In directionally dried colloidal dispersions regular bands can appear behind the drying front, inclined at $\pm 45°$ to the drying line. Although these features have been noted to share visual similarities with shear bands in metal, no physical mechanism for their formation has ever been suggested, until very recently. Here, through microscopy of silica and polystyrene dispersions, dried in Hele-Shaw cells, we demonstrate that the bands are indeed associated with local shear strains. We further show how the bands form, that they scale with the thickness of the drying layer, and that they are eliminated by the addition of salt to the drying dispersions. Finally, we reveal the origins of these bands in the compressive forces associated with drying, and show how they affect the optical properties (birefringence) of colloidal films and coatings.

We present a search for $\gamma$-ray emission from the direction of the newly discovered dwarf galaxy Reticulum II. Using Fermi-LAT Collaboration data, we detect a signal that exceeds expected backgrounds between $\sim 2–10\mathrm{GeV}$ and is consistent with annihilation of dark matter for particle masses less than a few $\times 10^2\mathrm{GeV}$. Modeling the background as a Poisson process based on Fermi-LAT diffuse models, and taking into account trial factors, we detect emission with $p$ value less than $9.8\times 10^{-5}$ ($>3.7\sigma$). An alternative, model-independent treatment of the background reduces the significance, raising the $p$ value to $9.7\times 10^{-3}$ ($2.3\sigma$). Even in this case, however, Reticulum II has the most significant $\gamma$-ray signal of any known dwarf galaxy. If Reticulum II has a dark-matter halo that is similar to those inferred for other nearby dwarfs, the signal is consistent with the $s$-wave relic abundance cross section for annihilation.

Consistent formulations of relativistic viscous hydrodynamics involve short-lived modes, leading to asymptotic rather than convergent gradient expansions. In this Letter we consider the Müller-Israel-Stewart theory applied to a longitudinally expanding quark-gluon plasma system and identify hydrodynamics as a universal attractor without invoking the gradient expansion. We give strong evidence for the existence of this attractor and then show that it can be recovered from the divergent gradient expansion by Borel summation. This requires careful accounting for the short-lived modes which leads to an intricate mathematical structure known from the theory of resurgence.

Fiber-based coalescers are widely used to accumulate droplets from aerosols and emulsions, where the accumulated droplets are typically removed by gravity or shear. This Letter reports self-propelled removal of drops from a hydrophobic fiber, where the surface energy released upon drop coalescence overcomes the drop-fiber adhesion, producing spontaneous departure that would not occur on a flat substrate of the same contact angle. The self-removal takes place above a threshold drop-to-fiber radius ratio, and the departure speed is close to the capillary-inertial velocity at large radius ratios.

At the horizon of a black hole, the action of ($3+1$)-dimensional loop quantum gravity acquires a boundary term that is formally identical to an action for three-dimensional gravity. I show how to use this correspondence to obtain the entropy of the ($3+1$)-dimensional black hole from well-understood conformal field theory computations of the entropy in ($2+1$)-dimensional de Sitter space.

We discuss the effect of gravitational interactions on the lifetime of the Higgs vacuum where generic quantum gravity corrections are taken into account. Using a “thin-wall” approximation, we provide a proof of principle that small black holes can act as seeds for vacuum decay, spontaneously nucleating a new Higgs phase centered on the black hole with a lifetime measured in millions of Planck times rather than billions of years. The corresponding parameter space constraints are, however, extremely stringent; therefore, we also present numerical evidence suggesting that with thick walls, the parameter space may open up. Implications for collider black holes are discussed.

Kelvin probe force spectroscopy was used to characterize the charge distribution of individual molecules with polar bonds. Whereas this technique represents the charge distribution with moderate resolution for large tip-molecule separations, it fails for short distances. Here, we introduce a novel local force spectroscopy technique which allows one to better disentangle electrostatic from other contributions in the force signal. It enables one to obtain charge-related maps at even closer tip-sample distances, where the lateral resolution is further enhanced. This enhanced resolution allows one to resolve contrast variations along individual polar bonds.

Observations of exotic structures in the $J/\psi p$ channel, which we refer to as charmonium-pentaquark states, in ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_b^0\to J/\psi K^{-}p$ decays are presented. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of $3{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ acquired with the LHCb detector from 7 and 8 TeV $pp$ collisions. An amplitude analysis of the three-body final state reproduces the two-body mass and angular distributions. To obtain a satisfactory fit of the structures seen in the $J/\psi p$ mass spectrum, it is necessary to include two Breit-Wigner amplitudes that each describe a resonant state. The significance of each of these resonances is more than 9 standard deviations. One has a mass of $4380\pm 8\pm 29\mathrm{MeV}$ and a width of $205\pm 18\pm 86\mathrm{MeV}$, while the second is narrower, with a mass of $4449.8\pm 1.7\pm 2.5\mathrm{MeV}$ and a width of $39\pm 5\pm 19\mathrm{MeV}$. The preferred $J^P$ assignments are of opposite parity, with one state having spin $3/2$ and the other $5/2$.

We report direct in situ measurements of the crystal structure of tin between 0.12 and 1.2 TPa, the highest stress at which a crystal structure has ever been observed. Using angle-dispersive powder x-ray diffraction, we find that dynamically compressed Sn transforms to the body-centered-cubic (bcc) structure previously identified by ambient-temperature quasistatic-compression studies and by zero-kelvin density-functional theory predictions between 0.06 and 0.16 TPa. However, we observe no evidence for the hexagonal close-packed (hcp) phase found by those studies to be stable above 0.16 TPa. Instead, our results are consistent with bcc up to 1.2 TPa. We conjecture that at high temperature bcc is stabilized relative to hcp due to differences in vibrational free energy.

Late time decay of very heavy dark matter is considered as one of the possible explanations for diffuse PeV neutrinos observed in IceCube. We consider implications of multimessenger constraints, and show that proposed models are marginally consistent with the diffuse $\gamma$-ray background data. Critical tests are possible by a detailed analysis and identification of the sub-TeV isotropic diffuse $\gamma$-ray data observed by Fermi and future observations of sub-PeV $\gamma$ rays by observatories like HAWC or Tibet $\mathrm{AS}+\mathrm{MD}$. In addition, with several-year observations by next-generation telescopes such as IceCube-Gen2, muon neutrino searches for nearby dark matter halos such as the Virgo cluster should allow us to rule out or support the dark matter models, independently of $\gamma$-ray and anisotropy tests.

Colloidal particles in geometrical confinement display a complex variety of packing structures different from their three-dimensional (3D) bulk counterpart. Here, we confined charged rodlike colloids with long-ranged repulsions to a thin wedge-shaped cell and show, by quantitative 3D confocal microscopy, that not only their positional but also their orientational order depends sensitively upon the slit width. Synchronized with transitions in lattice symmetry and number of layers confinement induces plastic crystal-to-crystal transitions. A model analysis suggests that this complex sequence of more or less rotationally ordered states originates from the subtle competition between the electrostatic repulsion of a rod with the wall and with its neighbors.

The growth of an Al-Ni-Co decagonal quasicrystal was observed by in situ, high-temperature, high-resolution transmission electron microscopy. The tiling patterns extracted from a series of high-resolution transmission electron microscopy images were analyzed on the basis of the high-dimensional description of quasicrystalline structures. The analyses indicated that the growth proceeded with frequent error-and-repair processes. The final, grown structure showed nearly perfect quasicrystalline order. Our observations suggest that the repair process by phason relaxation, rather than local growth rule, plays an essential role in the construction of ideal quasicrystalline order in real materials.

Disordered noble-metal nanoparticle films exhibit highly localized and stable nonlinear light emission from subdiffraction regions upon illumination by near-infrared femtosecond pulses. Such hot spot emission spans a continuum in the visible and near-infrared spectral range. Strong plasmonic enhancement of light-matter interaction and the resulting complexity of experimental observations have prevented the development of a universal understanding of the origin of light emission. Here, we study the dependence of emission spectra on excitation irradiance and provide the most direct evidence yet that the continuum emission observed from both silver and gold nanoparticle aggregate surfaces is caused by recombination of hot electrons within the conduction band. The electron gas in the emitting particles, which is effectively decoupled from the lattice temperature for the duration of emission, reaches temperatures of several thousand Kelvin and acts as a subdiffraction incandescent light source on subpicosecond time scales.

We consider models of identical pulse-coupled oscillators with global interactions. Previous work showed that under certain conditions such systems always end up in sync, but did not quantify how small clusters of synchronized oscillators progressively coalesce into larger ones. Using tools from the study of aggregation phenomena, we obtain exact results for the time-dependent distribution of cluster sizes as the system evolves from disorder to synchrony.

We report observations of superradiance for atoms trapped in the near field of a photonic crystal waveguide (PCW). By fabricating the PCW with a band edge near the $D_1$ transition of atomic cesium, strong interaction is achieved between trapped atoms and guided-mode photons. Following short-pulse excitation, we record the decay of guided-mode emission and find a superradiant emission rate scaling as ${\overline{\mathrm{\Gamma }}}_{\mathrm{SR}}\propto \overline{N}{\mathrm{\Gamma }}_{1\mathrm{D}}$ for average atom number $0.19\lesssim \overline{N}\lesssim 2.6$ atoms, where ${\mathrm{\Gamma }}_{1\mathrm{D}}/{\mathrm{\Gamma }}^{\prime }=1.0\pm 0.1$ is the peak single-atom radiative decay rate into the PCW guided mode, and ${\mathrm{\Gamma }}^{\prime }$ is the radiative decay rate into all the other channels. These advances provide new tools for investigations of photon-mediated atom-atom interactions in the many-body regime.

Ultraintense laser pulses with a few-cycle rising edge are ideally suited to accelerating ions from ultrathin foils, and achieving such pulses in practice represents a formidable challenge. We show that such pulses can be obtained using sufficiently strong and well-controlled relativistic nonlinearities in spatially well-defined near-critical-density plasmas. The resulting ultraintense pulses with an extremely steep rising edge give rise to significantly enhanced carbon ion energies consistent with a transition to radiation pressure acceleration.

Scanning probe microscopy can be used to probe the internal atomic structure of flat organic molecules. This technique requires an unreactive tip and has, until now, been demonstrated only at liquid helium and liquid nitrogen temperatures. We demonstrate intramolecular and intermolecular force contrast at room temperature on PTCDA molecules adsorbed on a $\mathrm{Ag}/\mathrm{Si}(111)\text{−}(\sqrt{3}\times \sqrt{3})$ surface. The oscillating force sensor allows us to dynamically measure the vertical decay constant of the tunneling current. The precision of this method is increased by quantifying the transimpedance of the current to voltage converter and accounting for the tip oscillation. This measurement yields a clear contrast between neighboring molecules, which we attribute to the different charge states.

The predicted rate of binary black hole mergers from galactic fields can vary over several orders of magnitude and is extremely sensitive to the assumptions of stellar evolution. But in dense stellar environments such as globular clusters, binary black holes form by well-understood gravitational interactions. In this Letter, we study the formation of black hole binaries in an extensive collection of realistic globular cluster models. By comparing these models to observed Milky Way and extragalactic globular clusters, we find that the mergers of dynamically formed binaries could be detected at a rate of $\sim 100$ per year, potentially dominating the binary black hole merger rate. We also find that a majority of cluster-formed binaries are more massive than their field-formed counterparts, suggesting that Advanced LIGO could identify certain binaries as originating from dense stellar environments.

We present a mass map reconstructed from weak gravitational lensing shear measurements over $139{\mathrm{deg}}^2$ from the Dark Energy Survey science verification data. The mass map probes both luminous and dark matter, thus providing a tool for studying cosmology. We find good agreement between the mass map and the distribution of massive galaxy clusters identified using a red-sequence cluster finder. Potential candidates for superclusters and voids are identified using these maps. We measure the cross-correlation between the mass map and a magnitude-limited foreground galaxy sample and find a detection at the $6.8\sigma$ level with 20 arc min smoothing. These measurements are consistent with simulated galaxy catalogs based on $N$-body simulations from a cold dark matter model with a cosmological constant. This suggests low systematics uncertainties in the map. We summarize our key findings in this Letter; the detailed methodology and tests for systematics are presented in a companion paper.

The nuclear spins of ionized donors in silicon have become an interesting quantum resource due to their very long coherence times. Their perfect isolation, however, comes at a price, since the absence of the donor electron makes the nuclear spin difficult to control. We demonstrate that the quadrupolar interaction allows us to effectively tune the nuclear magnetic resonance of ionized arsenic donors in silicon via strain and determine the two nonzero elements of the $S$ tensor linking strain and electric field gradients in this material to $S_{11}=1.5\times {10}^{22}\mathrm{V}/{\mathrm{m}}^2$ and $S_{44}=6\times {10}^{22}\mathrm{V}/{\mathrm{m}}^2$. We find a stronger benefit of dynamical decoupling on the coherence properties of transitions subject to first-order quadrupole shifts than on those subject to only second-order shifts and discuss applications of quadrupole physics including mechanical driving of magnetic resonance, cooling of mechanical resonators, and strain-mediated spin coupling.