The current-voltage characteristics of a new range of devices built around Weyl semimetals has been predicted using the Landauer formalism. The potential step and barrier have been reconsidered for three-dimensional Weyl semimetals, with analogies to the two-dimensional material graphene and to optics. With the use of our results we also show how a Veselago lens can be made from Weyl semimetals, e.g., from NbAs and NbP. Such a lens may have many practical applications and can be used as a probing tip in a scanning tunneling microscope (STM). The ballistic character of Weyl fermion transport inside the semimetal tip, combined with the ideal focusing of the Weyl fermions (by Veselago lens) on the surface of the tip may create a very narrow electron beam from the tip to the surface of the studied material. With a Weyl semimetal probing tip the resolution of the present STMs can be improved significantly, and one may image not only individual atoms but also individual electron orbitals or chemical bonding and therewith to resolve the long-term issue of chemical and hydrogen bond formation. We show that applying a pressure to the Weyl semimental, having no center of spatial inversion, one may model matter at extreme conditions, such as those arising in the vicinity of a black hole. As the materials ${\mathrm{Cd}}_3{\mathrm{As}}_2$ and ${\mathrm{Na}}_3\mathrm{Bi}$ show an asymmetry in their Dirac cones, a scaling factor was used to model this asymmetry. The scaling factor created additional regions of no propagation and condensed the appearance of resonances. We argue that under an external pressure there may arise a topological phase transition in Weyl semimetals, where the electron transport changes character and becomes anisotropic. There a hyperbolic Dirac phase occurs where there is a strong light absorption and photocurrent generation.

We report on the observation of magnon thermal conductivity ${\kappa }_m\sim 70$ W/mK near 5 K in the helimagnetic insulator ${\mathrm{Cu}}_2{\mathrm{OSeO}}_3$, exceeding that measured in any other ferromagnet by almost two orders of magnitude. Ballistic, boundary-limited transport for both magnons and phonons is established below 1 K, and Poiseuille flow of magnons is proposed to explain a magnon mean-free path substantially exceeding the specimen width for the least defective specimens in the range $2\mathrm{K}<T<10$ K. These observations establish ${\mathrm{Cu}}_2{\mathrm{OSeO}}_3$ as a model system for studying long-wavelength magnon dynamics.

We theoretically study the single-particle Green function of a three-dimensional disordered Weyl semimetal using a combination of techniques. These include analytic $T$-matrix and renormalization group methods with complementary regimes of validity and an exact numerical approach based on the kernel polynomial technique. We show that at any nonzero disorder, Weyl excitations are not ballistic: They instead have a nonzero linewidth that for weak short-range disorder arises from nonperturbative resonant impurity scattering. Perturbative approaches find a quantum critical point between a semimetal and a metal at a finite disorder strength, but this transition is avoided due to nonperturbative effects. At moderate disorder strength and intermediate energies the avoided quantum critical point renormalizes the scaling of single-particle properties. In this regime we compute numerically the anomalous dimension of the fermion field and find $\eta =0.13\pm 0.04$, which agrees well with a renormalization group analysis ($\eta =0.125$). Our predictions can be directly tested by ARPES and STM measurements in samples dominated by neutral impurities.

Fluctuations are strong in mesoscopic systems and have to be taken into account for the description of transport. We show that they can even be used as a resource for the operation of a system as a device. We use the physics of single-electron tunneling to propose a bipartite device working as a thermal transistor. Charge and heat currents in a two-terminal conductor can be gated by thermal fluctuations from a third terminal to which it is capacitively coupled. The gate system can act as a switch that injects neither charge nor energy into the conductor, hence achieving huge amplification factors. Nonthermal properties of the tunneling electrons can be exploited to operate the device with no energy consumption.

The low-temperature magnetic phases in the layered honeycomb lattice material $\alpha -{\mathrm{RuCl}}_3$ have been studied as a function of in-plane magnetic field. In zero field this material orders magnetically below 7 K with a so-called zigzag order within the honeycomb planes. Neutron diffraction data show that a relatively small applied field of 2 T is sufficient to suppress the population of the magnetic domain in which the zigzag chains run along the field direction. We found that the intensity of the magnetic peaks due to zigzag order is continuously suppressed with increasing field until their disappearance at ${\mu }_o{H}_c=8\mathrm{T}$. At still higher fields (above 8 T) the zigzag order is destroyed, while bulk magnetization and heat capacity measurements suggest that the material enters a state with gapped magnetic excitations. We discuss the magnetic phase diagram obtained in our study in the context of a quantum phase transition.

We report a neutron scattering study of the magnetic excitation spectrum in each of the three temperature and pressure driven phases of ${\mathrm{URu}}_2{\mathrm{Si}}_2$. We find qualitatively similar excitations throughout the $\left(H0L\right)$ scattering plane in the hidden-order and large-moment phases, with no changes in the $\hslash \omega$ widths of the excitations at the $\mathrm{\Sigma }=(1.407,0,0)$ and $Z=(1,0,0)$ points, within our experimental resolution. There is, however, an increase in the gap at the $\mathrm{\Sigma }$ point from 4.2(2) meV to 5.5(3) meV, consistent with other indicators of enhanced antiferromagnetism under pressure.

We use a combination of neutron and x-ray total scattering measurements together with pair distribution function (PDF) analysis to characterize the variation in local structure across the orbital order/disorder transition in ${\mathrm{LaMnO}}_3$. Our experimental data are inconsistent with a conventional order/disorder description of the transition, and reflect instead the existence of a discontinuous change in local structure between ordered and disordered states. Within the orbital ordered regime, the neutron and x-ray PDFs are best described by a local structure model with the same local orbital arrangements as those observed in the average (long-range) crystal structure. We show that a variety of meaningfully different local orbital arrangement models can give fits of comparable quality to the experimental PDFs collected within the disordered regime; nevertheless, our data show a subtle but consistent preference for the anisotropic Potts model proposed previously [M. R. Ahmed and G. A. Gehring, Phys. Rev. B 79, 174106 (2009)]. The key implications of this model are electronic and magnetic isotropy together with the loss of local inversion symmetry at the Mn site. We conclude with a critical assessment of the interpretation of PDF measurements when characterizing local symmetry breaking in functional materials.

We study Floquet topological phases in periodically driven systems that are protected by “time glide symmetry”, a combination of reflection and half time period translation. Time glide symmetry is an analog of glide symmetry with partial time translation replacing the partial space translation and, hence, is an intrinsically dynamical symmetry which may be engineered in periodically driven systems by exploiting the controllability of driving. We present lattice models of time glide symmetric Floquet topological insulators in two and three dimensions. The topological numbers characterizing those Floquet topological phases are derived from the half-period time-evolution operator along with time glide operator. Moreover, we classify Floquet topological phases protected by time glide symmetry in general dimensions using a Clifford algebra approach. The obtained classification table is similar to that for topological crystalline insulators protected by static reflection symmetry, but shows nontrivial entries in different combination of symmetries, which clarifies that time glide symmetric Floquet topological phases are a distinct set of topological phases from topological crystalline insulators. We also classify Floquet topological phases with “time screw symmetry”, defined as a twofold spatial rotation accompanied by half-period time translation.

We propose the definitions of many-body topological invariants to detect symmetry-protected topological phases protected by point group symmetry, using partial point group transformations on a given short-range entangled quantum ground state. Here, partial point group transformations $g_D$ are defined by point group transformations restricted to a spatial subregion $D$, which is closed under the point group transformations and sufficiently larger than the bulk correlation length $\xi$. By analytical and numerical calculations, we find that the ground state (GS) expectation value of the partial point group transformations behaves generically as $\langle \mathrm{GS}|g_D|\mathrm{GS}\rangle \sim \exp [i\theta +\gamma -\alpha \frac{\mathrm{Area}\left(\partial D\right)}{{\xi }^{d-1}}]$. Here, $\mathrm{Area}\left(\partial D\right)$ is the area of the boundary of the subregion $D$, and $\alpha$ is a dimensionless constant. The complex phase of the expectation value $\theta$ is quantized and serves as the topological invariant, and $\gamma$ is a scale-independent topological contribution to the amplitude. The examples we consider include the ${\mathbb{Z}}_8$ and ${\mathbb{Z}}_{16}$ invariants of topological superconductors protected by inversion symmetry in $(1+1)$ and $(3+1)$ dimensions, respectively, and the lens space topological invariants in $(2+1)$-dimensional fermionic topological phases. Connections to topological quantum field theories and cobordism classification of symmetry-protected topological phases are discussed.

We report an experimental observation of the classical version of valley polarized states in a two-dimensional hexagonal sonic crystal. The acoustic valley states, which carry specific linear momenta and orbital angular momenta, were selectively excited by external Gaussian beams and conveniently confirmed by the pressure distribution outside the crystal, according to the criterion of momentum conservation. The vortex nature of such intriguing bulk crystal states was directly characterized by scanning the phase profile inside the crystal. In addition, we observed a peculiar beam-splitting phenomenon, in which the separated beams are constructed by different valleys and locked to the opposite vortex chirality. The exceptional sound transport, encoded with valley-chirality locked information, may serve as the basis of designing conceptually interesting acoustic devices with unconventional functions.

We classify and construct models for two-dimensional (2D) interacting fermionic symmetry-protected topological (FSPT) phases with general finite Abelian unitary symmetry $G_f$. To obtain the classification, we couple the FSPT system to a dynamical discrete gauge field with gauge group $G_f$ and study braiding statistics in the resulting gauge theory. Under reasonable assumptions, the braiding statistics data allows us to infer a potentially complete classification of 2D FSPT phases with Abelian symmetry. The FSPT models that we construct are simple stacks of the following two kinds of existing models: (i) free-fermion models and (ii) models obtained through embedding of bosonic symmetry-protected topological (BSPT) phases. Interestingly, using these two kinds of models, we are able to realize almost all FSPT phases in our classification, except for one class. We argue that this exceptional class of FSPT phases can never be realized through models (i) and (ii), and therefore can be thought of as intrinsically interacting and intrinsically fermionic. The simplest example of this class is associated with ${\mathbb{Z}}_4^f\times {\mathbb{Z}}_4\times {\mathbb{Z}}_4$ symmetry. In addition, we show that all 2D FSPT phases with a finite Abelian symmetry of the form ${\mathbb{Z}}_2^f\times G$ can be realized through the above models (i), (ii), or a simple stack of them. Finally, we study the stability of BSPT phases when they are embedded into fermionic systems.

The scattering response of high refractive index particles enables a rich variety of electromagnetic phenomena that are inaccessible with plasmonic particles. Here we investigate the response of dielectric dimer structures illuminated by radially and azimuthally polarized cylindrical vector beams. Using finite-difference time-domain simulations, we demonstrate significant modification of the scattering spectra of dimer antennas and reveal how the illumination condition gives rise to these spectra through manipulation of electric and magnetic mode hybridization. By appropriately combining dimer geometries and beam symmetries, we demonstrate coupling to high-$Q$ dark quadrupole modes with exceptional magnetic intensity enhancements. This work exploits structured light as a powerful framework for manipulating multipolar phenomena in multiparticle dielectric resonators.

The mechanism underlying femtosecond laser-pulse-induced ultrafast magnetization dynamics remains elusive, despite two decades of intense research on this phenomenon. Most experiments focused so far on characterizing magnetization and charge carrier dynamics, while the first direct measurements of structural dynamics during ultrafast demagnetization were reported only very recently. We here present our investigation of the infrared laser-pulse-induced ultrafast demagnetization process in a thin Ni film, which characterizes simultaneously magnetization and structural dynamics. This is achieved by employing femtosecond time-resolved x-ray resonant magnetic reflectivity (tr-XRMR) as the probe technique. The experimental results reveal unambiguously that the subpicosecond magnetization quenching is accompanied by strong changes in nonmagnetic x-ray reflectivity. These changes vary with reflection angle, and changes up to $30\%$ have been observed. By modeling the x-ray reflectivity of the investigated thin film, we can reproduce these changes by a variation of the apparent Ni layer thickness of up to $1\%$. Extending these simulations to larger incidence angles, we show that tr-XRMR can be employed to discriminate experimentally between currently discussed models describing the ultrafast demagnetization phenomenon.

Following the recent realization that periodically driven quantum matter can support new types of spatiotemporal order, now known as discrete time crystals (DTCs), we consider the stability of this phenomenon. Motivated by its conceptual importance as well as its experimental relevance, we consider the effect of coupling to an external environment. We use this to argue, both analytically and numerically, that the DTC in disordered one-dimensional systems is destroyed at long times by any such natural coupling. This holds true even in the case where the coupling is such that the system is prevented from heating up by an external thermal bath.

Interfaces play an essential role in phonon-mediated heat conduction in solids, impacting applications ranging from thermoelectric waste heat recovery to heat dissipation in electronics. From the microscopic perspective, interfacial phonon transport is described by transmission coefficients that link vibrational modes in the materials composing the interface. However, direct experimental determination of these coefficients is challenging because most experiments provide a mode-averaged interface conductance that obscures the microscopic detail. Here, we report a metrology to extract thermal phonon transmission coefficients at solid interfaces using ab initio phonon transport modeling and a thermal characterization technique, time-domain thermoreflectance. In combination with transmission electron microscopy characterization of the interface, our approach allows us to link the atomic structure of an interface to the spectral content of the heat crossing it. Our work provides a useful perspective on the microscopic processes governing interfacial heat conduction.

A quantum dot coupled to a superconducting contact provides a tunable artificial analog of a magnetic atom in a superconductor, a paradigmatic quantum impurity problem. We realize such a system with an InAs semiconductor nanowire contacted by an Al-based superconducting electrode. We use an additional normal-type contact as a weakly coupled tunnel probe to perform tunneling spectroscopy measurements of the elementary subgap excitations, known as Andreev bound states or Yu-Shiba-Rusinov states. We demonstrate that the energy of these states $\zeta$ scales with the ratio between the Kondo temperature $T_K$ and the superconducting gap $\mathrm{\Delta }$. $\zeta$ vanishes for $T_K/\mathrm{\Delta }\approx 0.6$, denoting a quantum phase transition between the spin singlet and doublet ground states. By further leveraging the gate control over the quantum dot parameters, we determine the singlet-doublet phase boundary in the stability diagram of the system. Our experimental results show remarkable quantitative agreement with numerical renormalization group calculations.

We study the role of Hamiltonian complexity in the performance of quantum annealers. We consider two general classes of annealing Hamiltonians: stoquastic ones, which can be simulated efficiently using the quantum Monte Carlo algorithm, and nonstoquastic ones, which cannot be treated efficiently. We implement the latter by adding antiferromagnetically coupled two-spin driver terms to the traditionally studied transverse-field Ising model, and compare their performance to that of similar stoquastic Hamiltonians with ferromagnetically coupled additional terms. We focus on a model of long-range Ising spin glass as our problem Hamiltonian and carry out the comparison between the annealers by numerically calculating their success probabilities in solving random instances of the problem Hamiltonian in systems of up to 17 spins. We find that, for a small percentage of mostly harder instances, nonstoquastic Hamiltonians greatly outperform their stoquastic counterparts and their superiority persists as the system size grows. We conjecture that the observed improved performance is closely related to the frustrated nature of nonstoquastic Hamiltonians.

${\mathrm{BaSnO}}_3$ (BSO) is a promising transparent conducting oxide with reported room-temperature (RT) Hall mobility exceeding $320{\mathrm{cm}}^2{\mathrm{V}}^{-1}{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}$. Among perovskite oxides, it has the highest RT mobility, about 30 times higher than that of the prototypical ${\mathrm{SrTiO}}_3$. Using first-principles calculations based on hybrid density functional theory, we elucidate the physical mechanisms that govern the mobility by studying the details of LO-phonon and ionized impurity scattering. A careful numerical analysis to obtain converged results within the relaxation-time approximation of Boltzmann transport theory is presented. The $\mathbf{k}$ dependence of the relaxation time is fully taken into account. We find that the high RT mobility in BSO originates not only from a small effective mass, but also from a significant reduction in the phonon scattering rate compared to other perovskite oxides; the origins of this reduction are identified. Ionized impurity scattering influences the total mobility even at RT for dopant densities larger than $5\times {10}^{18}{\mathrm{cm}}^{-3}$, and becomes comparable to LO-phonon scattering for $1\times {10}^{20}{\mathrm{cm}}^{-3}$ doping, reducing the drift mobility from its intrinsic LO-phonon-limited value of $\sim 594{\mathrm{cm}}^2{\mathrm{V}}^{-1}{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}$ to less than $310{\mathrm{cm}}^2{\mathrm{V}}^{-1}{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}$. We suggest pathways to avoid impurity scattering via modulation doping or polar discontinuity doping. We also explicitly calculate the Hall factor and Hall mobility, allowing a direct comparison to experimental reports for bulk and thin films and providing insights into the nature of the dominant mechanisms that limit mobility in state-of-the art samples.

Dynamical systems may host a number of remarkable symmetry-protected phases that are qualitatively different from their static analogs. In this work, we consider the phase space of symmetry-respecting unitary evolutions in detail and identify several distinct classes of evolution that host dynamical order. Using ideas from group cohomology, we construct a set of interacting Floquet drives that generate dynamical symmetry-protected topological order for each nontrivial cohomology class in every dimension, illustrating our construction with explicit two-dimensional examples. We also identify a set of symmetry-protected Floquet drives that lie outside of the group cohomology construction, and a further class of symmetry-respecting topological drives which host chiral edge modes. We use these special drives to define a notion of phase (stable to a class of local perturbations in the bulk) and the concepts of relative and absolute topological order, which can be applied to many different classes of unitary evolutions. These include fully many-body localized unitary evolutions and time crystals.

A free-standing GaAs membrane is investigated by pump-probe reflectivity measurements with femtosecond laser pulses of 400-nm wavelength. It is found that the detected wide spectrum of laser-generated coherent strain waves in the membrane does not contain a specific hypersonic frequency. Theoretical analysis reveals that this effect is related to zero sensitivity of the acousto-optic detection at a particular frequency defined by the wavelength of the probe laser pulse on the mechanical free surface of the GaAs membrane. We predict that a similar behavior is expected in Si and Au membranes and films, indicating that the presence of zeros in the spectral transformation function of acousto-optic conversion is a rather general phenomenon in picosecond ultrasonics that has so far been neglected.