X-ray ptychography is a robust microscopy technique with nanoscale resolution that requires a spatially and temporally coherent illumination. In a typical setup, the temporal coherence requirements are satisfied by monochromating the x-ray source, e.g., using a crystal monochromator. Recent studies have shown that energy resolving, or hyperspectral, detectors can to some extent replace the role of the monochromator to perform, e.g., edge-subtraction ptychographic imaging with broadband radiation in a single acquisition. Scaling this capability from two dimensions (2D) to three dimensions (3D), and from a single absorption edge to multiple edges, is critical for its applications in structural and elemental characterisation. The method is hitherto limited by the inherently lower maximum count rate of hyperspectral detectors and the chromaticity of the optics often used in x-ray ptychography experiments, namely Fresnel zone plates. In this work, we design an optimized broadband spectroscopic ptychography setup and use it to perform 3D hyperspectral imaging of particles of battery material containing various percentages of nickel, manganese, cobalt (NMC). We show that we can identify different compositions based on their spectral response. We discuss the results and provide guidelines for future exploitation of the method in laboratory settings.

We present a framework for determining effectively the spectrum and stability of traveling waves on networks with symmetries, such as rings and lattices, by computing master stability curves (MSCs). Unlike traditional methods, MSCs are independent of system size and can be readily used to assess wave destabilization and multistability in small and large networks.

Decohering topological order (TO) is central to the many-body physics of open quantum matter and decoding transitions. We identify statistical mechanical models for decohering non-Abelian TOs, which have been crucial for understanding the error threshold of Abelian stabilizer codes. The decohered density matrix can be described by loop models, whose topological loop weight $N$ is the quantum dimension of the decohering anyon—reducing to the Ising model if $N=1$. In particular, the Rényi-$n$ moments correspond to $n$ coupled $\mathrm{O}(N)$ loop models. Moreover, by diagonalizing the density matrix at maximal error rate, we connect the fidelity between two logically distinct ground states to random $\mathrm{O}(N)$ loop and spin models. We find a remarkable stability to quantum channels which proliferate non-Abelian anyons with large quantum dimension, with the possibility of critical phases for smaller dimensions. Intuitively, this stability is due to non-Abelian anyons not admitting finite-depth string operators. We confirm our framework with exact results for Kitaev quantum double models, and with numerical simulations for the non-Abelian phase of the Kitaev honeycomb model. Our work opens up the possibility of non-Abelian TO being robust against maximally proliferating certain anyons, which can inform error-correction studies of these topological memories.

Higher-point functions in $\mathcal{N}=4$ super Yang-Mills theory can be constructed using integrability by triangulating the surfaces on which Feynman graphs would be drawn. It remains hard to analytically compute the necessary regluing of the tiles by virtual particles. We propose a new approach to study a series of residues encountered in the two-particle gluing of the planar one-loop five-point function of stress tensor multiplets. After exposing the twisted period nature of the integral functions, we employ intersection theory to derive canonical differential equations and present a solution.

A loosely bound hadronic molecule produced by a relativistic heavy-ion collision has been described as a “snowball in hell” since it emerges from a hadron resonance gas whose temperature is orders of magnitude larger than the binding energy of the molecule. This remarkable phenomenon can be explained in terms of a novel thermodynamic variable called the “contact” that is conjugate to the binding momentum of the molecule. The production rate of the molecule can be expressed in terms of the contact density at the kinetic freeze-out of the hadron resonance gas. It approaches a nonzero limit as the binding energy goes to 0.

We employed laser spectroscopy of atomic transitions to measure the nuclear charge radii and electromagnetic properties of the high-spin isomeric states in neutron-rich indium isotopes ($Z=49$) near the closed proton and neutron shells at $Z=50$ and $N=82$. Our data reveal a reduction in the nuclear charge radius and intrinsic quadrupole moment when protons and neutrons are fully aligned in ${}^{129}\mathrm{In}(N=80)$, to form the high spin isomer. Such a reduction is not observed in ${}^{127}\mathrm{In}(N=78)$, where more complex configurations can be formed by the existence of four neutron holes. These observations are not consistently described by nuclear theory.

Light amplification toward extremely high power in the infrared regime remains a significant challenge due to the lack of suitable gain media. Here we propose a new scheme to amplify a laser pulse with tunable wavelengths toward extremely high power via forward Raman amplification in plasma. Different from previously proposed schemes based upon backward Raman or Brillouin amplification, our scheme involves a pump pulse and a seed pulse copropagating in moderate density plasma, with the phase matching conditions for forward Raman scattering fulfilled. Due to their group velocity difference in plasma, the pump with a shorter wavelength and longer duration will chase the seed and transfer energy to the latter efficiently. Analytical models for both linear and nonlinear stages of amplification as well as particle-in-cell simulation show that, by employing a $1.0\mathrm{\mu }\mathrm{m}$ pump laser, a $1.8\mathrm{\mu }\mathrm{m}$ seed pulse can be amplified ${10}^4$ times in its intensity and then self-compressed to nearly single-cycle. Our scheme shows the merits of high efficiency, high compactness, and relatively easy implementation with the copropagating configuration, which may provide a unique route toward the petawatt few-cycle infrared laser pulses.

Moiré superlattices created by stacking atomic layers of transition metal dichalcogenide semiconductors have emerged as a class of fascinating artificial photonic and electronic materials. An appealing attribute of these structures is the inheritance of the valley degree of freedom from the constituent monolayers. Recent studies show evidence that the valley polarization of the moiré excitons is highly tunable. In heterojunctions of ${\mathrm{WSe}}_2/{\mathrm{WS}}_2$, marked improvement in valley polarization is observed by increasing optical excitation power, a behavior that is quite distinct from the monolayers, and lacks a clear understanding so far. In this Letter, we show that this highly tunable valley property arises from filling of the moiré superlattice, which provides an intriguing mechanism for engineering these quantum opto-valleytronic platforms. Our data further demonstrate that the long-range electron-hole exchange interaction, despite being significantly weakened in the junctions, is the dominant source of moiré exciton intervalley scattering at low population. Using magnetic field tuning, we quantitatively determine the exchange interaction strength to be 0.03 and 0.24 meV for 0° and 60° twisted samples, respectively, in our experiments, about 1 order of magnitude weaker than that in the monolayers.

We analyze the Kitaev model on the $\{9,3\}$ hyperbolic lattice. The $\{9,3\}$ is formed by a regular tricoordinated tiling of nonagons, where the three-color coding of bonds according to the inequivalent Kitaev Ising spin couplings yields the natural generalization of the original Kitaev model for Euclidean regular honeycomb tiling. Upon investigation of the bulk spectrum for large finite size droplets, we identify a gapless chiral ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$ spin liquid state featuring spontaneous time-reversal symmetry breaking. Because of its noncommutative translation group structure, such type of hyperbolic spin liquid is conjectured to feature chiral quasiparticles with a potentially non-Abelian Bloch profile.

Polar skyrmion bubbles are spherical electric solitons offering multiple new functionalities for the next generation of electronic devices. In this study, we explore the formation of these particlelike entities at room temperature within a ferroelectric nanostructure composed of a nanodot embedded in a thin film. Our findings emphasize the unique capability of this specific geometry to host various types of electric solitons, particularly to allow for a low-power encoding of a single-byte skyrmion bubble at the precise location of the nanodot through a sequence of bias voltage signals. This intricate process is found to be driven by the emergence of a negative nonlocal dielectric response in nanoscale ultrathin film. Our findings offer practical insights into the controlled encoding operations of polar defects at targeted locations, thereby paving the way for the practical implementation of emerging topological ferroelectrics in memory and logic devices.

Spontaneous symmetry breaking generally circumvents one-dimensional systems with local interactions in thermal equilibrium. Here, we analyze a category of one-dimensional Hermitian models via local non-Hermitian constructions. Notably, spontaneous symmetry breaking and long-range order may emerge at finite temperatures in such systems under periodic boundary conditions, in sharp contrast to Hermitian constructions. We demonstrate clear numerical evidence, such as order parameters and specific heat, supporting phase diagrams with robust ordered phases. Non-Hermitian physics plays a vital role in prohibiting domain-wall proliferation and promoting spontaneous symmetry breaking. The fermions exhibit an exotic topological nature in their path-integral windings, which uphold nonzero integers—commonly a non-Hermitian signature—in the ordered phases, thus offering a novel and spontaneous origin for both symmetry breaking and non-Hermiticity.

The toric code is a canonical example of a topological error-correcting code. Two logical qubits stored within the toric code are robust against local decoherence, ensuring that these qubits can be faithfully retrieved as long as the error rate remains below a certain threshold. Recent studies have explored such a threshold behavior as an intrinsic information-theoretic transition, independent of the decoding protocol. These studies have shown that information-theoretic metrics, calculated using the Renyi (replica) approximation, demonstrate sharp transitions at a specific error rate. However, an exact analytic expression that avoids using the replica trick has not been shown, and the connection between the transition in information-theoretic capacity and the random bond Ising model (RBIM) has only been indirectly established. In this Letter, we present the first analytic expression for the coherent information of a decohered toric code, thereby establishing a rigorous connection between the fundamental error threshold and the criticality of the RBIM.

Searching for exotic interactions beyond the standard model of particle physics may solve some of the current puzzles in physics. Here, the authors experimentally explore a spin- and velocity-dependent exotic interaction between the nucleons in a gold sphere and the electrons in a spin source in the micrometer range. The microfabricated spin source provides periodically varying spin density of electrons, resulting in a periodic exotic field. A cantilever glued with a gold sphere is used to measure the force acting on the gold sphere by the spin source. The spin source is driven to oscillate, and then, the imaginary component of the signal is extracted at the 10th harmonic of the oscillation frequency, which effectively separates the exotic interaction from the spurious forces commonly present in such short-range measurements. No signal of the exotic interaction is observed, then, new limits on the coupling constant are set in the interaction range below $10\mathrm{\mu }\mathrm{m}$, with $f_{\perp }\le 2.2\times {10}^{-9}$ at $2.1\mathrm{\mu }\mathrm{m}$.

We introduce the complex Liouville string, a solvable string theory defined by coupling two Liouville theories with complex conjugate central charges $c\in 13+i\mathbb{R}$ on the world sheet. We compute its amplitudes from first principles and establish a duality with a double-scaled two-matrix integral. We also analyze general world sheet boundaries and nonperturbative effects in the genus expansion. By expressing the complex Liouville string as a 2D dilaton gravity theory with a sine potential, we show that it admits both ${\mathrm{AdS}}_2$ and ${\mathrm{dS}}_2$ vacua.

We consider the thrust ($T$) distribution in electron-positron ($e^{+}{e}^{-}$) annihilation into hadrons and we perform the all-order resummation of the large logarithms of $1-T$ up to full next-to-next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic (${\mathrm{N}}^3\mathrm{LL}$) accuracy in QCD, also including the impact of next-order logarithmic corrections (${\mathrm{N}}^4\mathrm{LL}$). We consistently combine resummation with the known fixed-order results up to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO). All perturbative terms up to $\mathcal{O}({\alpha }_S^3)$ are included in our calculation, which, thanks to a unitarity constraint, exactly reproduces, after integration over $T$, the next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (${\mathrm{N}}^3\mathrm{LO}$) result for the total cross section of $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ into hadrons. We perform resummation in the Laplace-conjugated space, which ensures the factorization of the kinematic momentum conservation constraint, and compare our results with those obtained using the resummation formalism in the physical ($T$) space. We find that the differences in the spectra obtained with the two different formalisms are sizable. Nonperturbative corrections are included using an analytic hadronization model, depending on two free parameters. Finally, we present a comparison of our spectra with experimental data at the $Z$-boson mass ($m_Z$) energy, which enables us to extract the value of the QCD coupling ${\alpha }_S(m_Z^2)=0.1181\pm 0.0018$, fully consistent with the world average. We explicitly show that resumming Sudakov logarithms in Laplace-conjugated space and evaluating the inverse Laplace transform exactly is crucial in order to obtain an accurate determination of the QCD coupling.

We compute the production rates for two, three, four, and five jets in the hadronic decay of a Higgs boson in its two dominant decay modes to bottom quarks and gluons to third order in the QCD coupling constant. The five-, four-, and three-jet rates are obtained from a next-to-next-to-leading order calculation of Higgs decay to three jets, while the two-jet rate is inferred at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order from the inclusive decay rate. Our results show distinct differences in the dependence of the jet rates on the jet resolution parameter between the two decay modes, supporting the aim of discriminating different Higgs boson decay channels via classic QCD observables.

Understanding the interplay between inelastic and reactive processes in low temperature molecular collisions is a true theoretical challenge. This study addresses this challenge by employing the statistical adiabatic channel model (SACM) to quantify the rotational excitation processes in the ${\mathrm{OH}}^{+}+{\mathrm{H}}_2$ reactive system, such process being key in astrochemistry. The SACM approach demonstrates very good agreement with reduced dimensional close-coupling calculations in describing pure inelastic collisions in the low energy regime and satisfactory agreement with experimental measurement for treating reactive processes. Hence, the SACM approach can be considered as a good alternative to consider molecular collisions in reactive systems characterized by strongly bounded intermediate complexes, in absence of exact calculation in the low energy regime. Our findings reveal that reactive processes dominate the pure collisional excitation at all temperatures studied (5–300 K) by at least about one order of magnitude. This suggests a strong revision of the predicted abundance of ${\mathrm{OH}}^{+}$ in astrophysical environments since astrochemical models are presently significantly overestimating the impact of ${\mathrm{OH}}^{+}$ excitation induced by ${\mathrm{H}}_2$ collisions.

We explore a new class of chipscale torsion pendula formed by ${\text{Si}}_3{\mathrm{N}}_4$ nanoribbon suspensions. Owing to their unique heirarchy of gravitational, tensile, and elastic stiffness, the devices exhibit damping rates of $\sim 10\mathrm{\mu }\mathrm{Hz}$ and parametric gravity sensitivities near that of an ideal pendulum. The suspension nonlinearity can also be used to cancel the pendulum nonlinearity, paving the way toward fully isochronous, high $Q$ pendulum gravimeters. As a demonstration, we study a 0.1 mg, 32 Hz micropendulum with a damping rate of $16\mathrm{\mu }\mathrm{Hz}$, a thermal acceleration sensitivity of $2\times {10}^{-9}{g}_0/\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}(g_0=9.8\mathrm{m}/{\mathrm{s}}^2)$, and a parametric gravity sensitivity of $5\mathrm{Hz}/g_0$. We record Allan deviations as low as $2.5\mathrm{\mu }\mathrm{Hz}$ at 100 seconds, corresponding to a bias stability of $5\times {10}^{-7}{g}_0$. We also demonstrate a 100-fold cancellation of the pendulum nonlinearity. In addition to inertial sensing, our devices are well suited to proposed searches for new physics exploiting low-loss micro- to milligram-scale mechanical oscillators.