The decahedral cage is the theoretically established ground state of the hydrogen saturated ${\mathrm{Si}}_{20}{\mathrm{H}}_{20}$ fullerene. However it has never been observed experimentally. Based on an extensive exploration of the potential energy surface and by constructing theoretical reaction pathways from possible initial structures to the ground state of ${\mathrm{Si}}_{20}{\mathrm{H}}_{20}$, we show that there is no driving force towards the global minimum. There exists a huge number of intermediate structures that consist mainly of collapsed cages. Visiting all these intermediate states to find the ground state is not possible on experimentally relevant time scales. In this way the ground state becomes kinetically inaccessible. We contrast the features of the potential energy landscape of ${\mathrm{Si}}_{20}{\mathrm{H}}_{20}$ with that of ${\mathrm{C}}_{60}$ which spontaneously forms by condensation.

We study weak ergodicity breaking in a one-dimensional, nonintegrable spin-1 XY model. We construct for it an exact, highly excited eigenstate, which despite its large energy density, can be represented analytically by a finite bond-dimension matrix product state (MPS) with area-law entanglement. Upon a quench to a finite Zeeman field, the state undergoes periodic dynamics with perfect many-body revivals, in stark contrast to other generic initial states which instead rapidly thermalize. This dynamics can be completely understood in terms of the evolution of entangled virtual spin-1/2 degrees of freedom, which in turn underpin the presence of an extensive tower of strong-eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH)-violating many-body eigenstates. The resulting quantum many-body scars are therefore of novel origin. Our results provide important analytical insights into the nature and entanglement structure of quantum many-body scars.

Non-Hermiticity alters band topology in the presence of loss and/or gain in topological systems, which not only introduces new definitions in topological classifications, topological invariants, and the bulk-boundary correspondence, but also gives rise to unprecedented applications such as topological insulator lasers. Most existing non-Hermitian topological systems derive their topological phases from Hermitian components, rather than being driven by non-Hermiticity itself. Here we report on the experimental observation of topological edge states induced solely by non-Hermiticity in an acoustic crystal. The acoustic crystal consists of a periodic one-dimensional chain of coupled acoustic resonators with tunable loss. In the Hermitian limit, or when the loss is negligible, the crystal exhibits no band gap and hosts no topological edge states. By introducing loss, we show that a band gap is induced, which can be either topological or trivial, depending on the loss configuration. In the topological case, topological edge modes are found inside the band gap. These results demonstrate that non-Hermiticity is able to drive a topological phase transition from a trivial system to a topological one, offering the possibilities for actively steerable topological wave manipulations in applications ranging from acoustics to photonics.

In crystals with time-reversal symmetry but without inversion symmetry, the phonon angular momentum can be generated by the temperature gradient, and it is called the phonon thermal Edelstein effect. On the other hand, when both symmetries are broken and their product is conserved, the phonon angular momentum for any phonon modes at any wave vectors vanishes and the phonon thermal Edelstein effect does not occur. In this paper, we propose another mechanism of generation of the phonon angular momentum. We show that in such crystals the electric field generates the phonon angular momentum via the lattice distortion due to the electric field. This effect is in the same symmetry class with the magnetoelectric effect, and we call this effect the phonon rotoelectric effect. We discuss the temperature dependence of the phonon angular momentum generated by the temperature gradient and by the electric field in the high- and low-temperature limits.

We study a one-dimensional system of interacting spinless fermions subject to a localized loss, where the interplay of gapless quantum fluctuations and particle interactions leads to an incarnation of the quantum Zeno effect of genuine many-body nature. This model constitutes a nonequilibrium counterpart of the paradigmatic Kane-Fisher potential barrier problem, and it exhibits strong interaction effects due to the gapless nature of the system. As a central result, we show that the loss probability is strongly renormalized near the Fermi momentum as a realization of the quantum Zeno effect, resulting in a suppression of the emission of particles at the Fermi level. This is reflected in the structure of the particle momentum distribution, exhibiting a peak close to the Fermi momentum. We substantiate these findings by three complementary approaches: a real-space renormalization group of a general microscopic continuum model, a dynamical Hartree-Fock numerical analysis of a microscopic model on a lattice, and a renormalization group analysis based on an effective Luttinger liquid description incorporating mode-coupling effects.

We demonstrate that modulations of the stiffness properties of an elastic plate along a spatial dimension induce edge states spanning nontrivial gaps characterized by integer-valued Chern numbers. We also show that topological pumping is induced by smooth variations of the phase of the modulation profile along one spatial dimension, which results in adiabatic edge-to-edge transitions of the edge states. The concept is first illustrated numerically for sinusoidal stiffness modulations and then experimentally demonstrated in a plate with square-wave thickness profile. The presented numerical and experimental results show how continuous modulations of properties may be exploited in the quest for topological phases of matter. This opens new possibilities for topology-based waveguiding through slow modulations along a second dimension, spatial or temporal.

Femtosecond laser excitation of solid-state systems creates out-of-equilibrium hot electrons that cool down by transferring their energy to other degrees of freedom and ultimately to lattice vibrations of the solid. By combining ab initio calculations with ultrafast diffuse electron scattering, we gain a detailed understanding of the complex nonequilibrium energy transfer between electrons and phonons in laser-excited Ni metal. Our experimental results show that the wave-vector-resolved population dynamics of phonon modes is distinctly different throughout the Brillouin zone and are in remarkable agreement with our theoretical results. We find that zone-boundary phonon modes become occupied first. As soon as the energy in these modes becomes larger than the average electron energy, a backflow of energy from lattice to electronic degrees of freedom occurs. Subsequent excitation of lower-energy phonon modes drives the thermalization of the whole system on the picosecond time scale. We determine the evolving nonequilibrium phonon occupations, which we find to deviate markedly from thermal occupations.

We consider the class of dual-unitary quantum circuits in $1+1$ dimensions and introduce a notion of “solvable” matrix product states (MPSs), defined by a specific condition which allows us to tackle their time evolution analytically. We provide a classification of the latter, showing that they include certain MPSs of arbitrary bond dimension, and study analytically different aspects of their dynamics. For these initial states, we show that while any subsystem of size $\ell$ reaches infinite temperature after a time $t\propto \ell$, irrespective of the presence of conserved quantities, the light cone of two-point correlation functions displays qualitatively different features depending on the ergodicity of the quantum circuit, defined by the behavior of infinite-temperature dynamical correlation functions. Furthermore, we study the entanglement spreading from such solvable initial states, providing a closed formula for the time evolution of the entanglement entropy of a connected block. This generalizes recent results obtained in the context of the self-dual kicked Ising model. By comparison, we also consider a family of nonsolvable initial mixed states depending on one real parameter $\beta$, which, as $\beta$ is varied from zero to infinity, interpolate between the infinite-temperature density matrix and arbitrary initial pure product states. We study analytically their dynamics for small values of $\beta$, and highlight the differences from the case of solvable MPSs.

We report on thermal and optically driven transitions between the commensurate (C) and incommensurate (IC) charge-density wave (CDW) phases of $1T-\mathrm{TaS}{\mathrm{e}}_2$. Optical excitation results in suppression of the C-CDW on a subpicosecond timescale. The optically driven C to IC transition involves a short-lived (∼1 ps) unreconstructed phase. Nucleation of an IC phase stacking order is observed already at ∼4 ps following photoexcitation. The short timescales involved in establishing the stacking order implies that the nucleation of the IC phase is influenced by the local geometry of the adjacent layers such that the stacking direction of the C phase determines the stacking direction of the IC phase. From this follows that the nucleation of the IC-CDW is inherently three dimensional (3D). We observe the activation of a coherent shear mode in the optically driven transitions to the transiently stabilized unreconstructed phase. The activation mechanism starts with a rapid lifting of the periodic lattice distortions (PLD) of the Ta sublattice which results in formation of local transient velocity disparities in the Se sublattice. The local differences in Se-phonon amplitudes result in noncompensated shear forces between the layers. This is an example of a multistep coherent launching mechanism. The energy of the optically excited electronic state dissipates energy into modes of the PLD through strong electron-phonon coupling. The rapid suppression of the PLD launches the third step, a coherent vibrational shear mode with low dissipation. The results highlight the importance in considering the 3D nature of the CDWs in the analysis of both structure and dynamics in transition-metal dichalcogenides.

We present a theory of the entanglement transition tuned by measurement strength in qudit chains evolved by random unitary circuits and subject to either weak or random projective measurements. The transition can be understood as a nonanalytic change in the amount of information extracted by the measurements about the initial state of the system, quantified by the Fisher information. To compute the von Neumann entanglement entropy $S$ and the Fisher information $\mathcal{F}$, we apply a replica method based on a sequence of quantities ${\tilde{S}}^{\left(n\right)}$ and ${\mathcal{F}}^{\left(n\right)}$ that depend on the $n\mathrm{th}$ moments of density matrices and reduce to $S$ and $\mathcal{F}$ in the limit $n\to 1$. These quantities with $n\ge 2$ are mapped to free energies of a classical spin model with $n!$ internal states in two dimensions with specific boundary conditions. In particular, ${\tilde{S}}^{\left(n\right)}$ is the excess free energy of a domain wall terminating on the top boundary, and ${\mathcal{F}}^{\left(n\right)}$ is related to the magnetization on the bottom boundary. Phase transitions occur as the spin models undergo ordering transitions in the bulk. Taking the limit of large local Hilbert space dimension $q$ followed by the replica limit $n\to 1$, we obtain the critical measurement probability $p_c=1/2$ and identify the transition as a bond percolation in the 2D square lattice in this limit. Finally, we show there is no phase transition if the measurements are allowed in an arbitrary nonlocal basis, thereby highlighting the relation between the phase transition and information scrambling. We establish an explicit connection between the entanglement phase transition and the purification dynamics of a mixed state evolution and discuss implications of our results to experimental observations of the transition and simulability of quantum dynamics.

We investigate the critical behavior of the entanglement transition induced by projective measurements in (Haar) random unitary quantum circuits. Using a replica approach, we map the calculation of the entanglement entropies in such circuits onto a two-dimensional statistical-mechanics model. In this language, the area- to volume-law entanglement transition can be interpreted as an ordering transition in the statistical-mechanics model. We derive the general scaling properties of the entanglement entropies and mutual information near the transition using conformal invariance. We analyze in detail the limit of infinite on-site Hilbert space dimension in which the statistical-mechanics model maps onto percolation. In particular, we compute the exact value of the universal coefficient of the logarithm of subsystem size in the $n\mathrm{th}$ Rényi entropies for $n\ge 1$ in this limit using relatively recent results for the conformal field theory describing the critical theory of two-dimensional (2D) percolation, and we discuss how to access the generic transition at finite on-site Hilbert space dimension from this limit, which is in a universality class different from 2D percolation. We also comment on the relation to the entanglement transition in random tensor networks, studied previously in Vasseur et al. [Phys. Rev. B 100, 134203 (2019)].

We construct a set of exact, highly excited eigenstates for a nonintegrable spin-1/2 model in one dimension that is relevant to experiments on Rydberg atoms in the antiblockade regime. These states provide a new solvable example of quantum many-body scars: their sub-volume-law entanglement and equal energy spacing allow for infinitely long-lived coherent oscillations of local observables following a suitable quantum quench. While previous works on scars have interpreted such oscillations in terms of the precession of an emergent macroscopic SU(2) spin, the present model evades this description due to a set of emergent kinetic constraints in the scarred eigenstates that are absent in the underlying Hamiltonian. We also analyze the set of initial states that give rise to periodic revivals, which persist as approximate revivals on a finite timescale when the underlying model is perturbed. Remarkably, a subset of these initial states coincides with the family of area-law entangled Rokhsar-Kivelson states shown by Lesanovsky to be exact ground states for a class of models relevant to experiments on Rydberg-blockaded atomic lattices.

We demonstrate that higher-order acoustic phonon oscillations of self-assembled Au nanoparticles can be excited using higher frequency bandwidth picosecond acoustic pulses generated by superdiffusive hot electrons. These modes require directional excitations such as a longitudinal strain pulse, being inaccessible in a direct optical excitation scheme. They are detected using the periodic shift of the surface plasmon resonance and are coherently controlled by a sequence of delayed acoustic pulses. Acoustic mode calculations show that the high-frequency mode corresponds to two higher-order spheroidal modes.

Building on recent results for adiabatic gauge potentials, we propose a variational approach for computing the generator of Schrieffer-Wolff transformations. These transformations consist of block diagonalizing a Hamiltonian through a unitary rotation, which leads to effective dynamics in a computationally tractable reduced Hilbert space. The generators of these rotations are computed variationally and thus go beyond standard perturbative methods, with error controlled by the locality of the variational ansatz. The method is demonstrated on two models. First, in the attractive Fermi-Hubbard model with onsite disorder, we find indications of a lack of observable many-body localization in the thermodynamic limit due to the inevitable mixture of different spinon sectors. Second, in the low-energy sector of the XY spin model with a broken $\text{U}\left(1\right)$ symmetry, we analyze ground-state response functions by combining the variational Schrieffer-Wolf transformation with the truncated spectrum approach.

Studies of topological semimetals have revealed spectacular transport phenomena spanning extreme magnetoresistance effects and ultrahigh mobilities. As phonon dynamics and electron-phonon scattering play a critical role in the electrical and thermal transport, we pursue a fundamental understanding of these effects in type-I Weyl semimetals NbAs and TaAs. In the temperature-dependent Raman spectra of NbAs we reveal a previously unreported Fano line shape, a signature stemming from the electron-phonon interaction. Additionally, the temperature dependence of the $A_1$ phonon linewidths in both NbAs and TaAs strongly deviate from the standard model of anharmonic decay. To capture the mechanisms responsible for the observed Fano asymmetry and the atypical phonon linewidth, we present first-principles calculations of the phonon self-energy correction due to the electron-phonon interaction. Through this study of the phonon dynamics and electron-phonon interaction in these Weyl semimetals, we consider specific microscopic pathways which could contribute to the nature of their macroscopic transport.

The excitations in honeycomb $\alpha -{\mathrm{Li}}_2{\mathrm{IrO}}_3$ have been investigated with high-resolution resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS) at the O $K$ edge. The low-energy response is dominated by a fully resolved ladder of excitations, which we interpret as being due to multiphonon processes in the presence of strong electron-phonon coupling (EPC). At higher energies, the orbital excitations are shown to be dressed by phonons. The high quality of the data permits a quantitative test of the analytical model for the RIXS cross section, which has been proposed to describe EPC in transition-metal oxides (TMOs). We find that the magnitude of the EPC is comparable to that found for a range of $3d$ TMOs. This indicates that EPC may be of equal importance in determining the phenomenology displayed by corresponding $5d$-based systems.

We study the eigenstate properties of a nonintegrable spin chain that was recently realized experimentally in a Rydberg-atom quantum simulator. In the experiment, long-lived coherent many-body oscillations were observed only when the system was initialized in a particular product state. This pronounced coherence has been attributed to the presence of special “scarred” eigenstates with nearly equally spaced energies and putative nonergodic properties despite their finite energy density. In this paper we uncover a surprising connection between these scarred eigenstates and low-lying quasiparticle excitations of the spin chain. In particular, we show that these eigenstates can be accurately captured by a set of variational states containing a macroscopic number of magnons with momentum $\pi$. This leads to an interpretation of the scarred eigenstates as finite-energy-density condensates of weakly interacting $\pi$ magnons. One natural consequence of this interpretation is that the scarred eigenstates possess long-range connected correlations in both space and time. We verify numerically the presence of this spatiotemporal long-range order and explain how it is consistent with established no-go theorems precluding its existence in ground states and at thermal equilibrium.

Ab initio calculations have been successfully used for evaluating lattice dynamical properties of solids within the (quasi)harmonic approximation (i.e., assuming noninteracting phonons with infinite lifetimes), but it remains difficult to treat anharmonicity in all but the simplest compounds. We detail a systematic information-theory-based approach to deriving ab initio anharmonic force constants: Compressive sensing lattice dynamics (CSLD). The non-negligible terms that are necessary to reproduce the first-principles calculated interatomic forces are automatically selected by minimizing the ${\ell }_1$ norm (sum of absolute values) of the scaled force constants. By using efficient sampling of the configuration space using a modest number of atomic configurations with quasirandom displacements, CSLD is well suited for deriving accurate anharmonic potentials for complex multicomponent compounds with large unit cells. We demonstrate the power and generality of CSLD by calculating the phonon lifetimes and thermal transport properties of type-I Si clathrates.

The element specificity of soft x-ray spectroscopy makes it an ideal tool for analyzing the microscopic origin of ultrafast dynamics induced by localized optical excitation in metal-insulator heterostructures. Using ${[\mathrm{Fe}/\mathrm{MgO}]}_n$ as a model system, we perform ultraviolet pump/soft x-ray probe experiments, which are sensitive to all constituents of these heterostructures, to probe both electronic and lattice excitations. Complementary ultrafast electron diffraction experiments independently analyze the lattice dynamics of the Fe constituent, and together with ab initio calculations yield comprehensive insight into the microscopic processes leading to local relaxation within a single constituent or nonlocal relaxation between two constituents. Besides electronic excitations in Fe, which are monitored at the Fe ${\mathrm{L}}_3$ absorption edge and relax within 1 ps by electron-phonon coupling, soft x-ray analysis identifies a change at the oxygen K absorption edge of the MgO layers which occurs within 0.5 ps. This ultrafast energy transfer across the Fe-MgO interface is mediated by high-frequency, interface vibrational modes, which are excited by hot electrons in Fe and couple to vibrations in MgO in a mode-selective, nonthermal manner. A second, slower timescale is identified at the oxygen K pre-edge and the Fe ${\mathrm{L}}_3$ edge. The slower process represents energy transfer by acoustic phonons and contributes to thermalization of the entire heterostructure. We thus find that the interfacial energy transfer is associated with nonequilibrium behavior in the phonon system. Because our experiments lack signatures of charge transfer across the interface, we conclude that phonon-mediated processes dominate the competition of electronic and lattice excitations in these nonlocal, nonequilibrium dynamics.

We show that the spatially homogeneous and isotropic evolution of a macroscopic Coulomb system of identical particles obeys equations that have the structure of the cosmological equations of the general theory of relativity. There is a Hubble law, and the background charge (if present) mimics the effect of a negative cosmological constant. Specifically, Coulomb explosions mimic the nonsingular open cosmologies in negatively curved spaces, while breathing modes in conductors model oscillatory universes including the anti–de Sitter space.