Effective models are constructed for a newly discovered superconductor $(\mathrm{Nd},\mathrm{Sr})\mathrm{Ni}{\mathrm{O}}_2$, which has been considered as a possible nickelate analog of the cuprates. Estimation of the effective interaction, which turns out to require a multiorbital model that takes account of all the orbitals involved on the Fermi surface, shows that the effective interactions are significantly larger than in the cuprates. A fluctuation exchange study suggests occurrence of $d_{x^2-y^2}$-wave superconductivity, where the transition temperature should be lowered from the cuprates due to the larger interaction.

We report a new measurement of the positronium (Ps) $2{{}^{3}S}_1\to 2{{}^{3}P}_0$ interval. Slow Ps atoms, optically excited to the radiatively metastable $2{{}^{3}S}_1$ level, flew through a microwave radiation field tuned to drive the transition to the short-lived $2{{}^{3}P}_0$ level, which was detected via the time spectrum of subsequent ground state Ps annihilation radiation. After accounting for Zeeman shifts we obtain a transition frequency ${\nu }_0=18501.02\pm 0.61\mathrm{MHz}$, which is not in agreement with the theoretical value of ${\nu }_0=18498.25\pm 0.08\mathrm{MHz}$.

Identifying the essence of doped Mott insulators is one of the major outstanding problems in condensed matter physics and the key to understanding the high-temperature superconductivity in cuprates. We report real space visualization of Mott insulator-metal transition in ${\mathrm{Sr}}_{1-x}{\mathrm{La}}_x{\mathrm{CuO}}_{2+y}$ cuprate films that cover both the electron- and hole-doped regimes. Tunneling conductance measurements directly on the copper-oxide (${\mathrm{CuO}}_2$) planes reveal a systematic shift in the Fermi level, while the fundamental Mott-Hubbard band structure remains unchanged. This is further demonstrated by exploring the atomic-scale electronic response of ${\mathrm{CuO}}_2$ to substitutional dopants and intrinsic defects in a sister compound ${\mathrm{Sr}}_{0.92}{\mathrm{Nd}}_{0.08}{\mathrm{CuO}}_2$. The results may be better explained in the framework of self-modulation doping, similar to that in semiconductor heterostructures, and form a basis for developing any microscopic theories for cuprate superconductivity.

We use a combination of high-speed video imaging and electrical measurements to study the direct conversion of the impact energy of water drops falling onto an electrically precharged solid surface into electrical energy. Systematic experiments at variable impact conditions (initial height; impact location relative to electrodes) and electrical parameters (surface charge density; external circuit resistance; fluid conductivity) allow us to describe the electrical response quantitatively without any fit parameters based on the evolution of the drop-substrate interfacial area. We derive a scaling law for the energy harvested by such “nanogenerators” and find that optimum efficiency is achieved by matching the timescales of the external electrical energy harvesting circuit and the hydrodynamic spreading process.

Free-electron lasers provide a source of x-ray pulses short enough and intense enough to drive nonlinearities in molecular systems. Impulsive interactions driven by these x-ray pulses provide a way to create and probe valence electron motions with high temporal and spatial resolution. Observing these electronic motions is crucial to understand the role of electronic coherence in chemical processes. A simple nonlinear technique for probing electronic motion, impulsive stimulated x-ray Raman scattering (ISXRS), involves a single impulsive interaction to produce a coherent superposition of electronic states. We demonstrate electronic population transfer via ISXRS using broad bandwidth (5.5 eV full width at half maximum) attosecond x-ray pulses produced by the Linac Coherent Light Source. The impulsive excitation is resonantly enhanced by the oxygen $1s\to 2{\pi }^{*}$ resonance of nitric oxide (NO), and excited state neutral molecules are probed with a time-delayed UV laser pulse.

Searches for electron antineutrino, muon neutrino, and muon antineutrino disappearance driven by sterile neutrino mixing have been carried out by the Daya Bay and $\mathrm{MINOS}+$ collaborations. This Letter presents the combined results of these searches, along with exclusion results from the Bugey-3 reactor experiment, framed in a minimally extended four-neutrino scenario. Significantly improved constraints on the ${\theta }_{\mu e}$ mixing angle are derived that constitute the most constraining limits to date over five orders of magnitude in the mass-squared splitting $\mathrm{\Delta }{m}_{41}^2$, excluding the 90% C.L. sterile-neutrino parameter space allowed by the LSND and MiniBooNE observations at 90% ${\mathrm{CL}}_s$ for $\mathrm{\Delta }{m}_{41}^2<13{\mathrm{eV}}^2$. Furthermore, the LSND and MiniBooNE 99% C.L. allowed regions are excluded at 99% ${\mathrm{CL}}_s$ for $\mathrm{\Delta }{m}_{41}^2<1.6{\mathrm{eV}}^2$.

We propose novel quantum antennas and metamaterials with a strong magnetic response at optical frequencies. Our design is based on the arrangement of natural quantum emitters with only electric dipole transition moments at distances smaller than a wavelength of light but much larger than their physical size. In particular, we show that an atomic dimer can serve as a magnetic antenna at its antisymmetric mode to enhance the decay rate of a magnetic transition in its vicinity by several orders of magnitude. Furthermore, we study metasurfaces composed of atomic bilayers with and without cavities and show that they can fully reflect the electric and magnetic fields of light, thus, forming nearly perfect electric or magnetic mirrors. The proposed metamaterials will embody the intrinsic quantum functionalities of natural emitters such as atoms, ions, color center, or molecules and can be fabricated with available state-of-the-art technologies, promising several applications both in classical optics and quantum engineering.

We introduce the notion of combinatorial gauge symmetry—a local transformation that includes single spin rotations plus permutations of spins (or swaps of their quantum states)—that preserve the commutation and anticommutation relations among the spins. We show that Hamiltonians with simple two-body interactions contain this symmetry if the coupling matrix is a Hadamard matrix, with the combinatorial gauge symmetry being associated with the automorphism of these matrices with respect to monomial transformations. Armed with this symmetry, we address the physical problem of how to build quantum spin liquids with physically accessible interactions. In addition to its intrinsic physical significance, the problem is also tied to that of how to build topological qubits.

The manipulation of quantum “resources” such as entanglement, coherence, and magic states lies at the heart of quantum science and technology, empowering potential advantages over classical methods. In practice, a particularly important kind of manipulation is to “purify” the quantum resources since they are inevitably contaminated by noise and thus often lose their power or become unreliable for direct usage. Here we prove fundamental limitations on how effectively generic noisy resources can be purified enforced by the laws of quantum mechanics, which universally apply to any reasonable kind of quantum resource. More explicitly, we derive nontrivial lower bounds on the error of converting any full-rank noisy state to any target pure resource state by any free protocol (including probabilistic ones)—it is impossible to achieve perfect resource purification, even probabilistically. Our theorems indicate strong limits on the efficiency of distillation, a widely used type of resource purification routine that underpins many key applications of quantum information science. In particular, this general result induces the first explicit lower bounds on the resource cost of magic state distillation, a leading scheme for realizing scalable fault-tolerant quantum computation. Implications for the standard error-correction-based methods are specifically discussed.

The tennis racket effect is a geometric phenomenon which occurs in a free rotation of a three-dimensional rigid body. In a complex phase space, we show that this effect originates from a pole of a Riemann surface and can be viewed as a result of the Picard-Lefschetz formula. We prove that a perfect twist of the racket is achieved in the limit of an ideal asymmetric object. We give upper and lower bounds to the twist defect for any rigid body, which reveals the robustness of the effect. A similar approach describes the Dzhanibekov effect in which a wing nut, spinning around its central axis, suddenly makes a half-turn flip around a perpendicular axis and the monster flip, an almost impossible skateboard trick.

Multidimensional coherent spectroscopy directly unravels multiply excited states that overlap in a linear spectrum. We report multidimensional coherent optical photocurrent spectroscopy in a semiconductor polariton diode and explore the excitation ladder of cavity polaritons. We measure doubly and triply avoided crossings for pairs and triplets of exciton polaritons, demonstrating the strong coupling between light and dressed doublet and triplet semiconductor excitations. These results demonstrate that multiply excited excitonic states strongly coupled to a microcavity can be described as two coupled quantum-anharmonic ladders.

We report experiments that show rapid crystallization of colloids tethered to an oil-water interface in response to laser illumination. This light-induced transition is due to a combination of long-ranged thermophoretic pumping and local optical binding. We show that the flow-induced force on the colloids can be described as the gradient of a potential. The nonequilibrium steady state due to local heating thus admits an effective equilibrium description. The optofluidic manipulation explored in this work opens novel ways to manipulate and assemble colloidal particles.

We demonstrate microwave dressing on ultracold, fermionic ${}^{23}\mathrm{Na}{}^{40}\mathrm{K}$ ground-state molecules and observe resonant dipolar collisions with cross sections exceeding 3 times the $s$-wave unitarity limit. The origin of these interactions is the resonant alignment of the approaching molecules’ dipoles along the intermolecular axis, which leads to strong attraction. We explain our observations with a conceptually simple two-state picture based on the Condon approximation. Furthermore, we perform coupled-channel calculations that agree well with the experimentally observed collision rates. The resonant microwave-induced collisions found here enable controlled, strong interactions between molecules, of immediate use for experiments in optical lattices.

We model power grids as graphs with heavy-tailed sinks, which represent demand from cities, and study cascading failures on such graphs. Our analysis links the scale-free nature of blackout sizes to the scale-free nature of city sizes, contrasting previous studies suggesting that this nature is governed by self-organized criticality. Our results are based on a new mathematical framework combining the physics of power flow with rare event analysis for heavy-tailed distributions, and are validated using various synthetic networks and the German transmission grid.

Achieving a low mean transverse energy or temperature of electrons emitted from the photocathode-based electron sources is critical to the development of next-generation and compact x-ray free electron lasers and ultrafast electron diffraction, spectroscopy, and microscopy experiments. In this Letter, we demonstrate a record low mean transverse energy of 5 meV from the cryo-cooled (100) surface of copper using near-threshold photoemission. Further, we also show that the electron energy spread obtained from such a surface is less than 11.5 meV, making it the smallest energy spread electron source known to date: more than an order of magnitude smaller than any existing photoemission, field emission, or thermionic emission based electron source. Our measurements also shed light on the physics of electron emission and show how the energy spread at few meV scale energies is limited by both the temperature and the vacuum density of states.

A first-order quantum chromodynamics (QCD) phase transition (PT) may take place in the protocompact star (PCS) produced by a core-collapse supernova (CCSN). In this work, we study the consequences of such a PT in a nonrotating CCSN with axisymmetric hydrodynamic simulations. We find that the PT leads to the collapse of the PCS and results in a loud burst of gravitational waves (GWs). The amplitude of this GW burst is $\sim 30$ times larger than the postbounce GW signal normally found for nonrotating CCSN. It shows a broad peak at high frequencies ($\sim 2500–4000\mathrm{Hz}$) in the spectrum, has a duration of $\lesssim 5\mathrm{ms}$, and carries $\sim 3$ orders of magnitude more energy than the other episodes. Also, the peak frequency of the PCS oscillation increases dramatically after the PT-induced collapse. In addition to a second neutrino burst, the GW signal, if detected by the ground-based GW detectors, is decisive evidence of the first-order QCD PT inside CCSNe and provides key information about the structure and dynamics of the PCS.

We highlight that the anomalous orbits of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) and an excess in microlensing events in the 5-year Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment data set can be simultaneously explained by a new population of astrophysical bodies with mass several times that of the Earth ($M_{\oplus }$). We take these objects to be primordial black holes (PBHs) and point out the orbits of TNOs would be altered if one of these PBHs was captured by the Solar System, inline with the Planet 9 hypothesis. Capture of a free floating planet is a leading explanation for the origin of Planet 9, and we show that the probability of capturing a PBH instead is comparable. The observational constraints on a PBH in the outer Solar System significantly differ from the case of a new ninth planet. This scenario could be confirmed through annihilation signals from the dark matter microhalo around the PBH.

Many complex systems, ranging from migrating cells to animal groups, exhibit stochastic dynamics described by the underdamped Langevin equation. Inferring such an equation of motion from experimental data can provide profound insight into the physical laws governing the system. Here, we derive a principled framework to infer the dynamics of underdamped stochastic systems from realistic experimental trajectories, sampled at discrete times and subject to measurement errors. This framework yields an operational method, Underdamped Langevin Inference, which performs well on experimental trajectories of single migrating cells and in complex high-dimensional systems, including flocks with Viscek-like alignment interactions. Our method is robust to experimental measurement errors, and includes a self-consistent estimate of the inference error.

In the current era of precision quantum many-body physics, one of the most scrutinized systems is the unitary limit of the nonrelativistic spin-$1/2$ Fermi gas, due to its simplicity and relevance for atomic, condensed matter, and nuclear physics. The thermodynamics of this strongly correlated system is determined by universal functions which, at high temperatures, are governed by universal virial coefficients $b_n$ that capture the effects of the $n$-body system on the many-body dynamics. Currently, $b_2$ and $b_3$ are well understood, but the situation is less clear for $b_4$, and no predictions have been made for $b_5$. To answer these open questions, we implement a nonperturbative analytic approach based on the Trotter-Suzuki factorization of the imaginary-time evolution operator, using progressively finer temporal lattice spacings. By means of these factorizations and automated algebra codes, we obtain the interaction-induced change $\mathrm{\Delta }{b}_n$ from weak coupling to unitarity. At unitarity, we find that $\mathrm{\Delta }{b}_3=-0.356(4)$ in agreement with previous results, $\mathrm{\Delta }{b}_4=0.062(2)$, which is in agreement with all previous theoretical estimates but at odds with experimental determinations, and $\mathrm{\Delta }{b}_5=0.078(6)$, which is a prediction. We show the impact of those answers on the density equation of state and Tan contact, and trace their origin back to their polarized and unpolarized components.

We investigate classic diffusion with the added feature that a diffusing particle is reset to its starting point each time the particle reaches a specified threshold. In an infinite domain, this process is nonstationary and its probability distribution exhibits rich features. In a finite domain, we define a nontrivial optimization in which a cost is incurred whenever the particle is reset and a reward is obtained while the particle stays near the reset point. We derive the condition to optimize the net gain in this system, namely, the reward minus the cost.