We study the phase behavior and the collective dynamics of interacting paramagnetic colloids assembled above a honeycomb lattice of triangular shaped magnetic minima. A frustrated colloidal molecular crystal is realized when filling these potential minima with exactly two particles per pinning site. External in-plane rotating fields are used to anneal the system into different phases, including long range ordered stripes, random fully packed loops, labyrinth and disordered states. At a higher amplitude of the annealing field, the dimer lattice displays a two-step melting transition where the initially immobile dimers perform first localized rotations and later break up by exchanging particles across consecutive lattice minima.

In recent years, a large body of research has focused on unveiling the fundamental physical processes that living systems utilize to perform functions, such as coordinated action and collective decision making. Here, we demonstrate that important features of collective decision making among higher organisms are captured effectively by a novel formulation of well-characterized physical spin systems, where the spin state is equivalent to two opposing preferences, and a bias in the preferred state represents the strength of individual opinions. We reveal that individuals (spins) without a preference (unbiased or uninformed) play a central role in collective decision making, both in maximizing the ability of the system to achieve consensus (via enhancement of the propagation of spin states) and in minimizing the time taken to do so (via a process reminiscent of stochastic resonance). Which state (option) is selected collectively, however, is shown to depend strongly on the nonlinearity of local interactions. Relatively linear social response results in unbiased individuals reinforcing the majority preference, even in the face of a strongly biased numerical minority (thus promoting democratic outcomes). If interactions are highly nonlinear, however, unbiased individuals exert the opposite influence, promoting a strongly biased minority and inhibiting majority preference. These results enhance our understanding of physical computation in biological collectives and suggest new avenues to explore in the collective dynamics of spin systems.

We present a framework for the quantum enhanced estimation of multiple parameters corresponding to noncommuting unitary generators. Our formalism provides a recipe for the simultaneous estimation of all three components of a magnetic field. We propose a probe state that surpasses the precision of estimating the three components individually, and we discuss measurements that come close to attaining the quantum limit. Our study also reveals that too much quantum entanglement may be detrimental to attaining the Heisenberg scaling in the estimation of unitarily generated parameters.

The soft photon theorem, in its standard form, requires corrections when the asymptotic particle states carry magnetic charges. These corrections are deduced using electromagnetic duality and the resulting soft formula conjectured to be exact for all Abelian gauge theories. Recent work has shown that the standard soft theorem implies an infinity of conserved electric charges. The associated symmetries are identified as “large” electric gauge transformations. Here the magnetic corrections to the soft theorem are shown to imply a second infinity of conserved magnetic charges. The associated symmetries are identified as large magnetic gauge transformations. The large magnetic symmetries are naturally subsumed in a complexification of the electric ones.

We demonstrate control of the absolute phase of an optical lattice with respect to a single trapped ion. The lattice is generated by off-resonant free-space laser beams, and we actively stabilize its phase by measuring its ac-Stark shift on a trapped ion. The ion is localized within the standing wave to better than 2% of its period. The locked lattice allows us to apply displacement operations via resonant optical forces with a controlled direction in phase space. Moreover, we observe the lattice-induced phase evolution of spin superposition states in order to analyze the relevant decoherence mechanisms. Finally, we employ lattice-induced phase shifts for inferring the variation of the ion position over the $157\mu \mathrm{m}$ range along the trap axis at accuracies of better than 6 nm.

Elastic collisions between initially unpolarized electrons and hydrogenlike atoms are discussed, aiming to analyze the entanglement properties of the correlated final spin system. Explicit spin-dependent interactions are neglected and electron exchange only is taken into account. We show the final spin system to be completely characterized by a single spin correlation parameter depending on scattering angle and energy. Its numerical value identifies the final spins of the collision partners to be either in the separable, entangled, or Bell correlated regions. We emphasize explicit examples for the mixed spin system in order to illustrate the abstract concepts. The analysis of published experimental and numerical data reveals the possibility to create tunable pairs of collision partners with any desired degree of spin entanglement.

A molecular wire containing an emitting molecular center is controllably suspended between the plasmonic electrodes of a cryogenic scanning tunneling microscope. Passing current through this circuit generates an ultranarrow-line emission at an energy of $\approx 1.5\mathrm{eV}$ which is assigned to the fluorescence of the molecular center. Control over the linewidth is obtained by progressively detaching the emitting unit from the surface. The recorded spectra also reveal several vibronic peaks of low intensities that can be viewed as a fingerprint of the emitter. Surface plasmons localized at the tip-sample interface are shown to play a major role in both excitation and emission of the molecular excitons.

In this Letter we study the effect of time-reversal symmetric impurities on the Josephson supercurrent through two-dimensional helical metals such as on a topological insulator surface state. We show that, contrary to the usual superconducting-normal metal-superconducting junctions, the suppression of the supercurrent in the superconducting-helical metal-superconducting junction is mainly due to fluctuations of impurities in the junctions. Our results, which are a condensed matter realization of a part of the Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein effect for neutrinos, show that the relationship between normal state conductance and the critical current of Josephson junctions is significantly modified for Josephson junctions on the surface of topological insulators. We also study the temperature dependence of the supercurrent and present a two fluid model which can explain some of the recent experimental results in Josephson junctions on the edge of topological insulators.

We use the scalar model with quartic interaction to illustrate how a nonperturbative variational technique combined with renormalization group (RG) properties efficiently resums perturbative expansions in thermal field theories. The resulting convergence and scale dependence of optimized thermodynamical quantities, here illustrated up to two-loop order, are drastically improved as compared to standard perturbative expansions, as well as to other related methods such as the screened perturbation or (resummed) hard-thermal-loop perturbation, that miss RG invariance (as we explain). Being very general and easy to implement, our method is a potential analytical alternative to dealing with the phase transitions of field theories such as thermal QCD.

In light of the forthcoming high precision quasielastic electron scattering data from Jefferson Lab, it is timely for the various approaches to nuclear structure to make robust predictions for the associated response functions. With this in mind, we focus here on the longitudinal response function and the corresponding Coulomb sum rule for isospin-symmetric nuclear matter at various baryon densities. Using a quantum field-theoretic quark-level approach which preserves the symmetries of quantum chromodynamics, as well as exhibiting dynamical chiral symmetry breaking and quark confinement, we find a dramatic quenching of the Coulomb sum rule for momentum transfers $|q|\gtrsim 0.5\mathrm{GeV}$. The main driver of this effect lies in changes to the proton Dirac form factor induced by the nuclear medium. Such a dramatic quenching of the Coulomb sum rule was not seen in a recent quantum Monte Carlo calculation for carbon, suggesting that the Jefferson Lab data may well shed new light on the explicit role of QCD in nuclei.

We probe the indistinguishability of photons emitted by a semiconductor quantum dot (QD) via time- and temperature-dependent two-photon interference (TPI) experiments. An increase in temporal separation between consecutive photon emission events reveals a decrease in TPI visibility on a nanosecond time scale, theoretically described by a non-Markovian noise process in agreement with fluctuating charge traps in the QD’s vicinity. Phonon-induced pure dephasing results in a decrease in TPI visibility from $(96\pm 4)\%$ at 10 K to a vanishing visibility at 40 K. In contrast to Michelson-type measurements, our experiments provide direct access to the time-dependent coherence of a quantum emitter on a nanosecond time scale.

We report the continuous and partially nondestructive measurement of optical photons. For a weak light pulse traveling through a slow-light optical medium (signal), the associated atomic-excitation component is detected by another light beam (probe) with the aid of an optical cavity. We observe strong correlations of $g_{sp}^{(2)}=4.4(5)$ between the transmitted signal and probe photons. The observed (intrinsic) conditional nondestructive quantum efficiency ranges between 13% and 1% (65% and 5%) for a signal transmission range of 2% to 35%, at a typical time resolution of $2.5\mu \mathrm{s}$. The maximal observed (intrinsic) device nondestructive quantum efficiency, defined as the product of the conditional nondestructive quantum efficiency and the signal transmission, is 0.5% (2.4%). The normalized cross-correlation function violates the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, confirming the nonclassical character of the correlations.