Fano line shapes observed in absorption spectra encode information on the amplitude and phase of the optical dipole response. A change in the Fano line shape, e.g., by interaction with short-pulsed laser fields, allows us to extract dynamical modifications of the amplitude and phase of the coupled excited quantum states. We introduce and apply this physical mechanism to near-resonantly coupled doubly excited states in helium. This general approach provides a physical understanding of the laser-induced spectral shift of absorption-line maxima on a sub-laser-cycle time scale as they are ubiquitously observed in attosecond transient-absorption measurements.

We propose a method of controlling two- and three-body interactions in an ultracold Bose gas in any dimension. The method requires us to have two coupled internal single-particle states split in energy such that the upper state is occupied virtually but amply during collisions. By varying system parameters, one can switch off the two-body interaction while maintaining a strong three-body one. The mechanism can be implemented for dipolar bosons in the bilayer configuration with tunneling or in an atomic system by using radio-frequency fields to couple two hyperfine states. One can then aim to observe a purely three-body interacting gas, dilute self-trapped droplets, the paired superfluid phase, Pfaffian state, and other exotic phenomena.

Entangling independent photons is not only of fundamental interest but also of crucial importance for quantum-information science. Two-photon interference is a major method for entangling independent identical photons. If two photons are different in color, perfect two-photon coalescence can no longer happen, which makes the entangling of different-color photons difficult to realize. In this Letter, by exploring and developing time-resolved measurement and active feed forward, we have entangled two independent photons of different colors for the first time. We find that entanglement with a varying form can be identified for different two-photon temporal modes through time-resolved measurement. By using active feed forward, we are able to convert the varying entanglement into uniform entanglement. Adopting these measures, we have successfully entangled two photons with a frequency separation 16 times larger than their linewidths. In addition to its fundamental interest, our work also provides an approach for solving the frequency-mismatch problem for future quantum networks.

Localized structures have been observed in many spatially extended systems of either biological, chemical, or physical nature. Here, we study experimentally front pinning and dissipative localized structures in a delayed optical system based on a bistable semiconductor laser with optoelectronic feedback. We observe that many of the concepts known to apply to spatially localized structures also apply in this context, with specificities related to the lack of reversibility symmetry. Numerical simulations based on purely prototypical modeling reproduce very well the experimental findings, which indicates that the results do not depend on the specific physical system under consideration, but are, on the contrary, very generic features of time delayed systems.

The low-energy spectrum of three particles interacting via nearly resonant two-body interactions in the Efimov regime is set by the so-called three-body parameter. We show that the three-body parameter is essentially determined by the zero-energy two-body correlation. As a result, we identify two classes of two-body interactions for which the three-body parameter has a universal value in units of their effective range. One class involves the universality of the three-body parameter recently found in ultracold atom systems. The other is relevant to short-range interactions that can be found in nuclear physics and solid-state physics.

Dislocations are line defects that play a key role in the plasticity of crystalline materials and affect their thermal, chemical, and electrical properties. Typically dislocations are treated as stable defects; e.g., the equilibrium core structure of a dislocation is obtained by minimizing the crystal potential energy with respect to atom positions. Here we show for the first time the possibility of “entropically stabilized dislocations” that exist due to entropic effects without a corresponding potential energy well. An entropically stabilized dislocation was discovered in an accelerated multiscale quasicontinuum simulation. Its entropic nature was verified with fully atomistic free energy calculations and explained by a simple continuum-based model. This result has important consequences for the study of dislocations as well as for temporal multiscale methods that use information from the potential energy surface to accelerate time in molecular simulations.

van der Waals (vdW) interactions between particles and surfaces are critical for the study of physical adsorption. In this work, we develop a method to calculate the leading- and higher-order coefficients, describing the dependence of vdW interaction on height above the surface. We find that the proposed method can produce the vdW coefficients for atoms on surfaces of metals and semiconductors, with a mean absolute relative deviation of about 5%. As an important application, we study the adsorption energies for rare-gas atoms on noble-metal surfaces by combining the present method, which accounts for the long-range part, with semilocal density functional theory (DFT), which accounts for the short-range part. This combined $\mathrm{DFT}+\mathrm{vdW}$ approach yields adsorption energies in excellent agreement (5%) with experiments. This suggests that the present method may serve as a useful dispersion correction to density functional approximations.

Surprisingly low solubility and toxicity of Fe-doped ZnO nanoparticles is elucidated on the basis of first-principles calculations. Various ZnO surfaces that could be present in nanoparticles are subject to substitutional Fe doping. We show that Fe stabilizes polar instable surfaces, while nonpolar surfaces, namely ($10\underset{\_}{1}0$) and ($11\underset{\_}{2}0$), remain intact. Polar surfaces can be stabilized indirectly through ${\mathrm{Fe}}^{2+}-{\mathrm{Fe}}^{3+}$ pair-assisted charge transfer, which reduces surface polarity and therefore, the solubility in polar solvents.

We study a new type of three-dimensional topological superconductor that exhibits Majorana zero modes (MZM) protected by a magnetic group symmetry, a combined antiunitary symmetry composed of a mirror reflection and time reversal. This new symmetry enhances the noninteracting topological classification of a superconducting vortex from $Z_2$ to $Z$, indicating that multiple MZMs can coexist at the end of one magnetic vortex of unit flux. Especially, we show that a vortex binding two MZMs can be realized on the (001) surface of a topological crystalline insulator SnTe with proximity induced BCS Cooper pairing, or in bulk superconductor ${\mathrm{In}}_x{\mathrm{Sn}}_{1-x}\mathrm{Te}$.

We show that resonant coupling and entanglement between a mechanical resonator and Majorana bound states can be achieved via spin currents in a 1D quantum wire with strong spin-orbit interactions. The bound states induced by vibrating and stationary magnets can hybridize, thus resulting in spin-current induced $4\pi$-periodic torques, as a function of the relative field angle, acting on the resonator. We study the feasibility of detecting and manipulating Majorana bound states with the use of magnetic resonance force microscopy techniques.

It is well known that, generically, one-dimensional interacting fermions cannot be described in terms of a Fermi liquid. Instead, they present a different phenomenology, that of a Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid: the Landau quasiparticles are ill defined, and the fermion occupation number is continuous at the Fermi energy. We demonstrate that suitable fine tuning of the interaction between fermions can stabilize a peculiar state of one-dimensional matter, which is dissimilar to both Tomonaga-Luttinger and Fermi liquids. We propose to call this state a quasi-Fermi liquid. Technically speaking, such a liquid exists only when the fermion interaction is irrelevant (in the renormalization group sense). The quasi-Fermi liquid exhibits the properties of both a Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid and a Fermi liquid. Similar to a Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid, no finite-momentum quasiparticles are supported by the quasi-Fermi liquid; on the other hand, its fermion occupation number demonstrates a finite discontinuity at the Fermi energy, which is a hallmark feature of a Fermi liquid. A possible realization of the quasi-Fermi liquid with the help of cold atoms in an optical trap is discussed.

We study a model for the metal-insulator ($M\text{−}I$) transition in the rare-earth-element nickelates $R{\mathrm{NiO}}_3$, based upon a negative charge transfer energy and coupling to a rocksaltlike lattice distortion of the ${\mathrm{NiO}}_6$ octahedra. Using exact diagonalization and the Hartree-Fock approximation we demonstrate that electrons couple strongly to these distortions. For small distortions the system is metallic, with a ground state of predominantly $d^{8}L$ character, where $\underset{\_}{L}$ denotes a ligand hole. For sufficiently large distortions ($\delta d_{\mathrm{Ni}\text{−}\mathrm{O}}\sim 0.05–0.10\AA$), however, a gap opens at the Fermi energy as the system enters a periodically distorted state alternating along the three crystallographic axes, with $(d^8{\underset{\_}{L}}^2{)}_{S=0}(d^8{)}_{S=1}$ character, where $S$ is the total spin. Thus the $M\text{−}I$ transition may be viewed as being driven by an internal volume “collapse” where the ${\mathrm{NiO}}_6$ octahedra with two ligand holes shrink around their central Ni, while the remaining octahedra expand accordingly, resulting in the ($1/2$, $1/2$, $1/2$) superstructure observed in x-ray diffraction in the insulating phase. This insulating state is an example of charge ordering achieved without any actual movement of the charge.

We consider the entanglement between two one-dimensional quantum wires (Luttinger liquids) coupled by tunneling through a quantum impurity. The physics of the system involves a crossover between weak and strong coupling regimes characterized by an energy scale $T_B$, and methods of conformal field theory therefore cannot be applied. The evolution of the entanglement in this crossover has led to many numerical studies, but has remained little understood, analytically or even qualitatively. We argue in this Letter that the correct universal scaling form of the entanglement entropy $S$ (for an arbitrary interval of length $L$ containing the impurity) is $\partial S/\partial \ln L=f(L{T}_B)$. In the special case where the coupling to the impurity can be refermionized, we show how the universal function $f(L{T}_B)$ can be obtained analytically using recent results on form factors of twist fields and a defect massless-scattering formalism. Our results are carefully checked against numerical simulations.

X-ray photoemission electron microscopy combined with x-ray magnetic circular dichroism is used to study the magnetic properties of individual iron nanoparticles with sizes ranging from 20 down to 8 nm. While the magnetocrystalline anisotropy of bulk iron suggests superparamagnetic behavior in this size range, ferromagnetically blocked particles are also found at all sizes. Spontaneous transitions from the blocked state to the superparamagnetic state are observed in single particles and suggest that the enhanced magnetic energy barriers in the ferromagnetic particles are due to metastable, structurally excited states with unexpected life times.

Han purple (${\mathrm{BaCuSi}}_2{\mathrm{O}}_6$) is not only an ancient pigment, but also a valuable model material for studying Bose-Einstein condensation of magnons in high magnetic fields. Using precise low-temperature structural data and extensive density-functional calculations, we elucidate magnetic couplings in this compound. The resulting magnetic model comprises two types of nonequivalent spin dimers, in excellent agreement with the ${}^{63,65}\mathrm{Cu}$ nuclear magnetic resonance data. We further argue that leading interdimer couplings connect the upper site of one dimer to the bottom site of the contiguous dimer, and not the upper-to-upper and bottom-to-bottom sites, as assumed previously. This finding is verified by inelastic neutron scattering data and implies the lack of frustration between the layers of spin dimers in ${\mathrm{BaCuSi}}_2{\mathrm{O}}_6$, thus challenging existing theories of the two-dimensional-like Bose-Einstein condensation of magnons in this compound.

A series of experiments is performed to examine the arrival of a pulse peak, using a Gaussian-shaped temporal wave packet as the input pulse and truncating it at various positions on or before the peak of the packet. When the truncating point is within the negative group delay limit of the fast light medium, a smooth Gaussian peak is observed at the exit port, despite the absence of an input pulse peak. The experimental results explicitly demonstrate that the superluminal propagation of a smooth Gaussian-shaped pulse peak is an analytic continuation over time of the earlier portion of the input pulse envelope. To investigate the physical meaning of the pulse peak further, we also examine the propagation of triangular-shaped pulses, for which the pulse peak can be recognized as a nonanalytical point.

We report the experimental observation of a submicron cellular structure on the surface of silicon targets eroded by an ion plasma. Analysis by atomic force microscopy allows us to assess the time evolution and show that the system can be described quantitatively by the convective Cahn-Hilliard equation, found in the study of domain coarsening for a large class of driven systems. The space-filling trait of the ensuing pattern relates it to evolving foams. Through this connection, we are actually able to derive the coarsening law for the pattern wavelength from the nontrivial topological dynamics of the cellular structure. Thus, the study of the topological properties of patterns in nonvariational spatially extended systems emerges as complementary to morphological approaches to their challenging coarsening properties.

We investigate wrinkling of two-dimensional random and triangular semiflexible polymer networks under shear. Both types of semiflexible networks exhibit wrinkling above a small critical shear angle, which scales with an exponent of the bending modulus between 1.9 and 2.0. Random networks exhibit hysteresis at the wrinkling threshold. Wrinkling lowers the total elastic energy by up to 20% and strongly affects the elastic properties of all semiflexible networks such as the crossover between bending and stretching dominated behavior. In random networks, we also find evidence for metastable wrinkled configurations. While the disordered microstructure of random networks affects the scaling behavior of wrinkle amplitudes, it has little effect on wrinkle wavelength. Therefore, wrinkles represent a robust, microstructure-independent assay of shear strain or elastic properties.

The ionization potential is a fundamental key quantity with great relevance to diverse material properties. We find that state of the art methods based on density functional theory and simple diagrammatic approaches as commonly taken in the $GW$ approximation predict the ionization potentials of semiconductors and insulators unsatisfactorily. Good agreement between theory and experiment is obtained only when diagrams resulting from the antisymmetry of the many-electron wave function are taken into account via vertex corrections in the self-energy. The present approach describes both localized and delocalized states accurately, making it ideally suited for a wide class of materials and processes.