We measure the length of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) feature, and the expansion rate of the recent Universe, from low-redshift data only, almost model independently. We make only the following minimal assumptions: homogeneity and isotropy, a metric theory of gravity, a smooth expansion history, and the existence of standard candles (supernovæ) and a standard BAO ruler. The rest is determined by the data, which are compilations of recent BAO and type IA supernova results. Making only these assumptions, we find for the first time that the standard ruler has a length of $103.9\pm 2.3h^{-1}\mathrm{Mpc}$. The value is a measurement, in contrast to the model-dependent theoretical prediction determined with model parameters set by Planck data ($99.3\pm 2.1h^{-1}\mathrm{Mpc}$). The latter assumes the cold dark matter model with a cosmological constant, and that the ruler is the sound horizon at radiation drag. Adding passive galaxies as standard clocks or a local Hubble constant measurement allows the absolute BAO scale to be determined ($142.8\pm 3.7\mathrm{Mpc}$), and in the former case the additional information makes the BAO length determination more precise ($101.9\pm 1.9h^{-1}\mathrm{Mpc}$). The inverse curvature radius of the Universe is weakly constrained and consistent with zero, independently of the gravity model, provided it is metric. We find the effective number of relativistic species to be $N_{\text{eff}}=3.53\pm 0.32$, independent of late-time dark energy or gravity physics.

In this Letter we explore and develop a simple set of rules that apply to cutting, pasting, and folding honeycomb lattices. We consider origami-like structures that are extrinsically flat away from zero-dimensional sources of Gaussian curvature and one-dimensional sources of mean curvature, and our cutting and pasting rules maintain the intrinsic bond lengths on both the lattice and its dual lattice. We find that a small set of rules is allowed providing a framework for exploring and building kirigami—folding, cutting, and pasting the edges of paper.

We have studied the superconducting $\mathrm{Si}(111)\text{−}(\sqrt{7}\times \sqrt{3})\text{−}\mathrm{In}$ surface using a ${}^3\mathrm{He}$-based low-temperature scanning tunneling microscope. Zero-bias conductance images taken over a large surface area reveal that vortices are trapped at atomic steps after magnetic fields are applied. The crossover behavior from Pearl to Josephson vortices is clearly identified from their elongated shapes along the steps and significant recovery of superconductivity within the cores. Our numerical calculations combined with experiments clarify that these characteristic features are determined by the relative strength of the interterrace Josephson coupling at the atomic step.

New physics effects in $B$ decays are routinely modeled through operators invariant under the strong and electromagnetic gauge symmetries. Assuming the scale for new physics is well above the electroweak scale, we further require invariance under the full standard model gauge symmetry group. Retaining up to dimension-six operators, we unveil new constraints between different new physics operators that are assumed to be independent in the standard phenomenological analyses. We illustrate this approach by analyzing the constraints on new physics from rare $B_q$ (semi-)leptonic decays.

We report the quantum transport properties of ${\mathrm{Cd}}_3{\mathrm{As}}_2$ single crystals in a magnetic field. A large linear quantum magnetoresistance is observed near room temperature. With decreasing temperature, the Shubnikov—de Haas oscillations appear in both the longitudinal resistance $R_{xx}$ and the transverse Hall resistance $R_{xy}$. From the strong oscillatory component $\mathrm{\Delta }{R}_{xx}$, a linear dependence of the Landau index $n$ on $1/B$ is obtained, and it gives an $n$-axis intercept between $1/2$ and $5/8$. This clearly reveals a nontrivial $\pi$ Berry’s phase, which is a distinguished feature of Dirac fermions. Our quantum transport results provide bulk evidence for the existence of a three-dimensional Dirac semimetal phase in ${\mathrm{Cd}}_3{\mathrm{As}}_2$.

Magnetic fluctuations caused by the nuclear spins of a host crystal are often the leading source of decoherence for many types of solid-state spin qubit. In group-IV semiconductor materials, the spin-bearing nuclei are sufficiently rare that it is possible to identify and control individual host nuclear spins. This Letter presents the first experimental detection and manipulation of a single ${}^{29}\mathrm{Si}$ nuclear spin. The quantum nondemolition single-shot readout of the spin is demonstrated, and a Hahn echo measurement reveals a coherence time of $T_2=6.3(7)\mathrm{ms}$—in excellent agreement with bulk experiments. Atomistic modeling combined with extracted experimental parameters provides possible lattice sites for the ${}^{29}\mathrm{Si}$ atom under investigation. These results demonstrate that single ${}^{29}\mathrm{Si}$ nuclear spins could serve as a valuable resource in a silicon spin-based quantum computer.

Tubular organs display a wide variety of surface morphologies including circumferential and longitudinal folds, square and hexagonal undulations, and finger-type protrusions. Surface morphology is closely correlated to tissue function and serves as a clinical indicator for physiological and pathological conditions, but the regulators of surface morphology remain poorly understood. Here, we explore the role of geometry and elasticity on the formation of surface patterns. We establish morphological phase diagrams for patterns selection and show that increasing the thickness or stiffness ratio between the outer and inner tubular layers induces a gradual transition from circumferential to longitudinal folding. Our results suggest that physical forces act as regulators during organogenesis and give rise to the characteristic circular folds in the esophagus, the longitudinal folds in the valves of Kerckring, the surface networks in villi, and the crypts in the large intestine.

Multi-GeV electron beams with energy up to 4.2 GeV, 6% rms energy spread, 6 pC charge, and 0.3 mrad rms divergence have been produced from a 9-cm-long capillary discharge waveguide with a plasma density of $\approx 7\times 10^{17}{\mathrm{cm}}^{-3}$, powered by laser pulses with peak power up to 0.3 PW. Preformed plasma waveguides allow the use of lower laser power compared to unguided plasma structures to achieve the same electron beam energy. A detailed comparison between experiment and simulation indicates the sensitivity in this regime of the guiding and acceleration in the plasma structure to input intensity, density, and near-field laser mode profile.

As a copious source of gamma rays, a nearby galactic gamma ray burst (GRB) can be a threat to life. Using recent determinations of the rate of GRBs, their luminosity function, and properties of their host galaxies, we estimate the probability that a life-threatening (lethal) GRB would take place. Amongst the different kinds of GRBs, long ones are most dangerous. There is a very good chance (but no certainty) that at least one lethal GRB took place during the past 5 gigayears close enough to Earth as to significantly damage life. There is a 50% chance that such a lethal GRB took place during the last $500\times 10^6\mathrm{years}$, causing one of the major mass extinction events. Assuming that a similar level of radiation would be lethal to life on other exoplanets hosting life, we explore the potential effects of GRBs to life elsewhere in the Galaxy and the Universe. We find that the probability of a lethal GRB is much larger in the inner Milky Way (95% within a radius of 4 kpc from the galactic center), making it inhospitable to life. Only at the outskirts of the Milky Way, at more than 10 kpc from the galactic center, does this probability drop below 50%. When considering the Universe as a whole, the safest environments for life (similar to the one on Earth) are the lowest density regions in the outskirts of large galaxies, and life can exist in only $\approx 10\%$ of galaxies. Remarkably, a cosmological constant is essential for such systems to exist. Furthermore, because of both the higher GRB rate and galaxies being smaller, life as it exists on Earth could not take place at $z>0.5$. Early life forms must have been much more resilient to radiation.

The interaction of individual electrons with vibrations has been extensively studied. However, the nature of electron-vibration interaction in the presence of many-body electron correlations such as a Kondo state has not been fully investigated. Here, we present transport measurements on a Copper-phthalocyanine molecule, suspended between two silver electrodes in a break-junction setup. Our measurements reveal both zero bias and satellite conductance peaks, which are identified as Kondo resonances with a similar Kondo temperature. The relation of the satellite peaks to electron-vibration interaction is corroborated using several independent spectroscopic indications, as well as ab initio calculations. Further analysis reveals that the contribution of vibration-induced inelastic current is significant in the presence of a Kondo resonance.

We report on spin injection into a high mobility 2D electron system confined at an $(\mathrm{Al},\mathrm{Ga})\mathrm{As}/\mathrm{GaAs}$ interface, using (Ga,Mn)As Esaki diode contacts as spin aligners. We measured a clear nonlocal spin valve signal, which varies nonmonotonically with the applied bias voltage. The magnitude of the signal cannot be described by the standard spin drift-diffusion model, because at maximum this would require the spin polarization of the injected current to be much larger than 100%, which is unphysical. A strong correlation of the spin signal with contact width and electron mean free path suggests that ballistic transport in the 2D region below ferromagnetic contacts should be taken into account to fully describe the results.

We present a novel method for probing the alignment of the molecular axis of an ultracold, nonpolar dimer. These results are obtained using diatomic ${}^{87}{\mathrm{Rb}}_2$ molecules in the vibrational ground state of the lowest triplet potential $a^3{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_u^{+}$ trapped in a 3D optical lattice. We measure the molecular polarizabilities, which are directly linked to the alignment, along each of the $x$, $y$, and $z$ directions of the lab coordinate system. By preparing the molecules in various, precisely defined rotational quantum states we can control the degree of alignment of the molecular axis with high precision over a large range. Furthermore, we derive the dynamical polarizabilities for a laser wavelength of 1064.5 nm parallel and orthogonal to the molecular axis of the dimer, ${\alpha }_{\parallel }=(8.9\pm 0.9)\times 10^3\mathrm{a}.\mathrm{u}.$ and ${\alpha }_{\perp }=(0.9\pm 0.4)\times 10^3\mathrm{a}.\mathrm{u}.$, respectively. Our findings highlight that the depth of an optical lattice strongly depends on the rotational state of the molecule, which has to be considered in collision experiments. The present work paves the way for reaction studies between aligned molecules in the ultracold temperature regime.

The energy landscapes that drive structure formation in biopolymers are difficult to measure. Here we validate experimentally a novel method to reconstruct landscape profiles from single-molecule pulling curves using an inverse Weierstrass transform (IWT) of the Jarzysnki free-energy integral. The method was applied to unfolding measurements of a DNA hairpin, replicating the results found by the more-established weighted histogram (WHAM) and inverse Boltzmann methods. Applying both WHAM and IWT methods to reconstruct the folding landscape for a RNA pseudoknot having a stiff energy barrier, we found that landscape features with sharper curvature than the force probe stiffness could not be recovered with the IWT method. The IWT method is thus best for analyzing data from stiff force probes such as atomic force microscopes.

$Q$ balls are nontopological solitonic solutions to a wide class of field theories that possess global symmetries. Here we show that in these same theories there also exists a tower of novel composite $Q$-ball solutions where, within one composite $Q$ ball, positive and negative charges coexist and swap at a frequency lower than the natural frequency of an individual $Q$ ball. These charge-swapping $Q$ balls are constructed by assembling $Q$ balls and anti-$Q$ balls tightly such that their nonlinear cores overlap. We explain why charge-swapping $Q$ balls can form and why they swap charges.

Human crowds often bear a striking resemblance to interacting particle systems, and this has prompted many researchers to describe pedestrian dynamics in terms of interaction forces and potential energies. The correct quantitative form of this interaction, however, has remained an open question. Here, we introduce a novel statistical-mechanical approach to directly measure the interaction energy between pedestrians. This analysis, when applied to a large collection of human motion data, reveals a simple power-law interaction that is based not on the physical separation between pedestrians but on their projected time to a potential future collision, and is therefore fundamentally anticipatory in nature. Remarkably, this simple law is able to describe human interactions across a wide variety of situations, speeds, and densities. We further show, through simulations, that the interaction law we identify is sufficient to reproduce many known crowd phenomena.

Extending the range of quantum interferometry to a wider class of composite nanoparticles requires new tools to diffract matter waves. Recently, pulsed photoionization light gratings have demonstrated their suitability for high mass matter-wave physics. Here, we extend quantum interference experiments to a new class of particles by introducing photofragmentation beam splitters into time-domain matter-wave interferometry. We present data that demonstrate this coherent beam splitting mechanism with clusters of hexafluorobenzene and we show single-photon depletion gratings based both on fragmentation and ionization for clusters of vanillin. We propose that photofragmentation gratings can act on a large set of van der Waals clusters and biomolecules which are thermally unstable and often resilient to single-photon ionization.

Radio-frequency compressed ultrafast electron diffraction has been used to probe the coherent and incoherent coupling of impulsive electronic excitation at 1.55 eV (800 nm) to optical and acoustic phonon modes directly from the perspective of the lattice degrees of freedom. A biexponential suppression of diffracted intensity due to relaxation of the electronic system into incoherent phonons is observed, with the 250 fs fast contribution dominated by coupling to the $E_{2g2}$ optical phonon mode at the $\mathrm{\Gamma }$ point ($\mathrm{\Gamma }-E_{2g2}$) and $A_1^{\prime }$ optical phonon mode at the $K$ point ($K-A_1^{\prime }$). Both modes have Kohn anomalies at these points in the Brillouin zone. The result is a unique nonequilibrium state with the electron subsystem in thermal equilibrium with only a very small subset of the lattice degrees of freedom within 500 fs following photoexcitation. This state relaxes through further electron-phonon and phonon-phonon pathways on the 6.5 ps time scale. In addition, electronic excitation leads to both in-plane and out-of-plane coherent lattice responses in graphite whose character we are able to fully determine based on spot positions and intensity modulations in the femtosecond electron diffraction data. The in-plane motion is specifically a $\mathrm{\Gamma }$ point shearing mode of the graphene planes and the out-of-plane motion an acoustic breathing mode response of the film.

Collective behavior in biological systems is often accompanied by strong correlations. The question has therefore arisen of whether correlation is amplified by the vicinity to some critical point in the parameters space. Biological systems, though, are typically quite far from the thermodynamic limit, so that the value of the control parameter at which correlation and susceptibility peak depend on size. Hence, a system would need to readjust its control parameter according to its size in order to be maximally correlated. This readjustment, though, has never been observed experimentally. By gathering three-dimensional data on swarms of midges in the field we find that swarms tune their control parameter and size so as to maintain a scaling behavior of the correlation function. As a consequence, correlation length and susceptibility scale with the system’s size and swarms exhibit a near-maximal degree of correlation at all sizes.

We establish theoretically that in nonmagnetic semiconducting bilayer or multilayer thin film systems rolled up into compact quasi-one-dimensional nanoarchitectures, the ballistic magnetoresistance is very anisotropic: conductances depend strongly on the direction of an externally applied magnetic field. This phenomenon originates from the curved open geometry of rolled-up nanotubes, which leads to a tunability of the number of quasi-one-dimensional magnetic subbands crossing the Fermi energy. The experimental significance of this phenomenon is illustrated by a sizable anisotropy that scales with the inverse of the winding number, and persists up to a critical temperature that can be strongly enhanced by increasing the strength of the external magnetic field or the characteristic radius of curvature, and can reach room temperature.

We use polarized Raman scattering to probe lattice vibrations and charge ordering in 12 nm thick, epitaxially strained ${\mathrm{PrNiO}}_3$ films, and in superlattices of ${\mathrm{PrNiO}}_3$ with the band insulator ${\mathrm{PrAlO}}_3$. A carefully adjusted confocal geometry is used to eliminate the substrate contribution to the Raman spectra. In films and superlattices under tensile strain which undergo a metal-insulator transition upon cooling, the Raman spectra reveal phonon modes characteristic of charge ordering. These anomalous phonons do not appear in compressively strained films, which remain metallic at all temperatures. For superlattices under compressive strain, the Raman spectra show no evidence of anomalous phonons indicative of charge ordering, while complementary resonant x-ray scattering experiments reveal antiferromagnetic order associated with a modest increase in resistivity upon cooling. This confirms theoretical predictions of a spin density wave phase driven by spatial confinement of the conduction electrons.