly hole-doped point, h8, was examined with spin-polarized NSCF and density-of-states calculations on a 4x4x4 k-point mesh. The NSCF Fermi energy, -0.7414 eV, agrees with the SCF value, -0.7413 eV. The DOS remains high near the Fermi level: at E = -0.740 eV, the total DOS is about 44.69 states/eV/cell, with DOS_up = 33.11 and DOS_down = 11.58 states/eV/cell. Thus h8 combines substantial suppression of the competing magnetic branch with preservation of a high-DOS metallic state. We do not claim superconductivity in C136. Instead, these calculations identify hole doping as a route for suppressing a competing magnetic instability while preserving electronic conditions relevant for further superconductivity screening. Lattice stability, electron-phonon coupling, and transition-temperature estimates remain open problems.

Spin-charge separation is a hallmark of one-dimensional fermionic systems, yet its realization in higher dimensions remains an open question. To address this issue, we investigate a two-leg t-J ladder using the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) method and its time-dependent extension. By analyzing ground-state correlations and single-particle removal spectra, we systematically examine the effects of plaquette diagonal hopping, spin exchange, and hole doping. Within appropriate parameter regimes, these factors drive the system from the well-known Luther Emery phase, with gapped spin and gapless charge modes, into a Luttinger liquid phase characterized by gapless spin and charge excitations, where signatures of spin-charge separation emerge. In combination with previous studies using exact diagonalization, our results provide evidence that spin-charge separation may persist in wider ladder systems.

We propose a three-dimensional multi-orbital tight-binding model for rare-earth nickelates RNiO$_3$ that treats charge, spin, orbital, and lattice degrees of freedom on equal footing. All model parameters, including the on-site interactions $U$ and $J$ and the electron-phonon (el-ph) coupling to the breathing mode, are extracted from hybrid-functional DFT calculations for the small-bandwidth nickelate LuNiO$_3$. The model describes three competing insulating phases governed by the interplay of $U{-}3J$ and el-ph coupling to the breathing and Jahn--Teller (JT) modes. For large $U{-}3J$, the insulating state is stabilized by local JT distortions on high-spin Ni$^{3+}$ sites. For smaller $U{-}3J$, the system undergoes charge disproportionation, $2\mathrm{Ni}^{3+}\rightarrow\mathrm{Ni}^{2+}+\mathrm{Ni}^{4+}$, resulting in the spin-polarized charge-ordered state observed experimentally below the Néel temperature in small-bandwidth RNiO$_3$. When the JT energy on the Ni$^{2+}$ site exceeds Hund's exchange $3J$, a distinct charge- and orbital-ordered insulating phase emerges in which the two $e_g$-electrons occupy the same orbital with opposite spin. The stability of this phase is further confirmed by self-consistent calculations within the full three-dimensional tight-binding model. This newly predicted metastable state, characterized by JT distortions in a nonmagnetic charge-ordered RNiO$_3$ phase, shows that the onset of magnetic order is not required for the metal-insulator transition in RNiO$_3$.

High-quality single crystals of the two-dimensional van der Waals ferromagnet Fe$_3$GaTe$_2$ (FGaT) were successfully grown using the chemical vapour transport method, which effectively reduced surface impurities compared with conventional self-flux growth. Structural and magnetic characterizations were performed using single-crystal X-ray and neutron diffraction. The results confirm that FGaT crystallizes in the hexagonal $P6_3/mmc$ structure, with Fe occupying two inequivalent sites (Fe$^{i}$ and Fe$^{ii}$), where the magnetic moment of Fe$^{i}$ [1.9(2) $\mu_B$] is larger than that of Fe$^{ii}$ [1.4(6) $\mu_B$]. The magnetic easy axis is oriented along the $c$ axis and the Curie temperature ($T_C$) is approximately 355-360 K. Compared with Fe$_3$GeTe$_2$ (FGT), FGaT exhibits a slightly expanded $a$ axis and a contracted $c$ axis, resulting in a reduction in the Fe$^{i}$-Fe$^{ii}$ interatomic distance along the $c$ axis. This pronounced contraction could strengthen the Fe$-$Fe exchange interaction, which is believed to be the key factor responsible for the significantly higher $T_C$ in FGaT relative to FGT.

Active matter systems encompass both natural and artificially created systems consisting of numerous active particles. These particles actively consume energy to propel themselves or exert mechanical forces, leading to intricate behaviors and a diverse range of collective motions from flocking transition to motility-induced phase separation. The flocking transition refers to the spontaneous alignment and coordination of individuals in a group, resembling the cohesive motion observed in flocks of birds or schools of fish. On the other hand, motility-induced phase separation refers to the segregation of active particles into distinct regions based on their differing motility levels. In this presentation, I will talk about active matter systems, specifically focusing on the collective behavior and dynamics, including the influence of volume exclusion features, the impact of disorder in the media, and the behavior of self-propelled particles in off-lattice domains by introducing spin anisotropy. The objective is to understand how the collective behavior of self-propelled particles is affected by various system parameters, including thermal noise, self-propulsion velocity, external field strength, etc. I will furthermore show the phenomena such as jamming, kinetic arrest, motility-induced phase separation, coexisting phases, microphase separation, and phase transitions within the context of active matter models.

Compensated ferrimagnets enable ferromagnet-like spin transport without net magnetization. We study the spin Seebeck effect in a compensated ferrimagnet/normal-metal junction using a four-sublattice model in which sublattice inequivalence arises from differences in exchange couplings, in contrast to the previously studied anisotropy-based mechanism. Within the nonequilibrium Green's function framework, we show that isotropic magnon splitting generates a robust spin current with a magnitude comparable to that in standard ferromagnetic junctions. We also demonstrate that the spin Seebeck effect vanishes in altermagnet junctions under identical conditions, thereby establishing compensated ferrimagnets as uniquely suited for thermal spin-current generation among magnetically compensated systems. These results provide a theoretical basis for the applications of compensated ferrimagnets with exchange-coupling asymmetry as stray-field-free spin-current sources in spintronic devices.

We derive analytically, and validate numerically, the dispersion renormalization and attenuation of acoustic waves propagating through quenched disordered media in the long-wavelength limit. We consider weak spatial fluctuations in elastic moduli and/or mass density and compute the disorder-induced self-energies within the leading (Born) approximation. For sufficiently weak disorder, the results depend only on the variances of the fluctuations and are therefore insensitive to the detailed form of the underlying random distribution. For spatially uncorrelated elasticity disorder we obtain Rayleigh-type attenuation, $\Gamma(q)\propto q^{d+1}$ , together with a reduction of the sound speed. In contrast, density disorder produces Rayleigh-type attenuation but does not renormalize the acoustic dispersion to leading order. Molecular dynamics simulations and normal-mode analyses of disordered one- and two-dimensional lattices quantitatively confirm the theoretical predictions.

We theoretically investigate the transverse magnetization and ferroaxial moments induced by electric field gradients arising from the geometry of finite systems. Based on the Kubo formalism and real-time numerical simulations for a finite trapezoidal model, we demonstrate that both quantities are generated under the electric field gradient and are enhanced by tuning the leg inclination, which controls the gradient strength. We further show that the induced transverse magnetization is antisymmetric and linear in the magnetic field; such a response is prohibited by Onsager reciprocity in the absence of an electric field gradient. In addition, we find that the total transverse magnetization scales linearly with the electric field, in contrast to the longitudinal one, which exhibits a quadratic dependence, providing an advantage for experimental observation. Our results establish geometry-induced electric field gradients as a versatile mechanism for realizing and controlling unconventional transverse responses in mesoscopic systems.

We study the Hofstadter model on a hexagonal lattice with irrational magnetic flux in this work. The Hofstadter model of the square lattice with irrational flux has been solved mathematically by Avila in his Fields medal work. However, this theory is usually not applicable to lattices with internal degrees of freedom, such as spin or sub-lattices. In this work, we show that for the hexagonal lattice with only nearest neighbor hopping, the system can still be characterized by a 2*2 transfer matrix and solved exactly by Avila$'$s global theory of Avila although this lattice has two sub-lattices. We obtained the exact localization phase diagram of the hexagonal lattice with irrational flux by this theory, which reveals three pure phases, that is, the extended, localized and critical states but no mobility edge due to the chiral symmetry. We used the renormalization group (RG) theory to verify these results, which can determine part of the phase diagram. We then computed the fractal dimension of the remaining part numerically. The results from both the RG theory and numerical analysis confirmed the phase diagram we get from Avila$'$s global theory.

Momentum-resolved spin textures and potential valley-contrasting physical properties in the momentum space are two intriguing characteristics of noncentrosymmetric materials, and they have broad applications in spintronics and valleytronics. The realization of diverse spin textures within a single material, along with their further coupling to the valley degree of freedom, is highly desirable. Via first-principles calculations, we investigate electronic properties of Janus MP$_2$S$_3$Se$_3$ monolayers, which exhibits distinct spin textures at different valleys. While Ising-type spin textures are located at $K_\pm$ valleys, the symmetry breaking from the Janus structure brings about a coexistence of Weyl-type and Rashba-type spin textures at $\Gamma$ valley. In addition to valley-contrasting spin textures, valley dependence also occurs in Berry-curvature-driven anomalous Hall currents and optical selectivity. Besides, energy differences between $\Gamma$ and $K_\pm$, as well as band gaps, are highly tunable by applied strain. These findings present an intriguing coupling between diverse spin textures and multiple valleys, and pave the way for designing advanced electronic devices that leverage spin and valley degrees of freedom.

We construct families of periodic tessellations of the plane with arbitrarily high critical temperature, $T_{\rm c}$, for the classical ferromagnetic Ising model. Our approach is motivated by recently found exact bounds, which imply that large values of $T_{\rm c}$ require large values of the maximal coordination number of the lattice, $q_{\rm max}$. We create such lattices through iterative triangulation and derive explicit expressions for their $T_{\rm c}$. Furthermore, we show that $T_{\rm c}$ for these families scales asymptotically as $T_{\rm c}/J\sim A \ln q_{\rm max}$ with a universal prefactor $A=2/\ln 2$. We introduce a function $T_{\rm c}^*(q_{\rm max})$ that we conjecture to be optimal for all periodic tessellations of the plane. We show that the family of so-called Apollonian lattices, which are derived from the Triangular lattice through iterative triangulation, saturates this bound. The lattices discussed in this work are relevant for theoretical questions of optimality in network systems and may be realized experimentally in Coherent Ising Machines or topoelectric circuits in the future.

In recent years, orbitronic effects have attracted growing attention as complementary counterparts to the well-established spintronic phenomena. In this work, we demonstrate that monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides provide an excellent platform for the observation of the orbital Nernst effect, a relatively less explored phenomenon describing the generation of a transverse orbital current in response to an applied temperature gradient. We show that, similar to its electrical counterpart, viz., the orbital Hall effect, the orbital Nernst effect does not require the presence of spin-orbit coupling. Analytical results based on a low-energy valley model offer key insights into the underlying mechanisms, highlighting in particular the crucial role of electronic states at the Fermi energy for the emergence of this effect. The inclusion of spin-orbit coupling further gives rise to a spin Nernst effect, which scales with the strength of spin-orbit coupling and vanishes in its absence. We substantiate our analytical findings with full Brillouin-zone tight-binding results for two representative systems, monolayer 2H MoS$_2$ and 2H NbS$_2$. Our results show that while both orbital and spin Nernst conductivities in MoS$_2$ require electron or hole doping, both effects are intrinsically present in metallic NbS$_2$. Our work reveals the central role of orbital and spin Berry curvatures, identifies doping as an effective route for tuning orbital and spin Nernst responses, and proposes a possible experimental setup for detecting these effects in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides.

Lithium electrolytes are commonly described using separate conceptual frameworks for local coordination chemistry, electrostatic screening, and ionic transport. This separation is effective in dilute conditions but breaks down at higher concentration, where coordination, ion pairing, clustering, and collective dynamics become intrinsically coupled. In this Perspective, we develop a unified multiscale framework that links local coordination motifs, mesoscopic ionic organization, and macroscopic transport within a single physical picture. Through representative examples spanning carbonate liquids, polymer electrolytes, concentrated systems, and confinement, we show that increasing concentration drives a systematic evolution from solvent-dominated Li$^+$ coordination to ion pairing, clustering, and correlated domains. In this regime, screening and transport are not independent phenomena but arise from the same underlying correlated structures. This perspective implies that rational electrolyte design must simultaneously control short-range coordination, mesoscale organization, and collective electrostatic response.

Recent angle-resolved photoemission measurements on La$_3$Ni$_2$O$_7$ have challenged the density-functional-theory-based picture of three Fermi surfaces by revealing that the $d_{z^2}$-derived $\gamma$ band can reside below the Fermi level. Motivated by this discrepancy, we investigate a realistic bilayer two-orbital Hubbard model using time-dependent variational principle (TDVP)-based cluster perturbation theory (CPT), alongside large-scale density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) calculations. Our TDVP-CPT calculations, performed on clusters of up to 16 physical sites, reveal that electronic correlations drive a pronounced orbital-selective reconstruction of the low-energy spectrum: the $d_{z^2}$ spectral weight is progressively depleted, the $\gamma$ band sinks below the Fermi level, and pseudogaps open on the remaining $\alpha$ and $\beta$ bands, leaving Fermi arcs dominated by the $d_{x^2-y^2}$ orbital at strong coupling. Furthermore, large-scale DMRG calculations demonstrate that the leading superconducting correlations evolve consistently with this Fermi surface reconstruction, transitioning from $d_{z^2}$-dominated to $d_{x^2-y^2}$-dominated interlayer spin-singlet pairing while retaining an $s_{\pm}$ structure. Consequently, our results indicate that the disappearance of the $\gamma$ pocket is not detrimental to superconductivity; rather, it signals a correlation-driven shift of the pairing channel mediated by interlayer antiferromagnetism, Hund's coupling, and inter-orbital hybridization.

The log H term is derived in the free energy of many-electron system from Chern-Simons gauge theory. Owing to the singularity at $H=0$, this leads the first order transition and B-H hysteresis to many-electron systems of symmetric and single domain. This has the origin in quantum mechanics and is irrelevant to non-invertible motions of domains. This transition appears in single and symmetric domain.

Hybrid ferromagnetic metal/organic interfaces (spinterfaces) exhibit unique properties, including spin filtering. In parallel, chiral organic molecules can themselves induce efficient spin filtering, leading to unexpectedly high spin polarizations. Here, we investigate how the proximity of gold-capped Co/Ni ferromagnetic multilayers influences the spectroscopic properties and photoinduced electron dynamics of chiral oligopeptides bearing a porphyrin chromophore. The molecules are covalently attached to the gold cap via a chiral linker, forming a self-assembled monolayer. The porphyrin macrocycles adopt an orientation parallel to the surface, resulting in the formation of J-like aggregates. Photoinduced dynamics are probed using femtosecond pump-probe transient absorption spectroscopy. Despite excitation of only a single molecular layer, a clear transient absorption signal of the porphyrin singlet excited state is observed. Adsorption on the metal surface leads to a pronounced reduction of the excited-state lifetime. However, no signatures of long-lived photoinduced charge-transfer products are detected. Furthermore, no dependence of the excited-state dynamics on either the magnetization direction of the ferromagnetic layer or the molecular chirality is observed.

We study a Rashba superconductor thin film with ferromagnetic insulators (FIs) placed on top of it. We show that the ferromagnetic insulators generate circular super-currents, enabling long-range magnetic interactions (LRMI), decaying in power laws. In the static case, the long-range magnetic interaction can be ferromagnetic, in contrast to previous studies showing that superconductor mediates anti-ferromagnetic interactions decaying exponentially. Surprisingly, we find that in the dynamic case, the LRMI has a different distance dependence. Our results have potential applications in superconducting spintronics.

The observation of the fractional quantum Hall (FQH) effect in 2D electron gases ushered in investigations of topological phases driven by strong electron correlations. Their remarkable features include fractionalized elementary excitations, gapless boundary states, and non-trivial quantum entanglement patterns. Thanks to persistent efforts in the building of new platforms and making higher-quality samples, a diverse plethora of FQH states have been unveiled in experiments. We report a systematic study of ultrahigh-quality GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells with mobility up to 3.7*10^7 cm^2/V/s using quantum transport measurements in nuclear adiabatic demagnetization and dilution refrigerators down to 1 mK. In addition to many FQH states that have already been identified in previous work, new longitudinal resistance dips are observed at filling factors 17/33 and 15/31. The application of an in-plane magnetic field causes disparate variations of the FQH states. The theoretical foundation of these states is discussed in the framework of composite fermion theory. While most fractions can be explained as non-interacting composite fermions forming integer quantum Hall states, a few states correspond to FQH states of composite fermions that arise from residual interaction between them. We summarize the observed fractions in the range of 0 < {\nu} < 2 and propose a pattern to account for their experimental appearance that provides an intuitive picture about the relative strengths of different FQH states.

Lanthanide-doped fluorides are promising materials for advanced photonic and quantum applications due to their wide bandgap, low phonon energy, and chemical stability. In this work, we present a systematic comparative study of ytterbium incorporation at low doping levels (0.05--0.2 mol\%) in BaF$_2$ and CaF$_2$ single crystals, focusing on the interplay between host lattice properties, charge-state stabilization, and defect formation mechanisms. Using a combination of X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR), transmittance, and infrared photoluminescence (IR PL), we explore how host lattice properties affect the stabilization of Yb$^{3+}$ and Yb$^{2+}$ ions. XRD confirmed cubic phase purity and lattice parameter stability in both hosts, while XPS revealed surface chemical composition variations associated with charge-compensating defects and trace impurities. EPR spectra indicated that BaF$_2$ favored perturbed Yb$^{3+}$ environments with increasing dopant levels, while CaF$_2$ maintained predominantly unperturbed sites, suggesting a more favorable ionic match for Yb$^{2+}$. Photothermal deflection spectroscopy (PDS) and IR PL results showed host-specific optical responses, with CaF$_2$ exhibiting crystal-field splitting and broader local field effects. These results reveal a clear decoupling between long-range structural stability and local lattice perturbations, and demonstrate that host cation identity governs the balance between Yb$^{2+}$ and Yb$^{3+}$ stabilization as well as defect-driven optical behavior. This offers valuable insights for optimizing rare-earth-doped fluoride crystals in laser, scintillator, and quantum device applications.

Even if the atoms of a multicomponent alloy occupy a common lattice, their distribution is not homogeneous, and regions with different compositions can be detected. Three representative examples will be discussed: a Cantor-type system containing transition-metal elements (Cr, Mn, Fe, Ni, and Co), a refractory high-entropy alloy (Ti, Zr, Nb, Ta, and Mo), and a multicomponent system combining transition and refractory metals (Cu, Ni, Ti, Zr, and Hf). Using a combination of theoretical analysis and experimental observations, we demonstrate that the formation of locally segregated regions can lead to a reduction in the overall energy of the system. This stabilization arises from the compensation of tensile and compressive strain fields associated with atoms of different sizes, highlighting the key role of local chemical and structural heterogeneity in determining the thermodynamic stability of multicomponent alloys.

We present this http URL, an open-source Julia package implementing the Polynomially Filtered Exact Diagonalization (POLFED) algorithm for computing mid-spectrum eigenvalues and eigenvectors (shortly, eigenpairs) of quantum many-body Hamiltonians. Access to such eigenpairs is essential for studying non-equilibrium many-body physics, but is hindered by the exponential growth of Hilbert-space dimension. POLFED addresses this challenge through a polynomial spectral transformation evaluated on the fly within a Lanczos iteration, preserving Hamiltonian sparsity and substantially reducing memory costs compared to other diagonalization methods. The package supports flexible energy targeting, automatic optimization of the spectral mapping for structured Hamiltonians, and GPU acceleration, which is particularly effective since the dominant computational cost reduces to repeated sparse matrix-vector multiplications. Benchmarks on disordered spin-chain and fermionic models demonstrate access to larger system sizes than alternative approaches, and CPU--GPU comparisons confirm significant speedups. In particular, we also provide code for constructing the quantum sun model Hamiltonian, a toy model of a many-body ergodicity-breaking transition. While our focus is on many-body Hamiltonians, this http URL may be applied to any large sparse matrix.

We consider a model of 1D relativistic hydrogen-like atom, formed by a Coulomb impurity in graphene nanoribbon. Describing the electron motion in terms of the one-dimensional Dirac equation for Coulomb potential taking into account the finite-size of the atomic nucleus, we compute the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the atomic electron. The cases of unconfined atom and atomin-box system are considered. Special focus is given calculation of supercritical energy levels and the critical charge. The latter is the value of the atomic nucleus charge, when the electronic state reaches the border of the Dirac sea. It is found that for confined atom the value of the critical charge is larger than that of free atom. Experimentally measurable characteristics, local density of states is also plotted for both cases. Existence of strong localization for atom-in-box system is shown.

Solid-electrolyte interphase (SEI) growth is widely modeled cell-by-cell with chemistry-specific closures, yet its underlying kinetic scaling is rarely tested across chemistries. By compiling cycle-resolved data from public long-cycle datasets covering four anode configurations -- graphite, silicon composite, lithium metal, and anode-free -- we show that the cumulative interphase-loss index Lambda_int obeys the parabolic law Lambda_int = A_chem * sqrt(1 - Theta_Li) in three of the four chemistries, with an exponent indistinguishable from alpha = 1/2 within experimental uncertainty. The chemistry-specific prefactor A_chem spans an order of magnitude, but the diffusion-limited parabolic kinetics is preserved. The fourth chemistry, anode-free configurations, deviates with a super-parabolic exponent alpha approx 0.77, consistent with a nucleation-controlled growth regime. We rationalize the result using the Tammann-Deal-Grove parabolic-growth framework adapted to interphase formation and identify the conditions under which universality is recovered. The observed regularity reduces SEI modeling complexity to a single rate constant per chemistry and provides a sharp falsifiable test for next-generation cell formats.

Transport experiments on two-dimensional superconductors often yield direction-dependent transition temperatures, raising the question of whether such a ``double-$T_c$'' reflects a true thermodynamic splitting or a transport artifact. To establish a baseline, we study a minimal anisotropic phase-only Josephson-junction array in equilibrium and under resistively shunted junction dynamics with fluctuating twist boundary conditions. The equilibrium model exhibits a single Berezinskii--Kosterlitz--Thouless (BKT) transition. Out of equilibrium, anisotropic Josephson couplings and anisotropic dissipation reshape the linear $R$--$T$ curves in a finite-size, finite-current crossover regime, so that curve-shape criteria such as Halperin--Nelson fits and fixed-resistance thresholds yield an apparent double-$T_c$. In contrast, critical-scaling criteria -- the universal exponent $\alpha=3$ and dynamic finite-size scaling -- remain consistent with the single $T_{\mathrm{BKT}}$. A robust splitting that persists in the nonlinear critical scaling, such as that recently reported at KTaO$_3$ interfaces, therefore points to physics beyond this clean anisotropic baseline.

The search and characterization of supersolid phases remain a central topic in condensed matter physics. Inspired by the experimental discovery of local superfluid and insulating phases in two-dimensional moiré optical lattices [Meng et al., Nature 615, 231 (2023)], we systematically explore the emergence of a local supersolid ($l$SS) phase in a one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model subjected to a moiré potential, using the density-matrix renormalization group method. We impose a maximum site occupation $n_{\rm max}=2$ to realize the soft-core boson constraint. In the absence of nearest-neighbor repulsion, we identify the conventional superfluid, local superfluid, Mott insulator, and moiré-induced insulator phases. When the nearest-neighbor repulsion is turned on, the $l$SS phase emerges in the strong-moiré regime. This phase is uniquely characterized by three key signatures: (i) coexisting local staggered density order and local off-diagonal coherence within isolated moiré supercells; (ii) exponentially decaying global off-diagonal correlations; and (iii) a vanishing global structure factor in the thermodynamic limit, while the local structure factor remains finite. These features clearly distinguish the $l$SS from the conventional global supersolid (SS) phase, which exhibits algebraic correlations and a finite global structure factor. Our results provide a complete microscopic picture of local quantum phases in moiré lattices and offer clear experimental observables for detecting $l$SS states with ultracold atoms.

We propose a minimal nonlinear closure ODE for the dynamic active-area factor of a battery interface and show that it exhibits a saddle-node bifurcation when the smoothing rate saturates with surface roughness. The closure is the simplest physically motivated extension of a recently introduced single-fixed-point closure [C. Bae, in preparation (2026)]: u = K - u/(1 + alphau^2), where u = xi - 1 is the dimensionless excess active area, K the dimensionless drive, and alpha a single saturation parameter. The bifurcation occurs at K_c = 1/(2sqrt(alpha)), separating a smooth passivating phase from a morphologically unstable phase. Mapping four canonical anode configurations -- graphite, silicon composite, lithium metal, and anode-free Li/Cu -- onto the closure via end-of-cycling steady-state xi extracted from publicly available long-cycle data populates the stable branch with monotonically increasing K/K_c ratios: graphite (~0.01), silicon composite (~0.24), lithium metal (~0.73), and anode-free (~0.95). The anode-free configuration sits within 5% of the saddle-node threshold, predicting a vanishingly small operational stability window in current density, temperature, and electrolyte composition. We test three falsifiable predictions of the framework -- a critical current density, a critical temperature shift, and a mean-field critical-slowing-down exponent -- and find them broadly consistent with publicly available data. We argue that this near-critical position is universal to nucleation-controlled deposition on non-passivating substrates.

We study hard-core dipolar bosons on a square lattice subject to a unidirectional periodic drive that Floquet-engineers anisotropic hopping. Driving along one lattice direction provides a controlled way to suppress transverse tunneling, yielding a kinetically quasi-one-dimensional regime with strongly anisotropic transport within the leading-order high-frequency Floquet effective description. In this limit, the system does not reduce to decoupled chains, due to the long-range in-plane dipolar interaction remains isotropic and couples different chains. Focusing on dipoles polarized perpendicular to the plane, for which the interaction is purely repulsive and isotropic, we use sign-problem-free worm-algorithm quantum Monte Carlo simulations to map the half-filling phase diagram versus kinetic anisotropy and dipolar coupling. We find that increasing kinetic anisotropy systematically lowers the interaction strength required to stabilize checkerboard order, demonstrating that Floquet-induced suppression of transverse motion enhances density ordering. Near the superfluid--checkerboard boundary, finite-size results reveal a narrow transition region where the stiffness drops rapidly while checkerboard correlations rise sharply; Its pronounced sharpening with system size is consistent with a weakly first-order transition rounded by finite-size effects. Away from half filling, on the doped sides of the checkerboard plateau, we identify a narrow checkerboard-supersolid regime with simultaneously finite checkerboard correlations and superfluid stiffness, where the superfluid stiffness is anisotropic but the density pattern is isotropic.

Using the Hopfield model as a benchmark case, the present work focuses on the investigation of partially annealed associative neural networks, wherein neural dynamics is coupled to slowly evolving patterns within the two-temperature-two-timescale framework. This setting inherently introduces a real parameter n, reminiscent of the number of replicas in the celebrated replica trick, that tunes the separation of timescales and the effective interaction between fast (i.e. the neurons) and slow (i.e. the synapses) degrees of freedom. By adapting Guerra's interpolation to the case, we derive the free energy without relying on analytical continuation. The obtained results demonstrate that negative values of n induce a progressive decorrelation of the stored patterns, thereby effectively reducing interference, promoting orthogonal configurations and ultimately conferring to the network the maximal storage alphac=1. Numerical simulations based on a mean field Monte Carlo dynamics have been employed to confirm this scenario and prove that partial annealing restores retrieval in challenging regimes, such as in the presence of biased patterns, outperforming standard decorrelation methods. These findings underscore the notion of partial annealing as an adaptive mechanism for enhancing memory organisation and retrieval in complex systems.

We introduce a general scheme for constructing order parameters (OPs) by extracting generic patterns from the dominant Fock states of many-body ground states. While topological phases are traditionally characterized by non-local invariants, we demonstrate that our real-space OPs provide a more refined classification. In the extended Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model, we show that the standard winding number is insufficient to fully distinguish all phases; our OPs reveal a hidden sub-structure where each topological sector splits into two distinct phases. Beyond identifying the phase boundaries, these OPs quantify the depth of a phase, and remain robust in characterizing transitions in disordered systems. Furthermore, our approach provides a practical finite-size diagnostic for the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition in the interacting spin-1/2 XXZ model. The presented framework offers a broadly applicable tool for uncovering the phase diagrams of diverse interacting and non-interacting quantum many-body systems.

We investigate the $N$-queens problem as a lattice gas -- a model in which $N$ queens are placed on an $N \times N$ chessboard with pairwise repulsive interactions along shared rows, columns, and diagonals -- from the perspective of statistical mechanics. The ground states are exactly the $Q(N)$ solutions of the classical $N$-queens problem, with entropy per queen $s_0 \approx \ln N - \gamma$ ($\gamma \approx 1.944$). This entropy reflects a characteristic constraint hierarchy: each successive geometric constraint -- columns, then diagonals -- reduces the entropy from the free-placement value $\ln N$ by a definite constant. We derive the exact high-temperature energy $E/N \to 5/3$ as $N \to \infty$. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations with $10^8$ sweeps per temperature point for $N = 8$--$1024$ reveal that the specific heat per queen $C_v/N$ converges to a universal function of $T$ as $N \to \infty$. The converged curve features a non-divergent peak $C_v^{\max}/N \approx 1.63$ at $T^* \approx 0.235\,J$, establishing the absence of a thermodynamic phase transition. Combined with the trivially exact high-temperature entropy $S(\infty)/N = (1/N) \ln \binom{N^2}{N}$, the convergence of $C_v/N$ enables a thermodynamic integration of $C_v/T$ from $T = \infty$ to $T = 0$ that recovers the ground-state entropy -- and hence the Simkin constant $\gamma$ -- purely from Monte Carlo data. This provides an independent thermodynamic route to a fundamental combinatorial constant. Thermodynamic integration yields $\gamma_{\rm MC} = 1.946 \pm 0.003$ at $N = 1024$, within $0.1\%$ of the precise combinatorial value $\gamma = 1.94400(1)$. We further present a transfer-matrix-based tensor network formulation that encodes the non-attacking constraints into a rank-9 site tensor with 17 nonzero elements, providing a complementary exact-enumeration route.

Hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) hosts robust room-temperature single-photon emitters, yet their coherence is typically limited by phonon induced dephasing and spectral broadening. Here, we show that thermally induced curvature in bulk like hBN flakes provides a strain enabled route to suppress defect phonon coupling under ambient conditions. Nanoscale bubbles formed by thermal processing generate strong through thickness strain gradients, which we directly probe by infrared nano spectroscopy. These measurements reveal strain induced splitting of in-plane phonon modes, evidencing a substantial local modification of the phonon density of states. Quantum emitters localized within these curved regions exhibit markedly enhanced room temperature spectral purity, with Debye Waller factors of 0.91 and narrower line widths than emitters in flat regions. Photon correlation measurements confirm high-purity single photon emission at room temperature. Supported by first-principles calculations, we attribute this behavior to strain driven phonon redistribution, which depletes phonons in tensile regions and accumulates them in compressive regions, thereby creating locally phonon suppressed environments for defect emitters. These results establish strain engineering as an effective route for phonon control in hBN and open a pathway toward high coherence, room-temperature quantum light sources for integrated nano photonic platforms.

The relative phase between the two pair condensates of a bilayer s-wave superconductor is a collective degree of freedom distinct from the usual in-phase Anderson-Bogoliubov mode. Working at the Gaussian fluctuation level for the AA-stacked attractive-Hubbard honeycomb bilayer, we show analytically that the layer-antisymmetric pair-phase channel hosts an in-gap collective pole at twice the single-particle interlayer hopping, $2t_h$, precisely the bonding-antibonding band splitting. The mechanism is algebraic: at this frequency, the antisymmetric phase bubble reduces pointwise in momentum space to the static symmetric phase bubble that enforces the in-phase Goldstone pole. The resulting resonance scale is therefore fixed by the single-particle hybridization, rather than by the interaction-driven Josephson coupling that controls the canonical Leggett mode. The identity is verified numerically by direct Bogoliubov-de Gennes calculations. The diagonal antisymmetric phase-channel kernel zero is exact within Gaussian theory at any chemical potential; the full coupled amplitude-phase pole coincides with it at half filling and tracks it closely away from half filling. The excitation is Raman-forbidden by inversion, which motivates layer-odd probes. We find that a layer-imbalance drive has finite Gaussian-level overlap with the pair-phase sector, suggesting a possible cold-atom layer-bias response feature near the sub-kilohertz scale for typical optical-lattice parameters.

Here we present different approaches to ultrafast pulse and polarization shaping, based on a ``quantum fluid'' platform of polaritons. Indeed we exploit the normal modes of two dimensional polariton fluids made of strong coupled quantum well excitons and microcavity photons, by rooting different polarization and topological states into their sub-picosecond Rabi oscillations. Coherent control of two resonant excitation pulses allows us to prepare the desired state of the polariton, taking benefit from its four-component features given by the combination of the two normal modes with the two degrees of polarization. An ultrafast imaging based on the digital off-axis holography technique is implemented to study the polariton complex wavefunction with time and space resolution. We show in order coherent control of the polariton state on the Bloch sphere, an ultrafast polarization sweeping of the Poincaré sphere, and the dynamical twist of full Poincaré states such as the skyrmion on the sphere itself. Finally, we realize a new kind of ultrafast swirling vortices by adding the angular momentum degree of freedom to the two-pulse scheme. These oscillating topology states are characterized by one or more inner phase singularities tubes which spirals around the axis of propagation. The mechanism is devised in the splitting of the vortex into the upper and lower polaritons, resulting in an oscillatory exchange of energy and angular momentum and in the emitted time and space structured photonic packets.

We find a mapping between the attractive Fermi-Hubbard model and the repulsive Bose-Hubbard model at finite temperature and at imaginary chemical potential $\mu =i\theta$. We show, by using a large $N$-expansion, that the partition functions of the two models are related by a simple shift $\theta \to \theta + \pi$. This condition maps the BCS--BEC crossover of attractive fermions to a Bose--Fermi crossover (fermion-like occupation) of repulsive bosons. Central feature of this correspondence plays the thermal kernel $g(\beta E,\phi),$ whose analytic continuation $g_B(\beta E,\phi) = g_F(\beta E,\phi+\pi)$ governs the bosonic and fermionic sectors. Interestingly, we are able to find that the special angles $\phi = 2\pi/3,4\pi/3$ for fermions correspond to $\phi = \pi/3,5\pi/3$ for bosons, marking the boundaries of a universal thermal window. We further argue that the present mechanism shows that fermionization can occur at finite interaction strength through a thermodynamic effect induced by the imaginary chemical potential. This suggests that it is a new way of fermionization (not a change in statistics but a fermion-like behaviour) unlike the Tonks--Girardeau limit, where fermionization arises from an infinite repulsive interaction and anyonic or Floquet-engineered systems where transmutation emerges from modified statistics or dynamics. Essentially, the phase $\phi$ is a statistical parameter; by twisting the thermal phase, it generates fermion-like behaviour without hard-core constraints or infinite repulsion but only by using thermodynamics. We derive the gap equation and number equation for the bosonic model, highlighting the role of the imaginary chemical potential as a statistical regulator. Our results provide a unified framework for understanding crossovers in interacting lattice systems.

Computational studies of the thermodynamic properties of materials at the mesoscopic and macroscopic scales -- involving lengths and times of at least $\mu$m and $\mu$s, respectively -- rely on a coarse-graining approximation such that only a few relevant collective variables are treated explicitly. Those variables typically take the form of fields defined everywhere in space or macroscopic quantities when spatial inhomogeneities can be treated implicitly. The free energy is usually expressed as a Landau-like potential whose temperature-dependent minima track stable states, characteristic equilibrium fluctuations being implicitly accounted for. Further, the response of the system to external perturbations, and its relaxation toward thermal equilibrium, are described in terms of simple equations of motion governed by effective inertial and viscous-damping constants. There is considerable literature on the problem of deriving Landau free energy potentials, from either experiment or predictive atomistic simulations, including recent efforts to develop systematic machine-learning approaches that we denote ``third principles''. Much less attention has received the calculation of the effective constants controlling the nonequilibrium macroscopic or mesoscopic dynamics. Here we tackle that problem, describing a protocol that allows us to compute the temperature-dependent inertial and damping coefficients associated to the electric polarization in representative soft-mode ferroelectric PbTiO$_{3}$. Our scheme lends itself to a widespread application, although the non-trivial behaviors found in PbTiO$_{3}$ suggest that more case studies will be needed to finetune a general and robust calculation protocol. Our results also allow us to comment on common assumptions in the literature of effective dynamic treatments of ferroelectrics and related materials.

The renormalization group (RG) in statistical physics focuses on ground-state properties of equilibrium systems. However, it is unclear how it should be generalized to nonunitary quantum dynamics caused by dissipation and measurement backaction, in which the notion of conserved energy is absent. Here, we extend the RG to cover nonunitary quantum dynamics governed by quantum operations. By performing coarse-graining in real time, we find that the competition between decoherence and coherent dynamics plays a decisive role in the behavior of the RG flow. In particular, we find that chaotic behavior without fixed points emerges in the RG flow when coherent dynamics is dominant, with the parity-time transition serving as a prototypical example. The measurement-induced parity-time transition belongs to the universality class of the one-dimensional Yang-Lee edge singularity, which serves as a guide for experimentally realizing imaginary fields in lattice spin systems with a quantum system.

Dynamics of exciton-polaritonic condensate under incoherent pumping is studied using the non-Markovian stochastic Gross-Pitaevskii equation with the pseudo-differential dispersion term. This term corresponds to the lower energy branch of polaritons. It is shown that an increasing of the pumping spot area leads to the appearance of various spatial structures whose properties depend on the duration of the dynamical memory. In the regime of short memory time, condensate can form an extended state that spans outside the pumping area. We conclude that onset of such extended states is related to the specific form of the dispersion term causing the ``traffic jam'' effect. The case of long memory time corresponds to enhanced condensate formation, when increasing of the pumping area leads to appearance of angular condensate structures which partially suppress emission of matter waves from the pumping area.

Magnetic MAX phases are nanolaminated metals that combine ceramic-like thermal and mechanical stability with peculiar magnetic ordering, making them attractive for thin-film optoelectronics and spintronics. However, their magnetization dynamics remain largely unexplored. Here, we investigate laser-induced ultrafast demagnetization in a 40-nm-thick epitaxial film of the magnetic MAX phase (Cr0.5Mn0.5)2GaC, which magnetically orders below ~250 K, using time-resolved magneto-optical Kerr effect spectroscopy. We reveal, that the demagnetization transients exhibit a two-step type-II demagnetization - a signature of two-dimensional magnetic systems. The fast demagnetization stage is small at low temperatures and fluences but becomes prominent with increasing excitation. The second stage dominates the process and has a characteristic time of approximately 100 ps. Applying the three-temperature model, we extract the electron-lattice, spin-lattice, and electron-spin coupling constants. The reconstructed spin heat capacity exhibits a weak temperature dependence, accounting for the absence of significant slowing down of demagnetization at elevated temperatures and fluences. Our results provide a starting point for experimental optical control of magnetism in MAX phases, bringing this broad class of materials into modern 2D spintronics.

The family of noncentrosymmetric rare-earth germanides RGaGe (R = Ce, Pr, Nd) provides a rich materials platform to explore the intertwined physics of strong magnetism, electronic correlations, and topological band structures. Through a combination of crystal growth, characterization, and first-principles calculations, we reveal that these compounds exhibit a pronounced uniaxial magnetic anisotropy, leading to distinct ground states: RGaGe orders ferromagnetically with moments along the crystallographic c-axis, and shows an antiferromagnetic-like structure in the ab-plane. A key finding is a significantly enhanced intrinsic anomalous Hall conductivity (AHC) compared to their well-known RAlGe counterparts, which even reaches as high as 948 {\Omega}-1 cm-1 at 2 K in PrGaGe. Our theoretical analysis predicts that this AHC originates from a robust Weyl semimetallic state driven by inversion symmetry breaking, where Weyl points near the Fermi level couple strongly to the magnetic order. Importantly, this topological state persists above the magnetic ordering temperature, confirming its intrinsic electronic origin. Our calculation also reveals that, while the near-Fermi-level states in CeGaGe and PrGaGe are dominated by d-orbital contributions, NdGaGe exhibits significant f-orbital involvement, signaling a progressive evolution from d- to f-orbital dominated topology. These results establish the RGaGe system as a tunable platform for systematically extending the RAlGe-related family, showcasing a large anomalous Hall response and orbital evolution near the Fermi level, and advancing the understanding of the interplay between topology and magnetism in quantum materials.

We investigate the emergent collective dynamics of LLM-based multi-agent systems on a 2D square lattice and present a model-agnostic statistical-physics method to disentangle social conformity from intrinsic bias, compute critical exponents, and probe the collective behavior and possible phase transitions of multi-agent systems. In our framework, each node of an $L\!\times\!L$ lattice hosts an identical LLM agent holding a binary state ($+1$/$-1$, mapped to yes/no) and updating it by querying the model conditioned on the four nearest-neighbor states. The sampler temperature $T$ serves as the sole control parameter. Across three open-weight models (llama3.1:8b, phi4-mini:3.8b, mistral:7b), we measure magnetization and susceptibility under a global-flip protocol designed to probe $\mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry. All models display temperature-driven order-disorder crossovers and susceptibility peaks; finite-size scaling on even-$L$ lattices yields effective exponents $\gamma/\nu$ whose values are model-dependent, close to but incompatible with the 2D Ising universality class ($\gamma/\nu=7/4$). Our method enables the extraction of effective $\beta$-weighted couplings $\tilde{J}(T)$ and fields $\tilde{h}(T)$, which serve as a measure of social conformity and intrinsic bias. In the models we analyzed, we found that collective alignment is dominated by an intrinsic bias ($\tilde{h}\gg\tilde{J}$) rather than by cooperative neighbor coupling, producing field-driven crossovers instead of genuine phase transitions. These effective parameters vary qualitatively across models, providing compact collective-behavior fingerprints for LLM agents and a quantitative diagnostic for the reliability of multi-agent consensus and collective alignment.

We investigate the vortex lattices of harmonically confined quasi-two-dimensional tilted rotational dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates. By employing an extended Gross-Pitaevskii equation for a rotating condensate, we reveal the structural transformation of vortices from square to triangular lattices as the tilt of dipolar bosons relative to the polarization axis approaches a critical angle. When the tilt of the magnetic dipoles surpasses the magic angle, the condensate elongates diagonally and becomes devoid of vortices. Moreover, we include the Lee-Huang-Yang correction, which enables the formation of vortices in the elongated condensate. Additionally, when dipoles are oriented perpendicular to the polarization axis, the Lee-Huang-Yang correction results in the fragmentation of condensates under strong rotation. The quench dynamics of the rotational frequency demonstrate the development of vortex lattices; however, with a strong rotational quench, the condensate remains free of vortices. Our numerical analysis highlights the beyond mean-field effects of the rotational properties of anisotropic dipolar bosons, which can be observed in current dipolar quantum gas experiments.

High-entropy alloys (HEAs) are known for superb combination of performance attributes, making them ideal for advanced applications, e.g., nuclear engineering. The concept of cobalt-free HEAs aims to mitigate concerns about cobalt's radioactivity, however, predicting their phase formation remains challenging due to their complex compositions. In this work, we integrate six semiempirical parameters, i.e., mixing entropy ({\Delta}Smix), mixing enthalpy ({\Delta}Hmix), atomic size difference ({\delta}), valence electron concentration (VEC), d-orbital energy level (Md), and the {\Omega} parameter, along with machine learning (ML) to predict the body-centered cubic phase stability in Co free HEAs. To address the limitations of experimental data, generative adversarial networks were used to augment the dataset, thus improving the accuracy of the Gaussian process classification model used for phase prediction. After dimensionality reduction to five principal components, the model achieved an accuracy of 84%, with {\Delta}Hmix and {\delta} identified as the key descriptors influencing phase formation. This approach highlights the synergy of ML and data augmentation in accelerating the design of HEAs for advanced applications.

We derive the exact evolution equation for the probability density function of particle displacements generated by arbitrary Gaussian velocity processes, when neither Markovianity and nor stationarity are assumed. Starting from the characteristic function of the density of the position, we construct a systematic hierarchy of equations based on Wick's theorem, in which the dynamics is governed by sums of geometrically connected Wick contractions. This approach yields a closed non-Markovian diffusion equation that generalizes the Fokker-Planck description and preserves Gaussianity only in the infinite-order limit.

Standard adiabatic protocols for superconducting qubits often face a trade-off between gate speed and decoherence. In this work, using IBM Quantum 127-qubit processors (ibm_fez and ibm_kingston), we report the discovery of a fundamental non-adiabatic resonance window at about 4.9. This window demonstrates the potential for a 9.2-fold reduction in gate duration relative to the conventional adiabatic limit, while maintaining state high fidelities within the identified resonance windows. Through synchronous cross-backend execution, we demonstrate a near-perfect correlation (R = 0.9998) in the resonance profile, confirming the universality of the non-adiabatic parameter across independent hardware architectures. However, our longitudinal analysis reveals that these high-Q windows are sensitive to sub-percent calibration drifts, which dynamically shift the system into a stochastic regime. These findings suggest that achieving next-tier quantum performance requires a transition from static gate protocols to dynamic resonance-tracking control tools. This study provides both the theoretical foundation and the experimental evidence for such ultra-fast, high-performance quantum architectures.

Altermagnets are a novel class of magnetic systems characterized by their momentum-dependent spin splitting without net magnetization. In this work, we extend established Euclidean tight-binding models of altermagnets to regular hyperbolic lattices in two spatial dimensions defined on a discretized Poincaré disk. Using hyperbolic crystallography and hyperbolic band theory, we show that the inclusion of next-nearest neighbor hopping is sufficient to induce spin splitting in bipartite hyperbolic lattices. While certain families and special cases of hyperbolic lattices remain antiferromagnetic, we identify an entire family and a special case that show spin splitting in this framework. Hence, altermagnetism is inherent to certain hyperbolic lattices. Since hyperbolic band theory yields a momentum space that is at least four-dimensional, we classify the leading spin-splitting harmonics using four-dimensional atomic orbitals.

We introduce a technique that enables Neural-ODEs to approximate arbitrary velocity fields with a priori planted fixed-points. Specifically, a recipe is given to explicitly accommodate for a finite collection of points in the reference multi-dimensional space of the Neural-ODE where the velocity field is exactly equal to zero. In this way, the gradient-based training is rigorously constrained inside the prescribed hypothesis class while leaving the expressive power of the Neural-ODE unaltered. We rigorously prove the universality of the Neural-ODE under any local constraints in the velocity field and give a computationally convenient way of imposing the fixed points. Our method is then tested on two paradigmatic physical models.

We explore how the thermodynamic properties and dynamics of a self-interstitial prismatic dislocation loop are affected by microscopic-scale variations in its geometric configuration, an aspect that rarely received attention in literature. First, we develop a machine-learning (ML) model to predict the formation energy of an arbitrary geometrically complex configuration of a self-interstitial atom dislocation loop. Trained on atomistic simulation data, the ML model achieves high predictive accuracy across a broad range of configurations, with a typical error in the 1% range. Second, from the ML model, we evaluate the density of configurational microstates as a function of loop's formation energy and derive analytical expressions valid in tractable limiting cases. Using statistical mechanics, we derive the configurational free energy, the average energy, and the thermodynamic entropy of a dislocation loop as a function of temperature. Third, we simulate the dynamics of self-climb of dislocation loops with various geometries and evaluate their diffusion coefficients and effective activation energies. Our analysis shows that there is a single universal parameter describing the morphological irregularity of loop configurations in its ground state. This parameter determines the thermodynamic properties of a loop as well as its dynamics, and simulations illustrate how the properties and mobility of a configurationally complex loop vary as functions of the irregularity parameter.

Thermochemical energy storage (TCES) in oxide perovskites relies on reversible oxygen vacancy formation, and computational high-throughput screening of candidate materials has predominantly used the single oxygen vacancy formation energy (OVFE) as the key descriptor. We demonstrate that the OVFE is insufficient for screening cubic CaMnO3 perovskites, because the stoichiometric compound is not the minimum energy reference state; vacancies are inherently present at operating temperatures. Materials with negative single OVFEs are routinely excluded from screening datasets as unsuitable, but this reflects a mischoice of reference state rather than a genuine materials limitation, and risks discarding promising TCES candidates. We address this by computing OVFEs as a function of vacancy concentration using ab initio density functional theory, establishing the equilibrium vacancy concentration as the correct reference point. OVFE curves referenced to this minimum align with experimentally measured reduction enthalpies, providing a framework directly comparable to experiments. We further show that A-site and B-site doping modify the vacancy formation landscape through distinct mechanisms. A-site dopants act primarily through strain relaxation and symmetry breaking, while B-site dopants reshape the local redox environment and introduce strong configurational dependence. Finally, we develop a thermodynamic model incorporating configurational entropy that accurately predicts equilibrium oxygen stoichiometry as a function of temperature and oxygen partial pressure and reveals that selective reduction of Mn4+ versus B-site dopant ions can tune the onset temperature for vacancy formation. These results establish a screening framework for perovskite TCES materials and provide practical guidance for extending high-throughput workflows beyond the single-vacancy paradigm.

We investigate infectious disease spreading on scale-free networks using a heterogeneous mean-field approach applied to the susceptible-infected-susceptible model, incorporating a mitigation factor. Individual heterogeneity is incorporated through a power-law distribution, while a mitigation factor accounts for behavioral responses and external effects that effectively reduce transmission from infected individuals. This mechanism, inspired by Malthus-Verhulst-type constraints, introduces a nonlinear saturation effect that encodes self-limiting dynamics in a tractable way. Analytical results are supported by stochastic simulations. We find that the mitigation factor induces a nontrivial behavior in the probability that a link points to an infected node, which develops a maximum at finite infection rates. In contrast, the overall prevalence remains a monotonically increasing function of the transmission rate. Additionally, the mitigation mechanism leads to an inversion in the dependence of epidemic observables on the degree exponent at sufficiently high transmission rates. While in the standard model smaller exponents yield higher endemic prevalence, in the modified model this trend reverses, with larger exponents producing higher prevalence and increased infection probability along network links.

We investigate two-dimensional Dirac fermions embedded in a deep-subwavelength cavity formed by high-impedance metasurfaces. We point out that, unlike conventional metallic boundaries, these metasurfaces support quasielectrostatic transverse-magnetic modes that mediate a long-range interaction between two-dimensional electrons. Combining static electronic screening with a Dyson-Schwinger analysis, we show that this engineered interaction can qualitatively alter the ground-state properties of Dirac materials. For a fermion flavor number $N_{f}$ below a critical value $N_{c}=16/\pi$, the interaction drives an excitonic insulating phase through an infinite-order quantum phase transition and spontaneously generates a mass gap. At $N_{f}>N_{c}$, the system remains gapless but enters a non-Fermi-liquid critical regime where the quasiparticle residue is singularly suppressed to zero, and the Dirac cone exhibits a nonanalytic dispersion relation. Furthermore, under a perpendicular magnetic field, the cavity fluctuations dynamically lift the zeroth Landau level degeneracy across all $N_{f}$. These results identify high-impedance metasurface cavities as promising platforms for engineering correlated Dirac matter.

The precise atomic-scale structure around Eu$^{2+}$ activators in the $\beta$-Si$_{6-z}$Al$_z$O$_z$N$_{8-z}$:Eu$^{2+}$ commercial green phosphor remains elusive. We use the first-principles $\Delta$SCF excited-state method, embedding of the interatomic force constants for supercells up to 3501 atoms, and Huang-Rhys theory to clarify this issue. Monte Carlo exploration is used to identify representative low-energy structural models spanning different levels of Al/O concentration $z$. For the lowest-energy structure at low $z$, our computed photoluminescence spectrum reproduces the experimental vibronic peaks at 6~K with excellent agreement in peak positions and intensities, validating the Eu-N$_9$ coordination model with Al, O, and Eu confined to the same crystallographic plane. Analysis of the low-energy structures reveals that the electron-phonon coupling is weak ($S \approx 2.15$) with a robust characteristic phonon signature across different Al/O arrangements, explaining the surprising persistence of resolved phonon replicas with increasing $z$. We explain the experimentally observed red-shift of emission with increasing $z$ through systematic trends in zero-phonon line energies, modest increases in Huang-Rhys factors, and larger configurational diversity at higher compositions.

We develop a Ginzburg--Landau theory for superconducting thin films under quantum confinement. Starting from the microscopic BCS free energy and the recently developed confinement theory of metallic thin films, explicit analytical expressions are derived for the Ginzburg--Landau coefficients, coherence length, penetration depth, electronic mean free path, and Ginzburg--Landau parameter in confined geometries. The central result is that quantum confinement directly renormalizes the intrinsic superconducting coherence length through confinement-induced modifications of the electronic density of states and Fermi energy. This effect is absent in conventional thin-film transport theories based solely on surface scattering. As a consequence, confinement simultaneously suppresses the coherence length and enhances the penetration depth, thereby driving superconductors toward progressively stronger type-II behavior with decreasing film thickness. The theory predicts a crossover regime in which confinement-induced renormalization of superconducting length scales and transport scattering become strongly intertwined. Comparison with recent penetration-depth measurements in Al thin films shows that the observed enhancement of the penetration depth originates from the interplay between confinement-induced renormalization of the coherence length and suppression of the effective mean free path by surface and disorder scattering. The results establish a direct connection between quantum confinement and superconducting electrodynamics in confined metallic films.

We demonstrate how crystalline symmetry lowering, as for instance through strain, allows elemental superconductors such as vanadium and niobium to realize spin-singlet orbitally polarized Cooper pairs composed of electrons with identical orbital moments. Using superconducting density functional theory, we show that lowering of trigonal symmetry to $C_s$, thus keeping only a single mirror plane, activates interorbital pairing in bulk and (111) surfaces, with a pronounced surface enhancement. In a magnetic field, the resulting orbitally polarized superconducting state leads to a novel transverse magnetic response. For in--plane field orientations that break the remaining mirror symmetry, a sizable orbital magnetization emerges perpendicular to the applied field. We show that this effect is a direct consequence of equal--orbital-moment Cooper pairing, providing an experimentally accessible signature of this state. Our results establish strained elemental superconductors as a minimal material platform for superconducting orbitronics.

Freestanding GdBa2Cu3O7 (GdBCO) superconducting thin films were fabricated using a water-soluble Sr3Al2O6 (SAO) sacrificial layer in combination with thermal release tape. An amorphous Al2O3 capping layer was introduced to suppress crack formation during the lift-off process. The influence of buffer-layer design inserted between the GdBCO and SAO layers was systematically investigated with respect to structural integrity and superconducting properties after lift-off. A LaAlO3/SrTiO3 bilayer buffer was found to be essential for maintaining epitaxial growth and a superconducting transition temperature (Tc) of approximately 92 K after lift-off, comparable to that of the as-grown films. In contrast, a reversed SrTiO3/LaAlO3 bilayer and single-layer buffer structures led to a suppression of Tc, highlighting the critical role of stacking sequence. These results demonstrate that optimization of the buffer-layer design is a key factor for realizing high-quality freestanding GdBCO films while maintaining their superconducting characteristics.

Hexagonal germanium polytypes have emerged as promising direct-gap semiconductors for silicon-integrated optoelectronics, yet their optical properties remain largely unexplored beyond the well-studied 2H phase. We present a comprehensive theoretical study of optical properties of hexagonal 2H-, 4H-, and 6H-Ge polytypes through ab initio calculations of quasiparticle band structures, dipole transition matrix elements, and solution of the Bethe-Salpeter equation. While all three polytypes exhibit direct band gaps of increasing size from 2H to 6H, we reveal that the fundamental optical transition in 4H-Ge is parity-forbidden due to matching band parities at the valence and conduction band edges. This selection rule results in a radiative lifetime seven orders of magnitude longer than in 2H- and 6H-Ge, severely limiting light emission capabilities. To demonstrate that the selection rule can be lifted, we introduce controlled symmetry perturbations by substituting single Ge atoms with Si in each unit cell, breaking the crystal symmetry. This perturbation increases the optical matrix elements by up to two orders of magnitude and reduces radiative lifetimes for all perturbed polytypes. We also compute absorption coefficients and frequency-dependent dielectric tensors for both light polarizations, including excitonic effects up to 5 eV, providing complete optical characterization of ideal and symmetry-perturbed hexagonal Ge systems relevant for optoelectronic applications.

We theoretically investigate the anomalous and diode Josephson effects in planar two-dimensional Josephson junctions with arbitrarily oriented exchange fields in two ferromagnets within the barrier, and spin-orbit coupling at the superconductor/ferromagnet interfaces, where the superconducting electrodes can have $s$-wave or arbitrarily oriented $d$-wave order parameter lobes. We perform a systematic symmetry analysis of the junction Hamiltonian and identify the minimal conditions for breaking time-reversal and space-inversion symmetries, which are required for the emergence of anomalous and diode Josephson effects. We classify the junctions into three classes, with particular attention to those between $d_{x^2-y^2}$ and $d_{xy}$ oriented superconductors. Our symmetry analysis is supported by numerical calculations of the current-phase relation (CPR) obtained using a generalized Furusaki-Tsukada (F-T) approach. By tuning the directions of exchange fields in the ferromagnets, Rashba SOC at the interfaces and superconducting order parameter orientations, nonreciprocity can be enhanced by more than 40\%. We further analyze the phase-dependent Andreev bound states (ABS) spectrum and their contribution to charge transport, as well as their signatures in the nonreciprocal transport characteristics. By comparing the current carried by ABS with that obtained using the F-T technique, we find that the contribution from continuum states above the gap becomes pronounced in presence of zero energy crossings in the ABS spectrum, and in junctions with $d$-wave superconducting electrodes due to the narrower superconducting gap, which may become closed. In the nonreciprocal regime, the ABS spectra show an asymmetric profile with respect to phase inversion, indicating the presence of a finite current at zero phase difference and unequal critical currents in opposite directions.

Critical eigenstates are usually identified through wave-function geometry in a chosen basis, such as participation ratios, multifractal spectra, or finite-size scaling. Here we formulate criticality instead as a dual-space Lyapunov property. We prove a Fourier exclusion principle: exponential localization in one representation is incompatible with exponential localization in its Fourier-dual representation. This turns the Liu--Xia condition, \(\gamma_x(E)=\gamma_m(E)=0\), from a phenomenological criterion into a rigorous length-scale statement: a critical state is characterized by the simultaneous absence of exponential confinement in real and momentum space. The criterion is invariant under bounded local gauge transformations of the transfer matrix and remains compatible with conventional single-space multifractal diagnostics. More importantly, it is exactly predictive. In analytically tractable quasiperiodic models, the same condition yields closed-form critical lines, an exact finite critical region with an additional critical branch, and a complex critical surface in a non-Hermitian non-self-dual spectrum. Thus the Liu--Xia condition provides not only a diagnostic of critical states, but an exact solvability principle for locating critical sets across distinct microscopic structures.

We develop a theory of angle-dependent magnetoresistance (ADMR) in metallic altermagnets coupled to ferromagnetic insulators and establish criteria that distinguish them from conventional compensated magnets with spin-orbit coupling. We show that the spin-splitter magnetoresistance (SSMR) reported by H. Chen et al. [Adv. Mater. 37, 2507764 (2025)] constitutes a smoking-gun signature of collinear altermagnetism in metallic systems. In contrast to spin-Hall magnetoresistance (SMR), SSMR exhibits three key distinctions: it depends solely on the relative orientation between the ferromagnetic magnetization and the altermagnetic Néel vector, yields a longitudinal ADMR response of opposite sign, and features a direct proportionality between longitudinal and transverse ADMR signals, absent in SMR. These results provide a clear route to unambiguously identify altermagnets in transport.

In this work the connection established in [7, 8] between a model of two linked polymers rings with fixed Gaussian linking number forming a 4-plat and the statistical mechanics of non-relativistic anyon particles is explored. The excluded volume interactions have been switched off and only the interactions of entropic origin arising from the topological constraints are considered. An interpretation from the polymer point of view of the field equations that minimize the energy of the model in the limit in which one of the spatial dimensions of the 4-plat becomes very large is provided. It is shown that the self-dual contributions are responsible for the long-range interactions that are necessary for preserving the global topological properties of the system during the thermal fluctuations. The non self-dual part is also related to the topological constraints, and takes into account the local interactions acting on the monomers in order to prevent the breaking of the polymer lines. It turns out that the energy landscape of the two linked rings is quite complex. Assuming as a rough approximation that the monomer densities of half of the 4-plat are constant, at least two points of energy minimum are found. Classes of non-trivial self-dual solutions of the self-dual field equations are derived. ... .

High-entropy alloys (HEAs) have attracted growing attention for their exceptional mechanical and thermal properties arising from complex atomic configurations. In this paper, we propose crystal fractional graph neural network for predicting the energy of high-entropy alloys by explicitly integrating both local atomic environments and global compositional information. The model consists of three components: a crystal graph neural network, which employs graph attention network layers to learn local interactions among 16 on-site atoms within the crystal lattice; fractional neural network, a fully connected network that embeds the global fraction of constituent elements; and feature fusion neural network, which fuses the outputs of the two submodels to predict the total crystal energy. We train the model on a dataset of 1,049 crystal structures and validate it on 198 quaternary structures, optimizing all hyperparameters via Optuna. Our results show that our model achieves an RMSE comparable to first-principles calculations and maintains high accuracy even for low-energy configurations. However, the model exhibits limitations in handling large crystal cells, which we aim to address in future work to extend its applicability to more complex systems.

Inertial microfluidic devices (IMDs) offer low-cost, high-throughput alternative techniques for many traditional particle- (or cell-) manipulation tasks, but simulating them requires being able to predict particle migration, and thus particle lift forces, under a variety of possible channel geometries. Recent work has demonstrated that machine learning models can be used to drastically speed up these numerical simulations, but doing so required training individual models for every unique channel cross-section type (e.g., rectangular, triangular) -- shifting the burden from the simulation step to the training step. In this paper, we develop a novel approach for predicting particle lift forces that contains no explicit geometric parameters. We train a neural network model using a new parameter set and show that while it performs comparably to existing models on channel geometries in the training set, it is able to generalize to unseen channel geometries far more effectively. We show that the lift force model developed herein can be easily transferred to particle tracing simulation software, where it is capable of predicting particle migration patterns consistent with the literature across a variety of channel designs.

Can large language models predict physical and mechanical polymer properties simply by reading unstructured scientific prose? Polymer performance is rarely determined by chemical structure alone; identical nominal polymers can exhibit drastically different behaviors depending on their synthesis route, processing history, morphology, and testing conditions. Yet, state-of-the-art polymer property models typically rely on structure-only representations -- such as SMILES or molecular graphs -- which strip away this vital experimental context. In this work, we introduce \textbf{PolyLM}, a natural-language-only, process- and condition-aware framework that predicts materials performance directly from full-text literature. By circumventing structural inputs entirely, PolyLM preserves the nuanced, unstructured descriptions of synthesis and processing reported by domain scientists. To train this framework, we curated an unprecedented, literature-scale dataset encompassing 185,000 scientific papers and over 276,400 unique polymer samples across 22 physical, mechanical, and thermal properties. We fine-tuned a massive 9-billion-parameter language model (Qwen3.5-9B) using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and task-level uncertainty weighting. Evaluated on 68,283 held-out observations, the model achieves remarkably high predictive accuracy, establishing new state-of-the-art benchmarks for complex properties. Across the 22 diverse targets, the model achieves a median $R^2$ of 0.74, with predictions for key thermal, mechanical, and physicochemical properties frequently surpassing an $R^2$ of 0.80. These results unequivocally demonstrate that natural language is a powerful, highly scalable interface for realistic materials performance prediction.

Glassy carbon (GC) microelectrodes are increasingly being used for voltametric detection of electroactive neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin. However, non-electroactive molecules including lactate, glutamate, and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) cannot be directly detected using conventional voltammetry without surface functionalization. In this study, lactate oxidase was immobilized within a chitosan matrix on lithographically patterned GC microelectrodes to enable indirect detection of lactate via enzymatic generation of hydrogen peroxide, an electroactive byproduct. The resulting hydrogen peroxide was detected using fast-scan cyclic voltammetry (FSCV), enabling indirect in vitro detection of lactate at concentrations as low as 10 nM. The functionalized GC microelectrodes were integrated into a four channel array on a 1.6 cm flexible neural probe with potential for in vivo applications. Surface morphology and bonding interactions were characterized using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy. FTIR analysis confirmed successful chitosan deposition through characteristic O-H, N-H, amide, and C-O stretching bands. Hydrogen peroxide detection was concentration-dependent, while lactate detection exhibited early saturation consistent with enzyme-limited kinetics. These results demonstrate a mechanically robust GC microelectrode platform for nanomolar-level indirect lactate sensing and provide insight into the reaction-diffusion coupling governing enzyme-based electrochemical detection.

Digital quantum computers offer a promising route for studying complex many-body systems that are otherwise inaccessible by their classical counterparts. Capabilities including mid-circuit measurements and feedback allow for simulating the dynamics of interacting open quantum systems. Using the Quantinuum System Model H1 trapped-ion quantum computer, we experimentally realise quantum trajectories for a two-dimensional system of (interacting) particles-hard-core bosons or fermions-undergoing stochastic driving at a source and drain at opposite corners of a square lattice. We study the non-equilibrium steady state with persistent current resulting from the this in/out flow of particles. The particle statistics, presence of interactions, and introduction of a magnetic field produce measurable effects on the steady state. Our findings highlight the rich physics in this corner driven two-dimensional setup and showcases both the power and current limitations of quantum computers as a platform to study it.

We study temporal correlations in interacting quantum systems through the influence functional of a half-infinite quantum Ising chain. Using Rényi entropies and temporal mutual information, we confirm that integrable dynamics is captured by the quasiparticle picture. In contrast, generic ergodic Hamiltonian dynamics exhibits pronounced deviations from random-circuit universality, and its generalization including a symmetry accounting for energy conservation. Instead, we find a long mesoscopic regime suggestive of a slow spectral reorganization of the influence functional. Our results reveal a rich temporal structure in generic Hamiltonian dynamics and point to limitations of existing random-circuit paradigms at experimentally and numerically relevant timescales.

Debates about large language model post-training often treat supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as imitation and reinforcement learning (RL) as discovery. But this distinction is too coarse. What matters is whether a training procedure increases the probability of behaviors the pretrained model could already produce, or whether it changes what the model can practically reach. We argue that post-training research should distinguish between capability elicitation and capability creation. We make this distinction operational by introducing the notion of accessible support: the set of behaviors that a model can practically produce under finite budgets. Post-training that reweights behaviors within this support is capability elicitation; whereas changing the support itself corresponds to capability creation. We develop this argument through a free-energy view of post-training. SFT and RL can both be seen as reweighting a pretrained reference distribution, only with different external signals. Demonstration signals define low-energy behavior for SFT, and reward signals define low-energy behavior for RL. When the update remains close to the base model, the main effect is local reweighting, not capability creation. Within this framework, the central question is no longer whether post-training is framed as SFT or RL, but whether it reweights behaviors already within reach, or instead expands the model's reachable behavioral space through search, interaction, tool use, or the incorporation of new information.

Non-radiative decay in photoexcited molecular systems is driven by nuclear motion toward conical intersections (CIs), where electronic states become degenerate and nonadiabatic transitions occur. Identifying the nuclear degrees of freedom responsible for CI access from nonadiabatic molecular dynamics (NAD) simulations remains challenging because the underlying motions are high-dimensional and collective. Here, we introduce an unsupervised, information-theoretic framework based on Differentiable Information Imbalance (DII) to identify the nuclear coordinates governing CI access directly from trajectory surface hopping (TSH) simulations. By quantifying correlations between structural descriptors and electronic observables, including energy gaps and oscillator strengths, the method ranks nuclear degrees of freedom by predictive relevance. A multi-step protocol then extracts low-dimensional, physically interpretable modes associated with non-radiative decay. We apply the framework to the methaniminium cation, furan, L-glutamine, L-pyroglutamine-ammonium, and a photoactive molecular motor. Across all systems, the method recovers known mechanistic coordinates while revealing the relative importance of competing modes when multiple structural distortions contribute to CI access. The analysis also reveals a systematic distinction between observables: energy gaps are typically governed by a small number of localized coordinates, whereas oscillator strengths depend on more collective and distributed structural rearrangements. Overall, the DII-based framework combines predictive power with direct interpretability, providing a general and scalable route for extracting mechanistic insight from high-dimensional NAD data and constructing reduced-dimensional models of excited-state dynamics.

Tip-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (TERS) can be used to make nanoscale spatial measurements of 2D materials, such as graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). The TERS theory introduced in [Phys. Rev. X 4, 031054 (2014)], however, was tailored for graphene, whose out-of-plane Raman response is neglected. In the present work, we include the out-of-plane response in the TERS theory. In doing so, we provide an exact analytical expression for the field propagation between the tip and the sample, and show that the contribution to the TERS signal that scatters first at the sample, then at the tip (sample-tip, or TS) is important only when the out-of-plane response is significant. We extensively study the variation of TERS experimental measurements when varying physical parameters of the system, like the tip radius, the out-of-plane response, the TERS coherence length, and others. It becomes evident that the TERS enhancement is very sensitive to the out-of-plane Raman response of the phonon mode, while normalized tip-approach measurements are more sensitive to the coherence length, and we show that the medium refractive index leads to an effective tip enhancement factor $f_e$. Our results lead to the conclusion that, in general, a strong TERS enhancement is a necessary condition for investigating the physics discussed here, which here means surveying the difference in TERS signals between different Raman modes. We use our model to analyze some graphene TERS experiments, showing that they are consistent with a negligible out-of-plane Raman response and a non-zero TERS coherence length in the fitting.

Accurate calculation of free energies and their derivatives is central to assessing the thermodynamic stability of molecular and particulate systems across length scales. Yet such quantities can be difficult to compute reliably in strongly interacting systems, such as solutions of ionic species in polar solvents. One important example is the chemical potential of water in aqueous electrolytes, which can be estimated through staged particle insertion by gradually coupling an inserted molecule to its environment. Although the resulting insertion free energy should be independent of the alchemical pathway, the order and manner in which van der Waals and electrostatic interactions are activated can strongly affect convergence and, in some cases, yield inconsistent estimates. Here, we examine this issue by calculating water's chemical potential in aqueous KCl solutions using eight alchemical insertion pathways that differ in the extent and order of van der Waals and Coulombic coupling. We find that concurrently activating these interactions, particularly in fully coupled and partially end-coupled protocols, can produce chemically implausible insertion free energies. These anomalies arise from intermediate states in which the inserted water molecule develops strong electrostatic interactions with a chloride ion before sufficient short-range repulsion has been established. In contrast, pathways that activate short-range van der Waals interactions before electrostatics yield more consistent and chemically plausible estimates. These findings demonstrate that practical alchemical calculations in polar and ionic environments can be highly sensitive to pathway design, underscoring the importance of decoupling short-range and electrostatic interactions in staged insertion alchemical protocols.

We study an exactly solvable model that can be interpreted as an ideal one-dimensional electron gas confined with an anisotropic quantum wire potential of oscillator-shaped profile. The homogeneous nature of the quantum wire is broken by the introduction of the effective electron mass, which changes with radial distance. We solve the problem described both within the canonical and the non-canonical approach. Analytical expressions of the wavefunctions of the stationary states for both cases in terms of the Laguerre polynomials are obtained, as well as the discrete energy spectrum related to these wavefunctions. Additionally, an exact solution to the angular position part of the position-dependent mass Schrödinger equation within the non-canonical approach leads to the angular-part wavefunctions of the even and odd states expressed through the Gegenbauer polynomials. Possible limit relations and special cases are studied too.

The current catalyst discovery and development pipeline for energy-intensive applications like methane conversion remains bottlenecked by expensive trial-and-error experimentation, irreproducible chemical intuition, and a lack of frameworks linking complex catalytic design spaces to performance. This work presents an interpretable machine learning framework that integrates SHAP-based feature importance analysis (Explainable AI) with tree-based ensembles (Random Forest and Bayesian-optimized CatBoost) to characterize Fe-zeolite and oxide-supported catalysts for the partial oxidation of methane (POM). Despite limited data, the framework decodes complex structure-performance relationships by identifying and ranking thermodynamic, structural, and geometric microdescriptors that influence the electronic band gap and govern macroscale performance metrics such as selectivity, activity, and stability. This work explicitly demonstrates that thermodynamic lattice stability and geometric factors are the primary drivers of electronic band gap (a critical proxy for redox reactivity) rather than bulk stoichiometry. Non-linear models achieve an R2 of 0.61 - 0.77, significantly outperforming traditional linear baselines (R2 = 0.32). This workflow provides both a light-weight generalizable methodology and a prioritized list of physical features for accelerated catalyst screening - and these features can subsequently be integrated into microkinetic and reaction engineering models to create digital twins of complex reactor systems and to enable predictive optimization in autonomous R&D laboratories.

We study finite-temperature $P$-form $\mathbb Z_N$ homological codes via an exact finite-Trotter quantum-to-classical map to a $(d+1)$-dimensional spacetime model with electric and magnetic topological background charges. The resulting background-resolved partition functions admit an exact reformulation in terms of closed magnetic and electric defect polymers, with opposite-species interactions governed by linking phases. By bounding this complex polymer gas by positive same-species hard-core majorant gases, we obtain an explicit low-activity criterion under which all background-dependent partition functions are uniformly controlled and homologically nontrivial polymers are exponentially suppressed on the scale of the spacetime systole. We also derive an exact higher-form Kramers-Wannier duality exchanging electric and magnetic backgrounds, Wilson and 't Hooft operators, and $P$-form and $(d-P)$-form theories. Finally, for prime $N$, we identify an exact source-free gauge-theory specialization coupled to the plaquette random-cluster model, which imports sharp phase-transition results on special geometries into the spacetime framework.

Traditional population models that include predator-prey interactions attribute demographic changes directly to predation-related effects. However, predator-induced fear in prey has increasingly been recognised as an important factor shaping population dynamics. In this study, we propose a cubic population model in which fear acts through two distinct functional channels for a single-species population exhibiting the Allee effect. In this model, fear reduces the intrinsic growth rate through a multiplicative suppression mechanism while also playing an integrated role in modulating the growth and interaction dynamics by rescaling the saturation structure of the Holling type III interaction term. The stochastic extension of the model is described by a Langevin formalism containing correlated additive and multiplicative Gaussian noise, and the steady state probability distribution (SSPD) is analytically obtained using the corresponding Fokker-Planck equation. The analytical solution is validated by numerical simulations. The SSPD reveals both noise-induced transitions and fear-controlled regime changes between low- and high-density states, with the two-channel effect of fear producing structural competition and non-monotonic changes in the distribution. These are analysed through phenomenological bifurcation (P-bifurcation) diagrams and three-dimensional distribution surfaces. Additionally, statistical properties, parameter sensitivity, and escape dynamics are investigated through normalised moments, Fisher information, and mean first-passage time (MFPT) calculations. Notably, our model treats fear as an independent control parameter and provides a natural explanation for several conflicting empirical findings in the literature on fear-mediated population dynamics, while also offering an analytical basis for conservation biology and ecosystem management.

Loopy tensor networks exhibit internal correlations that often render their compression inefficient. We show that even local bond optimization can more effectively exploit locally available information about relevant loop correlations. By cutting a bond, we define a set of states whose linear dependence can be identified through a zero mode of the states' metric tensor and used to truncate the bond dimension. In the absence of an exact zero mode, a linear combination of a small number of the lowest modes can instead be optimized to provide the optimal approximation to a zero mode. The truncation does not require prior gauge fixing. The method is applied to the two-dimensional finite-temperature $Z_2$ lattice gauge theory, whose thermal-state purification is represented by an infinite projected entangled-pair state (iPEPS).

Once trained, machine-learned interatomic potentials (MLIPs) provide a fast and accurate way to study catalytic reaction pathways, but their performance strongly depends on the training set. Here, we compare nine MLIPs trained with different data sets and strategies, including from-scratch (FS) training and fine-tuning (FT) of large foundation models. The models are evaluated on reaction energies, $E_{r}$, and reaction energy barriers, $E_{a}$, for 141 reactions, including CO$_2$ reduction to C$_2$ and C$_3$ products, propane dehydrogenation, hydrogen intercalation on Pd, and out-of-distribution oxygen evolution reaction (OER) on metal oxides. FS models trained with 5%--10% perturbed high-energy configurations from molecular dynamics or contour exploration reduce the error by more than twofold compared with models trained only on relaxation trajectories. In contrast, FT MLIPs are less sensitive to sampling and transfer well to out-of-distribution reactions. An MLIP fine-tuned on metallic catalysts achieves a 0.30 eV MAE for OER on iridium oxide polymorphs, outperforming out-of-the-box MACE-MH-1 by 0.08 eV and the best FS model by 0.14 eV. A model fine-tuned to O and OH adsorption on metal oxides gives a 0.19 eV reaction-barrier MAE for out-of-distribution CO$_2$RR on Cu, comparable to an FS model trained on in-distribution C--C bond-breaking reactions. Finally, a large MLIP fine-tuned on 49,860 configurations gives the best overall performance across metallic and metal-oxide catalysts and was used to screen a large left-out set of bimetallic alloys, achieving a 0.15 eV MAE for $E_{r}$, even for adsorbates on unseen Miller-index surfaces such as (532). This work identifies the training configurations needed for accurate FS and FT MLIPs for catalytic reaction modeling.

Chimera states are among the most intriguing phenomena in nonlinear dynamics, characterized by the coexistence of coherent and incoherent behavior in systems of coupled identical oscillators. Many methods have been proposed to detect chimera states and to distinguish their different types. However, such methods often suffer from important limitations that prevent sufficiently precise classification. In this work, we overcome the issue by considering a method based on Fourier analysis to determine key signal characteristics such as amplitude, phase, and frequency, jointly with an unsupervised clustering step acting on normalized total variations, measures of local spatial changes of the above-mentioned dynamical features. The proposed method allows us to identify regions in parameter space returning chimera states, but also to further distinguish between the different types. The method is applied to a network of Rayleigh oscillators, which has been shown to exhibit a rich variety of dynamical patterns.

The end of conventional Dennard scaling and the widening gap between memory bandwidth and arithmetic throughput have made the von Neumann partition a structural bottleneck rather than a transient one. Two-dimensional (2D) materials, with atomically thin geometries, electrically tunable carrier densities, and large optical responses, offer a unified platform on which to build devices that compute where they store, process events rather than clock cycles, and shift workload into the optical domain. This perspective surveys progress along three converging thrusts, graphene and graphene nanoribbon transistors as scalable channel materials, oxide and 2D-integrated memristors for in-memory analog compute, and silicon-compatible 2D photonic and thermal-emitter structures for optical computing primitives. Our central argument is that the 2D-materials community has spent a decade producing record devices, and the next decade will be decided by who first integrates three of them on a single semiconductor wafer.

Detection based on quantum principles such as entanglement has the capacity to achieve finessed levels of sensitivity, bringing transformative impacts to applications. In this study, we propose a rotation sensor using ultra-cold dipolar atoms trapped in a four-well configuration. The design, based on a simple population imbalance measurement to quantify rotation, profits from the property of superintegrability. The implementation of the measurement protocol achieves rotation-detection sensitivity beyond the Heisenberg limit. Our results spotlight superintegrability opportunities for advancing the field of quantum sensing.

A general polarizable embedded (PE) quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics scheme for periodic systems is presented, describing mutual polarization of the two subsystems. The QM system, described with density functional theory (DFT), is coupled to a single center multipole expansion (SCME) model, characterising H$_2$O molecules in the MM region. In SCME the H$_2$O molecules are ascribed anisotropic dipole and quadrupole polarizabilities and permanent multipoles up to and including the hexadecapole. Our embedding scheme illustrates a smooth and efficient convergence pattern of the periodic interaction potential by introducing a single and clustered multipole expansion points in the far-field. By choosing the near- and far-field expansion of the potential carefully the PE-QM/MM calculation matches the level of accuracy of a the QM calculation. In the short range, the electrostatic interaction between the QM and MM subsystems is damped with a real-space and pair-wise isotropic damping functions - resulting in a screened interaction and preventing over-polarization. In molecular dynamics simulations the two subsystems are separated with the elastic scattering assisted flexible inner region [Kirchhoff et. al. JCTC, 2021, 17, 9, 5863] - ensuring a smooth transition in the radial distribution at the boundary between the two subsystems.

We study a model for a dilute suspension of rod-like particles swimming at constant velocity in a Stokes flow. As the translational diffusivity of the particles decreases, a two-dimensional uniform concentration of randomly aligned particles undergoes either a codimension-2 pitchfork bifurcation or a codimension-4 Hopf bifurcation, depending on the particles' swimming speed. We use a weakly nonlinear expansion to reduce the system to a low-dimensional one for the amplitudes of the bifurcating eigenmodes. The originality of our calculations lies in incorporating spatio-temporal white noise forcing. The stochastic forcing terms in the amplitude equations are derived analytically from the noise acting on the original system. Past the onset of the bifurcations, the particles deterministically self-organize into steady or oscillating states of collective motion. For the Hopf bifurcation scenario, two stable periodic orbits are found to coexist, each corresponding to a distinct collective dynamics. The stochastic forcing induces rare transitions between them. Owing to the low dimensionality of amplitude equations, steady and dynamical statistics can be computed directly from the Fokker-Planck equation, or via the Adaptive Multilevel Splitting (AMS) rare-event algorithm. In particular, extremely long mean transition times and associated out-of-equilibrium paths between the periodic orbits are obtained. These paths can be understood in light of the invariant manifolds of the low-dimensional system, which brings insights into the mechanism behind the transitions. We also performed fully nonlinear stochastic simulations and used the AMS algorithm directly on the full system. The statistics are in good quantitative agreement with those computed on the reduced systems, the latter being obtained at a considerably lower numerical cost.

We discuss the interplay between thermodynamics and magic resources in closed quantum dynamics by introducing Clifford ergotropy, the amount of extractable energy under the restriction to Clifford operations. We provide universal upper bounds on Clifford ergotropy, which decrease with increasing magic as quantified by the infinite-order filtered stabilizer Rényi entropy. We demonstrate the utility of this bound for one- and two-qubit systems, with the latter exhibiting a notable transition in the control landscape of Clifford ergotropy. Finally, we show that our analysis has nontrivial consequences even for many-body systems, including a form of the second law of thermodynamics under Clifford operations for typical quantum states.

Diamond 1 - 10 micrometers thick membranes are platform for photonic, quantum and opto-mechanic devices with applications across UV-IR spectral ranges. IR characterization of diamond gratings in reflection and transmission showed a change of the IR absorbance dichroism between positive and negative when the grating period was 1-2 wavelengths (free space) including inside the region of the intrinsic diamond absorbance. Femtosecond laser cutting of micrometers-wide and mm-long structures are demonstrated by steps of carbonization > 0.4 J/cm2/pulse (1030 nm/200 fs) and oxidation of diamond membranes. Light intensity distribution inside form-birefringent diamond structure was modeled for a scaled-down structure and wavelength to reveal characteristic interference patterns for different polarizations.

Optical interfaces that connect long-lived spin qubits to photons are a central requirement for quantum networking and distributed quantum information processing. Currently, solid-state atomic defects are leading candidates due to their inherent spin and optical coherence. Building on these advancements, synthetically tailored molecular systems represent a fundamental change in the field, utilizing precise atomic control and consistent bottom-up assembly. However, the lack of a robust spin-photon interface combining bright fluorescence, high spectral stability, and the persistent spin lifetimes inherent to ground-state systems has prohibited the detection of individual molecular qubits. Here we show that a triplet ground state carbene molecule, embedded within a structurally matched host crystal, functions as a robust spin-photon interface with single-molecule addressability. The system exhibits narrow zero-phonon lines, spectral stability over more than an hour, spin-selective optical transitions and single-molecule optically detected magnetic resonance. Coherent control yields millisecond-scale dynamical-decoupling coherence and tens-of-milliseconds spin relaxation at a temperature of 4.5 K. These results establish molecular qubits as a viable platform for single-emitter quantum optics while preserving the advantages of bottom-up chemical design and processable materials.

The Jarzynski equality is a cornerstone of nonequilibrium thermodynamics, linking work statistics to equilibrium free-energy differences. Although it has been extensively verified in classical and quantum Hermitian settings, its status in non-Hermitian dynamics remains under debate. Here we show that, in a postselected no-quantum-jump framework, a conditional non-Hermitian Jarzynski equality holds when the transition probabilities obey a parity-exchange symmetry. We study a constructed family of two-level hybrid Hamiltonians formed as linear combinations of parity-time ($\mathcal{PT}$) and anti-parity-time ($\mathcal{APT}$) symmetric terms, and demonstrate using complementary geometric and algebraic arguments that the parity-exchange symmetry persists throughout the corresponding $\mathrm{SU}(2)$-rotated orbit. Relative to previous $\mathcal{PT}$-focused conditional Jarzynski equality results, the advance here is an extension of the symmetry criterion from the isolated $\mathcal{PT}$ endpoint to a broader $\mathcal{PT}$--$\mathcal{APT}$ hybrid family. Experimentally, we implement three representative points, $\theta_k = 0, \pi/4, \pi/2$, in a single trapped $^{171}\mathrm{Yb}^+$ ion and measure the resulting work distributions under cyclic protocols with $\Delta F = 0$, confirming the predicted symmetry criterion at those points. Our results establish a symmetry-based extension of the conditional non-Hermitian Jarzynski relation within this restricted two-level setting.

Tackling the task of materials generation, we aim to enhance the previously proposed All-atom Diffusion Transformer (ADiT) by introducing SymADiT, a symmetry-aware variant. To do so, we use a representation of materials based on Wyckoff positions. We follow ADiT and perform generative modelling in latent space, adapted to our symmetry-aware representation. By forcing the output of the generative model to adhere to the symmetry restrictions imposed by the generated crystal's space group and each atom's Wyckoff-position, the generated materials exhibit more realistic symmetry properties. We benchmark our method against both symmetry-aware and symmetry-agnostic models for materials generation and show competitive performance, generating stable, symmetric materials with a simple Transformer architecture.

More profound than bulk topological order of quantum materials is only its unwinding via gapless excitations along boundaries of the sample. We recast this bulk-edge correspondence -- for the experimentally relevant case of fractional quantum Hall (FQH) systems -- in terms of effective relative higher gauge theory, controlled by choices of classifying fibrations. For FQH systems, we identify the complex Hopf fibration as classifying the bulk/boundary topological effects, and find that it yields a non-Lagrangian reconstruction of Floreanini-Jackiw/Wess-Zumino-Witten chiral edge currents. Remarkably, the resulting effective FQH higher gauge theory turns out to be "geometrically engineered" on M2/M5-branes probing A-type orbi-singularities in 11D supergravity, globally completed by flux-quantization in twisted equivariant differential (TED) Cohomotopy: Here the M-string ends of M2-branes on M5-branes engineer the FQH liquid's boundary. This geometric engineering on M-branes might naturally elucidate the curious combination of $W_\infty$-symmetry and of super-symmetry that is known to govern the collective excitations of FQH liquids at long wavelengths.

We investigate the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of a relativistic $Z_2$-symmetric scalar field theory with Langevin dynamics in two and three spatial dimensions under linear driving across magnetic first-order phase transitions, close to and far below the critical temperature $T_c$. Using classical-statistical lattice simulations, we find that if the driving timescale is sufficiently fast, the system exhibits finite-time scaling behavior independent of temperature and dimensionality, identical to that observed in mean-field simulations. In slow quenches near $T_c$ this mean-field behavior crosses over to critical Kibble-Zurek scaling behavior, while for temperatures $T \ll T_c$ nucleation and growth dominate the transition dynamics, resulting in corrections to scaling. Near the transition point where the order parameter changes sign, the crossover between mean-field and critical out-of-equilibrium dynamics is found to be well described by the leading algebraic correction to Kibble-Zurek scaling. We find that universal non-equilibrium scaling behavior can be observed for $T \lesssim T_c$, provided the driving is fast enough to avoid nucleation but slow enough for correlations to form, and compute the associated universal scaling functions for the order parameter.

Atomic properties such as partial charges or multipoles encode chemically meaningful information that can inform downstream molecular property prediction, but their evaluation as machine learning targets has been complicated by the absence of a principled out-of-distribution evaluation protocol at the atomic level. In this work, we propose a held-out evaluation protocol that clusters atomic environments by SOAP descriptors and computes metrics accounting only for cluster labels unseen during training. Following this procedure, we use 5$\times$5 cross-validation and Tukey's HSD to run a statistically rigorous comparison of E(3)-equivariant against non-equivariant, rotationally augmented models for predicting electron populations and multipoles of H, C, N, and O atoms. Building on our results, we introduce the Quantum Topological Neural Network (QT-Net), a rotationally augmented, non-equivariant graph neural network. We show that QT-Net can be used to infer properties of atoms in molecules from QM9 outside our training set, and that these inferred properties can yield improvement when used as input features for downstream molecular property prediction. To further validate the framework, molecular dipole moments computed from QT-Net's per-atom outputs recover the ground-truth values reported in QM9. We release all code and data, including a JAX implementation of QT-Net, to support the broader use of learned QTA properties as inductive biases for atomic-scale molecular machine learning.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been widely adopted both in the industry and in everyday life, but at the cost of high compute demands. Recent studies show that implementing machine learning in physical systems in the deep quantum regime could not only lead to faster information processing, but also to perform tasks that are out of reach for classical systems. Here, we report a quantum reservoir processing device capable of performing both quantum and classical machine learning tasks. The implementation is realized with a programmable silicon chip excited with single photons, a highly scalable and adaptable photonics technology. We successfully implement a variety of quantum tasks, including quantum state tomography and measurement of entanglement via negativity. Moreover, we implement a method of mitigation of experimental imperfections which results in a significant improvement in accuracy in comparison to the same system operating in the classical regime. Our results demonstrate a method to overcome a crucial bottleneck of quantum technologies by providing a practical way of probing quantum states.

Examining and controlling the interaction between semiconductor quantum qubits and their environment can boost semiconductor quantum technologies, which have many applications in table-top quantum computing hardware. Electron beams in electron microscopes have opened up a new avenue for the quantum-coherent probing of semiconductor excitations and strong-coupling effects. Here, I provide a brief overview of recent advancements in electron-beam probes for investigating quantum coherence in semiconductors and two-dimensional materials, complemented by my perspective on using electron beams to manipulate the entanglement and correlations between quantum systems.

We review various numerical approaches to compute transport coefficients in molecular dynamics. These approaches can be broadly classified into three groups: (i) nonequilibrium methods based on applying an external driving field to the system, measuring the average response in the system, and evaluating the related linear response coefficient; (ii) approaches reformulating the transport coefficient of interest through a time correlation function for the equilibrium dynamics (the most popular instances being Green--Kubo and Einstein formulas); (iii) transient techniques, where the transport coefficient can be computed by monitoring the return to the steady state of a dynamics perturbed off its stationary distribution. For all three classes of methods, we provide elements of numerical analysis, allowing to estimate or at least quantify the level of numerical errors in the estimator of the transport coefficient; and also briefly present recent attempts to more efficiently compute transport coefficients with variance reduction approaches such as control variates, importance sampling and coupling methods. The computation of transport coefficients remains nonetheless challenging and will continue requiring research efforts in the foreseeable future.

Pretrained diffusion models provide powerful learned priors, but in scientific sampling the target distribution often depends on physical context that is not fully represented by one generative model. We introduce Generative Gibbs for Physics-Aware Sampling (GG-PA), a training-free framework that formulates the composition of learned partial priors and explicit physical context as inference over a joint target distribution in an augmented state space. We derive a Gibbs sampler for this joint target, show that it is asymptotically exact as the diffusion time approaches zero, and prove that in settings with quadratic interactions it remains exact at finite diffusion times. We further introduce replica exchange over diffusion time to accelerate mixing. Experiments on a double-well system, a $\phi^4$ lattice model, and atomistic peptide systems show that GG-PA recovers context-induced distribution shifts and emergent collective behavior in interacting systems using partial priors without retraining. These results demonstrate GG-PA as a practical approach for combining pretrained generative priors with explicit physical context.

Proper weight initialization prior to training has historically been one of the key factors that helped kick off the deep learning revolution. Initialization is even more crucial in "reservoir computing", where the weights of a readout layer are learned linearly while the reservoir weights are fixed and largely determine the richness, stability and memory of the resulting dynamics. In the infinite-width limit it has been shown that meaningful initializations are those sitting at an effective critical point of the randomly initialized model. The phase transition is controlled by the weight variance $g^2$ and separates an ordered phase from a chaotic one where information progressively degrades. Here we derive a simple criterion to estimate the critical $g_c$ for a broad class of recurrent architectures and we show that it closely tracks the gain at which a gated-RNN reservoir achieves peak performance on a chaotic forecasting task. Finally, we argue that our criterion can serve as a design principle for future initialization schemes.

In our previous article [arXiv:2307.12552], we introduced local topological order (LTO) axioms for abstract quantum spin systems which allow one to access topological order via a boundary algebra construction. Using the LTO axioms, we produced a canonical pure state on the quasi-local algebra, which gives a net of von Neumann algebras associated to a poset of cones in $\mathbb{R}^n$. In this article, motivated by [arXiv:2509.23734], we introduce an axiom for LTOs which ensures Haag duality for cone-like regions using Tomita-Takesaki theory. We prove this axiom is satisfied for all known topologically ordered commuting projector models. We thus get an independent proof of Haag duality for the Levin-Wen string net models originally proved in [arXiv:2509.23734]. We also give a reflection positivity axiom for LTOs, connecting to the recent article [arXiv:2510.20662]. We again prove this axiom is satisfied for all known topologically ordered commuting projector models about some $\mathbb{Z}/2$-reflection symmetry.

We investigate the vacuum and thermal fluctuations of a neutral massless scalar field living in Minkowski spacetime and interacting with a finite number of point-like obstacles, modelled by zero-range potentials. The system is described rigorously in terms of self-adjoint realizations of the Laplacian, under assumptions ensuring the absence of instabilities. Using the relative zeta-function technique, we determine the renormalized connected partition function and derive explicit expressions for the thermodynamic observables, characterizing both their low- and high-temperature behaviours. Furthermore, we derive of a convergent Born series expansion for the Casimir energy, which identifies multiple-scattering processes as the mechanism underlying vacuum forces. The latter decompose into pairwise contributions directed along the lines joining the obstacles, with intensities depending non-locally on the full configuration. We also present some numerical results for identical obstacles, indicating that the Casimir forces are always attractive in this context.

We show that the entanglement entropy (EE) of one-dimensional (1d) non-interacting fermions with $U(1)$ symmetry in the presence of a quasi-periodic or disordered potential in which the occupation number is being monitored by homodyne or quantum jump protocols is always in an area-law phase so no measurement induced phase transition (MIPT) occurs. The reason for the previously claimed MIPT in these systems was a finite size effect related to the fact that the maximum lattice size $L \sim 500$ was of the order of the correlation length. By increasing the system size up to $L \leq 18000$, employing Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), and performing a careful finite size scaling analysis, we find that the critical monitoring strength is consistent with zero so no MIPT occurs. For the disordered case, these numerical results are fully supported by an analytical calculation based on mapping the problem onto a nonlinear sigma model (NLSM) with an additional mass-like term that confirms the absence of the MIPT for any monitoring or disorder strength. Another salient feature of the disordered case, in part related to a different symmetry in the NLSM, is that the correlation length in the weak disorder limit is longer than in the clean limit and increases with the disordered strength.

Large language models demonstrate remarkable ability in factual recall, yet the fundamental limits of storing and retrieving input--output associations with neural networks remain unclear. We study these limits in a minimal setting: a linear associative memory that maps $p$ input embeddings in $\mathbb{R}^d$ to their corresponding~$d$-dimensional targets via a single layer, requiring each mapped input to be well separated from all other targets. Unlike in supervised classification, this strict separation induces~$p$ constraints per association and produces strong correlations between constraints that make a direct characterisation of the storage capacity difficult. Here, we provide a precise characterisation of this capacity in the following way. We first introduce a decoupled model in which each input has its own independent set of competing outputs, and provide numerical and analytical evidence that this decoupled model is equivalent to the original model in terms of storage capacity, spectra of the learnt weights, and storage mechanism. Using tools from statistical physics, we show that the decoupled model can store up to $p_c \log p_c / d^2 = 1 / 2$ associations, and generalise the computation of $p_c$ to linear two-layer architectures. Our analysis also gives mechanistic insight into how the optimal solution improves over a naïve Hebbian learning rule: rather than boosting input-output alignments with broad fluctuations, the optimal solution raises the correct scores just above the extreme-value threshold set by the competing outputs. These findings give a sharp statistical-physics characterisation of factual storage in linear networks and provide a baseline for understanding the memory capacity of more realistic neural architectures.

A single-aperture, two-layer Canted-Cosine-Theta (CCT) sextupole magnet using high-temperature superconducting (HTS) ReBCO tape has been developed for the short straight sections (SSS) of FCC through the FCCee-HTS4 project. The magnet was designed, manufactured and tested under cryogenic conditions. Two HTS tapes from two manufacturers have been qualified for this specific application. Design and manufacturing details and cryogenic temperature measurements are presented. This demonstrator represents the first HTS CCT magnet ever constructed.

Topologically-ordered quantum states with Abelian excitations can host defects that obey effective non-Abelian statistics, in principle allowing for quantum information processing via defect braiding. These extrinsic defects (or twists) are typically studied as static features of the lattice. However, an alternative proposal considers how an underlying topologically ordered quantum substrate can be locally perturbed to create and manipulate synthetic defects \cite{you_synthetic_2013}. Unfortunately, while largely referenced, elements of this proposal were never systematically studied. Understanding the energy spectrum is particularly important in finite size and finitely perturbed systems, which are crucial for experimental realizations. In this work we announce a significant step in this direction by explicitly constructing, simplifying, and numerically studying the spectral properties of synthetic defects in a model system. First, we introduce two alternative representations of this problem in both spin and Majorana languages. In the former we describe emergent virtual symmetries which constrain and simplify the problem and in the latter we show a direct connection to Kitaev's well-known Majorana chain. We utilize these simplifications to perform numerical calculations to indicate the location of the quantum phase transition driving the emergence of the synthetic defects. We conclude by discussing key steps for future work to more clearly and completely study this phenomena.

We study the parafermionization of the Monster CFT with respect to its $\mathbb{Z}_{pA}$ subgroups, with $p$ an odd prime. Under certain assumptions, we show that the parafermionization is equal to a non-invertible gauging of $\mathcal{P}(p) \times \mathcal{P}(p)^\vee$, where $\mathcal{P}(p)$ is the theory of $\mathbb{Z}_p$-parafermions and $\mathcal{P}(p)^\vee$ is an appropriate dual theory, with global symmetry characterized by the centralizer of $\mathbb{Z}_{pA}$. By tracking the symmetries of $\mathcal{P}(p) \times \mathcal{P}(p)^\vee$ through the non-invertible gauging, we argue that the diagonal Monster CFT has $\mathrm{Rep}(\mathfrak{so}(3)_p) \boxtimes \mathrm{Rep}(\mathfrak{so}(3)_p)^\mathrm{op}$ symmetry, and hence that the holomorphic Monster theory has symmetry $\mathrm{Rep}(\mathfrak{so}(3)_p)$. We then compute the defect McKay-Thompson series associated to these symmetries, and prove that their invariance subgroups are $\Gamma_1(p+2)$.

Solid-state processors require control layers whose errors are legible to quantum-error-correction decoders. We show that crystallographic symmetry can provide such a layer in strain-active Lambda manifolds. When the projected strain tensor and Lambda-transition operators share a multiplicity-one two-dimensional irreducible representation, symmetry fixes the linear strain interaction to a scalar dot product. Two phase-locked mechanical modes synthesize a circular strain field, enabling complex phononic Lambda-leg control without local microwave near fields. On this manifold we construct a superadiabatic echo-lune holonomic gate using Lambda-leg control and a resonant double-quantum counterdiabatic tone. Rotating-frame simulations of a nitrogen-vacancy center give 99.88% conditional average fidelity in 1.833 microseconds, or 99.40% when leakage is counted as error. A resonant gigahertz high-overtone bulk acoustic resonator analysis translates the Hamiltonian into Rabi-rate, linewidth, and envelope-tracking requirements. The bright-state structure organizes noise: A2-sector perturbations are parity-filtered into an optically distinguishable auxiliary state, whereas transverse E-sector faults are echo suppressed and retained as a decoder stress axis. The extracted channel has 0.47% erasure probability and 0.168% residual Z error. In XZZX code-capacity simulations, this biased-erasure model yields a nominal 64% fit-extrapolated data-qubit reduction relative to an unstructured Rabi baseline. Repeated-round detector-model diagnostics preserve the nominal distance-9 proxy and identify missed erasures, transverse floors, leakage/flag timing, and strong crosstalk as validation limits. Extensions to orbital Lambda systems and bright-projector phonon-bus diagnostics identify crystallographic symmetry as a principle for co-designing phononic actuation, leakage, noise bias, and quantum decoding.

We construct a 3D Pauli stabilizer Hamiltonian whose ground state space can encode a qubit for exponential time when coupled to a bath at non-zero temperature. Our construction recursively applies a sequence of transformations to a seed Hamiltonian that increases the memory lifetime of the encoded qubit while maintaining geometric locality in $\mathbb{R}^3$.

Understanding and ultimately controlling the transformations and properties of nanoscale systems, from proteins to synthetic nanomaterial assemblies, is limited by the inability to uncover their dynamics on their characteristic length and time scales. Here, we nevertheless demonstrate this ability using MHz X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (XPCS) -- directly elucidating the characteristic microsecond-dynamics of density fluctuations of semiconductor nanocrystals (NCs), not only in a colloidal dispersion but also in a liquid phase consisting of densely packed, yet mobile, NCs with no long-range order. We find the wavevector-dependent fluctuation rates in the liquid phase are suppressed relative to those in the colloidal phase and relative to observations of densely packed repulsive particles. We show that the suppressed rates are due to a substantial decrease in the self-diffusion of NCs, which we attribute to explicit attractive interactions. Using coarse-grained simulations, we find that the extracted shape and strength of the interparticle potential explains the stability of the liquid phase, in contrast to the gelation observed via XPCS in many other charged colloidal systems. This work opens the door to elucidating fast, condensed phase dynamics in complex fluids and other nanoscale soft matter, such as densely packed proteins and non-equilibrium self-assembly processes, in addition to designing microscopic strategies to avert gelation.

We apply a recently developed first-principles based approach for treating generic spin-phonon couplings in materials with strong spin-orbit coupling to study $\alpha$-RuCl$_3$. Of particular focus is the potential for this material to exhibit a phonon thermal Hall effect induced by spin-phonon interactions. We find that spin-orbit coupling significantly enriches the form of these interactions, and imbues them with chirality that is conducive to generating finite phonon Berry curvatures. We show that this leads to a phonon thermal Hall effect that qualitatively reproduces the measured field dependence of $\kappa_{xy}$ without requiring a field-induced spin liquid.

We report the numerical observation of a far-from-equilibrium equation of state (EOS) in the Gross-Pitaevskii model. We first show that the momentum distribution of the turbulent cascade is well described by wave-turbulent kinetic theory in the appropriate limits. Calculating the energy and particle fluxes $\Pi_\varepsilon(k)$ and $\Pi_N(k)$, we show that the turbulent state possesses the hallmarks of a direct energy cascade. Building on this, we show that the GP model encodes a universal EOS in the form of a relationship between the turbulent cascade's momentum distribution amplitude $n_0$ and the energy flux $\epsilon$ in the steady state. We find that in our regime of `mixed' turbulence - where both vortices and waves play a significant role - $n_0\propto \epsilon^{0.67(2)}$, a result that is not captured by any existing theory of turbulence but that agrees with a recent experimental measurement for large energy fluxes. Finally, we find that the concept of quasi-static thermodynamic processes between equilibrium states extends to far-from-equilibrium steady states.

We show how the effects of large numbers of measurements on many-body quantum ground and thermal states can be studied using Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC). Density matrices generated by measurement in this setting feature products of many local non-unitary operators, and by expanding these density matrices as sums over operator strings we arrive at a generalized stochastic series expansion (SSE). Our `post-measurement SSE' is based on importance sampling of operator strings contributing to a measured thermal density matrix. We demonstrate our algorithm by probing the effects of measurements on the spin-$1/2$ Heisenberg antiferromagnet on the square lattice. Thermal states of this system have \SU{2} symmetry, and at first we preserve this symmetry by measuring \SU{2} symmetric observables. We identify classes of post-measurement states for which correlations can be calculated efficiently, as well as states for which \SU{2} symmetric measurements generate a QMC sign problem when working in any site-local basis. For the first class, we show how deterministic loop updates can be leveraged. Using our algorithm we demonstrate the creation of long-range Bell pairs and symmetry-protected topological order, as well as the measurement-induced enhancement of antiferromagnetic correlations. We then study the effects of measuring the system in a basis where the standard (unmeasured) SSE is sign-free: for measurement schemes with this property, we can calculate correlations in all post-measurement states without a sign problem. The method developed in this work opens the door to scalable experimental probes of measurement-induced collective phenomena, which require numerical estimates for the effects of measurements.

Conventional molecular dynamics (MD) simulation approaches, such as $\textit{ab initio}$ MD (AIMD) and empirical force field MD (EFFMD), face significant trade-offs between physical accuracy and computational efficiency. This work presents a linear-scaling potential-free data-driven molecular dynamics (PDMD) framework for predicting system energy and atomic forces of arbitrary-sized water clusters $(\text{H}_2\text{O})_n$. Specifically, PDMD employs a Gaussian-based atomic geometry descriptor to generate high-dimensional, equivariant features, then leverages ChemGNN, a graph neural network model that adaptively learns the atomic chemical environments without requiring $\textit{a priori}$ knowledge. Through an iterative self-consistent training approach, the converged PDMD achieves a mean absolute error of 1.39 meV/atom for energy and 50.7 meV/angstrom for forces, outperforming the state-of-the-art DeepMD by $\sim$5x in energy accuracy and $\sim$3x in force accuracy. As a result, the linear-scaling PDMD can reproduce the AIMD properties of water clusters at orders-of-magnitude lower computational cost, as illustrated by simulations of systems consisting of thousands or more molecules. These results demonstrate that the proposed PDMD offers multiphase predictive power and enables ultra-fast, general-purpose MD simulations while retaining AIMD-level accuracy. This accuracy is achieved by efficiently capturing many-body potentials that are critical in numerous polyatomic systems but are often missing in EFFMD. Moreover, we have constructed an $\textit{ab initio}$ dataset with over 300,000 $(\text{H}_2\text{O})_n$ structures, standardized in a unified PyTorch Geometric framework, to support scalable evaluation of artificial intelligence methods for molecular dynamics.

The Shastry-Sutherland model is an effective model of the layered material SrCu$_2$(BO$_3$)$_2$, which exhibits an extremely rich phase diagram as a function of pressure and magnetic field. Motivated by the recent controversy regarding its phase diagram at zero magnetic field, we perform large-scale simulations based on infinite projected entangled-pair states (iPEPS), a two-dimensional tensor network ansatz to represent the ground state directly in the thermodynamic limit. By employing the latest optimization techniques, we obtain variational states with lower energy than previous results obtained from other methods. Using systematic extrapolations to the exact infinite bond dimension limit, our simulations reveal a narrow quantum spin liquid phase between the plaquette and antiferromagnetic phases in the range $0.785(5) \le J'/J \le 0.82(1)$.

We investigate the effects of heterogeneous (spatially varying) activity in a hydrodynamical model for dense bacterial suspensions, confining ourselves to experimentally realizable, simple, quenched, activity patterns. We show that the evolution of the bacterial velocity field under such activity patterning leads to the emergence of hydrodynamic interfaces separating spatially localized turbulence from jammed frictional surroundings. We characterise the intermittent and multiscale fluctuations of this interface and also investigate how heterogeneity influences mixing via the residence times of Lagrangian tracers. This work reveals how naturally occurring heterogeneities could decisively steer active flows into more complex configurations than those typically studied, opening up parallels to droplet dynamics, front propagation and turbulent mixing layers.

Understanding interactions between excitons and correlated electronic states presents a fundamental challenge in quantum many-body physics. Here, we introduce a purely electronic model for the formation of exciton-polarons in moiré lattices. Unlike conventional approaches that treat excitons as tightly-bound bosonic particles, our model considers only electronic degrees of freedom, describing excitons as electron-hole bound states. Our findings reveal a pronounced renormalization of the polaron mass as a function of electron density, particularly near correlated insulators, consistent with recent transport experiments. Additionally, we predict an observable sign change in the effective polaron mass when increasing the electron density that can be measured in Hall-type experiments. Our purely electronic model provides a unified framework to investigate the formation and renormalization of exciton-polarons in correlated states.

The full counting statistics (FCS) of current has long provided fundamental insights into nonequilibrium systems. Recently, the FCS in quantum many-body systems has attracted growing attention, driven by rapid experimental progress in measuring current fluctuations. Nevertheless, for diffusive quantum many-body dynamics, the FCS of current has yet to be obtained exactly. In this Letter, we present the first exact solution for the FCS of current in a diffusive quantum many-body system, specifically a tight-binding chain with dephasing noise. By leveraging the system's SU(2) symmetry and a mapping to the one-dimensional Hubbard model, we derive an exact Fredholm determinant representation for the moment generating function of the time-integrated current. Our long-time asymptotic analysis shows that the cumulant generating function, and hence the corresponding large-deviation function, exhibit diffusive scaling for any nonzero dephasing. We compare our theoretical predictions with experimentally measured current variance and find consistent diffusive scaling.

The paradox of Maxwell's demon motivated the development of information thermodynamics and the creation of nanoscale information engines. We now understand that machines such as the molecular motors within cells can in principle harvest fluctuations and thereby operate as a Maxwell demon -- but do they? Answering this question would seemingly require simultaneous measurement of all system degrees of freedom, which is generally intractable in single-molecule experiments. Here, we derive a simple statistical estimator to infer both the direction and magnitude of subsystem heat flows, and thus determine whether -- and how strongly -- a motor operates as a Maxwell demon. The estimator uses only trajectory measurements for a single degree of freedom. Simulating both colloidal information engines and kinesin molecular motors, we show that our estimator can precisely and accurately detect Maxwell-demon behavior with experimentally accessible resolution and quantities of data. Moreover, we find that kinesin transitions to a Maxwell-demon mechanism in the presence of nonequilibrium noise, with a corresponding increase in velocity consistent with experiments. These findings suggest that molecular motors may have evolved to leverage active fluctuations within cells.

Hydrogen synthesis is a clean, sustainable alternative to fossil fuel \cite{gals}. It has come of age: prototyping various aspects of hydrogen power are hot topics. In 9 out of 10 reactions, a solid catalyst is used. Here hydrogen production (via water-gas shift) is studied. Adsorbed reactants are optimidsed on model Pt(111). Focus is on partial O-H bond dissociation, when CO is co-adsorbed with water on this plane. hydrogen is the product. Many chemical reactions involve bond-dissociation. This process is often the key to rate-limiting reaction steps at solid surfaces. Bond-breaking is poorly described by Hartree-Fock and DFT methods, our embedded active site approach is used. We showcase Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methodology using the ground-state Slater Determinant of a simple four primitive-cell layer model, oriented to expose Pt (111), to initialise the QMC. This stochastic approach solves the Schr{ö}dinger equation. It recently came of age for heterogeneous systems involving solids. During hydrolysis of carbon monoxide, initial O-H bond stretch is rate-limiting. Its dissociation energy is offset by surface Pt-H bond formation. The reactive formate (H-O-C=O) species formed by initial hydrolysis of CO, also interacting with a vicinal Pt. The products are hydrogen (CO$_2$ by-product is mineralised. A H-atom dissociates from the formate, another is desorbed from Pt(111). This yields pure hydrogen. Single-determinant work with a novel averaging procedure is compared to a high-level configuration interaction (CI) wave-function. Activation barriers are given to 0.86kJ/mol (c.f. 0.7 of the CI benchmark). Active sites embedded in metal lattice (111) faces. These trial wave-functions guide QMC.

At very small twist angles, bilayer moiré systems exhibit characteristic stacking domain patterns, where the moiré length scale is determined solely by the twist angle. In contrast, the additional stacking and twisting degrees of freedom in twisted trilayer systems give rise to richer and more intricate domain tessellations. In twisted trilayer hexagonal boron nitride (TTBN), the interplay between polar and nonpolar domains and their domain walls is shown to result in unconventional responses to external electric fields, including electric-field tunability of the moiré-of-moiré or super moiré pattern--features absent in bilayer counterparts. We demonstrate that at the vertices of super moiré domains, TTBN can support arrays of quantum dots hosting localized quantum harmonic oscillator (QHO) states with diverse spatial symmetries. Futhermore, we show that the shape of the array and the spacing between the localized QHO states can be dynamically reconfigured by electric fields, enabling facile switching between fully isolated and strongly coupled regimes. The local potentials for the quantum dot state are predicted to be sufficiently deep to support a series of QHO states with nonzero angular momentum. This tunability enables control over the transport of quantum dot states and their interdot coupling, facillitating long-range quantum state transfer. Combined with the feasibility of large-scale fabrication of homogeneous twisted trilayer materials, these properties position TTBN as a promising platform for a wide range of quantum technologies.

Infinite projected entangled-pair states (iPEPS) provide a powerful tool for studying strongly correlated systems directly in the thermodynamic limit. A core component of the algorithm is the approximate contraction of the iPEPS, where the computational bottleneck typically lies in the singular value or eigenvalue decompositions involved in the renormalization step. This is particularly true on GPUs, where tensor contractions are substantially faster than these decompositions. Here we propose a contraction scheme for $C_{4v}$-symmetric tensor networks based on combining the corner transfer matrix renormalization group (CTMRG) with QR-decompositions which are substantially faster, especially on GPUs. Our approach achieves up to two orders of magnitude speedup compared to standard CTMRG without loss of accuracy and yields state-of-the-art results for the Heisenberg and $J_1$-$J_2$ models in less than 1 h on an H100 GPU.

We introduce a machine-learning framework termed coarse-grained all-atom force field (CGAA-FF), which incorporates coarse-grained message passing within an all-atom force field using equivariant nature of graph models. The CGAA-FF model employs grain embedding to encode atomistic coordinates into nodes representing grains rather than individual atoms, enabling predictions of both grain-level energies and atom-level forces. Tested on EC/EMC organic electrolytes and RDX crystalline and disordered phases, CGAA-FF achieves 0.201 and 0.253 eV A-1, respectively, while providing about 10-fold and 5-fold higher computational speed and memory efficiency, respectively, than conventional MLIPs. Since this CGAA framework can be integrated into any equivariant architecture, we believe this work opens the door to efficient all-atom simulations of soft-matter systems.

The one-dimensional hard rod model describes impenetrable bosons with finite diameter, extending the Lieb-Liniger model to systems with excluded volume interactions. Here, we investigate the thermodynamics of quantum HRs using Yang-Yang theory, path integral quantum Monte-Carlo calculations, and Luttinger liquid theory. We first discuss the behavior of characteristic thermodynamic quantities, exhibiting deviations to the Lieb-Liniger model for sufficiently high densities, with excellent agreement between analytical and numerical results. We then show that the hard rod model exhibits Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid behavior across a wide range of parameters, at zero and finite temperature, as unveiled by correlation functions. The Tomonaga-Luttinger parameter and thermal length can be extracted by fitting correlation functions to Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid theory, hence demonstrating a robust method for thermometry. This work provides a comprehensive study of strongly correlated hard rod systems at finite temperatures, with applications to quantum wires, spin chains, and ultracold atoms.

Altermagnetism has emerged as an unconventional form of collinear magnetism with spatial rotational symmetries, that give rise to strongly spin-split bands despite of an underlying fully-compensated antiferromagnetic order. Here, we develop a theory for the Angle Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy (ARPES) response of altermagnetic Mott insulators. Crucially, the spectrum does not simply reflect the non-interacting band structure, but instead a magnetic polaron is formed at low energies, that can be interpreted as a spinon-holon bound state. We develop a spinon-holon parton theory and predict a renormalized bandwidth that we confirm by tensor network simulations. We analyze the characteristic spin-split spectrum and identify a spin-dependent spectral weight of the magnetic polaron, resulting from the altermagnetic symmetry. Our work paves the way for a systematic study of doping effects and correlation phenomena in altermagnetic Mott insulators.

Stochastic thermodynamics investigates energetic and entropic bounds in small systems. Foundational results, e.g., the first and second laws, predominantly rely on the Markov (memoryless) assumption. Although physicists recognise that the Markov assumption is questionable in real experimental setups, extending stochastic thermodynamics to general non-Markov systems has proven challenging. Fundamentally, it has been elusive how to model memory-dependent non-Gaussian fluctuations consistently with thermodynamic laws. Here we establish a general theory of stochastic thermodynamics for classical non-Markov jump processes. We introduce a key technique, called the Fourier embedding, which converts non-Markov jump processes into Markovian field dynamics of auxiliary Fourier modes. This yields necessary and sufficient conditions for time-reversal symmetry and enables the derivation of the second law for a broad class of strong-memory dynamics that admit the Fourier embedding. We demonstrate the power of our framework by presenting two novel non-Markov models: (i) a history-dependent two-level system and (ii) a history-dependent random walk. Our work accommodates diverse non-Markov dynamics in realistic experimental settings and offers a guiding principle for physics-informed modelling of history-dependent fluctuations.

NiI2 and NiBr2 are archetypal van der Waals (vdW) triangular-lattice multiferroics that host incommensurate helimagnetic order at the lowest temperatures and undergo a transition to collinear antiferromagnetic order upon heating. Focusing on NiBr2, we reveal that both antiferromagnetic phases exhibit a pronounced sensitivity to hydrostatic pressure. The Neel temperature of the collinear phase increases steeply at 20 K/GPa, reaching 100 K at 3 GPa without any indication of saturation, whereas the helimagnetic phase is completely suppressed only above 0.8 GPa. This behavior contrasts sharply with NiI2, in which both helical and collinear phases are strengthened until a moderate pressure of 6 GPa, above which the helical phase instantly disappears. Ab initio calculations identify the second-nearest interlayer exchange interaction (j2') as the primary driver stabilizing the collinear AFM phase in NiBr2. In addition, the in-plane exchange ratio renders the helical order in NiBr2 considerably more fragile, enabling its suppression under relatively small pressures. These results underscore the dominant role of interlayer interactions in governing the distinct pressure responses of the magnetic phases in NiBr2 and NiI2.

The bulk-boundary correspondence, which relates topological properties of a material in the bulk to the presence of robust modes localized on the edge, is at the core of the now mature field of topological wave physics. More recently, it was realized that in crystalline structures, certain types of defects can host localized modes, in which case the bulk-boundary correspondence has to be replaced by a bulk-defect correspondence. These defect-localized modes are expected to have robust properties owing to their topological origin. In this work, we show how to obtain topological defect modes in a lattice possessing both mirror and chiral symmetry. The defect is obtained by endowing a plaquette with a non-trivial gauge flux. We show that the bulk-defect correspondence is satisfied by introducing appropriate topological invariants. Moreover, the topological defect modes are shown to be highly robust to the introduction of symmetry-preserving disorder. The model is then realized in an acoustic system made of a bilayer network of tubes, and the presence of topological defect modes is experimentally clearly demonstrated.

Spatial entanglement of quantum states has become a central paradigm of many-body physics. Here, we unearth a fundamentally different form of entanglement, the entanglement between imaginary time scales. This time-scale entanglement is accessible through quantics tensor train diagnostics (QTTD), where the bond dimension of an $n$-particle correlator encodes the coupling between temporal scales. Our central result is that time-scale entanglement is generically enhanced in the vicinity of phase transitions and crossovers. At quantum critical points, it becomes scale-invariant. We demonstrate time-scale entanglement across a range of systems, including finite-size Hubbard rings, the transverse-field Ising model, the single-impurity Anderson model, and the Mott transition in the Hubbard model. Remarkably, the enhanced time-scale entanglement is largely independent of the specific observable, establishing QTTD as a universal and unbiased diagnostic of criticality.

The class of $N$-body complex systems with total number of microscopic states given by $W(N) \sim \nu^{N^\gamma}\;(\nu >1, \,\gamma > 0)$ can be thermostatistically handled with the nonadditive entropic functional $S_\delta(\{p_{i}\}) = k\sum_{i=1}^W p_i \Bigl(\ln \frac{1}{p_i} \Bigr)^\delta \;(\delta>0,\,S_1=S_{BG})$, $S_{BG}=k\sum_{i=1}^W p_i \ln \frac{1}{p_i}$ being the Boltzmann-Gibbs functional. Indeed, $S_{\delta=1/\gamma}(\{1/W(N)\})=k[\ln W(N)]^{\frac{1}{\gamma}} \propto N$, as mandated by thermodynamics. Another wide class is that with $W(N) \sim N^\rho\;(\rho>0)$ and a generalized statistical mechanics grounded on the nonadditive entropic functional $S_q(\{p_{i}\})=k\sum_{i=1}^W p_i \ln_q \frac{1}{p_i} \;(q\in \mathbb{R},\;S_1=S_{BG})$, with $\ln_q z =\frac{z^{1-q}-1}{1-q}\; (z\geq0,\;q\in\mathbb{R},\;\ln_1 z=\ln z)$, satisfactorily handles such systems with $q=1-1/\rho$. Furthermore, for this class, the size of the corresponding admissible phase space is characterized by $\ln_q (x\otimes_q y) =\ln_q x + \ln_q y,\, x,y\geq1,\,q\leq 1$, and the $q$-product $x\otimes_q y=[x^{1-q}+y^{1-q}-1]^{\frac{1}{1-q}}_{+}\;(x\otimes_1 y=xy)$ also leads to the definition of a $q$-algebra. The entropic functional $S_{q,\delta}(\{p_{i}\})=k\sum_{i=1}^W p_i \Bigl(\ln_q \frac{1}{p_i} \Bigr)^\delta\;(q\in\mathbb{R},\delta>0)$ unifies both cases above: $S_{q,1}=S_q$, $S_{1,\delta}=S_\delta$ and $S_{1,1}=S_{BG}$. In this paper, we generalize the $q$-algebra associated with $S_{q}$ to a new one associated with $S_{q,\delta}$, namely the $(q,\delta)$-algebra.

The mobility of both Fe and Ni atoms in ferromagnetic Fe$_x$Ni$_{1-x}$ alloys ($0.4 \leq x \leq 0.6$) is investigated within the framework of ab initio electronic structure calculations, using the nudged elastic band (NEB) method to accurately quantify energetic barriers to lattice vacancy migration. Both the atomically disordered (A1) fcc phase, as well as the atomically ordered, tetragonal $\mathrm{L}1_0$ phase - which is under consideration as a material for a rare-earth-free 'gap' magnet for advanced engineering applications - are investigated. Across an ensemble of NEB calculations performed on supercell configurations spanning a range of compositions and containing disordered, partially ordered, and fully ordered structures, we find that Ni atoms are consistently significantly less mobile than Fe atoms. Crucially, we are able to interpret these findings in terms of the ferromagnetic alloy's underlying spin-polarised electronic structure. Specifically, we report a coupling between the size of local lattice distortions and the magnitude of the local electronic spin polarisation around vacancies. This causes Fe atoms to relax into lattice vacancies, while Ni atoms remain rigidly fixed to their original lattice positions. This effect plays a key role in determining the reduced mobility of Ni atoms compared to that of Fe atoms. These results shed atomic-scale insight into the longstanding experimental observation that Ni exhibits remarkably slow atomic diffusion in Fe-Ni alloys.

We investigate the emergence of geometric phases in graphene-based nanostructures through the lens of the Atiyah-Singer index theorem. By modeling low-energy quasiparticles in curved graphene geometries as Dirac fermions, we demonstrate that topological defects arising from the insertion of pentagonal or heptagonal carbon rings generate effective gauge fields that induce quantized Berry phases. We derive a compact expression for the geometric phase in terms of the genus and number of open boundaries of the structure, providing a topological classification of zero-energy modes. This framework enables a deeper understanding of quantum holonomies in graphene and their potential application in holonomic quantum computation. Our approach bridges discrete lattice models with continuum index theory, yielding insights that are both physically intuitive and experimentally accessible.

We investigate a quasi-periodically driven four-level system that serves as a temporal analog of topological phenomena found in four-band models with intertwined spin and orbital degrees of freedom. Under a two-tone drive in the strong-driving regime, the system realizes a two-dimensional synthetic Floquet lattice, thus facilitating the realization of topological energy pumping. For a temporal quantum spin Hall insulator, we find that the rates of emission and absorption of energy between the two drives are not exactly opposite for a given band. However, when contributions from two chiral symmetric partner bands are added, they become exactly opposite. This quantized rate of energy exchange is a direct consequence of propagating edge modes in the real-space model, which we further characterize by computing the spin-Chern number. Interestingly, our analysis yields zero rate of exchange of energy between the drives for a temporal higher-order topological insulator, suggesting the presence of localized corner modes that we characterize by the mid-gap Wannier spectra. {Our findings uncover the role of chiral, particle-hole and time reversal symmetries on the energy dynamics in temporal quantum spin Hall and higher-order topological insulators.} Finally, we demonstrate that the perfect (imperfect) nature of the fidelity during the time-evolution of the system serves as a characteristic signature of a topological (trivial) phase.

Our previous numerical simulation [C.-E. Tsai et al., Physical Review Research \textbf{6}, 023065 (2024)] has shown that, for soft granular particles under quasistatic shearing, incorporating a speed-dependent friction is essential to reproduce the rate-dependent stick-slip fluctuations that have been found in the laboratory experiment [J.-C. Tsai et al., Physical Review Letters \textbf{126}, 128001 (2021)]. As a continuation, here we employ the simulation in a wide range of driving speeds to examine the role of grain inertia in the quaking dynamics. With our Stribeck-Hertz model, we find that having the volume fraction exceeding a critical value $\phi_{\text{c}}$ is a necessary condition for the quaking to occur, and that the value of $\phi_{\text{c}}$ is determined by material parameters only, independent of the driving rate. The effect of grain inertia generally suppresses the occurrence of quaking, and we conclude by presenting the state diagrams which exhibit a progressive narrowing of the quaking regime as the driving speed increases and the disappearance of quaking at an extremely high shear rate.

A model of dissipative micromagnetics coupled to (visco-)elasticity is explored, following the procedures of the Ericksen-Leslie theory of nematic liquid crystals allowing for angular momentum due to magnetization. An outcome is the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert theory coupled to material spin. A further power-less augmentation to the angular momentum of the theory with classical kinetic energy density is also considered, with a preliminary exploration of its potential in representing the Einstein-de Haas and Barnett effects within continuum mechanics. A treatment of the continuum mechanics of hard magnetic soft materials as a constrained polar material is presented. The models of DeSimone and James (2002) and Zhao et al. (2019) are discussed as two different, namely energetically and kinematically, constrained models of magnetoelasticity encompassed within the overall framework.

The thermal Hall effect has been observed in a wide variety of magnetic insulators, yet its origins remains controversial. While some studies attribute the effect to intrinsic mechanism, such as heat carriers with Berry curvature, others propose extrinsic mechanisms, such as heat carriers scattering off crystal defects. Even the nature of the heat carriers is unknown: magnons, phonons, and fractionalized spin excitations have all been proposed. Resolving these issues is essential for the study of quantum spin liquids, and particularly for $\alpha$-RuCl$_3$, where a quantized thermal Hall effect has been attributed to Majorana edge modes. Here, we use ultrasonic measurements of the acoustic Faraday effect to demonstrate that the phonons in $\alpha$-RuCl$_3$ have Hall viscosity -- a non-dissipative viscosity that rotates phonon polarizations and deflects phonon heat currents. We show that phonon Hall viscosity produces an intrinsic thermal Hall effect that quantitatively accounts for a significant fraction of the measured thermal Hall effect in $\alpha$-RuCl$_3$: the thermal Hall effect in $\alpha$-RuCl$_3$ is due to phonons \textit{and} it is intrinsic. More broadly, we demonstrate that the acoustic Faraday effect is a powerful tool for detecting phonon Hall viscosity and the associated phonon Berry curvature, offering a new way to uncover and study exotic states of matter that elude conventional experiments.

We study magnon-plasmon coupling in effectively two-dimensional stacks of van der Waals layers in the context of the band structure topology. Invoking the quasiparticle approximation, we show that the magnetic dipole coupling between the plasmons in a metallic layer and the magnons in a neighboring magnetic layer gives rise to a Berry curvature. As a result, the hybrid quasiparticles acquire an anomalous velocity, leading to intrinsic anomalous thermal Hall and spin-Nernst effects in ferromagnets and antiferromagnets. We propose magnetic layers supporting skyrmion crystals as a platform to realize chiral magnon-plasmon edge states, inviting the notion of topological magnon-plasmonics.

Common force fields overestimate the hydration free energies of hydrophobic solutes, leading to an exaggerated hydrophobic effect. We compute the hydration free energies of linear alkanes from methane to eicosane (C${20}$H${42}$) using free energy perturbation with various three-site (SPC/E, OPC3) and four-site (TIP4P/2005, OPC) water models in combination with the TraPPE-UA alkane force field. All water models overestimate hydration free energies, although the four-site models perform better than the three-site ones. Using alkane cavity free energies, we reparameterize the alkane-water Lennard-Jones well depth to bring simulation results in agreement with experimental and group-contribution estimates at 300 K. The reparameterized models significantly improve agreement with experiments across temperatures (290--350 K). We also show that the General Amber Force Field (GAFF) with TIP4P/2005 water provides closer agreement with experimental hydration free energies than the original TraPPE-UA/TIP4P/2005 combination. Finally, we show that applying a shifted Lennard-Jones potential introduces systematic deviations in the hydration free energies.

Reconstructing effective Hamiltonians of condensed matter systems directly from experimental data is challenging because of the intricate relationship between Hamiltonian parameters and observables. Here, we reconstruct an effective three-band electron-hole (e-h) Hamiltonian in bulk GaAs based on high-order sideband generation (HSG) induced by quasi-continuous NIR and THz lasers. We perform polarimetry of high-order sidebands while varying the wavelength and polarization of the NIR laser, as well as the strength of the THz field. An analytic model is derived to incorporate the effects of both dephasing and quantum fluctuations around the semiclassical e-h recollision pathways. Surprisingly, the contribution of quantum fluctuations to the decay of sideband intensity with increasing sideband order is comparable to the contribution of dephasing. We simultaneously and unambiguously determine through Bloch-wave interferometry the effective Hamiltonian parameter that determines the e-h reduced masses, the bandgap of GaAs, and two dephasing constants associated with two e-h species. We demonstrate that full Hamiltonian reconstruction can be achieved by combining HSG measurements with absorbance spectroscopy. Unexpectedly, we find that the extracted bandgap of GaAs is about 10 meV larger than the value inferred from previous absorbance measurements. Quantum-kinetic analysis suggests that, in the HSG experiments, the e-h energy may be renormalized through Fröhlich interaction that is modulated by the strong THz fields. We also show that the energy threshold for optical-phonon emission can be suppressed by applying a strong THz field, leading to nearly constant dephasing rates.

Atomtronic quantum sensors based on trapped superfluids offer a promising platform for high-precision inertial measurements where the dynamics of quantized vortices can serve as sensitive probes of external forces. We analytically investigate persistent current oscillations between two density-coupled Bose-Einstein condensate rings and show that the vortex dynamics is governed by low-energy acoustic excitations circulating through the condensate bulk. The oscillation frequency and damping rate are quantitatively predicted by a simplified hydrodynamic model, in agreement with Bogoliubov-de Gennes analysis and Gross-Pitaevskii simulations. We identify the critical dissipation separating persistent oscillations from overdamped vortex localization. Furthermore, we demonstrate that periodic modulation of the inter-ring barrier at resonant frequencies enables controlled vortex transfer even when the condensates are well separated in density. These results clarify the role of collective hydrodynamic modes in circulation transfer and establish a framework for employing vortex dynamics in atomtronic quantum technologies.

Resonant parametric modulation is a major tool of studying magnetic systems. For a spin-1/2 chain in a strong magnetic field, the resulting excitations can be mapped on fermionic excitations in the Kitaev chain. We show that the response to turning on the modulation reveals dynamical bulk aspects of the nontrivial topology of the closed chain. In the topological regime, depending on the turn-on rate, the system displays an absence of frequency dispersion of the time-averaged magnetization and an absence or a suppression of its spatial correlations near resonance. The transition between the topological and trivial regimes is controlled by the modulation frequency.

The Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH) has been established as a cornerstone for understanding thermalization in quantum many-body systems. Recently, there has been growing interest in the full ETH, which extends the framework of the conventional ETH and postulates a smooth function to describe the multi-point correlations among matrix elements. Within this framework, free cumulants play a central role, and most previous studies have primarily focused on closed systems. In this paper, we extend the analysis to a system-bath setup, considering both an idealized case with a random-matrix bath and a more realistic scenario where the bath is modeled as a defect Ising chain. In both cases, we uncover a universal scaling of the microcanonical free cumulants of observables associated with the central system Hamiltonian with respect to the interaction strength. Furthermore we establish a connection between this scaling behavior and the thermalization dynamics of the thermal free cumulants of corresponding observables.

We present an unsupervised learning analysis of correlation hierarchies in the quarter-filled simple and extended Hubbard models by applying principal component analysis (PCA) to exact-diagonalization (ED) data on 3x4 and 4x4 cylindrical clusters. While the non-interacting limit (U=0) provides a finite-size reference, increasing on-site repulsion U induces localization and reorganizes the low-energy spectrum. For the extended model, we examine moderate (U=4) and strong (U=10) coupling regimes, where conventional structure factors reveal familiar crossovers among charge, spin and local-pairing correlations. PCA of the corresponding correlation matrices captures these crossovers directly from the data, without assuming predefined order parameters by identifying charge-dominated, spin-dominated and pairing-dominated regimes through variance condensation into leading components. This establishes PCA as a transparent, model-agnostic framework for uncovering the hierarchy and competition of correlation channels in finite Hubbard clusters, providing a bridge between exact diagonalization and modern machine-learning diagnostics in strongly correlated systems.

We present a symmetry-based formulation of nonlinear fluctuating hydrodynamics (NFH) for one-dimensional many-particle systems with generic homogeneous nearest-neighbor interactions. We derive the hydrodynamic equations solely from symmetry and conservation principles, ensuring full consistency with thermalization. Using the dynamic renormalization group, we identify a KPZ-type fixed point, characterized by the dynamical exponent $z=3/2$ for both the sound and heat modes. Extensive numerical simulations of the derived NFH equations confirm this exponent and further reveal that both modes are close to the universal KPZ scaling function, the Prahofer-Spohn this http URL findings establish a unified, symmetry-based framework for understanding universal transport and fluctuation phenomena in one-dimensional nonequili brium systems, independent of microscopic details.

Anisotropic intersite exchange interactions in frustrated rare-earth magnets are difficult to assess both theoretically and experimentally. Here, we propose an ab initio force-theorem framework combining the quasi-atomic Hubbard-I approach to 4f correlations with a static mean-field treatment of the on-site intershell Coulomb interaction between rare-earth 4f and 5d states to simultaneously capture both 4f superexchange and 5d-mediated indirect exchange. Applying it to the triangular lattice Ce delafossites CsCeSe$_2$, KCeS$_2$, and RbCeO$_2$, we find that the indirect exchange dominates in the selenide, the superexchange in the oxide, while both mechanisms contribute almost equally in the sulfide. The magnetic exciation spectra of CsCeSe$_2$ and KCeS$_2$ evaluated from the calculated spin Hamiltonains are in good qualitative and quantitative agreement with experimental data.

Gauge theories are important descriptions for many physical phenomena and systems in quantum computation. Automorphism of gauge group naturally gives global symmetries of gauge theories. In this work we study such symmetries in gauge theories induced by automorphisms of the gauge group, when the gauge theories have nontrivial topological actions in different spacetime dimensions. We discover the automorphism symmetry can be extended, become a higher group symmetry, and/or become a non-invertible symmetry. We illustrate the discussion with various models in field theory and on the lattice. In particular, we use automorphism symmetry to construct new transversal non-Clifford logical gates in topological quantum codes. In particular, we show that 2+1d $\mathbb{Z}_N$ qudit Clifford stabilizer models can implement non-Clifford transversal logical gate in the 4th level $\mathbb{Z}_N$ qudit Clifford hierarchy for $N\geq 3$, extending the generalized Bravyi-König bound proposed in the companion paper [arXiv:2511.02900] for qubits.

Excitons, bound electron-hole pairs, are responsible for strong optical resonances near the bandgap in low-dimensional materials and wide-bandgap insulators. Although current ab initio methods can accurately determine exciton energies and eigenstates, their symmetries have been much less explored. In this work, we employ standard group-theory methods to analyse the transformation properties of excitonic states, obtained by solving the BSE, under crystal symmetry operations. We develop an approach to assign irreducible-representation labels to excitonic states, providing a state-of-the-art framework for analysing their symmetries and selection rules (including, for example, the case of exciton-phonon coupling). Complementary to the symmetry classification, we introduce the concept of total crystal angular momentum for excitons in the presence of rotational symmetries, allowing the derivation of conservation laws. Furthermore, we demonstrate how these symmetry properties can be exploited to greatly enhance the computational efficiency of exciton calculations with the BSE. We apply our methodology to three prototypical systems to understand the role of symmetries in different contexts: (i) For LiF, we present the symmetry analysis of the entire excitonic dispersion and examine the selection rules for optical absorption. (ii) In the calculation of resonant Raman spectra of monolayer MoSe2, we demonstrate how the conservation of total crystal angular momentum governs exciton-phonon interactions, leading to the observed resonant enhancement. (iii) In bulk hBN, we analyze the role of symmetries for the coupling of finite-momentum excitons to finite-momentum phonons and their manifestation in the phonon-assisted luminescence spectra. This work establishes a general and robust framework for understanding the symmetry properties of excitons in crystals, providing a foundation for future studies.

Entangled structures such as textiles and architected materials are often doubly periodic. Due to this property and their finite transverse thickness, the symmetries of these materials are described by the crystallographic layer groups. While orbifold notation provides a compact topological description and classification of the planar wallpaper groups, no analogous framework has been available for the spatial layer groups. In this article we develop an orbifold theory in three dimensions and introduce a complete set of Conway-type symbols for all layer groups. To illustrate its applicability, we analyze several knitted fabric motifs and show how their layer-group symmetries are naturally expressed in this new orbifold notation. This work establishes a foundation for the topological classification of doubly periodic structures beyond the planar setting.

Atomistic simulations generate large volumes of noisy structural data, yet extracting phase labels and continuous order parameters (OPs) in a robust and general manner remains challenging. Existing tools are often specialized to a limited set of prototypes and split thermal-noise removal, phase classification, and OP construction into separate steps. Here we present a unified probabilistic framework for analyzing noisy atomic configurations with respect to known crystal prototypes. The model predicts per-atom, per-prototype logits and aggregates them into a scalar log-probability (logP) landscape over atomic coordinates. Its gradient defines a conservative denoising field, while the logits provide local phase labels, prototype-resolved OPs, and ambiguity measures through logit margins. We train on AFLOW-mapped crystalline structures from the Materials Project with synthetic positional and elastic perturbations, then test extrapolation to stronger noise, finite-temperature disorder, point defects, water--ice coexistence, binary polymorphs, and shock-compressed Ti. A single differentiable scalar model recovers prototype identity after denoising, tracks smooth transformations such as Bain and Burgers paths, and exposes low-confidence regions near defects and phase boundaries. This provides an integrated and extensible tool for analyzing complex atomistic simulations.

Computing spectral functions in large, non-periodic super-moiré systems remains an open problem due to the exceptionally large system size that must be considered. Here, we establish a tensor network methodology that allows computing momentum-resolved spectral functions of non-interacting and interacting super-moiré systems at an atomistic level. Our methodology relies on encoding an exponentially large tight-binding problem as an auxiliary quantum many-body problem, solved with a many-body kernel polynomial tensor network algorithm combined with a quantum Fourier transform tensor network. We demonstrate the method for one and two-dimensional super-moiré systems, including super-moiré with non-uniform strain, interactions treated at the mean-field level, and quasicrystalline super-moiré patterns. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our methodology allows us to compute momentum-resolved spectral functions restricted to selected regions of a super-moiré, enabling direct imaging of position-dependent electronic structure and minigaps in super-moiré systems with non-uniform strain. Our results establish a powerful methodology to compute momentum-resolved spectral functions in exceptionally large super-moiré systems, providing a tool to directly model quantum twisting microscope experiments in twisted van der Waals heterostructures.

The separation of colloidal particles from fluids is essential to ensure a safe global supply of drinking water, yet in the case of microscopic particles, it remains a highly energy-intensive process when using traditional filtration methods. Water cleaning through diffusiophoresis, spontaneous colloid migration in chemical gradients, effectively circumvents the need for physical filters, representing a promising alternative. This separation process is typically realized in internal flows, where a cross-channel electrolyte gradient drives particle accumulation at walls, with colloid separation slowly increasing in the streamwise direction. However, the maximum separation efficiency, achieved sufficiently downstream as diffusiophoretic migration (driving particle accumulation) is balanced by Brownian motion (inducing diffusive spreading), has not yet been characterized. In this work, we develop an asymptotic theory to predict colloid separation in this limit, deriving expressions for the water recovery, defined as the fraction of clean water that can be obtained from the suspension. We find that the mechanism by which the chemical permeates in the channel and the reaction kinetics governing its dissociation into ions play key roles in the process. Moreover, we identify four distinct regimes in which separation is controlled by different scaling laws involving Damköhler and Péclet numbers, which measure the ratios of reaction kinetics to ion diffusion and diffusiophoresis to Brownian motion, respectively. We also confirm the scaling of one of these regimes using microfluidic experiments where separation is driven by CO2 gradients. Our results shed light on pathways toward new, more efficient separations and are also applicable to quantify colloidal accumulation in the presence of chemical gradients in more general situations.

The impact of projective lattice symmetry on electronic band structures has attracted significant attention in recent years, particularly in light of growing experimental studies of two-dimensional hexagonal materials in magnetic fields. Yet, most theoretical work to date has focused on the square lattice due to its relative simplicity. In this work, we investigate the role of projective lattice symmetry in a hexagonal lattice with rational magnetic flux, emphasizing the resulting topological constraints on the electronic band structure. We show that, at pi flux, the symmetry in the hexagonal lattice enforces novel Dirac band touchings at E not equal to zero, and for general rational flux it constrains the number of Dirac points at E = 0. We further analyze the symmetry-imposed constraints on the Chern numbers of both isolated gapped bands and band multiplets connected by Dirac-point touchings. Our results demonstrate that these constraints in the hexagonal lattice differ substantially from those in the square lattice.

X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) is a widely used technique for chemical analysis of solid surfaces, sensitive to the chemical environments of atoms via core-level binding energy shifts. While modern instruments allow experimental data to be acquired with ease, their evaluation and interpretation remain challenging for newcomers to the field, as a profound knowledge of the method is required for correct analysis. Here we present a concise yet comprehensive overview of the fundamental principles and methodologies of XPS, covering photoemission processes, chemical shifts, charge referencing, peak fitting, and quantification strategies. This overview aims to bridge the gap between data collection and reliable analysis, providing essential knowledge for correct interpretation. By clarifying key concepts and common practices, this work supports improved accuracy in surface chemical characterization using XPS.

The Euler buckling of rods is a long-studied mechanical instability, and it remains relevant to this day, as the constituent components in many biological and physical systems are linear polymers, such as microtubules or carbon nanotubes. At finite temperature, if a polymer is shorter than its persistence length, the polymer is semiflexible, and its elasticity remains rod-like. But polymers can also stretch due to their finite extensibility, which can couple to energetically cheap bending deformations in nonlinear ways when a load is applied to the system. We show how the interplay between thermal fluctuations and nonlinear elasticity dramatically modifies the Euler buckling instability for compressed semiflexible polymers in a fixed strain ensemble. We identify a Ginzburg-like length scale beyond which thermally excited undulations lead to a softened Young's modulus, while the polymer nevertheless remains semiflexible. Both perturbative calculations and numerical Monte Carlo simulations suggest a qualitative change in several scaling properties of the buckling transition. The critical compressional strain for thermal buckling now increases with system size, in contrast to athermal buckling, where it decreases with system size. Renormalization group calculations confirm this picture, and also show that thermal buckling is controlled by a new fixed point with different critical exponents compared to classical Euler buckling.

We study the twisted MoTe$_2$ homobilayer coupled to periodic driving of a circularly polarized light (CPL). Using Floquet theory in the high-frequency limit, we start from the Dirac model including both the valence and conduction bands of monolayer MoTe$_2$ to derive an effective time-independent Floquet Hamiltonian. The photon processes coupling the valence and conduction bands are captured in this Floquet analysis, and the resulting Floquet Hamiltonian contains explicit time-reversal symmetry breaking terms that are absent if conduction bands are integrated out from the beginning of the derivation. Based on the Floquet Hamiltonian, we find the increase of CPL driving intensity can cause the crossing of Floquet bands and redistribution of holes between the two valleys. When interactions are included, a transition between Floquet Laughlin-type FCIs with different behaviors of valley polarization is identified at total hole filling $5/3$.

A colloidal monolayer embedded in the bulk of a fluid experiences a "compressible", long-range hydrodynamic interaction which, far from boundaries, leads to a breakdown of Fick's law above a well defined length scale, showing up as anomalous collective diffusion. We here extend the model to study the effect of the hydrodynamic interaction on a monolayer formed by two types of particles. The most interesting finding is a new regime, in the limit of very dissimilar kinds of particles, where the effective dynamics of the concentration of "big" (slow) particles appears to obey Fick's law at large scales, but the corresponding collective diffusivity is completely determined, through hydrodynamic coupling, by the diffusivity of the "small" (fast) particles.

We extend a recently developed "tangent fermion" method to discretize the Hamiltonian of a helical Luttinger liquid on a one-dimensional lattice, including two-particle backscattering processes that may open a gap in the spectrum. The fermion-doubling obstruction of the sine dispersion is avoided by working with a tangent dispersion, preserving the time-reversal symmetry of the Hamiltonian. The numerical results from a tensor network calculation on a finite lattice confirm the expectation from infinite-system analytics, that a gapped phase with spontaneously broken time-reversal symmetry emerges when the Fermi level is tuned to the Dirac point and the Luttinger parameter crosses a critical value.

We study the Lanczos coefficients in a quadratic model given by an impurity interacting with a multi-mode field of fermions, also known as resonant level model. We analytically derive closed expressions for the Lanczos coefficients of Majorana fermion operators of the impurity for different structures of the coupling to the hybridization band at zero temperature. While the model remains quadratic, we find that the growth of the Lanczos coefficients structurally depends strongly on the chosen coupling. Concretely, we find $(i)$ approximately constant, $(ii)$ exactly constant, $(iii)$ square root-like as well as $(iv)$ linear growth in the same model. We further argue that in fact through suitably chosen couplings, essentially arbitrary Lanczos coefficients can be obtained in this model. These altogether evince the inadequacy of the Lanczos coefficients as a reliable criterion for classifying the integrability or chaoticity of the systems. Eventually, in the wide-band limit, we find exponential decay of autocorrelation functions in all the settings $(i)-(iv)$, which demonstrates the different structures of the Lanczos coefficients not being indicative of different physical behavior.

Within the framework of Gross-Pitaevskii theory, we investigate the effects of intraspecies interactions on the nucleation transition and the wetting phase diagram of dilute ternary Bose-Einstein condensate in the regime of strong segregation between two components. The analyses are carried out using both the analytical double-parabola approximation (DPA) and numerical computations. Our results show that the DPA provides a reliable approximation for describing the nucleation transition. For the wetting phase diagram, we find that the DPA is in excellent agreement with numerical results in symmetric systems, particularly in the completely symmetric case, whereas it fails to provide an adequate description for asymmetric systems.

The relationship between the topological architecture of polymer networks and their macroscopic rupture remains a fundamental challenge in polymer physics. Recent coarse-grained simulations have revealed that the dependence of stretch at break (\lambda_b) on node functionality and reaction conversion can be unified into a universal master curve when plotted against the cycle rank density (\xi). However, a theoretical derivation explaining this universality has been lacking. This study proposes a simple mechanical model to describe the \xi-dependence of \lambda_b. The polymer network is modeled as a mechanical system consisting of a sequence of springs representing localized, highly stretched strands and the surrounding unstretched network. By relating the stiffness contrast between these regions to the network connectivity defined by \xi, an analytical expression for the stretch at break is derived: \lambda_b-1\propto\sfrac{\left(3\xi+6\right)}{\left(3\xi+2\right)}\ . The proposed model is validated against phantom chain simulations using both Gaussian and finite extensibility (FENE) springs. The theoretical prediction shows reasonable agreement with simulation data, providing a physical basis for the phenomenological universality observed in polymer network rupture.

The magneto-optical transport of gapless type-I tilted single Weyl semimetals(WSMs) exhibits suppression of total magnetoconductivities in the presence of orbital magnetic moment(OMM) in linear and nonlinear responses (Yang Gao et al., Phys. Rev. B {\bf 105}, 165307 (2022)). In this work, we extend our study to investigate magnetoconductivities in gapless type-II Weyl semimetals within the semiclassical Boltzmann approach and show the differences that arise compared to type-I Weyl semimetals.

The aim of this paper is to offer an analytic theory of the shear banding instability in amorphous solids that are subjected to athermal quasi-static shear. To this aim we derive nonlinear equations for the displacement field, including the consequences of plastic deformation on the mechanical response of amorphous solids. The plastic events collectively induce distributed dipoles that are responsible for screening effects and the creation of typical length-scales that are absent in classical elasticity theory. The nonlinear theory exposes an instability that results in the creation of shear bands. By solving the weakly nonlinear amplitude equation we present analytic expressions for the displacement fields that is associated with shear bands, explaining the role of the elastic moduli that determine the width of a shear band from ductile to brittle characteristics. We derive an energy functional whose Hessian possesses an eigenvalue that goes to zero at the shear-banding instability, providing a prediction for the critical value of the accumulated stress that results in an instability.

We investigate measurement-induced localization in a continuously monitored one-dimensional Aubry--André--Harper model, focusing on the quantum Zeno regime in which the measurements dominate coherent dynamics. The presence of a quasiperiodic potential renders the problem analytically tractable and enables a controlled study of the interplay between monitoring and disorder. We develop an analytical description based on an instantaneous Schrödinger equation with a measurement-induced effective potential constructed self-consistently from individual quantum trajectories, without relying on postselection. In the quantum Zeno regime, an emergent dominant energy scale reduces the problem to a transfer-matrix formulation of an effective non-Hermitian Hamiltonian, which allows direct computation of the Lyapunov exponent. Complementarily, we extract the localization length numerically from long-time steady-state quantum state diffusion trajectories by reconstructing the intrinsic localized single-particle wave functions and analyzing their spatial decay. These numerical results show quantitative agreement with the effective theory predictions, with controlled corrections of order $J^2/[\lambda^2+(\gamma/2)^2]$ (where $J$ is the hopping amplitude, $\gamma$ the measurement strength, and $\lambda$ the quasiperiodic potential). Our results underscore the connection between the effective non-Hermitian description and the stochastic monitored dynamics, showing the interplay between Zeno-like localization, coherent hopping, and quasiperiodic-disorder-induced localization, while also laying the groundwork for understanding and exploiting measurement-induced localization as a tool for quantum control and state preparation.

The nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond exists in different charge states with distinct photoluminescence properties, which are sensitive to the nanoscale electrochemical environment. Hence, the NV charge state is emerging as a powerful all-optical platform for nanoscale sensing and imaging. Although significant progress has been made in engineering near-surface NV centers in bulk diamond, controlling the NV charge state in fluorescent nanodiamonds (FNDs) has proven challenging, limiting the sensitivity and reliability of FND-based charge state sensing. Here, we demonstrate reliable, reversible switching between the fluorescent NV$^0$ and non-fluorescent NV$^+$ charge states in sub-30 nm FNDs via surface oxidation and hydrogenation, respectively, for single particles and particle powder. In aqueous electrochemical cells, we demonstrate voltage and ion concentration imaging based on the NV charge state in self-assembled FND layers on transparent substrates. Applied voltages reliably modulate the FND PL with a sensitivity of up to 16 mV Hz$^{-1/2}$. Importantly, FND PL is also modulated by local changes in salt concentration with a sensitivity of up to 1.8% per millimolar NaCl, enabling all-optical imaging of ion concentration gradients at the microscale. Our results represent a significant step toward realizing fast, stable, and scalable nanoscale charge- and voltage-imaging technologies with sub-micrometer spatial resolution.

In standard thermodynamics, internal energy is a state function, independent of process rates. We show that this structure breaks down in open quantum systems undergoing thermalization. Within Gorini-Kossakowski-Lindblad-Sudarshan (GKLS) dynamics with detailed balance, relaxation at the generator level promotes a dynamical invariant to an emergent thermodynamic coordinate. As a result, the internal energy acquires an intrinsic dependence on the rate of entropy change, \[ E = E(S,\dot{S}), \] implying that thermalization enlarges the thermodynamic state space. This mechanism is generic in the Gaussian regime, where dynamics admits an effective quadratic description, and extends to quantum fields, where each mode contributes a rate-dependent term to the energy. It also applies to physically relevant interacting systems, such as a photon field coupled to an electronic bath. Our results show that detailed-balance relaxation induces a dynamical extension of thermodynamics, in which thermodynamic potentials depend on both state variables and their rates.

X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) and resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS) are powerful probes of electronic structure owing to their chemical and orbital selectivity. For powder samples, however, interpreting RIXS spectral intensities remains challenging as the measured signal is an average over all orientations. Existing theoretical treatments rely largely on spherical-tensor formalisms, which often involve complex derivations and case-specific analyses. Meanwhile, recent advances in quantum-chemistry methods have made the evaluation of transition tensors in Cartesian coordinates both accurate and straightforward. Here, we present a general theoretical framework that translates Cartesian transition tensors into physically meaningful, orientation-averaged intensities for powder samples. The formalism allows predicting angular and polarization dependences \textit{ab initio} for both XAS and RIXS and is extendable to other spectroscopies. The resulting predictions show excellent agreement with RIXS experimental data at the Ce L$_3$ edge.

Biological water is an ionic solution containing both monovalent and divalent ions. However, the effects of divalent ions on the dynamics of biological water remain largely unknown. Here, we investigate how the transport dynamics of water molecules nanoconfined between lipid membranes depends on the concentration of calcium (Ca2+) and magnesium (Mg2+) ions by using molecular dynamics simulations and the generalized transport equation for biological water. We find that the diffusion coefficient of biological water monotonically increases with Ca2+ ion concentration but exhibits a largely opposite, non-monotonic dependence on Mg2+ concentration. The deviation of the water molecules' displacement distribution from the Gaussian also shows distinct dependence on the concentrations of Mg2+ and Ca2+. These contrasting behaviors originate from the different hydration radii of these divalent ions and their distinct effects on the interfacial structure and dynamics of biological water. The relaxation of the lateral displacement distribution of water molecules toward a Gaussian is determined by the time-correlation function of diffusion coefficient fluctuations, whose relaxation time increases with salt concentrations. The primary source of the lateral diffusion coefficient fluctuation is thermal motion of water molecules in the longitudinal direction, along which microscopic environments surrounding a water molecule, including the functional groups of lipid membrane and ion concentrations, drastically change.

In the Comment by Bordag et al. [Phys. Rev. B 113, 207401 (2026) and arXiv:2506.10792], concerns are raised regarding the validity of the results presented in [Phys. Rev. B 111, 115428 (2025)], where the theoretical descriptions of the electric conductivity of graphene obtained from the Kubo formula and from quantum field theory via the polarization tensor are compared. In this Reply, we show that these concerns arise from misinterpretations of Phys. Rev. B 111, 115428 (2025), in which the results are either inaccurately represented or applied outside the domain of validity of the model. We address the comments concerning the derivation of the Luttinger formula for the electric conductivity from the Kubo formula and clarify why the results of Phys. Rev. B 111, 115428 (2025) cannot be arbitrarily extended to make claims on the gauge invariance. We further demonstrate that our findings are fully consistent with the established and widely accepted literature cited in the Comment. We confirm that the model for electric conductivity discussed in Phys. Rev. B 111, 115428 (2025) correctly predicts a vanishing electric current in the absence of an external electric field, as physically required, and in contrast with the model advocated by the Authors of the Comment. We also show that the electric permittivity does not exhibit a double pole in $\omega$, contrary to the claim made in the Comment. Finally, we emphasize that the inclusion of losses is a standard and well-established approach in the study of transport properties of materials, including graphene, and we take the opportunity to correct a few minor typographical errors in Phys. Rev. B 111, 115428 (2025). We show and maintain that all results derived in Phys. Rev. B 111, 115428 (2025) are fully valid and correct.

A generalisation of Takens' delay-coordinate embedding theorem to stochastic systems, the Stochastic Embedding Sufficiency Theorem, is an inverse methodology enabling non-parametric recovery of both drift and diffusion fields from scalar time series without prior assumptions about the governing physics. A blind protocol using only time series data is applied to nine domains: classical mechanics, statistical mechanics, nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, chemical kinetics, electromagnetism, relativistic quantum mechanics, quantum harmonic oscillator dynamics, and quantum electrodynamics. Fundamental constants (the Boltzmann constant, the Planck constant, the speed of light, the Fano factor, and the Van Kampen scaling exponent) emerge in both drift and diffusion channels without prior specification. The recovered diffusion coefficients, viewed across domains, constitute an empirical pattern, the $\sigma$-continuum, in which $k_B$, $\hbar$, and $c$ play structurally distinct roles. The Gravitational Diffusion Theorem, derived from the fluctuation-dissipation theorem, massless mode structure of linearised gravity, and gravitational self-coupling via the equivalence principle, determines the gravitational diffusion coefficient as one Planck length per square root of Planck time. Four canonical axioms formalise the framework, within which the noise character, drift, covariance operator, and fluctuation amplitude are uniquely determined by theorem, yielding the superspace diffusion hypothesis: $\mathrm{d}g_{ij} = \mathcal{D}_{ij}[g]\,\mathrm{d}\tau + \ell_P\,\mathrm{d}W_{ij}$ where all coefficients are non-parametric, first-principles consequences of the axioms. An implication of the hypothesis is that coarse-graining of the superspace Fokker-Planck equation via Mori-Zwanzig projection yields predictions for galactic-scale gravitational acceleration testable against kinematic data.

Transmission Kikuchi diffraction in the scanning electron microscope has gained popularity as a materials characterization technique for its high throughput and nanometer-level spatial resolution. While conventional diffraction pattern analysis routines focus on Kikuchi bands on the diffraction patterns, the full physical picture of electron scattering and diffraction pattern formation is more complex. Analysis that accounts for additional diffraction features such as diffraction spots and excess-deficiency effects should provide more robust and accurate indexing, if they can be incorporated in pattern indexing or simulation routines. A more accurate understanding of their physics of formation and geometry is required to enable this change. In this work, we demonstrate geometric and full contrast dynamical simulation of on-axis transmission Kikuchi patterns, based on experimental patterns captured using a modular, direct electron detector-based set-up in the scanning electron microscope. First, a diffraction geometry calibration routine is proposed based on the electron channeling pattern of the direct electron detector. This allows us to accurately account for the position of diffraction spots in both geometric and dynamical simulations with good agreement with experimental patterns. Further, by introducing appropriate weight factors, simulation of incoherent diffuse intensity, and calculation of the energy spectra of diffracted electrons, simulated patterns can be obtained which accurately capture the many diffraction features on experimental patterns. Workflows and findings of this work can be used to improve pattern indexing routines, as well as the understanding of the physical processes in the formation of on-axis transmission Kikuchi patterns.

We perform molecular dynamics simulations to investigate hydration structures and dynamics in seven water-containing polymers: PVA, PHEA, PHEMA, PBA, PMEMA, PEG, and PMEA. The analysis integrates four perspectives: the water-content dependence of the glass transition temperature $T_g$, polymer chain fluctuations characterized by dihedral angle distributions, hydrogen-bond lifetimes $\tau_{\mathrm{HB}}$ between water and polymer functional groups, and the localization and exchange dynamics of confined water quantified by the distinct part of van Hove correlation function. Hydroxyl-containing polymers (PVA, PHEA, and PHEMA) exhibit relatively high dry-state $T_g$ values and its pronounced depression upon hydration. Chain fluctuations are limited, and $\tau_{\mathrm{HB}}$ follows Arrhenius behavior, forming localized hydration shells. In contrast, PMEMA and PBA show low equilibrium water contents and hydrophobic character; although their dry-state $T_g$ values are moderately lower and less sensitive to water content, chain fluctuations remain small, and $\tau_{\mathrm{HB}}$ also obeys Arrhenius behavior, with hydrophobic aggregation promoting water localization. PEG and PMEA display low dry-state $T_g$ values and weak water-content dependence. Greater rotational freedom around ether or methoxy oxygen atoms leads to larger chain fluctuations and loosely bound water. Below $T_g$, $\tau_{\mathrm{HB}}$ between water and ether or methoxy oxygen atoms exhibits super-Arrhenius behavior. These results clarify three hydration types: highly hydrated (PVA, PHEA, and PHEMA), hydrophobic (PMEMA and PBA), and flexibly hydrated (PEG and PMEA), and provide a molecular-level framework for interpreting interfacial water governed by water-polymer interactions.

Corrosion originates from atomistic reactions occurring at dynamic solid liquid interfaces however, direct experimental observation of these reactions has remained elusive due to the inability to preserve transient interfacial states during characterization. To refine corrosion models, advanced techniques capable of analyzing corrosion interfaces at the atomic scale are essential. Recent advancements in cryogenic atom probe tomography (cryoAPT) enabled 3D nanoscale analysis of frozen liquid metal interfaces. However, challenges remain in sample preparation for cryoAPT on metals undergoing corrosion. This study introduces a microcorrosion cell fabricated using localized electrodeposition in liquid (LEL), enabling atomic scale capture of liquid metal reactions by integrating picoliterscale electrolytes encapsulated within sealed metallic microvessels, subsequently analyzed using this http URL approach enables 3D, nanoscale mapping of corrosion reactions with simultaneous spatial, chemical, and temporal resolution. As a model system, copper exposed to aerated dilute sulphuric acid reveals temperature and time dependent interfacial evolution, including nanoscale clustering of copper sulphate species, enhanced ion pairing at elevated temperature, and the emergence of transient carbon based interfacial complexes inaccessible to conventional characterization this http URL copper corrosion, the presented microcorrosion cell architecture establishes a strategy for interrogating confined electrochemical and degradation processes across a wide range of material liquid systems, using a combination of microfabrication and cryoAPT.

Transport coefficients and dielectric relaxation in liquids are often treated as distinct manifestations of molecular dynamics. We show that, in polar liquids, orientational dipolar fluctuations generate a substantial contribution to the shear viscosity that can be expressed in terms of dielectric response parameters. Using a Green-Kubo approach formulated in terms of dipolar body-force correlations, we derive an explicit relation linking the viscosity increment to the static permittivity and the Debye relaxation time. With a single microscopic cutoff length fixed from one temperature, the theory predicts the temperature dependence of the viscosity for water and several alcohols using independently measured dielectric data. The results identify a general mechanism by which slow polarization dynamics generate an additional, and in strongly polar liquids often dominant, contribution to the viscosity, providing a quantitative bridge between dielectric spectroscopy and rheology.

We present a systematic study of the electronic structure of strained La$_3$Ni$_2$O$_7$ thin films. We show that biaxial compressive strain mainly elongates the outer apical Ni-O bond while leaving the inner apical Ni-O bond nearly unchanged. As a result, the Jahn-Teller splitting $\Delta_{JT}$ is strongly enhanced, whereas the interlayer $d_{z^2}$ hopping $t_\perp^z$ changes only weakly. Since superconductivity is widely believed to emerge only below a critical in-plane lattice constant, our results identify the strain-enhanced $\Delta_{JT}$ as the relevant microscopic tuning parameter. Consistently, the calculated Fermi surfaces and Hall response for LaAlO$_3$ and SrLaAlO$_4$ substrates agree with ARPES and Hall measurements. Our results identify Jahn-Teller distortion as a key tuning parameter in strained La$_3$Ni$_2$O$_7$ and support its central role in optimizing superconductivity in bilayer nickelates.

Accurate predictions of exfoliation energies and lattice constants of layered materials hinge on a correct description of London dispersion physics. Modern a posteriori dispersion corrections in density-functional theory (DFT), such as the exchange-hole dipole moment (XDM) model, capture the proper asymptotic behaviour at long range while making use of damping functions to prevent unphysical divergence at short range. In the united-atom limit, the dispersion energy is damped to a finite, non-zero value by both the canonical Becke--Johnson (BJ) damping function and the new Z-damping function. XDM(BJ) has previously demonstrated exceptional accuracy for modelling layered materials, such as in the LM26 benchmark, which includes graphite, hexagonal boron nitride, lead(II) oxide, and transition-metal dichalcogenides. This work presents the first assessment of XDM(Z) on the same benchmark. We also show that inclusion of three-body interactions via the Axilrod--Teller--Muto (ATM) term further improves the computed exfoliation energies for both XDM(BJ) and XDM(Z), yielding the best performance achieved on LM26 using semi-local functionals to date, relative to reference data from the random-phase approximation.

Vacancy-induced structural reconstruction provides a general microscopic route to $d$-wave altermagnetism in two-dimensional systems. As a concrete realization, reconstructed $\mathrm{V_2X_2}$ ($\mathrm{X}=\mathrm{S}, \mathrm{Se}$) monolayers form an inverse Lieb magnetic network in which two inequivalent edge vanadium sites, related by $C_4$ lattice rotational symmetry and carrying opposite exchange fields, yield zero net magnetization despite broken time-reversal ($\mathcal{T}$) and combined inversion--time-reversal ($\mathcal{PT}$) symmetries. Structural stability is confirmed by formation energies, phonon spectra, and $ab$ $ initio$ molecular dynamics simulations at room temperature. A minimal tight-binding model, incorporating anisotropic second-order hopping between the inequivalent magnetic sites mediated by a nonmagnetic corner site, produces spin splitting with a $(\cos k_x - \cos k_y)$ form factor in quantitative agreement with first-principles calculations. The resulting spin splitting is strongly anisotropic, maximized near the $X$ and $Y$ high-symmetry points and exhibiting a symmetry-enforced nodal degeneracy at $M$, consistent with a $d_{x^2-y^2}$ altermagnetic form factor confirmed by the fourfold Fermi surface pattern. These findings establish vacancy-driven reconstruction of an inverse Lieb magnetic network as a general design principle for two-dimensional $d$-wave altermagnets.

We present a flexible microscopic modeling framework for flopping-mode spin qubits that captures the spatial structure of the double-well confinement and magnetic-field-gradient profile beyond conventional low-energy approximations. Our model enables a direct mapping from the device geometry to qubit parameters and metrics. By using this approach, we simulate electric dipole spin resonance-based single-qubit control and evaluate the frequency and spectral purity of the Rabi oscillations across different parameter regimes. Our analysis reveals a fundamental tradeoff between fast electrical driving and clean single-mode Rabi oscillations. We also investigate two-qubit control by considering two capacitively coupled flopping-mode qubits and derive the corresponding exchange interaction with an appropriately restricted configuration interaction treatment. Our approach reveals the interplay between the spatial profile of the double-well confinement, magnetic field gradient, and Coulomb interaction, which together govern the effective exchange coupling strength. Our microscopic modeling framework enables efficient exploration of device geometries and provides design guidelines for optimizing flopping-mode spin qubits in realistic architectures.

We study the statistics of rewired random regular graphs (RRGs) in a mixed ensemble, where the average number of triangles is controlled by the fugacity $\lambda$, while the number of vertices and the vertex degree are fixed. This model exhibits a phase transition at critical fugacity $\lambda_{cr}$ from a triangle-poor phase (TPP), in which the number of triangles is independent of the system size, to a triangle-rich phase (TRP), in which the number of triangles scales linearly with the system size. We estimate $\lambda_{cr}$ by comparing the entropy of TPP with the energy of TRP. Above $\lambda_{cr}$, the RRG becomes a two-phase system in which dense clusters are connected by a sparse scale-free sub-network characterized by a degree distribution, $P(d) \sim d^{-\gamma}$, with $\gamma \approx 2$, independent of the size of the whole graph and its degree. We attribute this behavior to an "emergent preferential attachment" induced by triangle motifs, describe the mechanism underlying its formation, and derive the exponent $\gamma$ within a mean-field approach. We show that most inter-cluster triangles are isosceles, with the base lying inside one cluster and the apex belonging to the inter-cluster network. Finally, we speculate on a possible connection between these triangles and Efimov states in a conformally invariant potential.

Strong-coupling experiments based on magnons enable the exploration into on-chip demonstrations involving numerous long-lived excitations. Yttrium iron garnet (YIG) has been considered for decades as a gold standard material for magnonics due to its low-loss magnonic properties. While YIG has successfully demonstrated strong-coupling in macroscopic device geometries, the strong coupling of magnons in truly sub-10 micron YIG structures to date has not yet been realized. This obstacle is due to the difficulty producing large enough effective magnonic mode volume necessary primarily due to thickness limitations of YIG deposition and device fabrication techniques. Here, we demonstrate the use of a microplatelet of YIG, manufactured from a single crystal of YIG via focused ion beam (FIB) techniques, placed on a constricted inductive line of an optimized superconducting lumped element LC resonator to achieve strong coupling between numerous magnon modes and the LC resonator photons. These experimental findings are qualitatively backed by micromagnetic simulations and quantitatively supported by analytical calculations to identify the magnon modes corresponding to the experimentally observed anti-crossings in the microwave transmission signal. Further, we show that these anti-crossings remain even at incredibly low device input powers ($\leq 10$ fW). The fabrication techniques and device geometry enable the deterministic use of numerous confined magnon modes in micron-scale YIG structures for various magnetic field strengths and orientations at substantially reduced device powers. The results here establish a foundational path forward to achieving efficient magnon-based strong-coupling experiments in micron-scale YIG magnetic elements for effective on-chip studies.

An axiomatic foundation regarding the entropy for complex systems is established. Missing from decades of research was the requirement that entropy must measure the uncertainty at the informational scale of the maximizing distribution, where the log-log slope equals $-1$. Additionally, entropy must be extensive across the full universality scaling classes defined by Hanel-Thurner. The coupled entropy, maximized by the coupled stretched exponential distributions, is proven to be the unique, universal entropy that satisfies these requirements. The non-additivity of the entropy is equal to the long-range dependence or nonlinear statistical coupling. The entropy-matched extensivity is a function of the coupling, stretching parameter, and dimensions. Evidence is provided that the Tsallis $q$-statistics creates misalignment in the physical modeling of complex systems. Information thermodynamic applications are reviewed, including measuring complexity, a zeroth law of temperature, the thermodynamic consistency of the coupled free energy, and a model of intelligence in non-equilibrium.

Combinatorial optimization problems in logistics, finance, energy, and scheduling routinely involve multi-state decision variables. Ising machines (IMs) require binary expansions (e.g., one-hot encoding) to encode such variables, whereas Potts machines (PMs) represent them natively. By doing so, PMs are expected to outperform IMs on multi-state problems. To the best of our knowledge, no systematic study of PM models has yet assessed whether this expectation holds. We therefore benchmark five representative PMs against a reference IM on Max-3-Cut and Max-4-Cut, using 800-vertex GSet graphs and random graphs of up to 50 vertices. Surprisingly, the reference IM still outperforms every PM, and the IM supremacy increases significantly in going from Max-3-Cut to Max-4-Cut. These results provide clear evidence that current PM dynamics underperform relative to binary approaches, even in regimes where they are presumed advantageous. We provide a way forward by quantifying the underperformance of current PMs, as well as by identifying three dynamical properties that correlate strongly with their performance ranking. Our work stresses the need for more systematic assessments of algorithmic performance in order to guide the design of more effective Potts machines.

Mixed-halide perovskites offer a route to enhance phase stability and modify optoelectronic properties. Here, we use large-scale molecular dynamics simulations with a reactive force field to investigate defects in CsPbBr$_\mathrm{x}$I$_\mathrm{3-x}$ perovskites, focusing on how defect mobility can be controlled and the stability of the material may be improved by layered ordering of Br and I anions in layers. Our results show that layered halide ordering induces strongly anisotropic defect diffusion: migration proceeds readily along the layers, whereas diffusion across them is strongly suppressed. For Cs defects, this anisotropy originates from directional lattice strain and the associated octahedral tilting, while halide migration is governed by an interplay between strain and preferential local halide bonding configurations.

The dataset collected at the Cape Rodney-Okakari Point Marine (CR-OPM) reserve on the North Island of New Zealand is rather unique. It describes the cyclic time evolution of a rocky intertidal community, with the relative abundances of the various coastal species that have been meticulously monitored for more than 20 years. Past theoretical studies, anchored on a deterministic description, required invoking ad hoc mechanisms to reproduce the observed dynamical paths. Following a maximum likelihood approach to interpolate individual stochastic trajectories, we here propose quasi-cycles as an alternative and simpler mechanism to explain the oscillations observed in the population numbers of the ecosystem. From a general standpoint, we also show that it is possible to return conclusive evidence on the existence of stochastic quasi-cycles, without resorting to global fitting strategies which necessitate handling a large collection of independent replicas of the dynamics, a possibility that is often precluded in real life applications.

Quantum low-density parity-check codes, such as the Kitaev toric code and bivariate bicycle codes, are often defined with periodic boundary conditions, which are difficult to realize in physical systems. In this paper, we present an algorithm for constructing all gapped boundaries and defects of two-dimensional Pauli stabilizer codes. Using the operator algebra formalism, we establish a one-to-one correspondence between the topological data, such as anyon fusion rules and topological spins, of two-dimensional bulk stabilizer codes and one-dimensional boundary anomalous subsystem codes. To make the operator algebra computationally accessible, we adapt Laurent polynomials and convert the tasks into matrix operations, e.g., the Hermite normal form for obtaining boundary anyons and the Smith normal form for determining fusion rules. This approach enables computers to automatically generate all possible gapped boundaries and defects for topological Pauli stabilizer codes through boundary anyon condensation and topological order completion. This streamlines the analysis of surface codes and associated logical operations for fault-tolerant quantum computation. Our algorithm applies to $\mathbb{Z}_d$ qudits for both prime and nonprime $d$, enabling exploration of topological phases beyond the Kitaev toric code. We have applied the algorithm and explicitly demonstrated the lattice constructions of 2 boundaries and 6 defects in the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ toric code, 3 boundaries and 22 defects in the $\mathbb{Z}_4$ toric code, 1 boundary and 2 defects in the double semion code, 1 boundary and 22 defects in the six-semion code, 6 boundaries and 270 defects in the color code, and 6 defects in the anomalous three-fermion code. Finally, we study the boundaries of bivariate bicycle codes, showing that they exhibit large logical dimensions and anyons with long translation periods.

There is great interest in generating and controlling entanglement in Bose-Einstein condensates and similar ensembles for use in quantum computation, simulation, and sensing. One class of entangled states useful for enhanced metrology are spin-squeezed states of $N$ two-level atoms. After preparing a spin coherent state of width $1/\sqrt{N}$ centered at coordinates $( \theta, \phi) $ on the Bloch sphere, atomic interactions generate a nonlinear evolution that shears the state's probability density, stretching it to an ellipse and causing squeezing in a direction perpendicular to the major axis. Here we consider the same setup but in the $N \rightarrow \infty $ limit . This shrinks the initial coherent state to zero area. Large $N$ also suppresses two-particle entanglement and squeezing, as required by a monogamy bound. The torsion (1-axis twist) is still present, however, and the center of the large $N$ coherent state evolves as a qubit governed by a two-state Gross-Pitaevskii equation. The resulting nonlinearity is known to be a powerful resource in quantum computation. It can be used to implement single-input quantum state discrimination, an impossibility within linear one-particle quantum mechanics. We obtain a solution to the discrimination problem in terms of a Viviani curve on the Bloch sphere. We also consider an open-system variant containing both Bloch sphere torsion and dissipation. In this case it should be possible to generate two basins of attraction within the Bloch ball, having a shared boundary that can be used for a type of autonomous state discrimination. We explore these and other connections between spin squeezing in the large $N$ limit and nonlinear quantum gates, and argue that a two-component condensate is a promising platform for realizing a nonlinear qubit.

We show that operator growth in large-central-charge conformal field theories with $\mathcal{W}_3$ symmetry can violate the universal operator growth hypothesis once the Liouvillian is enlarged to probe the higher-spin generators. For the generalized Liouvillian $\mathcal{L} = \kappa_1 \left( L_1 + L_{-1} \right) + \kappa_2 \left( W_2 + W_{-2} \right)$, we compute the Lanczos coefficients in the descendant module of a heavy primary and find several classes with faster-than-linear growth in the descendant level $N$, including maximally violating sectors with asymptotic behavior $b_N \sim N^2$. This superlinear growth exceeds the conjectured bound and renders the Krylov complexity divergent. We further show that the same quadratic asymptotic growth already arises in the global $SL(3, \mathbb{R})$ subalgebra, indicating that the violation is rooted in the extended higher-rank symmetry itself. Our results demonstrate that extended $\mathcal{W}$-symmetries can qualitatively modify operator growth and evade conventional bounds on information scrambling.

We show that, within a finite window of parameter space, random matrix theory (RMT) statistics emerge in observables of a finite-volume massive free scalar field theory after a local operator quench. The spacing-ratio distribution of two-point-function extremum locations is close to the Gaussian orthogonal ensemble statistics. An extrema-based form factor exhibits a dip--ramp--plateau structure characteristic of RMT. By contrast, the standard spectral form factor shows no ramp, consistent with the underlying free spectrum, while a global quench yields qualitatively different statistics.

We introduce measurement-based quantum diffusion models that bridge classical and quantum diffusion theory through randomized weak measurements. The measurement-based approach naturally generates stochastic quantum trajectories while preserving purity at the trajectory level and inducing depolarization at the ensemble level. We address two quantum state generation problems: trajectory-level recovery of pure state ensembles and ensemble-average recovery of mixed states. For trajectory-level recovery, we establish that quantum score matching is mathematically equivalent to learning unitary generators for the reverse process. For ensemble-average recovery, we introduce local Petz recovery maps for states with finite correlation length and classical shadow reconstruction for general states, both with rigorous error bounds. Our framework establishes Petz recovery maps as quantum generalizations of reverse Fokker-Planck equations, providing a rigorous bridge between quantum recovery channels and classical stochastic reversals. This work enables new approaches to quantum state generation with potential applications in quantum information science.

We study one of the simplest integrable two-dimensional quantum field theories with a boundary: $N$ free non-compact scalars in the bulk, constrained non-linearly on the boundary to lie on an $(N-1)$-sphere of radius $1/\sqrt{g}$. The $N=1$ case reduces to the single-channel Kondo problem, for $N=2$ the model describes dissipative Coulomb charging in quantum dots, and larger $N$ is analogous to higher-spin impurity or multi-channel scenarios. Adding a boundary magnetic field -- a linear boundary coupling to the scalars -- enriches the model's structure while preserving integrability. Lukyanov and Zamolodchikov (2004) conjectured an expansion for the boundary free energy on the infinite half-cylinder in powers of the magnetic field. Using large-$N$ saddle-point techniques, we confirm their conjecture to next-to-leading order in $1/N$. Renormalization of the subleading solution turns out to be highly instructive, and we connect it to the RG running of $g$ studied by Giombi and Khanchandani (2020).

While large language models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities are progressing rapidly on high-school math competitions and coding, can they reason effectively through complex, open-ended challenges found in frontier physics research? And crucially, what kinds of reasoning tasks do physicists want LLMs to assist with? To address these questions, we present the CritPt (Complex Research using Integrated Thinking - Physics Test, pronounced "critical point"), the first benchmark designed to test LLMs on unpublished, research-level reasoning tasks that broadly covers modern physics research areas, including condensed matter, quantum physics, atomic, molecular & optical physics, astrophysics, high energy physics, mathematical physics, statistical physics, nuclear physics, nonlinear dynamics, fluid dynamics and biophysics. CritPt consists of 71 composite research challenges designed to simulate full-scale research projects at the entry level, which are also decomposed to 190 simpler checkpoint tasks for more fine-grained insights. All problems are newly created by 50+ active physics researchers based on their own research. Every problem is hand-curated to admit a guess-resistant and machine-verifiable answer and is evaluated by an automated grading pipeline heavily customized for advanced physics-specific output formats. We find that while current state-of-the-art LLMs show early promise on isolated checkpoints, they remain far from being able to reliably solve full research-scale challenges: the best average accuracy among base models is only 5.7%, achieved by GPT-5 (high), moderately rising to around 10% when equipped with coding tools. Through the realistic yet standardized evaluation offered by CritPt, we highlight a large disconnect between current model capabilities and realistic physics research demands, offering a foundation to guide the development of scientifically grounded AI tools.

Continuous monitoring of one-dimensional free fermionic systems can generate phenomena reminiscent of quantum criticality, such as logarithmic entanglement growth, algebraic correlations, and emergent conformal invariance, but in a nonequilibrium setting. However, whether these signatures reflect a genuine phase of nonequilibrium quantum matter or persist only over finite length scales is an active area of research. We address this question in a free fermionic chain subject to continuous monitoring of lattice-site occupations. An unraveling phase $\varphi$ interpolates between measurement schemes, corresponding to different stochastic unravelings of the same Lindblad master equation: For $\varphi = 0$, measurements disentangle lattice sites, while for $\varphi = \pi/2$ they act as unitary random noise, yielding volume-law steady-state entanglement. Using replica Keldysh field theory, we obtain a nonlinear sigma model describing the long-wavelength physics. This analysis shows that for $0 \leq \varphi < \pi/2$, entanglement ultimately obeys an area law, but only beyond the exponentially large scale $\ln(l_{\varphi,*}) \sim J/[\gamma \cos(\varphi)]$, where $J$ is the hopping amplitude and $\gamma$ the measurement rate. Resolving $l_{\varphi, *}$ in numerical simulations is difficult for $\gamma/J \to 0$ or $\varphi \to \pi/2$. However, the theory also predicts that critical-like behavior appears below a crossover scale that grows only algebraically in $J/\gamma$, making it numerically accessible. Our simulations confirm these predictions, establishing the absence of measurement- or unraveling-induced entanglement transitions in this model.

The Gravity from Entropy (GfE) action posits that gravity that is fundamentally given by the information encoded in the interplay between matter and geometry. The GfE Lagrangian is given by the Geometric Quantum Relative Entropy (GQRE) between the physical metric and the metric induced by matter and curvature, leading to modified gravitational field equations with an emergent dynamical effective dark energy term, which reduce to Einstein's equations in the low energy, small curvature limit. Adopting a thermodynamic viewpoint, we identify the GfE energy density with this emergent effective dark energy term. For homogeneous and isotropic FRW spacetimes, we show that GfE universes admit a thermal description: locally, they are characterized by $k$-temperatures and $k$-pressures satisfying a first law of GfE thermodynamics. In the low energy, small curvature regime with perfect-fluid matter and radiation, GfE solutions are well approximated by Friedmann cosmologies. While the total GQRE per unit volume does not increase, the total entropy of GfE universes is non-decreasing in time. We show that, while the total GQRE per unit volume does not increase, consistent with its nature as a relative entropy, the total entropy of GfE universes is non-decreasing in time. These results provide a thermodynamic interpretation of GfE cosmologies and of general relativity (GR) itself, recovered in the low energy, small curvature limit of the theory, offering a framework to reconcile local order and complexity with the global increase of entropy in the universe.

Bosonic Gaussian states are ubiquitous in quantum optics and condensed matter physics. While they are efficiently handled within the Gaussian formalism, sampling requires calculating amplitudes in the boson occupation basis. This step, however, is hindered by a significant bottleneck due to the hafnian. We present an efficient algorithm that converts pure bosonic Gaussian states into matrix product states (MPSs), thereby establishing a versatile tool for probing bosonic Gaussian systems in settings where direct Gaussian-formalism-based calculations become inefficient. Our method combines a Gaussian singular value decomposition with a projected-creation-operator mapping that constructs local MPS tensors without computing hafnians. Benchmarking on covariance matrices from the Jiuzhang 2.0 and Jiuzhang 4.0 Gaussian boson sampling experiments demonstrates substantial speedups over previous tensor-network approaches in the low-entanglement regime relevant to lossy devices. The method provides a scalable classical simulation framework for bosonic Gaussian states with limited entanglement. In this regime, a target accuracy can be achieved with a bond dimension that remains computationally tractable, thereby extending the applicability of MPS-based methods to a broad range of bosonic systems.

The sensory richness of coffee is widely recognised and arises from the complex chemistry and immersion in cultural practices of coffee preparation. In contrast, the physical complexity of espresso has received less attention. The multiphase reactive flow through a dissolving, elastic porous medium remains challenging to describe. Using a controlled experimental setup based on a café-grade espresso machine, we demonstrate that the interplay between elasticity and porosity governs the long-time flow rate during espresso extraction and, consequently, the concentration of solubles in the final beverage. We introduce a minimal model that captures the resulting non-linear pressure-flow relationship and propose a methodology capable of reproducing the time-dependent behaviour of the espresso brewing process. Finally, we show that dissolution dynamics play a central role in determining the temporal evolution of flow during extraction.

Spatial photonic Ising machines offer a novel optical platform for optimization and spin-model simulation, but existing diffraction-based schemes rely on auxiliary spins or multiplexing to encode high-rank couplings and external fields, reducing either speed or spin count. We demonstrate an amplitude-only, rank-free spatial photonic Ising machine in which arbitrary Ising Hamiltonians are encoded as Hadamard products on aligned amplitude and binary spatial modulators and read out by a single-pixel intensity measurement. The machine directly programs fully connected 797-spin Ising models with external fields at nearly 9-bit precision and operates at a constant iteration rate of ~200 Hz. By removing zero-valued product terms, the same architecture scales to sparse problems and experimentally solves a Max-Cut instance on a 424,108-vertex Mobius ladder graph. We also observe the phase transition of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model, demonstrating programmable optical simulation beyond low-rank couplings. These results establish amplitude modulation as a scalable route to programmable photonic Ising machines.

The concept of gravitons and their masses, clear in the case of Minkowski spacetime, remains ambiguous for de Sitter spacetime. Here, we used a two-fluid approach to de Sitter thermodynamics and found a collective mode that is analogous to second sound in the two-fluid dynamics of the de Sitter state. This mode is massless and propagates at the speed of light. This suggests that this second-sound analog is a massless graviton propagating in de Sitter spacetime. The type of graviton this mode represents requires further consideration.

Noisy and Intermediate-Scale Quantum, or NISQ, processors are sensitive to noise, prone to quantum decoherence, and are not yet capable of continuous quantum error correction for fault-tolerant quantum computation. Hence, quantum algorithms designed in the pre-faulttolerant era cannot neglect the noisy nature of the hardware, and investigating the relationship between quantum hardware performance and the output of quantum algorithms is essential. In this work, we experimentally study how hardware-aware variational quantum circuits on a superconducting quantum processing unit can model distributions relevant to specific use-case applications for Credit Risk Analysis, e.g., standard Gaussian distributions for latent factor loading in the Gaussian Conditional- Independence model. We use a transpilation technique tailored to the specific quantum hardware topology, which minimizes gate depth and connectivity violations, and we calibrate the gate rotations of the circuit to achieve an optimized output from quantum algorithms. Our results demonstrate the viability of quantum adaptation on a small scale, proof-of-concept model inspired by financial applications and offer a good starting point for understanding the practical use of NISQ devices.

Spontaneous emission, as a fundamental radiative process and a versatile information carrier, plays a vital role in light-emitting devices, optical information modulation and encryption, super-resolution fluorescence imaging. Engineering the photonic environment surrounding photon emitters enables control over their emission properties. However, simultaneously achieving precise engineering of both excitation enhancement and quantum-yield modulation at the nanoscale remains elusive, highlighting substantial room for advancing the precise orchestrating of photoluminescence. Here, we introduce silicon Mie voids - air-defined cavities that invert the conventional solid-particle geometry - to achieve independent tuning of photoluminescence within a single subwavelength unit, while minimizing optical losses. Full-wave simulations and experiments on both gradient and uniform Mie-void arrays jointly validate this quantitative framework for spontaneous emission tuning, which disentangles excitation enhancement arising from local field confinement in air and quantum-yield enhancement resulting from strengthened emitter-resonator coupling, while confirming the accelerated radiative decay enabled by the modified optical LDOS. Leveraging this flexible mechanism, we realize a multimodal nanophotonic pattern with near-diffraction-limited pixels that encode the EPFL logo in the bright field and the SJTU logo in both dark field and photoluminescence maps. These results establish Mie voids as a powerful platform for high-density multimodal encrypted displays and open new avenues for advancing state-of-the-art nanophotonic devices.

A phase-space approach is used and benchmarked for the simulation of the continuous-time evolution of large registers of qubits. It is based on a statistical ensemble of independent mean-field trajectories, where mean field is introduced at the level of the qubits, substituting quantum fluctuations/correlations with classical ones. The approach only involves at worse a quadratic cost in the system size, allowing to simulate up to several thousands of qubits on a classical computer. It provides qualitatively accurate description of one-qubit observables evolutions, making it a useful reference in comparison to techniques limited to small qubit numbers. The predictive power is, however, less robust for multi-qubits observables. We benchmark the method on the $k$-local transverse-field Ising model, considering a large variety of systems ranging from local to all-to-all interactions, and from weak to strong coupling regimes, with up to 2000 qubits. To showcase the versatility of the approach, simulations on 2D and 3D Ising models are also made.

Yield-stress fluid flow through porous media is governed by a strong coupling between rheology and pore-scale geometry, leading to nonlinear, non-Darcy transport and pronounced channelisation near yielding. We develop a pore-network model for Herschel-Bulkley flow in two-dimensional disordered porous media, including optional wall slip. The network is closed by a physics-based pressure-flow relation for a converging-diverging throat, so that yielding and post-yield transport emerge directly from the pore-scale fluid mechanics without fitted resistance parameters. Benchmarking against direct numerical simulations shows that the model captures both the bulk pressure drop and the evolution of the flow topology from spatially distributed transport to strongly channelised flow. The framework also captures the leading effect of wall slip, which lowers the pressure gradient required for transport and reactivates pathways that remain blocked in the no-slip case. Using the model across different porous geometries, we show that near-yield pressure losses are governed by constriction statistics rather than by an obstacle-scale length. In particular, rescaling with the domain-averaged minimum throat width collapses the plastic-dominated response across porosities, identifying the dissipation-relevant geometric scale for viscoplastic transport in this regime.

In superconducting electronics, the ability to control the frequency of microwave wave packets is crucial for several applications, such as the operation of superconducting quantum processors and the readout of superconducting sensors. We introduce a new approach to microwave frequency conversion that harnesses a dynamic Doppler effect induced by a propagating front that separates regions of different phase velocities. Employing a high-kinetic-inductance superconducting transmission line in a travelling-wave geometry, we were able to implement frequency shifts of microwave wave packets at 500$\,$MHz and 4$\,$GHz of up to 3.7$\,$% while fully preserving their temporal shape. In contrast to conventional methods based on frequency-mixing, our Doppler-induced frequency-conversion method avoids spurious mixing products, is continuously tunable by a quasi-dc current amplitude, and allows to imprint arbitrary patterns on the instantaneous frequency profile of temporally long wave packets. By engineering transmission lines that allow for larger phase-velocity changes and/or by cascading multiple Doppler-induced frequency conversions, an unlimited amount of frequency shifting is in principle attainable. These features demonstrate the potential of our frequency-conversion technique as a promising tool for advanced control of microwave wave packets for different quantum applications.

We investigate the symmetry structure of the $3+1$ D staggered fermion Hamiltonian and its implications for anomalies. Since the spin and flavor degrees of freedom of Dirac fermions are distributed over the lattice, in addition to the standard on-site mass term, the staggered fermion system also admits one-, two-, and three-link bilinear terms within a unit cube as local, charge conserving mass terms with different spin and flavor dependence. We identify the spin flavor structures of all those bilinear mass terms and determine the symmetries preserved by each of them. Among them, one of the one-link mass terms preserves a larger residual symmetry associated with conserved charges that generate the Onsager algebra. Motivated by this structure, we consider a kink profile of the one-link mass and analyze the resulting domain-wall system. In the low-energy limit, the $3+1$ D bulk becomes gapped, while two-flavor massless Dirac fermions appear as localized modes on the $2+1$ D domain wall. We show that the bulk conserved charges act on the wall as generators of a flavor $\mathrm{SU}(2)$ symmetry, and that no symmetric mass gap is allowed for the boundary theory when this $\mathrm{SU}(2)$ symmetry and space reflection symmetry are both imposed. This realizes the parity anomaly of the boundary theory and shows that the boundary flavor symmetry and anomaly descend from the ultraviolet staggered-fermion Hamiltonian rather than emerging only in the infrared.

Can contagion be inferred from aggregated default data? We study this as a problem of identifiability, asking whether contagion generates components in default count distributions that remain distinct from those induced by macroeconomic fluctuations. We compare three dependence structures: cumulative contagion in the Lo-Davis model, threshold-type contagion in the Torri model, and common-factor dependence in the Vasicek model. Under an i.i.d. specification, the Vasicek model provides the best overall fit, especially in the tail, indicating that a smooth mixture structure captures annual default clustering more effectively than threshold-type contagion at the aggregate level. We then allow the default probability to vary across years through a hierarchical specification. Under this extension, most of the variation in annual default counts is explained by cross-year movements in default conditions rather than by within-year contagion. What remains, however, depends on the interaction mechanism. In the Torri model, threshold-type contagion does not leave a stable component that can be separated from macroeconomic heterogeneity after aggregation. In the Lo-Davis model, by contrast, a small but persistent component remains visible in both the variance decomposition and the tail behavior. These results clarify when contagion can still be inferred from coarse-grained data and when it is effectively absorbed into macroeconomic variation.

Quantum resources such as entanglement form the backbone of quantum technologies and their efficient generation is a central objective of modern quantum platforms. Independently, quantum batteries have emerged as nanoscale devices that utilize collective quantum effects to store energy with a charging advantage over classical strategies. Here, we show a direct connection between these two pursuits: protocols for fast generation of resourceful quantum states can simultaneously charge a quantum battery with a collective advantage, and conversely, a quantum battery protocol with a charging advantage rapidly produces resource-rich states. Using this connection, we propose an integrated hardware protocol on superconducting circuits in which each experimental run can interchangeably accomplish either quantum battery charging, or quantum sensing through generation of metrologically useful states. Our results establish that quantum resources and stored energy are distinct yet co-producable quantities within the same dynamics, opening the door to modular quantum architectures that dynamically switch between sensing and energy-storage functions, thereby producing additional functionalities without extra hardware cost.

We study the onset of weak ergodicity violations in closed quantum many-body systems and focus on cases in which they occur through a transition that is controlled by a model parameter. Our analysis is based on representing quantum systems in Fock space and utilizes graph-theoretical measures. As a main result, we show that the recently introduced graph-energy centrality captures known weak ergodicity-breaking transitions via characteristic changes in its distribution. While most numerical tools are limited to small system sizes, our measure can be calculated analytically for large systems of many hundreds of sites and in some cases, even in the thermodynamic limit. We conclude by demonstrating the applicability of our Fock-space based measure to a kinetically constrained quantum model, where we find evidence for a weak ergodicity-breaking transition accompanied by glassy dynamics.

We show that the third-order negativity provides a necessary and sufficient criterion for full separability of tripartite pure states, and extend this to mixed states beyond bipartite diagnostics such as negativity. As a minimal nontrivial example, a four-qubit pure state has three-qubit mixed reductions; its complete characterization requires six bipartite, eight tripartite, and four quadripartite measures, with the third-order negativity serving as a key separability criterion. We further generalize these separability criteria to multipartite qudit systems and discuss an application to conformal field theory.