We report the creation of a pair of Josephson junctions on a toroidal dilute gas Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), a configuration that is the cold atom analog of the well-known dc superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID). We observe Josephson effects, measure the critical current of the junctions, and find dynamic behavior that is in good agreement with the simple Josephson equations for a tunnel junction with the ideal sinusoidal current-phase relation expected for the parameters of the experiment. The junctions and toroidal trap are created with the painted potential, a time-averaged optical dipole potential technique which will allow scaling to more complex BEC circuit geometries than the single atom-SQUID case reported here. Since rotation plays the same role in the atom SQUID as magnetic field does in the dc SQUID magnetometer, the device has potential as a compact rotation sensor.

We study transport in the domain state, the so-called zero-resistance state, that emerges in a two-dimensional electron system in which the combined action of microwave radiation and magnetic field produces a negative absolute conductivity. We show that the voltage-biased system has a rich phase diagram in the system size and voltage plane, with second- and first-order transitions between the domain and homogeneous states for small and large voltages, respectively. We find the residual negative dissipative resistance in the stable domain state.

The collective motion of Bacillus subtilis in the presence of a photosensitizer is disrupted by reactive oxygen species when exposed to light of sufficient dosages and is partially recovered when light irradiation is suspended. The transition from a highly collective to a more random motion is modeled using an improved self-propelled model with alignment rule. The increment in noise level describes the enhanced uncertainty in the motion of swarming bacteria under stress as observed experimentally.

High-resolution O $1s$ resonant inelastic x-ray scattering spectra of liquid ${\mathrm{H}}_2\mathrm{O}$, ${\mathrm{D}}_2\mathrm{O}$, and HDO, obtained by excitation near the preedge resonance show, in the elastic line region, well-separated multiple vibrational structures corresponding to the internal OH stretch vibration in the ground state of water. The energy of the first-order vibrational excitation is strongly blueshifted with respect to the main band in the infrared or Raman spectra of water, indicating that water molecules with a highly weakened or broken donating hydrogen bond are correlated with the preedge structure in the x-ray absorption spectrum. The vibrational profile of preedge excited HDO water is well fitted with $50\%\pm 20\%$ greater OH-stretch contribution compared to OD, which strongly supports a preference for OH being the weakened or broken H-bond in agreement with the well-known picture that ${\mathrm{D}}_2\mathrm{O}$ makes stronger H-bonds than ${\mathrm{H}}_2\mathrm{O}$. Accompanying path-integral molecular dynamics simulations show that this is particularly the case for strongly asymmetrically H-bonded molecules, i.e., those that are selected by preedge excitation.

We demonstrate dispersion cancellation of entangled photons for arbitrary spectral orders, generalizing Franson cancellation typically considered in second order alone. Employing ultrafast coincidence detection based on sum-frequency generation in a periodically poled lithium niobate waveguide with a record-high pair conversion efficiency of ${10}^{-5}$, we verify cancellation of dispersion up to fifth order. Cancellation of odd-order phase is experimentally shown to require identical signal and idler dispersion coefficients, in contrast to even-order phase, which cancels with opposite signs. These results are especially important for future work on ultrabroadband biphotons.

Chaos is an inherently dynamical phenomenon traditionally studied for trajectories that are either permanently erratic or transiently influenced by permanently erratic ones lying on a set of measure zero. The latter gives rise to the final state sensitivity observed in connection with fractal basin boundaries in conservative scattering systems and driven dissipative systems. Here we focus on the most prevalent case of undriven dissipative systems, whose transient dynamics fall outside the scope of previous studies since no time-dependent solutions can exist for asymptotically long times. We show that such systems can exhibit positive finite-time Lyapunov exponents and fractal-like basin boundaries which nevertheless have codimension one. In sharp contrast to its driven and conservative counterparts, the settling rate to the (fixed-point) attractors grows exponentially in time, meaning that the fraction of trajectories away from the attractors decays superexponentially. While no invariant chaotic sets exist in such cases, the irregular behavior is governed by transient interactions with transient chaotic saddles, which act as effective, time-varying chaotic sets.

We study the dynamics of a strongly interacting bosonic quantum gas in an optical lattice potential under the effect of a dissipative environment. We show that the interplay between the dissipative process and the Hamiltonian evolution leads to an unconventional dynamical behavior of local number fluctuations. In particular, we show, both analytically and numerically, the emergence of an anomalous diffusive evolution in configuration space at short times and, at long times, an unconventional dynamics dominated by rare events. Such rare events, common in disordered and frustrated systems, are due here to strong interactions. This complex two-stage dynamics reveals information on the level structure of the strongly interacting gas.

We investigate the interlayer magnetoresistance (MR) along the chiral crystallographic axis in the hexagonal chiral magnet ${\mathrm{CrNb}}_3{\mathrm{S}}_6$. In a region below the incommensurate-commensurate phase transition between the chiral soliton lattice and the forced ferromagnetic state, a negative MR is obtained in a wide range of temperature, while a small positive MR is found very close to the Curie temperature. Normalized data of the negative MR almost falls into a single curve and is well fitted by a theoretical equation of the soliton density, meaning that the origin of the MR is ascribed to the magnetic scattering of conduction electrons by a nonlinear, periodic, and countable array of magnetic soliton kinks.

In the absence of environmental cues, a migrating cell performs an isotropic random motion. Recently, the breaking of this isotropy has been observed when cells move in the presence of asymmetric adhesive patterns. However, up to now the mechanisms at work to direct cell migration in such environments remain unknown. Here, we show that a nonadhesive surface with asymmetric microgeometry consisting of dense arrays of tilted micropillars can direct cell motion. Our analysis reveals that most features of cell trajectories, including the bias, can be reproduced by a simple model of active Brownian particle in a ratchet potential, which we suggest originates from a generic elastic interaction of the cell body with the environment. The observed guiding effect, independent of adhesion, is therefore robust and could be used to direct cell migration both in vitro and in vivo.

A candidate for the charmonium(like) state $X(3872)$ is found $11\pm 7\mathrm{MeV}$ below the $D{\overline{D}}^{*}$ threshold using dynamical $N_f=2$ lattice simulation with $J^{PC}=1^{++}$ and $I=0$. This is the first lattice simulation that establishes a candidate for $X(3872)$ in addition to the nearby scattering states $D{\overline{D}}^{*}$ and $J/\psi \omega$, which inevitably have to be present in dynamical QCD. We extract large and negative $D{\overline{D}}^{*}$ scattering length $a_0^{D{D}^{*}}=-1.7\pm 0.4\mathrm{fm}$ and the effective range $r_0^{D{D}^{*}}=0.5\pm 0.1\mathrm{fm}$, but their reliable determination will have to wait for a simulation on a larger volume. In $I=1$ channel, only the $D{\overline{D}}^{*}$ and $J/\psi \rho$ scattering states are found and no candidate for $X(3872)$. This is in agreement with the interpretation that $X(3872)$ is dominantly $I=0$, while its small $I=1$ component arises solely from the isospin breaking and is therefore absent in our simulation with $m_u=m_d$.

We identify a relation between the number of photon pairs generated by parametric fluorescence, through either spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) or spontaneous four-wave mixing, and the number generated by the corresponding stimulated process, respectively, either difference-frequency generation or stimulated four-wave mixing. On the basis of this very general result, we show that the characterization of SPDC sources of two-photon states in a given system can be performed solely by studying stimulated emission. We call this technique stimulated emission tomography (SET). We show that the number of photons detected in SET can be 9 orders of magnitude larger than the average number of coincidence counts in two-photon quantum state tomography. These results open the way to the study of sources of quantum-correlated photon pairs with unprecedented precision and unparalleled resolution.

Transition metals Ti, Zr, and Hf have a hexagonal close-packed structure ($\alpha$) at ambient conditions, but undergo phase transformations with increasing temperature and pressure. Of particular significance is the high-pressure hexagonal $\omega$ phase which is brittle compared to the $\alpha$ phase. There has been a long debate about transformation mechanisms and orientation relations between the two crystal structures. Here we present the first high pressure experiments with in situ synchrotron x-ray diffraction texture studies on polycrystalline aggregates. We follow crystal orientation changes in Zr, confirming the original suggestion by Silcock for an $\alpha \to \omega$ martensitic transition for Ti, with $(0001{)}_{\alpha }||(11\overline{2}0{)}_{\omega }$, and a remarkable orientation memory when $\omega$ reverts back to $\alpha$.

Graphene has exhibited a wealth of fascinating properties, but is also known not to be a superconductor. Remarkably, we show that graphene can be made a conventional Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer superconductor by the combined effect of charge doping and tensile strain. While the effect of doping obviously enlarges the Fermi surface, the effect of strain profoundly increases the electron-phonon coupling. At the experimental accessible doping ($\sim 4\times {10}^{14}{\mathrm{cm}}^{-2}$) and strain ($\sim 16\%$) levels, the superconducting critical temperature $T_c$ is estimated to be as high as $\sim 30\mathrm{K}$, the highest for a single-element material above the liquid hydrogen temperature.

We study the dynamics of a quantum Ising chain after the sudden introduction of a nonintegrable long-range interaction. Via an exact mapping onto a fully connected lattice of hard-core bosons, we show that a prethermal state emerges and we investigate its features by focusing on a class of physically relevant observables. In order to gain insight into the eventual thermalization, we outline a diagrammatic approach which complements the study of the previous quasistationary state and provides the basis for a self-consistent solution of the kinetic equation. This analysis suggests that both the temporal decay towards the prethermal state and the crossover to the eventual thermal one may occur algebraically.

Exciton-exciton recombination in isolated semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes was studied using femtosecond transient absorption. Under sufficient excitation to saturate the optical absorption, we observed an abrupt transition between reaction- and diffusion-limited kinetics, arising from reactions between incoherent localized excitons with a finite probability of $\sim 0.2\mathrm{per}$ encounter. This represents the first experimental observation of a crossover between classical and critical kinetics in a 1D coalescing random walk, which is a paradigm for the study of nonequilibrium systems.

Empirical evidence suggests that most urban systems experience a transition from a monocentric to a polycentric organization as they grow and expand. We propose here a stochastic, out-of-equilibrium model of the city, which explains the appearance of subcenters as an effect of traffic congestion. We show that congestion triggers the instability of the monocentric regime and that the number of subcenters and the total commuting distance within a city scale sublinearly with its population, predictions that are in agreement with data gathered for around 9000 U.S. cities between 1994 and 2010.

We determine the nonlinear time-dependent response of a tracer on a lattice with randomly distributed hard obstacles as a force is switched on. The calculation is exact to first order in the obstacle density and holds for arbitrarily large forces. Whereas, on the impurity-free lattice, the nonlinear drift velocity in the stationary state is analytic in the driving force, interactions with impurities introduce logarithmic contributions beyond the linear regime. The long-time decay of the velocity toward the steady state is exponentially fast for any finite value of the force, in striking contrast to the power-law relaxation predicted within linear response. We discuss the range of validity of our analytic results by comparison to stochastic simulations.

We propose a discrete set of continuous deformation of a circular nanoslit to generate and control optical vortices at the microscopic scale. The process relies on the interplay between the spin and orbital angular momentum degrees of freedom of light mediated by appropriate closed-path nanoslits milled on a thin gold film. Topological shaping of light is experimentally demonstrated in the visible domain. Moreover, all experimental observations are quantitatively validated by a simple model that takes into account the transverse manipulation of the optical phase via the space-variant form birefringence of subwavelength slits.

We show how to find the physical Langevin equation describing the trajectories of particles undergoing collisionless stochastic acceleration. These stochastic differential equations retain not only one-, but two-particle statistics, and inherit the Hamiltonian nature of the underlying microscopic equations. This opens the door to using stochastic variational integrators to perform simulations of stochastic interactions such as Fermi acceleration. We illustrate the theory by applying it to two example problems.

We present zero-temperature first-principles calculations of elemental cerium and we compute its pressure-volume phase diagram within a theoretical framework able to describe simultaneously both the $\alpha$ and the $\gamma$ phases. A surprising result revealed by our study is the presence of a clear signature of the transition at zero temperature and that this signature can be observed if and only if the spin-orbit coupling is taken into account. Our calculations indicate that the transition line in the pressure-temperature phase diagram of this material has a low-$T$ critical point at negative pressures, placed very close to zero temperature. This suggests that cerium is very close to being “quantum critical,” in agreement with recent experiments.