A Schrödinger equation may be unitarily transformed into dynamical equations in different interaction pictures which describe a common physical process, i.e., the same underlying interactions and dynamics. In contrast to this standard scenario, other relations are also possible, such as a common interaction-picture dynamical equation corresponding to several Schrödinger equations that represent different physical processes. This may enable us to design alternative and feasible experimental routes for operations that are a priori difficult or impossible to perform. The power of this concept is exemplified by engineering Hamiltonians that improve the performance or make realizable several shortcuts to adiabaticity.

Light nuclei at room temperature and below exhibit a kinetic energy which significantly deviates from the predictions of classical statistical mechanics. This quantum kinetic energy is responsible for a wide variety of isotope effects of interest in fields ranging from chemistry to climatology. It also furnishes the second moment of the nuclear momentum distribution, which contains subtle information about the chemical environment and has recently become accessible to deep inelastic neutron scattering experiments. Here, we show how, by combining imaginary time path integral dynamics with a carefully designed generalized Langevin equation, it is possible to dramatically reduce the expense of computing the quantum kinetic energy. We also introduce a transient anisotropic Gaussian approximation to the nuclear momentum distribution which can be calculated with negligible additional effort. As an example, we evaluate the structural properties, the quantum kinetic energy, and the nuclear momentum distribution for a first-principles simulation of liquid water.

Following recent ATLAS and CMS publications we interpret the results of their Higgs searches in terms of standard model operators. For a Higgs boson mass of 125 GeV we determine several Higgs couplings from published 2011 data and extrapolate the results towards different scenarios of LHC running. Even though our analysis is limited by low statistics we already derive meaningful constraints on modified Higgs sectors.

We provide a quantitative determination of the effective partonic kinematics for Higgs boson production in gluon fusion in terms of the collider energy at the LHC. We use the result to assess, as a function of the Higgs boson mass, whether the large $m_t$ approximation is adequate and Sudakov resummation advantageous. We argue that our results hold to all perturbative orders. Based on our results, we conclude that the full inclusion of finite top mass corrections is likely to be important for accurate phenomenology for a light Higgs boson with $m_H\sim 125\mathrm{GeV}$ at the LHC with $\sqrt{s}=14\mathrm{TeV}$.

We explore the anisotropic nature of Feshbach resonances in the collision between ultracold highly magnetic submerged-shell dysprosium atoms in their energetically lowest magnetic sublevel, which can only occur due to couplings to rotating bound states. This is in contrast to well-studied alkali-metal atom collisions, where broadest (strongest) Feshbach resonances are hyperfine induced and due to rotationless bound states. Our first-principle coupled-channel calculation of the collisions between these spin-polarized bosonic dysprosium atoms reveals a strong interplay between the anisotropies in the dispersion and magnetic dipole-dipole interaction. The former anisotropy is absent in alkali-metal and chromium collisions. We show that both types of anisotropy significantly affect the Feshbach spectrum as a function of an external magnetic field. Effects of the electrostatic quadrupole-quadrupole interaction are small. Over a 20 mT magnetic field range, we predict about 10 Feshbach resonances and show that the resonance locations depend on the dysprosium isotope.

The possible involvement of weakly bound three-body systems in the muonic hydrogen spectroscopy experiment, which could resolve the current discrepancy between determinations of the proton radius, is investigated. Using variational calculations with complex coordinate rotation, we show that in the $p\mu e$ ion, which was recently proposed as a possible candidate, the $p\mu$ core fails to bind the outer electron tightly enough to explain the discrepancy. It is also shown that the $pp\mu$ molecular ion cannot play any role in the observed line.

We optically trap a single nanoparticle in high vacuum and cool its three spatial degrees of freedom by means of active parametric feedback. Using a single laser beam for both trapping and cooling we demonstrate a temperature compression ratio of four orders of magnitude. The absence of a clamping mechanism provides robust decoupling from the heat bath and eliminates the requirement of cryogenic precooling. The small size and mass of the nanoparticle yield high resonance frequencies and high quality factors along with low recoil heating, which are essential conditions for ground state cooling and for low decoherence. The trapping and cooling scheme presented here opens new routes for testing quantum mechanics with mesoscopic objects and for ultrasensitive metrology and sensing.

We observed exact dynamic localization in its general case in strongly coupled curved waveguide arrays with periodic, nonsquare-wave curvatures. We achieved a six times change in the dynamic localization bandwidth by changing a design parameter in our deviated-square-wave curvature. By analyzing the relation between the bandwidth and curvature profile, we offer a general method to control the localization bandwidth.

We study the near-field heat exchange between hyperbolic materials and demonstrate that these media are able to support broadband frustrated modes which transport heat by photon tunneling with a high efficiency close to the theoretical limit. We predict that hyperbolic materials can be designed to be perfect thermal emitters at nanoscale and derive an upper limit for the heat flux due to hyperbolic modes.

Recently, it has been proposed that the turbulent fluctuations measured in a linear plasma device could be described as a superposition of uncorrelated Lorentzian pulses with a narrow distribution of durations, which would provide an explanation for the reported quasiexponential power spectra. Here, we study the applicability of this proposal to edge fluctuations in toroidal magnetic confinement fusion plasmas. For the purpose of this analysis, we introduce a novel wavelet-based pulse-detection technique that offers important advantages over existing techniques. This technique allows for extracting the properties of individual pulses from the experimental time series, and for quantifying the distribution of pulse duration and energy as well as temporal correlations. We apply the wavelet technique to edge turbulent fluctuation data from the W7-AS stellarator and the JET tokamak, and find that the pulses detected in the data do not have a narrow distribution of durations and are not uncorrelated. Instead, the distributions are of the power-law type, exhibiting temporal correlations over scales much longer than the typical pulse duration. These results suggest that turbulence in open and closed field line systems may be distinct, and cast doubts on the proposed ubiquity of exponential power spectra in this context.

The issue, composition dependence of glass-forming ability (GFA) in metallic glasses (MG), has been investigated by systematic experimental measurements coupled with theoretical calculations in Cu-Zr and Ni-Nb alloy systems. It is found that the atomic-level packing efficiency strongly relates to their GFA. The best GFA is located at the largest difference in the packing efficiency of the solute-centered clusters between the glassy and crystal alloys in both MG systems. This work provides an understanding of GFA from atomic level and will shed light on the development of new MGs with larger critical sizes.

Using real-time grazing-incidence small-angle x-ray scattering, we find that the processes of island formation and coalescence during the room-temperature vapor phase deposition of aluminum lead to dynamical scaling of the evolving surface morphology. The scaling is quantitatively consistent with the self-similarity predicted by the Family-Meakin model, which was developed to describe liquid droplet deposition, growth, and coalescence. The Family-Meakin model assumes only that atomic diffusion over the substrate between islands or droplets is negligible and that diffusion between impinging islands or droplets is sufficient to give complete coalescence. Therefore the dynamical scaling morphology evolution identified here may be common in the initial stages of those solid film growth processes which proceed by island formation and growth.

Using a multiscale approach combining continuum model with first-principles calculation, we develop a quantitative theoretical model for heterogeneous nucleation and the growth of a quantum dot molecule—a few islands “strain bonded” by a pit in heteroepitaxy of thin films, in contrast to homogeneous nucleation and growth of isolated strain islands on the surface. We show that the critical size and energy barrier for island nucleation next to a pit is substantially reduced with the increasing pit size, but the reduction approaches an upper bound of $\sim 85\%$ and $\sim 72\%$ for the size and barrier, respectively. Our model also predicts a self-limiting effect on island growth, resulting from an intriguing interplay between island-pit attraction and island-island repulsion, that drives the island size to increase linearly with the pit size, which explains a long-standing puzzle of experimental observation.

We investigated the charge dynamics of the conductivity enhancement from 2 to $1000\mathrm{S}/\mathrm{cm}$ in poly(3, 4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrenesulfonate) as induced by structural changes through the addition of a polar solvent and the following solvent bath treatment. Our results indicate that the addition of a polar solvent selectively enhanced the $\pi \mathrm{\text{−}}\pi$ coupling of the polymer chains, resulting in the reduction of disorder and tremendously increasing the charge carrier mobility, which yielded an insulator-to-metal transition. In contrast, the following solvent bath treatment selectively enhanced the intergrain coupling, which did not affect the disorder or the mobility but increased the charge carrier density. Therefore, we demonstrate that the conduction-character defining disorder in this conducting polymer system is determined by the extent of interchain coupling.

Electrical spin injection into semiconductors paves the way for exploring new phenomena in the area of spin physics and new generations of spintronic devices. However the exact role of interface states in the spin injection mechanism from a magnetic tunnel junction into a semiconductor is still under debate. In this Letter, we demonstrate a clear transition from spin accumulation into interface states to spin injection in the conduction band of $n$-Ge. We observe spin signal amplification at low temperature due to spin accumulation into interface states followed by a clear transition towards spin injection in the conduction band from 200 K up to room temperature. In this regime, the spin signal is reduced to a value compatible with the spin diffusion model. More interestingly, the observation in this regime of inverse spin Hall effect in germanium generated by spin pumping and the modulation of the spin signal by a gate voltage clearly demonstrate spin accumulation in the germanium conduction band.

We introduce the notion of the strongly correlated band insulator (SCI), where the lowest energy excitations are collective modes (excitons) rather than the single particles. We construct controllable $1/N$ expansion for SCI to describe their observable properties. A remarkable example of the SCI is bilayer graphene which is shown to be tunable between the SCI and usual weak coupling regime.

We demonstrate experimentally the existence of Josephson junctions having a doubly degenerate ground state with an average Josephson phase $\psi =\pm \phi$. The value of $\phi$ can be chosen by design in the interval $0<\phi <\pi$. The junctions used in our experiments are fabricated as 0-$\pi$ Josephson junctions of moderate normalized length with asymmetric 0 and $\pi$ regions. We show that (a) these $\phi$ Josephson junctions have two critical currents, corresponding to the escape of the phase $\psi$ from $-\phi$ and $+\phi$ states, (b) the phase $\psi$ can be set to a particular state by tuning an external magnetic field, or (c) by using a proper bias current sweep sequence. The experimental observations are in agreement with previous theoretical predictions.

We probe the effects of strong disorder ($2.4<k_{\mathrm{F}}l<8.6$) on superconductivity in thin films of niobium titanium nitride and titanium nitride by measuring the microwave electrodynamics in coplanar waveguide resonators. We find a gradual evolution of the electromagnetic response with disorder, deviating from BCS theory, for both materials. This result can be understood as due to changes in the quasiparticle density of states, induced by the short elastic scattering length. The observations are consistent with a model using an effective pair breaker, dependent on the level of disorder.

By performing density functional calculations, we investigate the origin of the Skyrmion state and ferroelectricity in ${\mathrm{Cu}}_2{\mathrm{OSeO}}_3$. We find that the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions between the two different kinds of Cu ions are extremely strong and induce the helical ground state and the Skyrmion state in the absence and presence of a magnetic field, respectively. On the basis of the general model for the spin-order induced polarization, we propose that the ferroelectric polarization of ${\mathrm{Cu}}_2{\mathrm{OSeO}}_3$ in the collinear ferrimagnetic state arises from an unusual mechanism, i.e., the single-spin-site contribution due to the spin-orbit coupling.

Platinum (Pt) metal, being nonmagnetic and with a strong spin-orbit coupling interaction, has been central in detecting the pure spin current and establishing most of the recent spin-based phenomena. Magnetotransport measurements, both electrical and thermal, conclusively show strong ferromagnetic characteristics in thin Pt films on the ferromagnetic insulator due to the magnetic proximity effects. The pure spin current phenomena measured by Pt, including the inverse spin Hall and the spin Seebeck effects, are thus contaminated and not exclusively established.