We demonstrate optical spin polarization of the neutrally charged silicon-vacancy defect in diamond (${\mathrm{SiV}}^0$), an $S=1$ defect which emits with a zero-phonon line at 946 nm. The spin polarization is found to be most efficient under resonant excitation, but nonzero at below-resonant energies. We measure an ensemble spin coherence time $T_2>100\mu \mathrm{s}$ at low-temperature, and a spin relaxation limit of $T_1>25\mathrm{s}$. Optical spin-state initialization around 946 nm allows independent initialization of ${\mathrm{SiV}}^0$ and ${\mathrm{NV}}^{-}$ within the same optically addressed volume, and ${\mathrm{SiV}}^0$ emits within the telecoms down-conversion band to 1550 nm: when combined with its high Debye-Waller factor, our initial results suggest that ${\mathrm{SiV}}^0$ is a promising candidate for a long-range quantum communication technology.

We consider the response of the density of a fermion ensemble to an applied weak static magnetic field. It is known that, for a noninteracting Fermi gas, this response is fully characterized by the Fermi volume and the Berry curvature on the Fermi surface. Here we show the same result holds for interacting fermions, including a Fermi liquid and a non-Fermi liquid, to all orders in perturbation theory. Our result relies only on the assumption of a well-defined Fermi surface and the general analytic properties of quantum field theory, and is completely model independent.

Spin excitations in the overdoped high temperature superconductors ${\mathrm{Tl}}_2{\mathrm{Ba}}_2{\mathrm{CuO}}_{6+\delta }$ and $(\mathrm{Bi},\mathrm{Pb}{)}_2(\mathrm{Sr},\mathrm{La}{)}_2{\mathrm{CuO}}_{6+\delta }$ were investigated by resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS) as functions of doping and detuning of the incoming photon energy above the $\mathrm{Cu}\text{−}{L}_3$ absorption peak. The RIXS spectra at optimal doping are dominated by a paramagnon feature with peak energy independent of photon energy, similar to prior results on underdoped cuprates. Beyond optimal doping, the RIXS data indicate a sharp crossover to a regime with a strong contribution from incoherent particle-hole excitations whose maximum shows a fluorescencelike shift upon detuning. The spectra of both compound families are closely similar, and their salient features are reproduced by exact-diagonalization calculations of the single-band Hubbard model on a finite cluster. The results are discussed in the light of recent transport experiments indicating a quantum phase transition near optimal doping.

In systems having an anisotropic electronic structure, such as the layered materials graphite, graphene, and cuprates, impulsive light excitation can coherently stimulate specific bosonic modes, with exotic consequences for the emergent electronic properties. Here we show that the population of $E_{2g}$ phonons in the multiband superconductor ${\mathrm{MgB}}_2$ can be selectively enhanced by femtosecond laser pulses, leading to a transient control of the number of carriers in the $\sigma$-electronic subsystem. The nonequilibrium evolution of the material optical constants is followed in the spectral region sensitive to both the $a$- and $c$-axis plasma frequencies and modeled theoretically, revealing the details of the $\sigma \text{−}\pi$ interband scattering mechanism in ${\mathrm{MgB}}_2$.

The emergence of $1/f$ noise from an aggregate of $1/f^2$ noise signals in magnetic nanodots undergoing random telegraph oscillations in their magnetization is reported. This emergence is found to occur with as few as two random telegraph noise (RTN) oscillators producing $1/f$ noise across two decades of frequency bandwidth, and with fewer than ten such oscillators producing $1/f$ noise across over four decades. The RTN fluctuations observed are as small as one part in 10 000 compared to dc voltage signals but still generate easily observable $1/f$ noise at up to ${10}^5\mathrm{Hz}$. These observations may explain the historic difficulty in identifying RTN oscillator sources of $1/f$ noise.

We propose that resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS) is an effective probe of the fractionalized excitations in three-dimensional (3D) Kitaev spin liquids. While the non-spin-conserving RIXS responses are dominated by the gauge-flux excitations and reproduce the inelastic-neutron-scattering response, the spin-conserving (SC) RIXS response picks up the Majorana-fermion excitations and detects whether they are gapless at Weyl points, nodal lines, or Fermi surfaces. As a signature of symmetry fractionalization, the SC RIXS response is suppressed around the $\mathrm{\Gamma }$ point. On a technical level, we calculate the exact SC RIXS responses of the Kitaev models on the hyperhoneycomb, stripyhoneycomb, hyperhexagon, and hyperoctagon lattices, arguing that our main results also apply to generic 3D Kitaev spin liquids beyond these exactly solvable models.

The directed-loop quantum Monte Carlo method is generalized to the case of retarded interactions. Using the path integral, fermion-boson or spin-boson models are mapped to actions with retarded interactions by analytically integrating out the bosons. This yields an exact algorithm that combines the highly efficient loop updates available in the stochastic series expansion representation with the advantages of avoiding a direct sampling of the bosons. The application to electron-phonon models reveals that the method overcomes the previously detrimental issues of long autocorrelation times and exponentially decreasing acceptance rates. For example, the resulting dramatic speedup allows us to investigate the Peierls quantum phase transition on chains of up to 1282 sites.

Aggregates of interacting molecules can exhibit electronically excited states that are coherently delocalized over many molecules. This can lead to a strong enhancement of the fluorescence decay rate which is referred to as superradiance (SR). To date, the temperature dependence of SR is described by a $1/T$ law. Using an epitaxial dye layer and a Frenkel-exciton based model we provide both experimental and theoretical evidence that significant deviations from the $1/T$ behavior can occur for brick-wall-type aggregates of finite size leading even to a maximum of the SR at finite temperature. This is due to the presence of low energy excitations of weak or zero transition strength. These findings are relevant for designing light-emitting molecular materials.

We study exciton-polariton nonlinear optical fluids in the high momentum waveguide regime for the first time. We demonstrate the formation of dark solitons with the expected dependence of width on fluid density for both main classes of soliton-forming fluid defects. The results are well described by numerical modeling of the fluid propagation. We deduce a continuous wave nonlinearity more than ten times that on picosecond time scales, arising due to interaction with the exciton reservoir.

We present a study of Andreev quantum dots fabricated with small-diameter (30 nm) Si-doped InAs nanowires where the Fermi level can be tuned across a mobility edge separating localized states from delocalized states. The transition to the insulating phase is identified by a drop in the amplitude and width of the excited levels and is found to have remarkable consequences on the spectrum of superconducting subgap resonances. While at deeply localized levels only quasiparticle cotunneling is observed, for slightly delocalized levels Shiba bound states form and a parity-changing quantum phase transition is identified by a crossing of the bound states at zero energy. Finally, in the metallic regime, single Andreev resonances are observed.

We demonstrate a single atom maser consisting of a semiconductor double quantum dot (DQD) that is embedded in a high-quality-factor microwave cavity. A finite bias drives the DQD out of equilibrium, resulting in sequential single electron tunneling and masing. We develop a dynamic tuning protocol that allows us to controllably increase the time-averaged repumping rate of the DQD at a fixed level detuning, and quantitatively study the transition through the masing threshold. We further examine the crossover from incoherent to coherent emission by measuring the photon statistics across the masing transition. The observed threshold behavior is in agreement with an existing single atom maser theory when small corrections from lead emission are taken into account.

We demonstrate that the enhanced segmental motion commonly observed in spin cast thin polymer films is a nonequilibrium phenomenon. In the presence of nonrepulsive interfaces, prolonged annealing in the liquid state allows, in fact, recovering bulk segmental mobility. Our measurements prove that, while the fraction of unrelaxed chains increases upon nanoconfinement, the dynamics of equilibration is almost unaffected by the film thickness. We show that the rate of equilibration of nanoconfined chains does not depend on the structural relaxation process but on the feasibility to form an adsorbed layer. We propose that the equilibration of the thin polymer melts is driven by the slow relaxation of interfacial chains upon irreversible adsorption on the confining walls.

We use dedicated microfluidic devices to expose soft hydrogel particles to a rapid change in the externally applied osmotic pressure and observe a surprising, nonmonotonic response: After an initial rapid compression, the particle slowly reswells to approximately its original size. We theoretically account for this behavior, enabling us to extract important material properties from a single microfluidic experiment, including the compressive modulus, the gel permeability, and the diffusivity of the osmolyte inside the gel. We expect our approach to be relevant to applications such as controlled release, chromatography, and responsive materials.

The Hilbert space dimension of a quantum system is the most basic quantifier of its information content. Lower bounds on the dimension can be certified in a device-independent way, based only on observed statistics. We highlight that some such “dimension witnesses” capture only the presence of systems of some dimension, which in a sense is trivial, not the capacity of performing information processing on them, which is the point of experimental efforts to control high-dimensional systems. In order to capture this aspect, we introduce the notion of irreducible dimension of a quantum behavior. This dimension can be certified, and we provide a witness for irreducible dimension four.

Many values of the observed conductivity percolation exponent $t$ cannot be explained by the classical universal theory or by the existing nonuniversal theories. In particular, the $1.3\le t\le 4.0$ clustering of $t$ values, in both composite materials and porous media has not been accounted for. In this work we were concerned with a pseudononuniversal percolation behavior that, unlike the genuine nonuniversal behavior, explains the statistics of the experimentally observed percolation conductivity exponents in continuum systems.

We establish a general connection between ballistic and diffusive transport in systems where the ballistic contribution in the canonical ensemble vanishes. A lower bound on the Green-Kubo diffusion constant is derived in terms of the curvature of the ideal transport coefficient, the Drude weight, with respect to the filling parameter. As an application, we explicitly determine the lower bound on the high-temperature diffusion constant in the anisotropic spin-$1/2$ Heisenberg chain for anisotropy parameters $\mathrm{\Delta }\ge 1$, thus, settling the question of whether or not the transport is subdiffusive. Additionally, the lower bound is shown to saturate the diffusion constant for a certain classical integrable model.

Charged-current ${\nu }_{\mu }$ interactions on carbon, iron, and lead with a final state hadronic system of one or more protons with zero mesons are used to investigate the influence of the nuclear environment on quasielasticlike interactions. The transferred four-momentum squared to the target nucleus, $Q^2$, is reconstructed based on the kinematics of the leading proton, and differential cross sections versus $Q^2$ and the cross-section ratios of iron, lead, and carbon to scintillator are measured for the first time in a single experiment. The measurements show a dependence on the atomic number. While the quasielasticlike scattering on carbon is compatible with predictions, the trends exhibited by scattering on iron and lead favor a prediction with intranuclear rescattering of hadrons accounted for by a conventional particle cascade treatment. These measurements help discriminate between different models of both initial state nucleons and final state interactions used in the neutrino oscillation experiments.

Inner-valence ionized states of atoms and molecules live shorter if these species are embedded in an environment due to the possibility for ultrafast deexcitation known as interatomic Coulombic decay (ICD). In this Letter we show that the lifetime of these ICD active states decreases further when a bridge atom is in proximity to the two interacting monomers. This novel mechanism, termed superexchange ICD, is an electronic correlation effect driven by the efficient energy transfer via virtual states of the bridge atom. The superexchange ICD is discussed in detail on the example of the NeHeNe trimer. We demonstrate that the decay width of the ${\mathrm{Ne}}^{+}(2s^{-1}){{}^2\mathrm{\Sigma }}_g^{+}$ resonance increases 6 times in the presence of the He atom at a distance of 4 Å between the two Ne atoms. Using a simple model, we provide a qualitative explanation of the superexchange ICD and we derive analytical expressions for the dependence of the decay width on the distance between the neon atoms.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel approach to a heralded single-photon source based on spectral multiplexing (SMUX) and feed-forward-based spectral manipulation of photons created by means of spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a periodically poled ${\mathrm{LiNbO}}_3$ crystal. As a proof of principle, we show that our three-mode SMUX increases the heralded single-photon rate compared to that of the individual modes without compromising the quality of the emitted single photons. We project that by adding further modes, our approach can lead to a deterministic single-photon source.