We present a further argument that typical black holes with field theory duals have firewalls at the horizon. This argument makes no reference to entanglement between the black hole and any distant system, and so is not evaded by identifying degrees of freedom inside the black hole with those outside. We also address the $\mathrm{\text{Einstein-Rosen=Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen}}$ conjecture of Maldacena and Susskind, arguing that the correlations in generic highly entangled states cannot be geometrized as a smooth wormhole.

We investigate the Brownian motion of boomerang colloidal particles confined between two glass plates. Our experimental observations show that the mean displacements are biased towards the center of hydrodynamic stress (CoH), and that the mean-square displacements exhibit a crossover from short-time faster to long-time slower diffusion with the short-time diffusion coefficients dependent on the points used for tracking. A model based on Langevin theory elucidates that these behaviors are ascribed to the superposition of two diffusive modes: the ellipsoidal motion of the CoH and the rotational motion of the tracking point with respect to the CoH.

While the slogan “no measurement without disturbance” has established itself under the name of the Heisenberg effect in the consciousness of the scientifically interested public, a precise statement of this fundamental feature of the quantum world has remained elusive, and serious attempts at rigorous formulations of it as a consequence of quantum theory have led to seemingly conflicting preliminary results. Here we show that despite recent claims to the contrary [L. Rozema et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 100404 (2012)], Heisenberg-type inequalities can be proven that describe a tradeoff between the precision of a position measurement and the necessary resulting disturbance of momentum (and vice versa). More generally, these inequalities are instances of an uncertainty relation for the imprecisions of any joint measurement of position and momentum. Measures of error and disturbance are here defined as figures of merit characteristic of measuring devices. As such they are state independent, each giving worst-case estimates across all states, in contrast to previous work that is concerned with the relationship between error and disturbance in an individual state.

Quantum state tomography is currently the standard tool for verifying that a state prepared in the lab is close to an ideal target state, but up to now there have been no rigorous methods for evaluating the precision of the state preparation in tomographic experiments. We propose a new estimator for quantum state tomography, and prove that the (always physical) estimates will be close to the true prepared state with a high probability. We derive an explicit formula for evaluating how high the probability is for an arbitrary finite-dimensional system and explicitly give the one- and two-qubit cases as examples. This formula applies for any informationally complete sets of measurements, arbitrary finite number of data sets, and general loss functions including the infidelity, the Hilbert-Schmidt, and the trace distances. Using the formula, we can evaluate not only the difference between the estimated and prepared states, but also the difference between the prepared and target states. This is the first result directly applicable to the problem of evaluating the precision of estimation and preparation in quantum tomographic experiments.

We report the localization of an ion by a one-dimensional optical lattice in the presence of an applied external force. The ion is confined radially by a radio frequency trap and axially by a combined electrostatic and optical-lattice potential. Using a resolved Raman sideband technique, one or several ions are cooled to a mean vibrational number $⟨n⟩=(0.1\pm 0.1)$ along the optical lattice. We measure the average position of a periodically driven ion with a resolution down to $\lambda /40$, and demonstrate localization to a single lattice site for up to 10 ms. This opens new possibilities for studying many-body systems with long-range interactions in periodic potentials, as well as fundamental models of friction.

Laser-wakefield acceleration offers the promise of a compact electron accelerator for generating a multi-GeV electron beam using the huge field gradient induced by an intense laser pulse, compared to conventional rf accelerators. However, the energy and quality of the electron beam from the laser-wakefield accelerator have been limited by the power of the driving laser pulses and interaction properties in the target medium. Recent progress in laser technology has resulted in the realization of a petawatt (PW) femtosecond laser, which offers new capabilities for research on laser-wakefield acceleration. Here, we present a significant increase in laser-driven electron energy to the multi-GeV level by utilizing a 30-fs, 1-PW laser system. In particular, a dual-stage laser-wakefield acceleration scheme (injector and accelerator scheme) was applied to boost electron energies to over 3 GeV with a single PW laser pulse. Three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations corroborate the multi-GeV electron generation from the dual-stage laser-wakefield accelerator driven by PW laser pulses.

We report an experimental realization of the Jaynes-Cummings-Hubbard model using the internal and radial phonon states of two trapped ions. An adiabatic transfer corresponding to a quantum phase transition from a localized insulator ground state to a delocalized superfluid (SF) ground state is demonstrated. The SF phase of polaritonic excitations characteristic of the interconnected Jaynes-Cummings (JC) system is experimentally explored, where a polaritonic excitation refers to a combination of an atomic excitation and a phonon interchanged via a JC coupling.

We study colonies of nonmotile, rod-shaped bacteria growing on solid substrates. In our model, bacteria interact purely mechanically, by pushing each other away as they grow, and consume a diffusing nutrient. We show that mechanical interactions control the velocity and shape of the advancing front, which leads to features that cannot be captured by established Fisher-Kolmogorov models. In particular, we find that the velocity depends on the elastic modulus of bacteria or their stickiness to the surface. Interestingly, we predict that the radius of an incompressible, strictly two-dimensional colony cannot grow linearly in time, unless it develops branches. Importantly, mechanical interactions can also account for the nonequilibrium transition between circular and branching colonies, often observed in the lab.

We consider the role of the internal kinetic energy of bound systems of matter in tests of the Einstein equivalence principle. Using the gravitational sector of the standard model extension, we show that stringent limits on equivalence principle violations in antimatter can be indirectly obtained from tests using bound systems of normal matter. We estimate the bound kinetic energy of nucleons in a range of light atomic species using Green’s function Monte Carlo calculations, and for heavier species using a Woods-Saxon model. We survey the sensitivities of existing and planned experimental tests of the equivalence principle, and report new constraints at the level of between a few parts in ${10}^6$ and parts in ${10}^8$ on violations of the equivalence principle for matter and antimatter.

We demonstrate coherent one-color photoassociation of a Bose-Einstein condensate, which results in Rabi oscillations between atomic and molecular condensates. We attain atom-molecule Rabi frequencies that are comparable to decoherence rates by driving photoassociation of atoms in an ${}^{88}\mathrm{Sr}$ condensate to a weakly bound level of the metastable ${}^{1}S_0+{}^{3}P_1$ molecular potential, which has a long lifetime and a large Franck-Condon overlap integral with the ground scattering state. Transient shifts and broadenings of the excitation spectrum are clearly seen at short times, and they create an asymmetric excitation profile that only displays Rabi oscillations for blue detuning from resonance.

We construct analytically, a new family of null solutions to Maxwell’s equations in free space whose field lines encode all torus knots and links. The evolution of these null fields, analogous to a compressible flow along the Poynting vector that is shear free, preserves the topology of the knots and links. Our approach combines the construction of null fields with complex polynomials on ${\mathbb{S}}^3$. We examine and illustrate the geometry and evolution of the solutions, making manifest the structure of nested knotted tori filled by the field lines.

Prompted by intriguing events observed in certain particle-physics searches for rare events, we study light and acoustic emission simultaneously in some inorganic scintillators subject to mechanical stress. We observe mechanoluminescence in ${\mathrm{Bi}}_4{\mathrm{Ge}}_3{\mathrm{O}}_{12}$, ${\mathrm{CdWO}}_4$, and ${\mathrm{ZnWO}}_4$, in various mechanical configurations at room temperature and ambient pressure. We analyze the temporal and amplitude correlations between the light emission and the acoustic emission during fracture. A novel application of the precise energy calibration of ${\mathrm{Bi}}_4{\mathrm{Ge}}_3{\mathrm{O}}_{12}$ provided by radioactive sources allows us to deduce that the fraction of elastic energy converted to light is at least $3\times {10}^{-5}$.

We present a scheme for linear optical quantum computing using time-bin-encoded qubits in a single spatial mode. We show methods for single-qubit operations and heralded controlled-phase (cphase) gates, providing a sufficient set of operations for universal quantum computing with the Knill-Laflamme-Milburn [Nature (London) 409, 46 (2001)] scheme. Our protocol is suited to currently available photonic devices and ideally allows arbitrary numbers of qubits to be encoded in the same spatial mode, demonstrating the potential for time-frequency modes to dramatically increase the quantum information capacity of fixed spatial resources. As a test of our scheme, we demonstrate the first entirely single spatial mode implementation of a two-qubit quantum gate and show its operation with an average fidelity of $0.84\pm 0.07$.

Time-bin encoding is a robust form of optical quantum information, especially for transmission in optical fibers. To readout the information, the separation of the time bins must be larger than the detector time resolution, typically on the order of nanoseconds for photon counters. In the present work, we demonstrate a technique using a nonlinear interaction between chirped entangled time-bin photons and shaped laser pulses to perform projective measurements on arbitrary time-bin states with picosecond-scale separations. We demonstrate a tomographically complete set of time-bin qubit projective measurements and show the fidelity of operations is sufficiently high to violate the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt-Bell inequality by more than 6 standard deviations.

We study the collapse of rapidly rotating supermassive stars that may have formed in the early Universe. By self-consistently simulating the dynamics from the onset of collapse using three-dimensional general-relativistic hydrodynamics with fully dynamical spacetime evolution, we show that seed perturbations in the progenitor can lead to the formation of a system of two high-spin supermassive black holes, which inspiral and merge under the emission of powerful gravitational radiation that could be observed at redshifts $z\gtrsim 10$ with the DECIGO or Big Bang Observer gravitational-wave observatories, assuming supermassive stars in the mass range ${10}^4–{10}^6{M}_{\odot }$. The remnant is rapidly spinning with dimensionless spin $a^{*}=0.9$. The surrounding accretion disk contains $\sim 10\%$ of the initial mass.

Single crystals of novel orthorhombic (space group Pnnm) iron tetraboride ${\mathrm{FeB}}_4$ were synthesized at pressures above 8 GPa and high temperatures. Magnetic susceptibility and heat capacity measurements demonstrate bulk superconductivity below 2.9 K. The putative isotope effect on the superconducting critical temperature and the analysis of specific heat data indicate that the superconductivity in ${\mathrm{FeB}}_4$ is likely phonon mediated, which is rare for Fe-based superconductors. The discovered iron tetraboride is highly incompressible and has the nanoindentation hardness of 62(5) GPa; thus, it opens a new class of highly desirable materials combining advanced mechanical properties and superconductivity.

The U(1) gauge-Higgs model with two flavors of opposite charge and a chemical potential is mapped exactly to a dual representation where matter fields correspond to loops of flux and the gauge fields are represented by surfaces. The complex action problem of the conventional formulation at finite chemical potential $\mu$ is overcome in the dual representation, and the partition sum has only real and nonzero contributions. We simulate the model in the dual representation using a generalized worm algorithm, explore the phase diagram, and study condensation phenomena at finite $\mu$.

We propose and analyze a nanoengineered vortex array in a thin-film type-II superconductor as a magnetic lattice for ultracold atoms. This proposal addresses several of the key questions in the development of atomic quantum simulators. By trapping atoms close to the surface, tools of nanofabrication and structuring of lattices on the scale of few tens of nanometers become available with a corresponding benefit in energy scales and temperature requirements. This can be combined with the possibility of magnetic single site addressing and manipulation together with a favorable scaling of superconducting surface-induced decoherence.

We use a small Bose-Einstein condensate on an atom chip as an interferometric scanning probe to map out a microwave field near the chip surface with a few micrometers resolution. With the use of entanglement between the atoms, our interferometer overcomes the standard quantum limit of interferometry by 4 dB and maintains enhanced performance for interrogation times up to 10 ms. This corresponds to a microwave magnetic field sensitivity of $77\mathrm{pT}/\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}$ in a probe volume of $20\mu {\mathrm{m}}^3$. Quantum metrology with entangled atoms is useful in measurements with high spatial resolution, since the atom number in the probe volume is limited by collisional loss. High-resolution measurements of microwave near fields, as demonstrated here, are important for the development of integrated microwave circuits for quantum information processing and applications in communication technology.

The $Q_{\mathrm{weak}}$ experiment has measured the parity-violating asymmetry in $\overrightarrow{e}p$ elastic scattering at $Q^2=0.025(\mathrm{GeV}/c{)}^2$, employing $145\mu \mathrm{A}$ of 89% longitudinally polarized electrons on a 34.4 cm long liquid hydrogen target at Jefferson Lab. The results of the experiment’s commissioning run, constituting approximately 4% of the data collected in the experiment, are reported here. From these initial results, the measured asymmetry is $A_{ep}=-279\pm 35$ (stat) $\pm 31$ (syst) ppb, which is the smallest and most precise asymmetry ever measured in $\overrightarrow{e}p$ scattering. The small $Q^2$ of this experiment has made possible the first determination of the weak charge of the proton $Q_W^p$ by incorporating earlier parity-violating electron scattering (PVES) data at higher $Q^2$ to constrain hadronic corrections. The value of $Q_W^p$ obtained in this way is $Q_W^p(\mathrm{PVES})=0.064\pm 0.012$, which is in good agreement with the standard model prediction of $Q_W^p(\mathrm{SM})=0.0710\pm 0.0007$. When this result is further combined with the Cs atomic parity violation (APV) measurement, significant constraints on the weak charges of the up and down quarks can also be extracted. That $\mathrm{PVES}+\mathrm{APV}$ analysis reveals the neutron’s weak charge to be $Q_W^n(\mathrm{PVES}+\mathrm{APV})=-0.975\pm 0.010$.