Doping a Mott-insulating ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$ spin liquid can lead to a fractionalized Fermi liquid (FL*). Such a phase has several favorable features that make it a candidate for the pseudogap metal for the underdoped cuprates. We focus on a particular, simple ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$-FL* state which can undergo a confinement transition to a spatially uniform superconductor which is smoothly connected to the “plain vanilla” BCS superconductor with $d$-wave pairing. Such a transition occurs by the condensation of bosonic particles carrying $+e$ charge but no spin (“chargons”). We show that modifying the dispersion of the bosonic chargons can lead to confinement transitions with charge density waves and pair density waves at the same wave vector $\mathbf{K}$, coexisting with $d$-wave superconductivity. We also compute the evolution of the Hall number in the normal state during the transition from the plain vanilla FL* state to a Fermi liquid, and argue, following Coleman, Marston, and Schofield [Phys. Rev. B 72, 245111 (2005)], that it exhibits a discontinuous jump near optimal doping. We note the distinction between these results and those obtained from models of the pseudogap with fermionic chargons.

Quantum squeezing and entanglement of spins can be used to improve the sensitivity in quantum metrology. Here we propose a scheme to create collective coupling of an ensemble of spins to a mechanical vibrational mode actuated by an external magnetic field. We find an evolution time where the mechanical motion decouples from the spins, and the accumulated geometric phase yields a squeezing of $5.9\text{dB}$ for 20 spins. We also show the creation of a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger spin state for 20 spins with a fidelity of $\sim 0.62$ at cryogenic temperature. The numerical simulations show that the geometric-phase-based scheme is mostly immune to thermal mechanical noise.

It is generally believed that free-standing graphene does not demonstrate any ferroic properties. In the present work we revise this statement and show that a single graphene sheet with a pair of magnetic adatoms can be driven into ferroelectric (FE) and multiferroic (MF) phases by tuning the Dirac cones slope. The transition into the FE phase occurs gradually, but an anomalous MF phase appears abruptly by means of a quantum phase transition. Our findings suggest that such features should exist in graphene recently investigated by scanning tunneling microscopy [H. González-Herrero et al., Science 352, 437 (2016)].

The electronic properties of monolayer graphene grown epitaxially on SiC(0001) are known to be highly sensitive to the presence of ${\mathrm{NO}}_2$ molecules. The presence of small areas of bilayer graphene, on the other hand, considerably reduces the overall sensitivity of the surface. We investigate how ${\mathrm{NO}}_2$ molecules interact with monolayer and bilayer graphene, both free-standing and on a SiC(0001) substrate. We show that it is necessary to explicitly include the effect of the substrate in order to reproduce the experimental results. When monolayer graphene is present on SiC, there is a large charge transfer from the interface between the buffer layer and the SiC substrate to the molecule. As a result, the surface work function increases by 0.9 eV after molecular adsorption. A graphene bilayer is more effective at screening this interfacial charge, and so the charge transfer and change in work function after ${\mathrm{NO}}_2$ adsorption is much smaller.

Electron-vibron coupling in quantum dots can lead to a strong suppression of the average current in the sequential tunneling regime. This effect is known as Franck-Condon blockade and can be traced back to an overlap integral between vibron states with different electron numbers which becomes exponentially small for large electron-vibron coupling strength. Here, we investigate the effect of a time-dependent drive on this phenomenon, in particular the effect of an oscillatory gate voltage acting on the electronic dot level. We employ two different approaches: perturbation theory based on nonequilibrium Keldysh Green's functions and a master equation in Born-Markov approximation. In both cases, we find that the drive can lift the blockade by exciting vibrons. As a consequence, the relative change in average current grows exponentially with the drive strength.

A tight-binding model of bcc tungsten that includes spin-orbit coupling is developed and applied to the surface states of (110) tungsten thin films. The model describes accurately the anisotropic Dirac conelike dispersion and Rashba-like spin polarization of the surface states, including the crucial effect of the relaxation of the surface atomic layer of the tungsten towards the bulk. It is shown that the surface relaxation affects the tungsten surface states because it results in increased overlaps between atomic orbitals of the surface atomic layer and nearby layers, whereas electric fields that are due to charge transfer between the tungsten and the vacuum near the surface or between the bulk and surface layers do not significantly affect the Rashba-Dirac surface states. It is found that hybridization with bulk modes has differing strengths for thin film surface states belonging to the upper and lower Rashba-Dirac cones and results in reversal of the directions of travel of spin $\uparrow$ and $\downarrow$ electrons in most of the upper Rashba-Dirac cone relative to those expected from phenomenology. It is also shown that intrasite (not intersite) matrix elements of the spin-orbit Hamiltonian are primarily responsible for the formation of the Rashba-Dirac cones and their spin polarization. This finding should be considered when modeling topological insulators, the spin Hall effect, and related phenomena.

We study the pyrochlore Heisenberg antiferromagnet with additional positive biquadratic interaction in the semiclassical limit. The classical ground-state manifold of the model contains an extensively large family of noncoplanar spin states known as “color ice states.” Starting from a color ice state, a subset of spins may rotate collectively at no energy cost. Such excitation may be viewed in this three-dimensional system as a “membranelike” analog of the well-known weathervane modes in the classical kagome Heisenberg antiferromagnet. We investigate the weathervane modes in detail and elucidate their physical properties. Furthermore, we study the order by disorder phenomenon in this model, focusing on the role of harmonic fluctuations. Our computationally limited phase space search suggests that quantum fluctuations select three different states as the magnitude of the biquadratic interaction increases relative to the bilinear interaction, implying a sequence of phase transitions solely driven by fluctuations.

The mechanism and activation energy for the annihilation of a magnetic skyrmion is studied by finding the minimum energy path for the transition in a system described by a Heisenberg-type Hamiltonian extended to include dipole-dipole, Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya, and anisotropy interactions so as to represent a Co monolayer on a Pt(111) surface. The annihilation mechanism involves isotropic shrinking of the skyrmion and slow increase of the energy until the transition state is reached after which the energy drops abruptly as the ferromagnetic final state forms. The maximum energy along the minimum energy path, which gives an estimate of the activation energy within the harmonic approximation of transition state theory, is found to be in excellent agreement with direct Langevin dynamics simulations at relatively high temperature carried out by Rohart et al. [Phys. Rev. B 93, 214412 (2016)]. The dipole-dipole interaction, the computationally most demanding term in the Hamiltonian, is found to be important but its effect on the stability of the skyrmion and shape of the transition path can be mimicked accurately by reducing the anisotropy constant in the Hamiltonian.

Dynamic magnetic properties of magnetoelectric $\mathrm{TmA}{\mathrm{l}}_3{\left(\mathrm{B}{\mathrm{O}}_3\right)}_4$ borate have been investigated by terahertz spectroscopy. Crystal-field transitions within the ground multiplet ${}^3\mathrm{H}{}_6$ of $\mathrm{T}{\mathrm{m}}^{3+}$ ions are observed and they are identified as magnetic-dipole transitions from the ground singlet $A_1$ to the next excited doublet $E$ of $\mathrm{T}{\mathrm{m}}^{3+}$ ions. Unexpected fine structure of the transitions is detected at low temperatures. The new modes are assigned to local distortions of the sites with $D_3$ symmetry by $\mathrm{B}{\mathrm{i}}^{3+}$ impurities, which resulted in the splitting of the $A_1\to E$ transition. Two types of locally distorted sites are identified and investigated. The main contribution to the static magnetic susceptibility is shown to be determined by the matrix elements of the observed magnetic transitions. We demonstrate that even in case of local distortions the symmetry of the undistorted crystal is recovered for magnetic and for quadratic magnetoelectric susceptibilities.

We propose a novel possibility of dynamically changing the pairing of superconductors from $s$ wave to $\eta$ pairing (where the pairs condense at the Brillouin-zone corner momenta) by driving the system with ac fields. We consider a periodically-driven attractive Hubbard model in the strong-coupling regime and show that the pair-hopping and pair-repulsion terms in the effective Hamiltonian in the Floquet formalism are drastically renormalized in different manners between the two terms, which can change the ground states from an $s$-wave superconductivity to an $\eta$-pairing superconductivity or a charge-ordered phase. While in isolated systems such as cold atoms a simple quench scheme would not realize the dynamical phase transition into $\eta$ pairing, we show that there are pathways that realize the dynamical transition, where the field amplitude is varied via a charge-ordered phase as an intermediate state.

Angular-resolved measurements of the exchange-bias field and the coercive field are a powerful tool to distinguish between different competing magnetic anisotropies in polycrystalline exchange-bias layer systems. No simple analytical model is as yet available which considers time-dependent effects such as enhanced coercivity in magnetic easy and hard axis configurations arising from the grain-size distribution of the antiferromagnet. In this work, we expand an existing model class describing polycrystalline exchange-bias systems by a rotatable magnetic anisotropy taking into account the relaxation time of thermally unstable grains. Our calculations show that coercivity mediated by the rotatable magnetic anisotropy can be distinguished from coercivity arising from ferromagnetic anisotropy by the shape of the angular dependence. Additionally, we performed angular-resolved magnetization curve measurements using vectorial magneto-optic Kerr magnetometry. Fitting the proposed model to the experimental data shows excellent agreement and reveals the ferromagnetic anisotropy and properties connected to the grain-size distribution of the antiferromagnet. Therefore, a distinction between the different influences on coercivity and magnetic anisotropy becomes available.

Spin-electric interactions and magnetic and magnetoelectric properties of the ${\mathrm{Dy}}_4$ ring molecular nanocluster are investigated. The effective spin-electric Hamiltonian is derived on a base of developed quantum mechanical model of the cluster spin structure. It is shown that the toroidal moment is a source of the quantum magnetoelectric effect. The dynamics of the toroidal moment (macroscopic quantum tunneling) is also discussed.

This paper presents the quantum mechanical type $T$-scattering operator approach to studying the forward volume magnetostatic spin-wave multiple scattering by a finite ensemble of cylindrical magnetic inclusions in a ferromagnetic thin film. The approach is applied to the problem of spin-wave excitation transfer along a linear chain of inclusions. The substantial results are deriving the optical theorem for the $T$-scattering operator and, as a consequence, deriving a formula for collective extinction cross section of inclusion ensemble, where only the first inclusion of the chain is irradiated by an incident narrow spin-wave beam. From this formula it can be shown that only irradiated inclusion makes a direct contribution in the collective extinction cross section of the total number of inclusions. In this case the direct summarized contribution of all the other inclusions from the chain into the spin-wave scattering is invisible; we call such phenomenon the dark mode. Applying a one-multipole and closest neighbor coupling approximation, we reveal a regime of distant resonant transfer for spin-wave excitation along the linear chain of an essentially big but finite number of particles with the dark mode. Because we also found a resonant mechanism of filtering this mode from radiation losses, the revealed regime shows that at resonant conditions the linear chain of magnetic inclusions can play the role of a spin-wave micro-waveguide, which transfers a signal over a big distance in a form of the dark mode, where the controllable level of radiation losses can tend to reach nearly zero values.

We investigate the electronic structure and the ferroelectric properties of the recently discovered multiferroic ${\mathrm{ScFeO}}_3$ by means of ab initio calculations. The $3d$ manifold of Fe in the half-filled configuration naturally favors an antiferromagnetic ordering, with a theoretical estimate of the antiferromagnetic Néel temperature in good agreement with the experimental values. We find that the inversion symmetry breaking is driven by the off-centering of Sc atoms, which results in a large ferroelectric polarization of $\sim 105 \mu \mathrm{C}/{\mathrm{cm}}^2$. Surprisingly the ferroelectric polarization is sensitive to the local magnetization of the Fe atoms resulting in a large negative magnetoelectric interaction. This behavior is unexpected in type-I multiferroic materials because the magnetic and ferroelectric orders are of different origins.

We present measurements of the thermoelectric power of the plutonium-based unconventional superconductor ${\mathrm{PuCoGa}}_5$. The data is interpreted within a phenomenological model for the quasiparticle density of states of intermediate valence systems, and the results are compared with results obtained from photoemission spectroscopy. The results are consistent with the intermediate valence nature of $5f$ electrons; furthermore, we propose that measurements of the Seebeck coefficient can be used as a probe of density of states in this material, thereby providing a link between transport measurements and photoemission in strongly correlated materials. We discuss these results and their implications for the electronic structure determination of other strongly correlated systems, especially actinide materials.

We report on the pressure and temperature dependence of the electronic and vibrational properties of polycrystalline CrN studied by optical transmission and reflection measurements over the frequency range 0.012–2.48 eV. The optical conductivity spectrum of CrN at ambient conditions shows a phonon mode at $\approx 55\mathrm{meV}$ with a shoulder at $\approx 69\mathrm{meV}$, a pronounced midinfrared absorption band centered at $123\pm 2\mathrm{meV}$, and a high-energy absorption band at $\approx 1.5\mathrm{eV}$. The absorption bands are discussed in terms of the charge-transfer insulator picture. Following the reflectance spectrum with increasing pressure, the activation of an additional phonon mode above 0.6 GPa indicates the occurrence of a pressure-induced structural phase transition. Furthermore, the absorption spectrum exhibits significant changes in the far-infrared range with decreasing temperature: The phonon mode shows a sudden broadening followed by a splitting below 270 K. These changes observed under pressure or while cooling down can be associated with the magnetostructural phase transition reported previously.

We derive the self-energy functional theory for bosonic lattice systems with broken U(1) symmetry by parametrizing the bosonic Baym-Kadanoff effective action in terms of one- and two-point self-energies. The formalism goes beyond other approximate methods such as the pseudoparticle variational cluster approximation, the cluster composite boson mapping, and the Bogoliubov+U theory. It simplifies to bosonic dynamical-mean-field theory when constraining to local fields, whereas when neglecting kinetic contributions of noncondensed bosons, it reduces to the static mean-field approximation. To benchmark the theory, we study the Bose-Hubbard model on the two- and three-dimensional cubic lattice, comparing with exact results from path integral quantum Monte Carlo. We also study the frustrated square lattice with next-nearest-neighbor hopping, which is beyond the reach of Monte Carlo simulations. A reference system comprising a single bosonic state, corresponding to three variational parameters, is sufficient to quantitatively describe phase boundaries and thermodynamical observables, while qualitatively capturing the spectral functions, as well as the enhancement of kinetic fluctuations in the frustrated case. On the basis of these findings, we propose self-energy functional theory as the omnibus framework for treating bosonic lattice models, in particular, in cases where path integral quantum Monte Carlo methods suffer from severe sign problems (e.g., in the presence of nontrivial gauge fields or frustration). Self-energy functional theory enables the construction of diagrammatically sound approximations that are quantitatively precise and controlled in the number of optimization parameters but nevertheless remain computable by modest means.

In a phase with fractional excitations, topological properties are enriched in the presence of global symmetry. In particular, fractional excitations can transform under symmetry in a fractionalized manner, resulting in different symmetry enriched topological (SET) phases. While a good deal is now understood in 2D regarding what symmetry fractionalization patterns are possible, the situation in 3D is much more open. A new feature in 3D is the existence of loop excitations, so to study 3D SET phases, first we need to understand how to properly describe the fractionalized action of symmetry on loops. Using a dimensional reduction procedure, we show that these loop excitations exist as the boundary between two 2D SET phases, and the symmetry action is characterized by the corresponding difference in SET orders. Moreover, similar to the 2D case, we find that some seemingly possible symmetry fractionalization patterns are actually anomalous and cannot be realized strictly in 3D. We detect such anomalies using the flux fusion method we introduced previously in 2D. To illustrate these ideas, we use the $3\mathrm{D}{Z}_2$ gauge theory with $Z_2$ global symmetry as an example, and enumerate and describe the corresponding SET phases. In particular, we find four nonanomalous SET phases and one anomalous SET phase, which we show can be realized as the surface of a 4D system with symmetry protected topological order.