Proton migration is a ubiquitous process in chemical reactions related to biology, combustion, and catalysis. Thus, the ability to manipulate the movement of nuclei with tailored light within a hydrocarbon molecule holds promise for far-reaching applications. Here, we demonstrate the steering of hydrogen migration in simple hydrocarbons, namely, acetylene and allene, using waveform-controlled, few-cycle laser pulses. The rearrangement dynamics is monitored using coincident 3D momentum imaging spectroscopy and described with a widely applicable quantum-dynamical model. Our observations reveal that the underlying control mechanism is due to the manipulation of the phases in a vibrational wave packet by the intense off-resonant laser field.

In the angle-averaged excitation and decay spectra of molecules, vibronic coupling may induce the usually weak dipole-forbidden transitions by the excitation intensity borrowing mechanism. The present complementary theoretical and experimental study of the resonant Auger decay of core-to-Rydberg excited ${\mathrm{CH}}_4$ and Ne demonstrates that vibronic coupling plays a decisive role in the formation of the angle-resolved spectra by additionally involving the decay rate borrowing mechanism. Thereby, we propose that the angle-resolved Auger spectroscopy can in general provide very insightful information on the strength of the vibronic coupling.

We study three-body recombination of ${\mathrm{Ba}}^{+}+\mathrm{Rb}+\mathrm{Rb}$ in the mK regime where a single ${{}^{138}\mathrm{Ba}}^{+}$ ion in a Paul trap is immersed into a cloud of ultracold ${}^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ atoms. We measure the energy dependence of the three-body rate coefficient $k_3$ and compare the results to the theoretical prediction, $k_3\propto E_{\mathrm{col}}^{-3/4}$, where $E_{\mathrm{col}}$ is the collision energy. We find agreement if we assume that the nonthermal ion energy distribution is determined by at least two different micromotion induced energy scales. Furthermore, using classical trajectory calculations we predict how the median binding energy of the formed molecules scales with the collision energy. Our studies give new insights into the kinetics of an ion immersed in an ultracold atom cloud and yield important prospects for atom-ion experiments targeting the $s$-wave regime.

Recent investigations have revealed that ion transport from aqueous electrolytes to ion-selective surfaces is subject to electroconvective instability that stems from coupling of hydrodynamics with electrostatic forces. These systems inherently involve fluid density variation set by salinity gradients. However, the coupling between the buoyancy effects and electroconvective instability has not yet been investigated although a wide range of electrochemical systems are naturally prone to these interplaying effects. In this study we thoroughly examine the interplay of gravitational convection and chaotic electroconvection. Our results reveal that buoyant forces can significantly influence the transport rates, otherwise set by electroconvection, when the Rayleigh number Ra of the system exceeds a value $\mathrm{Ra}\sim 1000$. We show that buoyancy forces can significantly alter the flow patterns in these systems. When the buoyancy acts in the stabilizing direction, it limits the extent of penetration of electroconvection, but without eliminating it. When the buoyancy destabilizes the flow, it alters the electroconvective patterns by introducing upward and downward fingers of respectively light and heavy fluids.

Trion states of three correlated particles (e.g., two electrons and one hole) are essential to understand the optical spectra of doped or gated nanostructures, like carbon nanotubes or transition-metal dichalcogenides. We develop a theoretical many-body description for such correlated states using an ab initio approach. It can be regarded as an extension of the widely used $GW$ method and Bethe-Salpeter equation, thus allowing for a direct comparison with excitons. We apply this method to a semiconducting (8,0) carbon nanotube, and find that the lowest optically active trions are redshifted by $\sim 130\mathrm{meV}$ compared to the excitons, confirming experimental findings for similar tubes. Moreover, our method provides detailed insights in the physical nature of trion states. In the prototypical carbon nanotube we find a variety of different excitations, discuss the spectra, energy compositions, and correlated wave functions.

We report the first observation of the coexistence of a distinct midgap state and a Mott state in undoped and their evolution in electron and hole-doped ambipolar ${\mathrm{Y}}_{0.38}{\mathrm{La}}_{0.62}({\mathrm{Ba}}_{0.82}{\mathrm{La}}_{0.18}{)}_2{\mathrm{Cu}}_3{\mathrm{O}}_y$ films using spectroscopic ellipsometry and x-ray absorption spectroscopies at the O $K$ and Cu $L_{3,2}$ edges. Supported by theoretical calculations, the midgap state is shown to originate from antiferromagnetic correlation. Surprisingly, while the magnetic state collapses and its correlation strength weakens with dopings, the Mott state in contrast moves toward a higher energy and its correlation strength increases. Our result provides important clues to the mechanism of electronic correlation strengths and superconductivity in cuprates.

We study the entanglement entropy and entanglement spectrum of the paradigmatic Bose-Hubbard model, describing strongly correlated bosons on a lattice. The use of a controlled approximation—the slave-boson approach—allows us to study entanglement in all regimes of the model (and, most importantly, across its superfluid–Mott-insulator transition) at a minimal cost. We find that the area-law scaling of entanglement—verified in all the phases—exhibits a sharp singularity at the transition. The singularity is greatly enhanced when the transition is crossed at fixed, integer filling, due to a richer entanglement spectrum containing an additional gapless mode, which descends from the amplitude (Higgs) mode of the global excitation spectrum—while this mode remains gapped at the generic (commensurate-incommensurate) transition with variable filling. Hence, the entanglement properties contain a unique signature of the two different forms of bosonic criticality exhibited by the Bose-Hubbard model.

Quantum mechanics predicts microscopic phenomena with undeniable success. Nevertheless, current theoretical and experimental efforts still do not yield conclusive evidence that there is or is not a fundamental limitation on the possibility to observe quantum phenomena at the macroscopic scale. This question prompted several experimental efforts producing quantum superpositions of large quantum states in light or matter. We report on the observation of quantum correlations, revealed using an entanglement witness, between a single photon and an atomic ensemble of billions of ions frozen in a crystal. The matter part of the state involves the superposition of two macroscopically distinguishable solid-state components composed of several tens of atomic excitations. Assuming the insignificance of the time ordering our experiment indirectly shows light-matter micro-macro entanglement. Our approach leverages from quantum memory techniques and could be used in other systems to expand the size of quantum superpositions in matter.

We use the soft-collinear bootstrap to construct the 8-loop integrand for the 4-point amplitude and 4-stress-tensor correlation function in planar maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. Both have a unique representation in terms of planar, conformal integrands grouped according to a hidden symmetry discovered for correlation functions. The answer we find exposes a fundamental tension between manifest locality and planarity with manifest conformality not seen at lower loops. For the first time, the integrand must include terms that are finite even on-shell and terms that are divergent even off-shell (so-called pseudoconformal integrals). We describe these novelties and their consequences in this Letter, and we make the full correlator and amplitude available as part of the Supplemental Material.

Processes involving narrow jets receive perturbative corrections enhanced by logarithms of the jet opening angle and the ratio of the energies inside and outside the jets. Analyzing cone-jet processes in effective field theory, we find that in addition to soft and collinear fields their description requires degrees of freedom that are simultaneously soft and collinear to the jets. These collinear-soft particles can resolve individual collinear partons, leading to a complicated multi-Wilson-line structure of the associated operators at higher orders. Our effective field theory provides, for the first time, a factorization formula for a cone-jet process, which fully separates the physics at different energy scales. Its renormalization-group equations control all logarithmically enhanced higher-order terms, in particular also the nonglobal logarithms.

The formalism based on factorization and nuclear spectral functions has been generalized to treat transition matrix elements involving two-nucleon currents, whose contribution to the nuclear electromagnetic response in the transverse channel is known to be significant. We report the results of calculations of the inclusive electron-carbon cross section, showing that the inclusion of processes involving two-nucleon currents appreciably improves the agreement between theory and data in the dip region, between the quasielastic and $\mathrm{\Delta }$-production peaks. The relation to approaches based on the independent particle of the nucleus and the implications for the analysis of flux-integrated neutrino-nucleus cross sections are discussed.

A shear Alfvén wave parametric instability is observed for the first time in the laboratory. When a single finite $\omega /{\mathrm{\Omega }}_i$ kinetic Alfvén wave (KAW) is launched in the Large Plasma Device above a threshold amplitude, three daughter modes are produced. These daughter modes have frequencies and parallel wave numbers that are consistent with copropagating KAW sidebands and a low frequency nonresonant mode. The observed process is parametric in nature, with the frequency of the daughter modes varying as a function of pump wave amplitude. The daughter modes are spatially localized on a gradient of the pump wave magnetic field amplitude in the plane perpendicular to the background field, suggesting that perpendicular nonlinear forces (and therefore $k_{\perp }$ of the pump wave) play an important role in the instability process. Despite this, modulational instability theory with $k_{\perp }=0$ has several features in common with the observed nonresonant mode and Alfvén wave sidebands.

We identify by ab initio calculations a novel topological semimetal carbon phase in all-$s{p}^2$ bonding networks with a 16-atom body-centered orthorhombic unit cell, termed bco-${\mathrm{C}}_{16}$. Total-energy calculations show that bco-${\mathrm{C}}_{16}$ is comparable to solid fcc-${\mathrm{C}}_{60}$ in energetic stability, and phonon and molecular dynamics simulations confirm its dynamical stability. This all-$s{p}^2$ carbon allotrope can be regarded as a three-dimensional modification of graphite, and its simulated x-ray diffraction (XRD) pattern matches well a previously unexplained diffraction peak in measured XRD spectra of detonation and chimney soot, indicating its presence in the specimen. Electronic band structure calculations reveal that bco-${\mathrm{C}}_{16}$ is a topological node-line semimetal with a single nodal ring. These findings establish a novel carbon phase with intriguing structural and electronic properties of fundamental significance and practical interest.

The injection of spin currents in semiconductors is one of the big challenges of spintronics. Motivated by the ultrafast demagnetization and spin injection into metals, we propose an alternative femtosecond route based on the laser excitation of superdiffusive spin currents in a ferromagnet such as Ni. Our calculations show that even though only a fraction of the current crosses the Ni-Si interface, the laser-induced creation of strong transient electrical fields at a ferromagnet-semiconductor interface allows for the injection of chargeless spin currents with record spin polarizations of 80%. Beyond that they are pulsed on the time scale of 100 fs which opens the door for new experiments and ultrafast spintronics.

The spin Hall angle (SHA) is a measure of the efficiency with which a transverse spin current is generated from a charge current by the spin-orbit coupling and disorder in the spin Hall effect (SHE). In a study of the SHE for a $\mathrm{Pt}|\mathrm{Py}$ ($\mathrm{Py}={\mathrm{Ni}}_{80}{\mathrm{Fe}}_{20}$) bilayer using a first-principles scattering approach, we find a SHA that increases monotonically with temperature and is proportional to the resistivity for bulk Pt. By decomposing the room temperature SHE and inverse SHE currents into bulk and interface terms, we discover a giant interface SHA that dominates the total inverse SHE current with potentially major consequences for applications.

The transport properties of disordered systems are known to depend critically on dimensionality. We study the diffusion coefficient of a quantum particle confined to a lattice on the surface of a tube, where it scales between the 1D and 2D limits. It is found that the scaling relation is universal and independent of the temperature, disorder, and noise parameters, and the essential order parameter is the ratio between the localization length in 2D and the circumference of the tube. Phenomenological and quantitative expressions for transport properties as functions of disorder and noise are obtained and applied to real systems: In the natural chlorosomes found in light-harvesting bacteria the exciton transfer dynamics is predicted to be in the 2D limit, whereas a family of synthetic molecular aggregates is found to be in the homogeneous limit and is independent of dimensionality.

We study the temperature-dependent electronic $B_{1g}$ Raman response of a slightly underdoped single crystal ${\mathrm{HgBa}}_2{\mathrm{Ca}}_2{\mathrm{Cu}}_3{\mathrm{O}}_{8+\delta }$ with a superconducting critical temperature $T_c=122\mathrm{K}$. Our main finding is that the superconducting pair-breaking peak is associated with a dip on its higher-energy side, disappearing together at $T_c$. This result reveals a key aspect of the unconventional pairing mechanism: spectral weight lost in the dip is transferred to the pair-breaking peak at lower energies. This conclusion is supported by cellular dynamical mean-field theory on the Hubbard model, which is able to reproduce all the main features of the $B_{1g}$ Raman response and explain the peak-dip behavior in terms of a nontrivial relationship between the superconducting gap and the pseudogap.

The anyonic excitations of a spin liquid can feature fractional quantum numbers under space group symmetries. Detecting these fractional quantum numbers, which are analogs of the fractional charge of Laughlin quasiparticles, may prove easier than the direct observation of anyonic braiding and statistics. Motivated by the recent numerical discovery of spin-liquid phases in the kagome Heisenberg antiferromagnet, we theoretically predict the pattern of space group symmetry fractionalization in the kagome lattice SO(3)-symmetric chiral spin liquid. We provide a method to detect these fractional quantum numbers in finite-size numerics which is simple to implement in the density matrix renormalization group. Applying these developments to the chiral spin liquid phase of a kagome Heisenberg model, we find perfect agreement between our theoretical prediction and numerical observations.

We present a temperature-dependent atomic and magnetic pair distribution function (PDF) analysis of neutron total scattering measurements of antiferromagnetic MnO, an archetypal strongly correlated transition-metal oxide. The known antiferromagnetic ground-state structure fits the low-temperature data closely with refined parameters that agree with conventional techniques, confirming the reliability of the newly developed magnetic PDF method. The measurements performed in the paramagnetic phase reveal significant short-range magnetic correlations on a $\sim 1\mathrm{nm}$ length scale that differ substantially from the low-temperature long-range spin arrangement. Ab initio calculations using a self-interaction-corrected local spin density approximation of density functional theory predict magnetic interactions dominated by Anderson superexchange and reproduce the measured short-range magnetic correlations to a high degree of accuracy. Further calculations simulating an additional contribution from a direct exchange interaction show much worse agreement with the data. The Anderson superexchange model for MnO is thus verified by experimentation and confirmed by ab initio theory.