We grow a tiled structure of insulating two-dimensional ${\mathrm{LaAlO}}_3$/${\mathrm{SrTiO}}_3$ interfaces composed of alternating one and three ${\mathrm{LaAlO}}_3$ unit cells. The boundary between two tiles is conducting. At low temperatures this conductance exhibits quantized steps as a function of gate voltage indicative of a one-dimensional channel. The step size of half the quantum of conductance is evidence for the absence of spin degeneracy.

Heterogeneity in biological molecules, resulting in molecule-to-molecule variations in their dynamics and function, is an emerging theme. To elucidate the consequences of heterogeneous behavior at the single molecule level, we propose an exactly solvable model in which the unfolding rate due to mechanical force depends parametrically on an auxiliary variable representing an entropy barrier arising from fluctuations in internal dynamics. When the rate of fluctuations—a measure of dynamical disorder—is comparable to or smaller than the rate of force-induced unbinding, we show that there are two experimentally observable consequences: nonexponential survival probability at constant force, and a heavy-tailed rupture force distribution at constant loading rate. By fitting our analytical expressions to data from single molecule pulling experiments on proteins and DNA, we quantify the extent of disorder. We show that only by analyzing data over a wide range of forces and loading rates can the role of disorder due to internal dynamics be quantitatively assessed.

We present the complete result for the $\mathcal{O}({\alpha }^7{m}_e)$ one photon annihilation contribution to the hyperfine splitting of the ground state energy levels in positronium. Numerically it increases the prediction of quantum electrodynamics by $217\pm 1\mathrm{kHz}$.

Azimuthal angular correlations of charged hadrons with respect to the axis of a reconstructed (trigger) jet in $\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}$ and $p+p$ collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=200\mathrm{GeV}$ in STAR are presented. The trigger jet population in $\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}$ collisions is biased toward jets that have not interacted with the medium, allowing easier matching of jet energies between $\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}$ and $p+p$ collisions while enhancing medium effects on the recoil jet. The associated hadron yield of the recoil jet is significantly suppressed at high transverse momentum ($p_T^{\text{assoc}}$) and enhanced at low $p_T^{\text{assoc}}$ in 0%–20% central $\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}$ collisions compared to $p+p$ collisions, which is indicative of medium-induced parton energy loss in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions.

Comprehensive no-go theorems show that information encoded over local two-dimensional topologically ordered systems cannot support macroscopic energy barriers, and hence will not maintain stable quantum information at finite temperatures for macroscopic time scales. However, it is still well motivated to study low-dimensional quantum memories due to their experimental amenability. Here we introduce a grid of defect lines to Kitaev’s quantum double model where different anyonic excitations carry different masses. This setting produces a complex energy landscape which entropically suppresses the diffusion of excitations that cause logical errors. We show numerically that entropically suppressed errors give rise to superexponential inverse temperature scaling and polynomial system size scaling for small system sizes over a low-temperature regime. Curiously, these entropic effects are not present below a certain low temperature. We show that we can vary the system to modify this bound and potentially extend the described effects to zero temperature.

Grain boundary segregation leads to nanoscale chemical variations that can alter a material’s performance by orders of magnitude (e.g., embrittlement). To understand this phenomenon, a large number of grain boundaries must be characterized in terms of both their five crystallographic interface parameters and their atomic-scale chemical composition. We demonstrate how this can be achieved using an approach that combines the accuracy of structural characterization in transmission electron microscopy with the 3D chemical sensitivity of atom probe tomography. We find a linear trend between carbon segregation and the misorientation angle $\omega$ for low-angle grain boundaries in ferrite, which indicates that $\omega$ is the most influential crystallographic parameter in this regime. However, there are significant deviations from this linear trend indicating an additional strong influence of other crystallographic parameters (grain boundary plane, rotation axis). For high-angle grain boundaries, no general trend between carbon excess and $\omega$ is observed; i.e., the grain boundary plane and rotation axis have an even higher influence on the segregation behavior in this regime. Slight deviations from special grain boundary configurations are shown to lead to unexpectedly high levels of segregation.

We study two models for spinless fermions featuring topologically nontrivial bands characterized by Chern numbers $C=\pm 1$ at fractional filling. Using exact diagonalization, we show that, even for infinitely strong nearest-neighbor repulsion, the ground states of these models belong to the recently discovered class of quantum liquids called fractional Chern insulators (FCI). Thus, we establish that FCI states can arise even if interaction strengths are arbitrarily larger than the noninteracting band gap, going beyond the limits in which FCI states have been previously studied. The strong-coupling FCI states, therefore, depart from the usual isolated-band picture that parallels the fractional quantum Hall effect in Landau levels and demonstrate how a topologically ordered state can arise in a truly multiband system.

Recently, the emergence of classical objectivity as a property of a quantum state has been explicitly derived for a small object embedded in a photonic environment in terms of a spectrum broadcast form—a specific classically correlated state, redundantly encoding information about the preferred states of the object in the environment. However, the environment was in a pure state and the fundamental problem was how generic and robust is the conclusion. Here, we prove that despite the initial environmental noise, the emergence of the broadcast structure still holds, leading to the perceived objectivity of the state of the object. We also show how this leads to a quantum Darwinism-type condition, reflecting the classicality of proliferated information in terms of a limit behavior of the mutual information. Quite surprisingly, we find “singular points” of the decoherence, which can be used to faithfully broadcast a specific classical message through the noisy environment.

We experimentally demonstrate first-order (fold) and second-order (cusp) catastrophes in the density of an atomic cloud reflected from an optical barrier in the presence of gravity and show their corresponding universal asymptotic behavior. These catastrophes, arising from classical dynamics, enable robust, field-free refocusing of an expanding atomic cloud with a wide velocity distribution. Specifically, the density attained at the cusp point in our experiment reached 65% of the peak density of the atoms in the trap prior to their release. We thereby add caustics to the various phenomena with parallels in optics that can be harnessed for manipulation of cold atoms. The structural stability of catastrophes provides inherent robustness against variations in the system’s dynamics and initial conditions, making them suitable for manipulation of atoms under imperfect conditions and limited controllability.

We propose a new characterization of non-Markovian quantum evolution based on the concept of non-Markovianity degree. It provides an analog of a Schmidt number in the entanglement theory and reveals the formal analogy between quantum evolution and the entanglement theory: Markovian evolution corresponds to a separable state and the non-Markovian one is further characterized by its degree. It enables one to introduce a non-Markovianity witness—an analog of an entanglement witness, and a family of measures—an analog of Schmidt coefficients, and finally to characterize maximally non-Markovian evolution being an analog of the maximally entangled state. Our approach allows us to classify the non-Markovianity measures introduced so far in a unified rigorous mathematical framework.

Estimation of parameters is a pivotal task throughout science and technology. The quantum Cramér-Rao bound provides a fundamental limit of precision allowed to be achieved under quantum theory. For closed quantum systems, it has been shown how the estimation precision depends on the underlying dynamics. Here, we propose a general formulation for metrology scenarios in open quantum systems, aiming to relate the precision more directly to properties of the underlying dynamics. This feature may be employed to enhance an estimation precision, e.g., by quantum control techniques. Specifically, we derive a Cramér-Rao bound for a fairly large class of open system dynamics, which is governed by a (time-dependent) dynamical semigroup map. We illustrate the utility of this scenario through three examples.

We show how engineered classical noise can be used to generate constrained Hamiltonian dynamics in atomic quantum simulators of many-body systems, taking advantage of the continuous Zeno effect. After discussing the general theoretical framework, we focus on applications in the context of lattice gauge theories, where imposing exotic, quasilocal constraints is usually challenging. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the scheme for both Abelian and non-Abelian gauge theories, and discuss how engineering dissipative constraints substitutes complicated, nonlocal interaction patterns by global coupling to laser fields.

We report the observation of strong coupling of a macroscopic ensemble of $\sim 10^{16}$ ${\mathrm{Fe}}_8$ molecular nanomagnets to the resonant mode of a microwave cavity. We use millimeter-wave spectroscopy to measure the splitting of the system’s resonant frequency induced by the coupling between the spins and the cavity mode. The magnitude of this splitting is found to scale with $\sqrt{N}$, where $N$ is the number of collectively coupled spins. We control $N$ by changing the system’s temperature and, thereby, the populations of the relevant spin energy levels. Strong coupling is observed for two distinct transitions between spin energy states. Our results indicate that at low temperatures nearly all of the spins in the sample couple with the cavity’s resonant mode even though there is substantial inhomogeneous broadening of the ${\mathrm{Fe}}_8$ spin resonances.

Phases of matter with nontrivial topological order are predicted to exhibit a variety of exotic phenomena, such as robust localized bound states in 1D systems, and edge states in 2D systems, which are expected to display spin helicity, immunity to backscattering, and weak antilocalization. In this Letter, we present an experimental observation of topological structures generated via the controlled implementation of two consecutive noncommuting rotations in photonic discrete-time quantum walks. The second rotation introduces valleylike Dirac points in the system, allowing us to create the nontrivial topological pattern. By choosing specific values for the rotations, it is possible to coherently drive the system between topological sectors characterized by different topological invariants. We probe the full topological landscape, demonstrating the emergence of localized bound states hosted at the topological boundaries, and the existence of extremely localized or delocalized non-Gaussian quantum states. Our results pave the way for the study of valley polarization and applications of topological mechanisms in robust optical-device engineering.

A long-standing open question about Gaussian continuous-variable cluster states is whether they enable fault-tolerant measurement-based quantum computation. The answer is yes. Initial squeezing in the cluster above a threshold value of 20.5 dB ensures that errors from finite squeezing acting on encoded qubits are below the fault-tolerance threshold of known qubit-based error-correcting codes. By concatenating with one of these codes and using ancilla-based error correction, fault-tolerant measurement-based quantum computation of theoretically indefinite length is possible with finitely squeezed cluster states.

We report the experimental realization and characterization of one 60-mode copy and of two 30-mode copies of a dual-rail quantum-wire cluster state in the quantum optical frequency comb of a bimodally pumped optical parametric oscillator. This is the largest entangled system ever created whose subsystems are all available simultaneously. The entanglement proceeds from the coherent concatenation of a multitude of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen pairs by a single beam splitter, a procedure which is also a building block for the realization of hypercubic-lattice cluster states for universal quantum computing.

High-dimensional quantum key distribution (HDQKD) offers the possibility of high secure-key rate with high photon-information efficiency. We consider HDQKD based on the time-energy entanglement produced by spontaneous parametric down-conversion and show that it is secure against collective attacks. Its security rests upon visibility data—obtained from Franson and conjugate-Franson interferometers—that probe photon-pair frequency correlations and arrival-time correlations. From these measurements, an upper bound can be established on the eavesdropper’s Holevo information by translating the Gaussian-state security analysis for continuous-variable quantum key distribution so that it applies to our protocol. We show that visibility data from just the Franson interferometer provides a weaker, but nonetheless useful, secure-key rate lower bound. To handle multiple-pair emissions, we incorporate the decoy-state approach into our protocol. Our results show that over a 200-km transmission distance in optical fiber, time-energy entanglement HDQKD could permit a $700\text{−}\mathrm{bit}/\sec$ secure-key rate and a photon information efficiency of 2 secure-key bits per photon coincidence in the key-generation phase using receivers with a 15% system efficiency.

We demonstrate that the concept of quantum typicality allows for significant progress in the study of real-time spin dynamics and transport in quantum magnets. To this end, we present a numerical analysis of the spin-current autocorrelation function of the antiferromagnetic and anisotropic spin-$1/2$ Heisenberg chain as inferred from propagating only a single pure state, randomly chosen as a “typical” representative of the statistical ensemble. Comparing with existing time-dependent density-matrix renormalization group data, we show that typicality is fulfilled extremely well, consistent with an error of our approach, which is perfectly under control and vanishes in the thermodynamic limit. In the long-time limit, our results provide for a new benchmark for the enigmatic spin Drude weight, which we obtain from chains as long as $L=33$ sites, i.e., from Hilbert spaces of dimensions almost $\mathcal{O}({10}^4)$ larger than in existing exact-diagonalization studies.