We report on magnetotransport studies of dual-gated, Bernal-stacked trilayer graphene (TLG) encapsulated in boron nitride crystals. We observe a quantum Hall effect staircase which indicates a complete lifting of the 12-fold degeneracy of the zeroth Landau level. As a function of perpendicular electric field, our data exhibit a sequence of phase transitions between all integer quantum Hall states in the filling factor interval $-8<\nu <0$. We develop a theoretical model and argue that, in contrast to monolayer and bilayer graphene, the observed Landau level splittings and quantum Hall phase transitions can be understood within a single-particle picture, but imply the presence of a charge density imbalance between the inner and outer layers of TLG, even at charge neutrality and zero transverse electric field. Our results indicate the importance of a previously unaccounted band structure parameter which, together with a more accurate estimate of the other tight-binding parameters, results in a significantly improved determination of the electronic and Landau level structure of TLG.

Ionization of atoms and molecules in strong laser fields is a fundamental process in many fields of research, especially in the emerging field of attosecond science. So far, demonstrably accurate data have only been acquired for atomic hydrogen (H), a species that is accessible to few investigators. Here, we present measurements of the ionization yield for argon, krypton, and xenon with percent-level accuracy, calibrated using H, in a laser regime widely used in attosecond science. We derive a transferable calibration standard for laser peak intensity, accurate to 1.3%, that is based on a simple reference curve. In addition, our measurements provide a much needed benchmark for testing models of ionization in noble-gas atoms, such as the widely employed single-active electron approximation.

Turing patterns in the chlorine dioxide-iodine-malonic acid reaction were modified through additions of sodium halide salt solutions. The range of wavelengths obtained is several times larger than in the previously reported literature. Pattern wavelength was observed to significantly increase with sodium bromide or sodium chloride. A transition to a uniform state was found at high halide concentrations. The observed experimental results are qualitatively well reproduced in numerical simulations with the Lengyel-Epstein model with an additional chemically realistic kinetic term to account for the added halide and an adjustment of the activator diffusion rate to allow for interhalogen formation.

The atomic structure of the disordered phase formed by oxygen on Ag(111) at low coverage is determined by a combination of low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy and density functional theory. We demonstrate that the previous assignment of the dark objects in STM to chemisorbed oxygen atoms is incorrect and incompatible with trefoil-like structures observed in atomic-resolution images in current work. In our model, each object is an oxidelike ring formed by six oxygen atoms around the vacancy in Ag(111).

We explore different Skyrmion types in the lowest Landau level of graphene at a filling factor $\nu =\pm 1$. In addition to the formation of spin and valley pseudospin Skyrmions, we show that another type of spin-valley entangled Skyrmions can be stabilized in graphene due to an approximate SU(4) spin-valley symmetry that is affected by sublattice symmetry-breaking terms. These Skyrmions have a clear signature in spin-resolved density measurements on the lattice scale, and we discuss the expected patterns for the different Skyrmion types.

We report a comparative study of magnetic field driven domain wall motion in thin films made of different magnetic materials for a wide range of field and temperature. The full thermally activated creep motion, observed below the depinning threshold, is shown to be described by a unique universal energy barrier function. Our findings should be relevant for other systems whose dynamics can be modeled by elastic interfaces moving on disordered energy landscapes.

The kinematic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (KSZ) effect—the Doppler boosting of cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons due to Compton scattering off free electrons with nonzero bulk velocity—probes the abundance and the distribution of baryons in the Universe. All KSZ measurements to date have explicitly required spectroscopic redshifts. Here, we implement a novel estimator for the KSZ—large-scale structure cross-correlation based on projected fields: it does not require redshift estimates for individual objects, allowing KSZ measurements from large-scale imaging surveys. We apply this estimator to cleaned CMB temperature maps constructed from Planck and WMAP data and a galaxy sample from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). We measure the KSZ effect at $3.8\sigma –4.5\sigma$ significance, depending on the use of additional WISE galaxy bias constraints. We verify that our measurements are robust to possible dust emission from the WISE galaxies. Assuming the standard $\mathrm{\Lambda }$ cold dark matter cosmology, we directly constrain $(f_b/0.158)(f_{\text{free}}/1.0)=1.48\pm 0.19$ (statistical error only) at redshift $z\approx 0.4$, where $f_b$ is the fraction of matter in baryonic form and $f_{\text{free}}$ is the free electron fraction. This is the tightest KSZ-derived constraint reported to date on these parameters. Astronomers have long known that baryons do not trace dark matter on $\sim$ kiloparsec scales and there has been strong evidence that galaxies are baryon poor. The consistency between the $f_b$ value found here and the values inferred from analyses of the primordial CMB and big bang nucleosynthesis verifies that baryons approximately trace the dark matter distribution down to $\sim$ megaparsec scales. While our projected-field estimator is already competitive with other KSZ approaches when applied to current data sets (because we are able to use the full-sky WISE photometric survey), it will yield enormous signal-to-noise ratios when applied to upcoming high-resolution, multifrequency CMB surveys.

In this work, we show the operational characterization to the divisibility of dynamical maps in terms of the distinguishability of quantum channels. It is proven that the distinguishability of any pair of quantum channels does not increase under divisible maps, in which the full hierarchy of divisibility is isomorphic to the structure of entanglement between system and environment. This shows that (i) channel distinguishability is the operational quantity signifying (detecting) divisibility (indivisibility) of dynamical maps and (ii) the decision problem for the divisibility of maps is as hard as the separability problem in entanglement theory. We also provide the information-theoretic characterization to the divisibility of maps with conditional min-entropy.

In this Letter, we report the observational constraints on the Hu-Sawicki $f(R)$ theory derived from weak lensing peak abundances, which are closely related to the mass function of massive halos. In comparison with studies using optical or x-ray clusters of galaxies, weak lensing peak analyses have the advantages of not relying on mass-baryonic observable calibrations. With observations from the Canada-France-Hawaii-Telescope Lensing Survey, our peak analyses give rise to a tight constraint on the model parameter $|f_{R0}|$ for $n=1$. The 95% C.L. is ${\log }_{10}|f_{R0}|<-4.82$ given WMAP9 priors on (${\mathrm{\Omega }}_m$, $A_s$). With Planck15 priors, the corresponding result is ${\log }_{10}|f_{R0}|<-5.16$.

With the discovery of the binary-black-hole (BBH) coalescence GW150914 the era of gravitational-wave (GW) astronomy has started. It has recently been shown that BBH with masses comparable to or higher than GW150914 would be visible in the Evolved Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (eLISA) band a few years before they finally merge in the band of ground-based detectors. This would allow for premerger electromagnetic alerts, dramatically increasing the chances of a joint detection, if BBHs are indeed luminous in the electromagnetic band. In this Letter we explore a quite different aspect of multiband GW astronomy, and verify if, and to what extent, measurement of masses and sky position with eLISA could improve parameter estimation and tests of general relativity with ground-based detectors. We generate a catalog of 200 BBHs and find that having prior information from eLISA can reduce the uncertainty in the measurement of source distance and primary black hole spin by up to factor of 2 in ground-based GW detectors. The component masses estimate from eLISA will not be refined by the ground based detectors, whereas joint analysis will yield precise characterization of the newly formed black hole and improve consistency tests of general relativity.

We study a system of three photons in an atomic medium coupled to Rydberg states near the conditions of electromagnetically induced transparency. Based on the analytical analysis of the microscopic set of equations in the far-detuned regime, the effective three-body interaction for these Rydberg polaritons is derived. For slow light polaritons, we find a strong three-body repulsion with the remarkable property that three polaritons can become essentially noninteracting at short distances. This analysis allows us to derive the influence of the three-body repulsion on bound states and correlation functions of photons propagating through a one-dimensional atomic cloud.

We study photonic band gap formation in two-dimensional high-refractive-index disordered materials where the dielectric structure is derived from packing disks in real and reciprocal space. Numerical calculations of the photonic density of states demonstrate the presence of a band gap for all polarizations in both cases. We find that the band gap width is controlled by the increase in positional correlation inducing short-range order and hyperuniformity concurrently. Our findings suggest that the optimization of short-range order, in particular the tailoring of Bragg scattering at the isotropic Brillouin zone, are of key importance for designing disordered PBG materials.