Properties of the depleted Heisenberg spin ladder material series $({\mathrm{C}}_7{\mathrm{H}}_{10}\mathrm{N}{)}_2{\mathrm{Cu}}_{1-z}{\mathrm{Zn}}_z{\mathrm{Br}}_4$ have been studied by the combination of magnetic measurements and neutron spectroscopy. Disorder-induced degrees of freedom lead to a specific magnetic response, described in terms of emergent strongly interacting “spin island” objects. The structure and dynamics of the spin islands is studied by high-resolution inelastic neutron scattering. This allows us to determine their spatial shape and to observe their mutual interactions, manifested by strong spectral in-gap contributions.

To understand DNA elasticity at high forces ($F>30\mathrm{pN}$), its helical nature must be taken into account, as a coupling between twist and stretch. The prevailing model, the wormlike chain, was previously extended to include this twist-stretch coupling. Motivated by DNA’s charged nature, and the known effects of ionic charges on its elasticity, we set out to systematically measure the impact of buffer ionic conditions on twist-stretch coupling. After developing a robust fitting approach, we show, using our new data set, that DNA’s helical twist is stabilized at high concentrations of the magnesium divalent cation. DNA’s persistence length and stretch modulus are, on the other hand, relatively insensitive to the applied range of ionic strengths.

Biological systems are characterized by compartmentalization from the subcellular to the tissue level, and thus reactions in small volumes are ubiquitous in living systems. Under such conditions, statistical number fluctuations, which are commonly negligible in bulk reactions, can become dominant and lead to stochastic behavior. We present here a stochastic model of protein filament formation in small volumes. We show that two principal regimes emerge for the system behavior, a small fluctuation regime close to bulk behavior and a large fluctuation regime characterized by single rare events. Our analysis shows that in both regimes the reaction lag-time scales inversely with the system volume, unlike in bulk. Finally, we use our stochastic model to connect data from small-volume microdroplet experiments of amyloid formation to bulk aggregation rates, and show that digital analysis of an ensemble of protein aggregation reactions taking place under microconfinement provides an accurate measure of the rate of primary nucleation of protein aggregates, a process that has been challenging to quantify from conventional bulk experiments.

The susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) model is a canonical model for emerging disease outbreaks. Such outbreaks are naturally modeled as taking place on networks. A theoretical challenge in network epidemiology is the dynamic correlations coming from that if one node is infected, then its neighbors are likely to be infected. By combining two theoretical approaches—the heterogeneous mean-field theory and the effective degree method—we are able to include these correlations in an analytical solution of the SIS model. We derive accurate expressions for the average prevalence (fraction of infected) and epidemic threshold. We also discuss how to generalize the approach to a larger class of stochastic population models.

We present a new algorithm for classical simulation of quantum circuits over the $\text{Clifford}+T$ gate set. The runtime of the algorithm is polynomial in the number of qubits and the number of Clifford gates in the circuit but exponential in the number of $T$ gates. The exponential scaling is sufficiently mild that the algorithm can be used in practice to simulate medium-sized quantum circuits dominated by Clifford gates. The first demonstrations of fault-tolerant quantum circuits based on 2D topological codes are likely to be dominated by Clifford gates due to a high implementation cost associated with logical $T$ gates. Thus our algorithm may serve as a verification tool for near-term quantum computers which cannot in practice be simulated by other means. To demonstrate the power of the new method, we performed a classical simulation of a hidden shift quantum algorithm with 40 qubits, a few hundred Clifford gates, and nearly 50 $T$ gates.

The first experimental and theoretical evidence was provided for the non-negligible role of a diffusio-osmosis in the ion concentration polarization (ICP) layer, which had been reported to be in a high Peclet number regime. Under the assumption that the hydrated shells of cations were stripped out with the amplified electric field inside the ICP layer, its concentration profile possessed a steep concentration gradient at the stripped location. Since the concentration gradient drove a strong diffusio-osmosis, the combination of electro-osmotic and diffusio-osmotic slip velocity had a form of an anomalous nonmonotonic function with both a single- and multiple-cationic solution. A direct measurement of electrolytic concentrations around the layer quantitatively validated our new investigations. This non-negligible diffusio-osmotic contribution in a micro- and nanofluidic platform or porous medium would be essential for clarifying the fundamental insight of nanoscale electrokinetics as well as guiding the engineering of ICP-based electrochemical systems.

The spontaneous formation of magnetic islands is observed in driven, antiparallel magnetic reconnection on the Terrestrial Reconnection Experiment. We here provide direct experimental evidence that the plasmoid instability is active at the electron scale inside the ion diffusion region in a low collisional regime. The experiments show the island formation occurs at a smaller system size than predicted by extended magnetohydrodynamics or fully collisionless simulations. This more effective seeding of magnetic islands emphasizes their importance to reconnection in naturally occurring 3D plasmas.

We present a systematical theoretical study on the transport properties of an archetypal family of Hund’s metals, ${\mathrm{Sr}}_2{\mathrm{RuO}}_4$, ${\mathrm{Sr}}_3{\mathrm{Ru}}_2{\mathrm{O}}_7$, ${\mathrm{SrRuO}}_3$, and ${\mathrm{CaRuO}}_3$, within the combination of first principles density functional theory and dynamical mean field theory. The agreement between theory and experiments for optical conductivity and resistivity is good, which indicates that electron-electron scattering dominates the transport of ruthenates. We demonstrate that in the single-site dynamical mean field approach the transport properties of Hund’s metals fall into the scenario of “resilient quasiparticles.” We explain why the single layered compound ${\mathrm{Sr}}_2{\mathrm{RuO}}_4$ has a relative weak correlation with respect to its siblings, which corroborates its good metallicity.

The quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) phase is a two-dimensional bulk ferromagnetic insulator with a nonzero Chern number in the presence of spin-orbit coupling (SOC) but in the absence of applied magnetic fields. Associated metallic chiral edge states host dissipationless current transport in electronic devices. This intriguing QAH phase has recently been observed in magnetic impurity-doped topological insulators, albeit, at extremely low temperatures. Based on first-principles density functional calculations, here we predict that layered rhodium oxide ${\mathrm{K}}_{0.5}{\mathrm{RhO}}_2$ in the noncoplanar chiral antiferromagnetic state is an unconventional three-dimensional QAH insulator with a large band gap and a Néel temperature of a few tens of Kelvins. Furthermore, this unconventional QAH phase is revealed to be the exotic quantum topological Hall effect caused by nonzero scalar spin chirality due to the topological spin structure in the system and without the need of net magnetization and SOC.

Electrons in image-potential states on the surface of bulk helium represent a unique model system of a two-dimensional electron gas. Here, we investigate their properties in the extreme case of reduced film thickness: a monolayer of helium physisorbed on a single-crystalline (111)-oriented Cu surface. For this purpose we have utilized a customized setup for time-resolved two-photon photoemission at very low temperatures under ultrahigh vacuum conditions. We demonstrate that the highly polarizable metal substrate increases the binding energy of the first ($n=1$) image-potential state by more than 2 orders of magnitude as compared to the surface of liquid helium. An electron in this state is still strongly decoupled from the metal surface due to the large negative electron affinity of helium and we find that even 1 monolayer of helium increases its lifetime by 1 order of magnitude compared to the bare Cu(111) surface.

We demonstrate electrical mapping of tetragonal domains and electric field-induced twin walls in ${\mathrm{SrTiO}}_3$ as a function of temperature and gate bias utilizing the conducting ${\mathrm{LaAlO}}_3/{\mathrm{SrTiO}}_3$ interface and low-temperature scanning electron microscopy. Conducting twin walls appear below 105 K, and new twin patterns are observed after thermal cycling through the transition or on electric field gating. The nature of the twin walls is confirmed by calculating their intersection angles for different substrate orientations. Numerous walls formed when a large side- or back-gate voltage is applied are identified as field-induced ferroelectric twin walls in the paraelectric tetragonal matrix. The walls persist after switching off the electric field and on thermal cycling below 105 K. These observations point to a new type of ferroelectric functionality in ${\mathrm{SrTiO}}_3$, which could be exploited together with magnetism and superconductivity in a multifunctional context.

Understanding the resource consumption in distributed scenarios is one of the main goals of quantum information theory. A prominent example for such a scenario is the task of quantum state merging, where two parties aim to merge their tripartite quantum state parts. In standard quantum state merging, entanglement is considered to be an expensive resource, while local quantum operations can be performed at no additional cost. However, recent developments show that some local operations could be more expensive than others: it is reasonable to distinguish between local incoherent operations and local operations which can create coherence. This idea leads us to the task of incoherent quantum state merging, where one of the parties has free access to local incoherent operations only. In this case the resources of the process are quantified by pairs of entanglement and coherence. Here, we develop tools for studying this process and apply them to several relevant scenarios. While quantum state merging can lead to a gain of entanglement, our results imply that no merging procedure can gain entanglement and coherence at the same time. We also provide a general lower bound on the entanglement-coherence sum and show that the bound is tight for all pure states. Our results also lead to an incoherent version of Schumacher compression: in this case the compression rate is equal to the von Neumann entropy of the diagonal elements of the corresponding quantum state.

A stability analysis is presented for boundary-driven and out-of-equilibrium systems in the framework of the hydrodynamic macroscopic fluctuation theory. A Hamiltonian description is proposed which allows us to thermodynamically interpret the additivity principle. A necessary and sufficient condition for the validity of the additivity principle is obtained as an extension of the Le Chatelier principle. These stability conditions result from a diagonal quadratic form obtained using the cumulant generating function. This approach allows us to provide a proof for the stability of the weakly asymmetric exclusion process and to reduce the search for stability to the solution of two coupled linear ordinary differential equations instead of nonlinear partial differential equations. Additional potential applications of these results are discussed in the realm of classical and quantum systems.

The aLIGO detection of the black-hole binary GW150914 opens a new era for probing extreme gravity. Many gravity theories predict the emission of dipole gravitational radiation by binaries. This is excluded to high accuracy in binary pulsars, but entire classes of theories predict this effect predominantly (or only) in binaries involving black holes. Joint observations of GW150914-like systems by aLIGO and eLISA will improve bounds on dipole emission from black-hole binaries by 6 orders of magnitude relative to current constraints, provided that eLISA is not dramatically descoped.

Charm meson oscillations are observed in a time-dependent analysis of the ratio of $D^0\to K^{+}{\pi }^{-}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}$ to $D^0\to K^{-}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}{\pi }^{+}$ decay rates, using data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $3.0{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ recorded by the LHCb experiment. The measurements presented are sensitive to the phase-space averaged ratio of doubly Cabibbo-suppressed to Cabibbo-favored amplitudes $r_D^{K3\pi }$ and the product of the coherence factor $R_D^{K3\pi }$ and a charm mixing parameter $y_{K3\pi }^{\prime }$. The constraints measured are $r_D^{K3\pi }=(5.67\pm 0.12)\times {10}^{-2}$, which is the most precise determination to date, and $R_D^{K3\pi }{y}_{K3\pi }^{\prime }=(0.3\pm 1.8)\times {10}^{-3}$, which provides useful input for determinations of the CP-violating phase $\gamma$ in $B^{\pm }\to D{K}^{\pm }$, $D\to K^{\mp }{\pi }^{\pm }{\pi }^{\mp }{\pi }^{\pm }$ decays. The analysis also gives the most precise measurement of the $D^0\to K^{+}{\pi }^{-}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}$ branching fraction, and the first observation of $D^0$–${\overline{D}}^0$ oscillations in this decay mode, with a significance of 8.2 standard deviations.

We propose a new approach to the resummation of the transverse-momentum distribution of a high-mass color-singlet system in hadronic collisions. The resummation is performed in momentum space and is free of kinematic singularities at small transverse momentum. We derive a formula accurate at the next-to-next-to-leading-logarithmic level, and present the first matched predictions to next-to-next-to-leading order for Higgs-boson production in gluon fusion at the LHC. This method can be adapted to all observables featuring kinematic cancellations in the infrared region.