In this Letter, we present photoluminescence measurements with different excitation energies on single-layer ${\mathrm{MoS}}_2$ and ${\mathrm{MoSe}}_2$ in order to examine the resonance behavior of the conservation of circular polarization in these transition metal dichalcogenides. We find that the circular polarization of the emitted light is conserved to 100% in ${\mathrm{MoS}}_2$ and 84%/79% ($A/A^{-}$ peaks) in ${\mathrm{MoSe}}_2$ close to resonance. The values for ${\mathrm{MoSe}}_2$ surpass any previously reported value. However, in contrast to previous predictions, the degree of circular polarization decreases clearly at energies less than the two-phonon longitudinal acoustic phonon energy above the resonance. Our findings indicate that at least two competing processes underly the depolarization of the emission in single-layer transition metal dichalcogenides.

We study the effect of point-defect chalcogen vacancies on the optical properties of monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides using ab initio $GW$ and Bethe-Salpeter equation calculations. We find that chalcogen vacancies introduce unoccupied in-gap states and occupied resonant defect states within the quasiparticle continuum of the valence band. These defect states give rise to a number of strongly bound defect excitons and hybridize with excitons of the pristine system, reducing the valley-selective circular dichroism. Our results suggest a pathway to tune spin-valley polarization and other optical properties through defect engineering.

We show that Britto-Cachazo-Feng-Witten (BCFW) recursion relations can be used to compute all tree level scattering amplitudes in terms of $2\to 2$ scattering amplitude in $\mathrm{U}(N)$ $\mathcal{N}=2$ Chern-Simons (CS) theory coupled to matter in the fundamental representation. As a by-product, we also obtain a recursion relation for the CS theory coupled to regular fermions, even though in this case standard BCFW deformations do not have a good asymptotic behavior. Moreover, at large $N$, $2\to 2$ scattering can be computed exactly to all orders in ’t Hooft coupling as was done in earlier works by some of the authors. In particular, for $\mathcal{N}=2$ theory, it was shown that $2\to 2$ scattering is tree level exact to all orders except in the anyonic channel [K. Inbasekar et al., J. High Energy Phys. 10 (2015) 176], where it gets renormalized by a simple function of ’t Hooft coupling. This suggests that it may be possible to compute the all loop exact result for arbitrary higher-point scattering amplitudes at large $N$.

We demonstrate an angular high-harmonic spectroscopy method to probe the spinning dynamics of a molecular rotation wave packet in real time. With the excitation of two time-delayed, polarization-skewed pump pulses, the molecular ensemble is impulsively kicked to rotate unidirectionally, which is subsequently irradiated by another delayed probe pulse for high-order harmonic generation (HHG). The spatiotemporal evolution of the molecular rotation wave packet is visualized from the time-dependent angular distributions of the HHG yields and frequency shift measured at various polarization directions and time delays of the probe pulse. The observed frequency shift in HHG is demonstrated to arise from the nonadiabatic effect induced by molecular spinning. Different from the previous spectroscopic and Coulomb explosion imaging techniques, the angular high-harmonic spectroscopy method can reveal additionally the electronic structure and multiple orbitals of the sampled molecule. All the experimental findings are well reproduced by numerical simulations. Further extension of this method would provide a powerful tool for probing complex polyatomic molecules with HHG spectroscopy.

We report on the nonadiabatic offset of the initial electron momentum distribution in the plane of polarization upon single ionization of argon by strong field tunneling and show how to experimentally control the degree of nonadiabaticity. Two-color counter- and corotating fields (390 and 780 nm) are compared to show that the nonadiabatic offset strongly depends on the temporal evolution of the laser electric field. We introduce a simple method for the direct access to the nonadiabatic offset using two-color counter- and corotating fields. Further, for a single-color circularly polarized field at 780 nm, we show that the radius of the experimentally observed donutlike distribution increases for increasing momentum in the light propagation direction. Our observed initial momentum offsets are well reproduced by the strong-field approximation. A mechanistic picture is introduced that links the measured nonadiabatic offset to the magnetic quantum number of virtually populated intermediate states.

The average density of states in a disordered three-dimensional Weyl system is discussed in the case of a continuous distribution of random scattering. Our results clearly indicate that the average density of states does not vanish, reflecting the absence of a critical point for a metal-insulator transition. This calculation supports recent suggestions of an avoided quantum critical point in the disordered three-dimensional Weyl semimetal. However, the effective density of states can be very small such that the saddle-approximation with a vanishing density of states might be valid for practical cases.

We report the experimental realization of a cross-linked chiral ladder with ultracold fermionic atoms in a 1D optical lattice. In the ladder, the legs are formed by the orbital states of the optical lattice and the complex interleg links are generated by the orbital-changing Raman transitions that are driven by a moving lattice potential superimposed onto the optical lattice. The effective magnetic flux per ladder plaquette is tuned by the spatial periodicity of the moving lattice, and the chiral currents are observed from the asymmetric momentum distributions of the orbitals. The effect of the complex cross-links is demonstrated in quench dynamics by measuring the momentum dependence of the interorbital coupling strength. We discuss the topological phase transition of the chiral ladder system for the variations of the complex cross-links.

Operationally accessible entanglement in bipartite systems of indistinguishable particles could be reduced due to restrictions on the allowed local operations as a result of particle number conservation. In order to quantify this effect, Wiseman and Vaccaro [Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 097902 (2003)] introduced an operational measure of the von Neumann entanglement entropy. Motivated by advances in measuring Rényi entropies in quantum many-body systems subject to conservation laws, we derive a generalization of the operationally accessible entanglement that is both computationally and experimentally measurable. Using the Widom theorem, we investigate its scaling with the size of a spatial subregion for free fermions and find a logarithmically violated area law scaling, similar to the spatial entanglement entropy, with at most a double-log leading-order correction. A modification of the correlation matrix method confirms our findings in systems of up to $10^5$ particles.

Secret sharing is a conventional technique for realizing secure communications in information networks, where a dealer distributes to $n$ players a secret, which can only be decoded through the cooperation of $k$ ($n/2<k\le n$) players. In recent years, quantum resources have been employed to enhance security of secret sharing, which has been named quantum secret sharing (QSS). A multipartite bound entanglement (BE) state of an optical field, due to its special entanglement features, can be used in quantum networks to improve security and flexibility of communication. We design and experimentally demonstrate a QSS protocol, where the dealer modulates a secret on a four-partite BE state and then distributes the submodes of the BE state to four spatially separated players. The presented QSS scheme has the capability to protect secrets from eavesdropping and dishonest players, because a nonlocal and deterministic BE state is shared among four authorized players.

Entanglement not only plays a crucial role in quantum technologies, but is key to our understanding of quantum correlations in many-body systems. However, in an experiment, the only way of measuring entanglement in a generic mixed state is through reconstructive quantum tomography, requiring an exponential number of measurements in the system size. Here, we propose a machine-learning-assisted scheme to measure the entanglement between arbitrary subsystems of size $N_A$ and $N_B$, with $\mathcal{O}(N_A+N_B)$ measurements, and without any prior knowledge of the state. The method exploits a neural network to learn the unknown, nonlinear function relating certain measurable moments and the logarithmic negativity. Our procedure will allow entanglement measurements in a wide variety of systems, including strongly interacting many-body systems in both equilibrium and nonequilibrium regimes.

Quantum resources can improve communication complexity problems (CCPs) beyond their classical constraints. One quantum approach is to share entanglement and create correlations violating a Bell inequality, which can then assist classical communication. A second approach is to resort solely to the preparation, transmission, and measurement of a single quantum system, in other words, quantum communication. Here, we show the advantages of the latter over the former in high-dimensional Hilbert space. We focus on a family of CCPs, based on facet Bell inequalities, study the advantage of high-dimensional quantum communication, and realize such quantum communication strategies using up to ten-dimensional systems. The experiment demonstrates, for growing dimension, an increasing advantage over quantum strategies based on Bell inequality violation. For sufficiently high dimensions, quantum communication also surpasses the limitations of the postquantum Bell correlations obeying only locality in the macroscopic limit. We find that the advantages are tied to the use of measurements that are not rank-one projective, and provide an experimental semi-device-independent falsification of such measurements in Hilbert space dimension six.

We compute the persistence for the $2D$-diffusion equation with random initial condition, i.e., the probability $p_0(t)$ that the diffusion field, at a given point $\mathbf{x}$ in the plane, has not changed sign up to time $t$. For large $t$, we show that $p_0(t)\sim t^{-\theta (2)}$ with $\theta (2)=3/16$. Using the connection between the $2D$-diffusion equation and Kac random polynomials, we show that the probability $q_0(n)$ that Kac’s polynomials, of (even) degree $n$, have no real root decays, for large $n$, as $q_0(n)\sim n^{-3/4}$. We obtain this result by using yet another connection with the truncated orthogonal ensemble of random matrices. This allows us to compute various properties of the zero crossings of the diffusing field, equivalently of the real roots of Kac’s polynomials. Finally, we unveil a precise connection with a fourth model: the semi-infinite Ising spin chain with Glauber dynamics at zero temperature.

We study Bose-Einstein condensation and the formation of Bose stars in virialized dark matter halos and miniclusters by universal gravitational interactions. We prove that this phenomenon does occur and it is described by a kinetic equation. We give an expression for the condensation time. Our results suggest that Bose stars may form kinetically in mainstream dark matter models such as invisible QCD axions and fuzzy dark matter.

This Letter presents a normalized differential cross-section measurement in a fiducial phase-space region where interference effects between top-quark pair production and associated production of a single top quark with a $W$ boson and a $b$-quark are significant. Events with exactly two leptons ($ee$, $\mu \mu$, or $e\mu$) and two $b$-tagged jets that satisfy a multiparticle invariant mass requirement are selected from $36.1{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ of proton-proton collision data taken at $\sqrt{s}=13\mathrm{TeV}$ with the ATLAS detector at the LHC in 2015 and 2016. The results are compared with predictions from simulations using various strategies for the interference. The standard prescriptions for interference modeling are significantly different from each other but are within $2\sigma$ of the data. State-of-the-art predictions that naturally incorporate interference effects provide the best description of the data in the measured region of phase space most sensitive to these effects. These results provide an important constraint on interference models and will guide future model development and tuning.

We propose how to create and manipulate one-way nonclassical light via photon blockade in rotating nonlinear devices. We refer to this effect as nonreciprocal photon blockade (PB). Specifically, we show that in a spinning Kerr resonator, PB happens when the resonator is driven in one direction but not the other. This occurs because of the Fizeau drag, leading to a full split of the resonance frequencies of the countercirculating modes. Different types of purely quantum correlations, such as single- and two-photon blockades, can emerge in different directions in a well-controlled manner, and the transition from PB to photon-induced tunneling is revealed as well. Our work opens up a new route to achieve quantum nonreciprocal devices, which are crucial elements in chiral quantum technologies or topological photonics.

Small flexible fibers in a turbulent flow are found to be as straight as stiff rods most of the time. This is due to the cooperative action of flexural rigidity and fluid stretching. However, fibers might bend and buckle when they tumble and experience a strong enough local compression. Such events are similar to an activation process, where the role of temperature is played by the inverse of Young’s modulus. Numerical simulations show that buckling occurs very intermittently in time. This results from unexpected long-range Lagrangian correlations of the turbulent shear.