“Structural lubricity” refers to a unique friction state in which two flat surfaces are sliding past each other with ultralow resistance due to incommensurate atomic lattice structures. In this case, theory anticipates sublinear scaling for the area dependence of friction. Here, we experimentally confirm these predictions by measuring the sliding resistance of amorphous antimony and crystalline gold nanoparticles on crystalline graphite. For the amorphous particles a square root relation between friction and contact area is observed. For crystalline gold particles we find a more complex scaling behavior related to variations in particle shape and orientation. These results allow us to link mesoscopic friction to atomic principles.

The properties of nanoconfined fluids can be strikingly different from those of bulk liquids. A basic unanswered question is whether the equilibrium and dynamic consequences of confinement are related to each other in a simple way. We study this question by simulation of a liquid comprising asymmetric dumbbell-shaped molecules, which can be deeply supercooled without crystallizing. We find that the dimensionless structural relaxation times—spanning six decades as a function of temperature, density, and degree of confinement—collapse when plotted versus excess entropy. The data also collapse when plotted versus excess isochoric heat capacity, a behavior consistent with the existence of isomorphs in the bulk and confined states.

We consider a bilayer geometry where a single impurity moves in a two-dimensional plane and is coupled, via dipolar interactions, to a two-dimensional system of fermions residing in the second layer. Dipoles in both layers point in the same direction oriented by an external field perpendicular to the plane of motion. We use quantum Monte Carlo methods to calculate the binding energy and the effective mass of the impurity at zero temperature as a function of the distance between layers as well as of the in-plane interaction strength. In the regime where the fermionic dipoles form a Wigner crystal, the physics of the impurity can be described in terms of a polaron coupled to the bath of lattice phonons. By reducing the distance between layers this polaron exhibits a crossover from a free-moving to a tightly bound regime where its effective mass is orders of magnitude larger than the bare mass.

We show that finite systems with conical intersections can exhibit spontaneous symmetry breaking which manifests itself in spatial localization of eigenstates. This localization has a geometric phase origin and is robust against variation of model parameters. The transition between localized and delocalized eigenstate regimes resembles a continuous phase transition. The localization slows down the low-energy quantum nuclear dynamics at low temperatures.

Topological energy bands have important geometrical properties described by the Berry curvature. We show that the Berry curvature changes the hydrodynamic equations of motion for a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate, and causes significant modifications to the collective mode frequencies. We illustrate our results for the case of two-dimensional Rashba spin-orbit coupling in a Zeeman field. Using an operator approach, we derive the effects of Berry curvature on the dipole mode in very general settings. We show that the sizes of these effects can be large and readily detected in experiment. Collective modes therefore provide a sensitive way to measure geometrical properties of energy bands.

We investigate the near-critical dynamics of atomic density fluctuations in the nonequilibrium self-organization transition of an optically driven quantum gas coupled to a single mode of a cavity. In this system cavity-mediated long-range interactions between atoms, tunable by the drive strength, lead to softening of an excitation mode recently observed in experiments. This phenomenon has previously been studied within a two-mode approximation for the collective motional degrees of freedom of the atomic condensate, which results in an effective open-system Dicke model. Here, including the full spectrum of atomic modes we find a finite lifetime for a rotonlike mode in the Bogoliubov excitation spectrum that is strongly pump dependent. The corresponding decay rate and critical exponents for the phase transition are calculated explaining the nonmonotonic pump-dependent atomic damping rate observed in recent experiments. We compute the near-critical behavior of the intracavity field fluctuations that has been previously shown to be enhanced with respect to the equilibrium Dicke model in a two-mode approximation. We highlight the role of the finite size of the system in the suppression of it below the expectations of the open Dicke model.

A simple argument shows that negative energy cannot be isolated far away from positive energy in a conformal field theory and strongly constrains its possible dispersal. This is also required by consistency with the Bekenstein bound written in terms of the positivity of relative entropy. We prove a new form of the Bekenstein bound based on the monotonicity of the relative entropy, involving a “free” entropy enclosed in a region which is highly insensitive to space-time entanglement, and show that it further improves the negative energy localization bound.

We analyze some phenomenological implications of the most general semiholographic models for non-Fermi liquids that have emerged with inputs from the holographic correspondence. We find generalizations of Landau-Silin equations with few parameters governing thermodynamics, low-energy response, and collective excitations. We show that even when there is a Fermi surface with well-defined quasiparticle excitations, the collective excitations can behave very differently from Landau’s theory.

New sub-GeV gauge forces (“dark photons”) that kinetically mix with the photon provide a promising scenario for MeV–GeV dark matter and are the subject of a program of searches at fixed-target and collider facilities around the world. In such models, dark photons produced in collisions may decay invisibly into dark-matter states, thereby evading current searches. We reexamine results of the SLAC mQ electron beam dump experiment designed to search for millicharged particles and find that it was strongly sensitive to any secondary beam of dark matter produced by electron-nucleus collisions in the target. The constraints are competitive for dark photon masses in the $\sim 1–30\mathrm{MeV}$ range, covering part of the parameter space that can reconcile the apparent $(g-2{)}_{\mu }$ anomaly. Simple adjustments to the original SLAC search for millicharges may extend sensitivity to cover a sizable portion of the remaining $(g-2{)}_{\mu }$ anomaly-motivated region. The mQ sensitivity is therefore complementary to ongoing searches for visible decays of dark photons. Compared to existing direct-detection searches, mQ sensitivity to electron-dark-matter scattering cross sections is more than an order of magnitude better for a significant range of masses and couplings in simple models.

We demonstrate the power of constraining theories of new physics by insisting that they lead to electroweak baryogenesis, while agreeing with current data from the Large Hadron Collider. The general approach is illustrated with a singlet scalar extension of the standard model. Stringent bounds can already be obtained, which reduce the viable parameter space to a small island.

We compute the cross section for the production of a high-mass photon pair in association with two hadronic jets to next-to-leading order in quantum chromodynamics. Our results allow us for the first time to reliably predict the absolute normalization of this process and demonstrate that the shape of important kinematical distributions is modified by higher-order effects. The perturbative corrections will be an important ingredient in precision studies of Higgs boson properties from its production in association with two jets.

The most precise determination of the neutron lifetime using the beam method was completed in 2005 and reported a result of ${\tau }_n=(886.3\pm 1.2[\mathrm{stat}]\pm 3.2[\mathrm{syst}])\mathrm{s}$. The dominant uncertainties were attributed to the absolute determination of the fluence of the neutron beam (2.7 s). The fluence was measured with a neutron monitor that counted the neutron-induced charged particles from absorption in a thin, well-characterized ${}^6\mathrm{Li}$ deposit. The detection efficiency of the monitor was calculated from the areal density of the deposit, the detector solid angle, and the evaluated nuclear data file, ENDF/B-VI ${}^6\mathrm{Li}(n,t){}^4\mathrm{He}$ thermal neutron cross section. In the current work, we measure the detection efficiency of the same monitor used in the neutron lifetime measurement with a second, totally absorbing neutron detector. This direct approach does not rely on the ${}^6\mathrm{Li}(n,t){}^4\mathrm{He}$ cross section or any other nuclear data. The detection efficiency is consistent with the value used in 2005 but is measured with a precision of 0.057%, which represents a fivefold improvement in the uncertainty. We verify the temporal stability of the neutron monitor through ancillary measurements, allowing us to apply the measured neutron monitor efficiency to the lifetime result from the 2005 experiment. The updated lifetime is ${\tau }_n=(887.7\pm 1.2[\mathrm{stat}]\pm 1.9[\mathrm{syst}])\mathrm{s}$.

We consider a general class of integrated quantum systems where photon-photon interaction occurs in a quantum device that is localized in space. Using techniques that are closely related to cluster decomposition principles in quantum field theory, we provide a general constraint on the analytic properties of a two-photon $S$ matrix in this class of systems. We also show that the photon-photon interaction in these systems inevitably leads to frequency mixing and entanglement and that frequencies of the single photons cannot be preserved in these systems.

We propose a simple laser-driven electron acceleration scheme based on tightly focused radially polarized laser pulses for the production of femtosecond electron bunches with energies in the few-hundreds-of-keV range. In this method, the electrons are accelerated forward in the focal volume by the longitudinal electric field component of the laser pulse. Three-dimensional test-particle and particle-in-cell simulations reveal the feasibility of generating well-collimated electron bunches with an energy spread of 5% and a temporal duration of the order of 1 fs. These results offer a route towards unprecedented time resolution in ultrafast electron diffraction experiments.

Radiation-damaged tungsten is exposed to high-flux, low-energy deuterium plasmas at self-bias conditions. We observe that the fraction of deuterium that penetrates is only ${10}^{-5}–{10}^{-7}$ of the plasma flux and strongly dependent on the local surface temperature. We propose that deuterium does not directly penetrate bulk tungsten but that it thermalizes at the surface, where it forms a protective chemisorbed layer. We find an energy barrier of 1–2 eV between the surface and bulk, causing the influx of deuterium to be low as compared to the number of defects and leading to slow filling of the damaged layer.

Filamentation due to the growth of a Weibel-type instability was observed in the interaction of a pair of counterstreaming, ablatively driven plasma flows, in a supersonic, collisionless regime relevant to astrophysical collisionless shocks. The flows were created by irradiating a pair of opposing plastic (CH) foils with 1.8 kJ, 2-ns laser pulses on the OMEGA EP Laser System. Ultrafast laser-driven proton radiography was used to image the Weibel-generated electromagnetic fields. The experimental observations are in good agreement with the analytical theory of the Weibel instability and with particle-in-cell simulations.

The theoretically predicted vanishment of the macroscopic contact angle hysteresis is found experimentally along with a small but finite force of adhesion ($F_{\mathrm{Ad}}\approx -0.5\mu \mathrm{N}$) that, unexpectedly, is independent of the history of the preload. Our results agree with the prediction of a model in which the surface tension of the liquid provides the counterpart of the restoring force of an elastic solid, evidencing that the dewetting of a liquid in the absence of strong pinning points is equivalent to the detachment of an elastic solid.

Motivated by the problem of identifying Majorana mode operators at junctions, we analyze a basic algebraic structure leading to a doubled spectrum. For general (nonlinear) interactions the emergent mode creation operator is highly nonlinear in the original effective mode operators, and therefore also in the underlying electron creation and destruction operators. This phenomenon could open up new possibilities for controlled dynamical manipulation of the modes. We briefly compare and contrast related issues in the Pfaffian quantum Hall state.

Current theories of Kondo insulators employ the interaction of conduction electrons with localized Kramers doublets originating from a tetragonal crystalline environment, yet all Kondo insulators are cubic. Here we develop a theory of cubic topological Kondo insulators involving the interaction of ${\Gamma }_8$ spin quartets with a conduction sea. The spin quartets greatly increase the potential for strong topological insulators, entirely eliminating the weak topological phases from the diagram. We show that the relevant topological behavior in cubic Kondo insulators can only reside at the lower symmetry $X$ or $M$ points in the Brillouin zone, leading to three Dirac cones with heavy quasiparticles.

We discuss density functional theory calculations of hybrid inorganic-organic systems that explicitly include the global effects of doping (i.e., position of the Fermi level) and the formation of a space-charge layer. For the example of tetrafluoro-tetracyanoquinodimethane on the $\mathrm{ZnO}(000\overline{1})$ surface we show that the adsorption energy and electron transfer depend strongly on the ZnO doping. The associated work function changes are large, for which the formation of space-charge layers is the main driving force. The prominent doping effects are expected to be quite general for charge-transfer interfaces in hybrid inorganic-organic systems and important for device design.