We investigate the scaling properties of the sources of crackling noise in a fully dynamic numerical model of sedimentary rocks subject to uniaxial compression. The model is initiated by filling a cylindrical container with randomly sized spherical particles that are then connected by breakable beams. Loading at a constant strain rate the cohesive elements fail, and the resulting stress transfer produces sudden bursts of correlated failures, directly analogous to the sources of acoustic emissions in real experiments. The source size, energy, and duration can all be quantified for an individual event, and the population can be analyzed for its scaling properties, including the distribution of waiting times between consecutive events. Despite the nonstationary loading, the results are all characterized by power-law distributions over a broad range of scales in agreement with experiments. As failure is approached, temporal correlation of events emerges accompanied by spatial clustering.

We investigate how natural curvature affects the configuration of a thin elastic rod suspended under its own weight, as when a single strand of hair hangs under gravity. We combine precision desktop experiments, numerics, and theoretical analysis to explore the equilibrium shapes set by the coupled effects of elasticity, natural curvature, nonlinear geometry, and gravity. A phase diagram is constructed in terms of the control parameters of the system, namely the dimensionless curvature and weight, where we identify three distinct regions: planar curls, localized helices, and global helices. We analyze the stability of planar configurations, and describe the localization of helical patterns for long rods, near their free end. The observed shapes and their associated phase boundaries are then rationalized based on the underlying physical ingredients.

Fullerene is scarcely soluble in most solvents, including alkanes. Yet, it has been shown that ${\mathrm{C}}_{60}$ dissolves in lipid bilayers, whose interior is chemically identical to alkanes. Here, we use molecular simulations to explain why lipid bilayers are better than alkanes at dissolving fullerene clusters. Fullerene aggregation is driven by entropy, but enthalpic contributions determine the difference between alkanes and bilayers. Surprisingly, confinement and chain alignment in the bilayer do not affect fullerene aggregation, while solvent density and the perturbation of solvent-solvent interactions are key factors.

We investigate for the first time, both experimentally and theoretically, low-frequency terahertz (THz) emission from the ambient air ionized by a two-color femtosecond laser pulse containing, besides the fundamental-frequency main field, a weak additional field tunable near the frequency of the half harmonic. By controlling the mutual polarization and the powers of the main and additional fields, we determine the dependences of the THz power and polarization on the parameters of the two-color pulse. We also discover the resonantlike dependence of the THz yield on the frequency detuning of the additional field. The analytical formulas obtained using the model of the free-electron residual current density give an excellent agreement with the experimental results.

Solid He is studied in the pressure and temperature ranges 1–40 TPa and 0–10 000 K using first-principles methods. Anharmonic vibrational properties are calculated within a self-consistent field framework, including the internal and free energies, density-pressure relation, stress tensor, thermal expansion, and the electron-phonon coupling renormalization of the electronic band gap. We find that an accurate description of electron-phonon coupling requires us to use a nonperturbative approach. The metallization pressure of 32.9 TPa at 0 K is larger than found previously. The vibrational effects are large; for example, at $P=30\mathrm{TPa}$ the band gap is increased by 2.8 eV by electron-phonon coupling and a further 0.1 eV by thermal expansion compared to the static value. The implications of the calculated metallization pressure for the cooling of white dwarfs are discussed.

We present the concept of a locally resonant nanophononic metamaterial for thermoelectric energy conversion. Our configuration, which is based on a silicon thin film with a periodic array of pillars erected on one or two of the free surfaces, qualitatively alters the base thin-film phonon spectrum due to a hybridization mechanism between the pillar local resonances and the underlying atomic lattice dispersion. Using an experimentally fitted lattice-dynamics-based model, we conservatively predict the metamaterial thermal conductivity to be as low as 50% of the corresponding uniform thin-film value despite the fact that the pillars add more phonon modes to the spectrum.

Boson sampling solves a classically intractable problem by sampling from a probability distribution given by matrix permanents. We propose a scalable implementation of boson sampling using local transverse phonon modes of trapped ions to encode the bosons. The proposed scheme allows deterministic preparation and high-efficiency readout of the bosons in the Fock states and universal mode mixing. With the state-of-the-art trapped ion technology, it is feasible to realize boson sampling with tens of bosons by this scheme, which would outperform the most powerful classical computers and constitute an effective disproof of the famous extended Church-Turing thesis.

Current measurements of the low and high redshift Universe are in tension if we restrict ourselves to the standard six-parameter model of flat $\mathrm{\Lambda }\mathrm{CDM}$. This tension has two parts. First, the Planck satellite data suggest a higher normalization of matter perturbations than local measurements of galaxy clusters. Second, the expansion rate of the Universe today, $H_0$, derived from local distance-redshift measurements is significantly higher than that inferred using the acoustic scale in galaxy surveys and the Planck data as a standard ruler. The addition of a sterile neutrino species changes the acoustic scale and brings the two into agreement; meanwhile, adding mass to the active neutrinos or to a sterile neutrino can suppress the growth of structure, bringing the cluster data into better concordance as well. For our fiducial data set combination, with statistical errors for clusters, a model with a massive sterile neutrino shows $3.5\sigma$ evidence for a nonzero mass and an even stronger rejection of the minimal model. A model with massive active neutrinos and a massless sterile neutrino is similarly preferred. An eV-scale sterile neutrino mass—of interest for short baseline and reactor anomalies—is well within the allowed range. We caution that (i) unknown astrophysical systematic errors in any of the data sets could weaken this conclusion, but they would need to be several times the known errors to eliminate the tensions entirely; (ii) the results we find are at some variance with analyses that do not include cluster measurements; and (iii) some tension remains among the data sets even when new neutrino physics is included.

We discuss whether massive neutrinos (either active or sterile) can reconcile some of the tensions within cosmological data that have been brought into focus by the recently released Planck data. We point out that a discrepancy is present when comparing the primary CMB and lensing measurements both from the CMB and galaxy lensing data using CFHTLenS, similar to that which arises when comparing CMB measurements and SZ cluster counts. A consistent picture emerges and including a prior for the cluster constraints and BAOs we find that for an active neutrino model with three degenerate neutrinos, $\sum m_{\nu }=(0.320\pm 0.081)\mathrm{eV}$, whereas for a sterile neutrino, in addition to 3 neutrinos with a standard hierarchy and $\sum m_{\nu }=0.06\mathrm{eV}$, $m_{\nu ,\text{sterile}}^{\text{eff}}=(0.450\pm 0.124)\mathrm{eV}$ and $\mathrm{\Delta }{N}_{\text{eff}}=0.45\pm 0.23$. In both cases there is a significant detection of modification to the neutrino sector from the standard model and in the case of the sterile neutrino it is possible to reconcile the BAO and local $H_0$ measurements. However, a caveat to our result is some internal tension between the CMB and lensing and cluster observations, and the masses are in excess of those estimated from the shape of the matter power spectrum from galaxy surveys.

We show that a huge thermoelectric effect can be observed by contacting a superconductor whose density of states is spin split by a Zeeman field with a ferromagnet with a nonzero polarization. The resulting thermopower exceeds $k_B/e$ by a large factor, and the thermoelectric figure of merit $ZT$ can far exceed unity, leading to heat engine efficiencies close to the Carnot limit. We also show that spin-polarized currents can be generated in the superconductor by applying a temperature bias.

Finding a good compromise between the exploitation of known resources and the exploration of unknown, but potentially more profitable choices, is a general problem, which arises in many different scientific disciplines. We propose a stylized model for these exploration-exploitation situations, including population or economic growth, portfolio optimization, evolutionary dynamics, or the problem of optimal pinning of vortices or dislocations in disordered materials. We find the exact growth rate of this model for treelike geometries and prove the existence of an optimal migration rate in this case. Numerical simulations in the one-dimensional case confirm the generic existence of an optimum.

This Letter reports on a series of high-adiabat implosions of cryogenic layered deuterium-tritium (DT) capsules indirectly driven by a “high-foot” laser drive pulse at the National Ignition Facility. High-foot implosions have high ablation velocities and large density gradient scale lengths and are more resistant to ablation-front Rayleigh-Taylor instability induced mixing of ablator material into the DT hot spot. Indeed, the observed hot spot mix in these implosions was low and the measured neutron yields were typically 50% (or higher) of the yields predicted by simulation. On one high performing shot (N130812), 1.7 MJ of laser energy at a peak power of 350 TW was used to obtain a peak hohlraum radiation temperature of $\sim 300\mathrm{eV}$. The resulting experimental neutron yield was $(2.4\pm 0.05)\times {10}^{15}$ DT, the fuel $\rho R$ was $(0.86\pm 0.063)\mathrm{g}/{\mathrm{cm}}^2$, and the measured $T_{\text{ion}}$ was $(4.2\pm 0.16)\mathrm{keV}$, corresponding to 8 kJ of fusion yield, with $\sim 1/3$ of the yield caused by self-heating of the fuel by $\alpha$ particles emitted in the initial reactions. The generalized Lawson criteria, an ignition metric, was 0.43 and the neutron yield was $\sim 70\%$ of the value predicted by simulations that include α-particle self-heating.

The magnitude and direction of current-induced spin polarization and spin-orbit splitting are measured in ${\mathrm{In}}_{0.04}{\mathrm{Ga}}_{0.96}$ As epilayers as a function of in-plane electric and magnetic fields. We show that, contrary to expectation, the magnitude of the current-induced spin polarization is smaller for crystal directions corresponding to larger spin-orbit fields. Furthermore, we find that the steady-state in-plane spin polarization does not align along the spin-orbit field, an effect due to anisotropy in the spin relaxation rate.

Vanadium sesquioxide, ${\mathrm{V}}_2{\mathrm{O}}_3$, is a prototypical metal-to-insulator system where, in temperature-dependent studies, the transition always coincides with a corundum-to-monoclinic structural transition. As a function of pressure, ${\mathrm{V}}_2{\mathrm{O}}_3$ follows the expected behavior of increased metallicity due to a larger bandwidth for pressures up to 12.5 GPa. Surprisingly, for higher pressures when the structure becomes unstable, the resistance starts to increase. Around 32.5 GPa at 300 K, we observe a novel pressure-induced corundum-to-monoclinic transition between two metallic phases, showing that the structural phase transition can be decoupled from the metal-insulator transition. Using x-ray Raman scattering, we find that screening effects, which are strong in the corundum phase, become weakened at high pressures. Theoretical calculations indicate that this can be related to a decrease in coherent quasiparticle strength, suggesting that the high-pressure phase is likely a critical correlated metal, on the verge of Mott-insulating behavior.

We report the first experimental realization of a three-dimensional thermal cloak shielding an air bubble in a bulk metal without disturbing the external conductive thermal flux. The cloak is made of a thin layer of homogeneous and isotropic material with specially designed three-dimensional manufacturing. The cloak’s thickness is $100\mu \mathrm{m}$ while the cloaked air bubble has a diameter of 1 cm, achieving the ratio between dimensions of the cloak and the cloaked object 2 orders smaller than previous thermal cloaks, which were mainly realized in a two-dimensional geometry. This work can find applications in novel thermal devices in the three-dimensional physical space.

Invisibility has attracted intensive research in various communities, e.g., optics, electromagnetics, acoustics, thermodynamics, dc, etc. However, many experimental demonstrations have only been achieved by virtue of simplified approaches due to the inhomogeneous and extreme parameters imposed by the transformation-optic method, and usually require a challenging realization with metamaterials. In this Letter, we demonstrate a bilayer thermal cloak made of bulk isotropic materials, and it has been validated as an exact cloak. We experimentally verified its ability to maintain the heat front and its heat protection capabilities in a 2D proof-of-concept experiment. The robustness of this scheme is validated in both 2D (including oblique heat front incidence) and 3D configurations. The proposed scheme may open a new avenue to control the diffusive heat flow in ways inconceivable with phonons, and also inspire new alternatives to the functionalities promised by transformation optics.