Traditional photonuclear reactions primarily excite giant dipole resonances, making the measurement of isovector giant resonances with higher multipolarities a great challenge. In this Letter, the manipulation of collective excitations of different multipole transitions in even-even nuclei via vortex $\gamma$ photons is investigated. We develop the calculation method for photonuclear cross sections induced by the vortex $\gamma$ photon beam using the fully self-consistent random-phase approximation plus particle-vibration coupling ($\mathrm{RPA}+\mathrm{PVC}$) model based on Skyrme density functional. We find that the electromagnetic transitions with multipolarity $J<|m_{\gamma }|$ are forbidden for vortex $\gamma$ photons due to the angular momentum conservation, with $m_{\gamma }$ being the projection of total angular momentum of $\gamma$ photon on its propagation direction. For instance, this allows for probing the isovector giant quadrupole resonance without interference from dipole transitions using vortex $\gamma$ photons with $m_{\gamma }=2$. Furthermore, the electromagnetic transition with $J=|m_{\gamma }|+1$ vanishes at a specific polar angle. Therefore, the giant resonances with specific multipolarity can be extracted via vortex $\gamma$ photons. Moreover, the vortex properties of $\gamma$ photons can be meticulously diagnosed by measuring the nuclear photon-absorption cross section. Our method opens new avenues for photonuclear excitations, generation of coherent $\gamma$ photon laser and precise detection of vortex particles, and consequently, has significant impact on nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics and strong laser physics.

The presence of doubly excited states (DESs) above the core-hole ionization threshold nontrivially modulates the x-ray absorption because the participator Auger decay couples DESs to the underlying low-energy core-hole continuum. We show that coupling also affects the high-energy continuum populated by the spectator Auger decay of DESs. For the $K-L_{23}^2$ Auger decay of the $1s^{-1}3p^{-1}4s^2{}^{1}P$ state in argon, the competing nonresonant path is assigned to the recapture of the $1s$ photoelectron caused by emission of the fast electron from the shake-up $K-L_{23}^2$ decay of the $1s^{-1}$ ion.

The highly excited super-Tonks-Girardeau (sTG) gas was recently observed to be extremely stable in the presence of a weak dipolar repulsion. Here we reveal the underlying reason for this mysterious phenomenon. By exactly solving the trapped small clusters with both contact and dipolar interactions, we show that the reason lies in the distinct spectral responses between sTG gas and its decaying channel (bound state) when a weak dipolar interaction is present. Specifically, a tiny dipolar force can produce a visible energy shift for the localized bound state, but can hardly affect the extended sTG branch. As a result, the avoided level crossing between two branches is greatly modified in both location and width in the parameter axis of coupling strength, leading to a more (less) stable sTG gas for a repulsive (attractive) dipolar force. These results, consistent with experimental observations, are found to robustly apply to both bosonic and fermionic systems.

Multiphoton light-matter interactions invoke a so-called “black box” in which the experimental observations contain the quantum interference between multiple pathways. Here, we employ polarization-controlled attosecond photoelectron metrology with a partial wave manipulator to deduce the pathway interference within this quantum ‘black box” for the two-photon ionization of neon atoms. The angle-dependent and attosecond time-resolved photoelectron spectra are measured across a broad energy range. Two-photon phase shifts for each partial wave are reconstructed through the comprehensive analysis of these photoelectron spectra. We resolve the quantum interference between the degenerate $p\to d\to p$ and $p\to s\to p$ two-photon ionization pathways, in agreement with our theoretical simulations. Our approach thus provides an attosecond time-resolved microscope to look inside the “black box” of pathway interference in ultrafast dynamics of atoms, molecules, and condensed matter.

Inertial-range scaling exponents for both Lagrangian and Eulerian structure functions are obtained from direct numerical simulations of isotropic turbulence in triply periodic domains at Taylor-scale Reynolds number up to 1300. We reaffirm that transverse Eulerian scaling exponents saturate at $\approx 2.1$ for moment orders $p\ge 10$, significantly differing from the longitudinal exponents (which are predicted to saturate at $\approx 7.3$ for $p\ge 30$ from a recent theory). The Lagrangian scaling exponents likewise saturate at $\approx 2$ for $p\ge 8$. The saturation of Lagrangian exponents and transverse Eulerian exponents is related by the same multifractal spectrum by utilizing the well-known frozen hypothesis to relate spatial and temporal scales. Furthermore, this spectrum is different from the known spectra for Eulerian longitudinal exponents, suggesting that Lagrangian intermittency is characterized solely by transverse Eulerian intermittency. We discuss possible implications of this outlook when extending multifractal predictions to the dissipation range, especially for Lagrangian acceleration.

The interaction of intense laser pulses with plasma mirrors has demonstrated the ability to generate high-order harmonics, producing a bright source of extreme ultraviolet (XUV) radiation and attosecond pulses. Here, we report an unexpected transition in this process. We show that the loss of spatiotemporal coherence in the reflected high harmonics can lead to a new regime of highly efficient coherent XUV generation, with an extraordinary property where the radiation is directionally anomalous, propagating parallel to the mirror surface. With analytical calculations and numerical particle-in-cell simulations, we discover that the radiation emission is due to laser-driven oscillations of relativistic electron nanobunches that originate from a plasma surface instability.

An attosecond x-ray pulse with known spectrotemporal information is an essential tool for the investigation of ultrafast electron dynamics in quantum systems. Ultrafast free-electron lasers (FELs) have the unique advantage on unprecedented high intensity at x-ray wavelengths. However, no suitable method has been established so far for the spectrotemporal characterization of these ultrashort x-ray pulses. In this Letter, a simple method has been proposed based on self-referenced spectral interferometry for reconstructing the temporal profile and phase of ultrashort FEL pulses. We have demonstrated that the proposed method is reliable to completely characterize the attosecond x-ray FEL pulses with an error at the level of a few percent. Moreover, the first proof-of-principle experiment has been performed to achieve the single-shot spectrotemporal characterization of ultrashort pulses from a high-gain FEL. The precision of the proposed method will be enhanced with the decrease of the pulse duration, paving a new way for complete attosecond pulse characterization at x-ray FELs.

Two-dimensional Josephson junction arrays frustrated by a perpendicular magnetic field are predicted to form a cascade of distinct vortex lattice states. Here, we show that the resistivity tensor provides both structural and dynamical information on the vortex-lattice states and intervening phase transitions, which allows for experimental identification of these symmetry-breaking ground states. We illustrate our general approach by a microscopic theory of the resistivity tensor for a range of magnetic fields exhibiting a rich set of vortex lattices as well as transitions to liquid-crystalline vortex states.

We show through nonequilibrium nonadiabatic electron-spin-lattice simulations that above a critical current in magnetic atomic wires with a narrow domain wall (DW), a couple of atomic spaces in width, the electron flow triggers violent stimulated emission of phonons and magnons with an almost complete conversion of the incident electron momentum flux into a phonon and magnon flux. Just below the critical levels of the current flow, the DW achieves maximal velocity of about $3\times {10}^4\mathrm{m}/\mathrm{s}$, entering a strongly nonadiabatic regime of DW propagation, followed by a breakdown at higher biases. Above this threshold, a further increase of the current with the applied bias is impossible—the electronic current suffers a heavy suppression and the DW stops. This poses a fundamental limit to the current densities attainable in atomic wires. At the same time it opens up an exciting way of generating the alternative quasiparticle currents, described above, once the requisite electronic-structure properties are met.

Bosonic condensation and lasing of exciton polaritons in microcavities is a fascinating solid-state phenomenon. It provides a versatile platform to study out-of-equilibrium many-body physics and has recently appeared at the forefront of quantum technologies. Here, we study the photon statistics via the second-order temporal correlation function of polariton lasing emerging from an optical microcavity with an embedded atomically thin ${\mathrm{MoSe}}_2$ crystal. Furthermore, we investigate the macroscopic polariton phase transition for varying excitation powers and temperatures. The lower-polariton exhibits photon bunching below the threshold, implying a dominant thermal distribution of the emission, while above the threshold, the second-order correlation transits towards unity, which evidences the formation of a coherent state. Our findings are in agreement with a microscopic numerical model, which explicitly includes scattering with phonons on the quantum level.

The functioning of machines typically requires a concerted action of their parts. This requirement also holds for molecular motors that drive vital cellular processes and imposes constraints on their conformational changes as well as the rates at which they occur. It remains unclear whether, during evolution, features required for functional molecular machines can emerge simultaneously or require sequential adaptation to different selection pressures. We address this question by theoretically analyzing the evolution of filament treadmilling. This process refers to the self-assembly of linear polymers that grow and shrink at equal rates at their opposite ends. It constitutes a simple biological molecular machine that is involved in bacterial cell division and requires that several conditions are met. In our simulation framework, treadmilling emerges as a consequence of selecting for a target average polymer length. We discuss why other forms of assembly dynamics, which also reach the imposed target length, do not emerge in our simulations. Our work shows that complex molecular functions can evolve de novo under selection for a single physical feature.

Superfluidity is a well-characterized quantum phenomenon which entails frictionless motion of mesoscopic particles through a superfluid, such as ${}^4\mathrm{He}$ or dilute atomic gases at very low temperatures. As shown by Landau, the incompatibility between energy and momentum conservation, which ultimately stems from the spectrum of the elementary excitations of the superfluid, forbids quantum scattering between the superfluid and the moving mesoscopic particle, below a critical speed threshold. Here, we predict that frictionless motion can also occur in the absence of a standard superfluid, i.e., when a He atom travels through a narrow (5,5) carbon nanotube (CNT). Because of the quasilinear dispersion of the plasmon and phonon modes that could interact with He, the (5,5) CNT embodies a solid-state analog of the superfluid, thereby enabling straightforward transfer of Landau’s criterion of superfluidity. As a result, Landau’s equations acquire broader generality and may be applicable to other nanoscale friction phenomena, whose description has been so far purely classical.

Excitable media are ubiquitous in nature, and in such systems the local excitation tends to self-organize in traveling waves, or in rotating spiral-shaped patterns in two or three spatial dimensions. Examples include waves during a pandemic or electrical scroll waves in the heart. Here we show that such phenomena can be extended to a space of four or more dimensions and propose that connections of excitable elements in a network setting can be regarded as additional spatial dimensions. Numerical simulations are performed in four dimensions using the FitzHugh-Nagumo model, showing that the vortices rotate around a two-dimensional surface which we define as the superfilament. Evolution equations are derived for general superfilaments of codimension two in an N-dimensional space, and their equilibrium configurations are proven to be minimal surfaces. We suggest that biological excitable systems, such as the heart or brain which have nonlocal connections can be regarded, at least partially, as multidimensional excitable media and discuss further possible studies in this direction.

Efficient suppression of errors without full error correction is crucial for applications with noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. Error mitigation allows us to suppress errors in extracting expectation values without the need for any error correction code, but its applications are limited to estimating expectation values, and cannot provide us with high-fidelity quantum operations acting on arbitrary quantum states. To address this challenge, we propose to use error filtration (EF) for gate-based quantum computation, as a practical error suppression scheme without resorting to full quantum error correction. The result is a general-purpose error suppression protocol where the resources required to suppress errors scale independently of the size of the quantum operation, and does not require any logical encoding of the operation. The protocol provides error suppression whenever an error hierarchy is respected—that is, when the ancillary controlled-swap operations are less noisy than the operation to be corrected. We further analyze the application of EF to quantum random access memory, where EF offers hardware-efficient error suppression.

Detailed measurements of the spectral structure of cosmic-ray electrons and positrons from 10.6 GeV to 7.5 TeV are presented from over 7 years of observations with the CALorimetric Electron Telescope (CALET) on the International Space Station. The instrument, consisting of a charge detector, an imaging calorimeter, and a total absorption calorimeter with a total depth of 30 radiation lengths at normal incidence and a fine shower imaging capability, is optimized to measure the all-electron spectrum well into the TeV region. Because of the excellent energy resolution (a few percent above 10 GeV) and the outstanding $\mathrm{e}/\mathrm{p}$ separation (${10}^5$), CALET provides optimal performance for a detailed search of structures in the energy spectrum. The analysis uses data up to the end of 2022, and the statistics of observed electron candidates has increased more than 3 times since the last publication in 2018. By adopting an updated boosted decision tree analysis, a sufficient proton rejection power up to 7.5 TeV is achieved, with a residual proton contamination less than 10%. The observed energy spectrum becomes gradually harder in the lower energy region from around 30 GeV, consistently with AMS-02, but from 300 to 600 GeV it is considerably softer than the spectra measured by DAMPE and Fermi-LAT. At high energies, the spectrum presents a sharp break around 1 TeV, with a spectral index change from $-3.15$ to $-3.91$, and a broken power law fitting the data in the energy range from 30 GeV to 4.8 TeV better than a single power law with 6.9 sigma significance, which is compatible with the DAMPE results. The break is consistent with the expected effects of radiation loss during the propagation from distant sources (except the highest energy bin). We have fitted the spectrum with a model consistent with the positron flux measured by AMS-02 below 1 TeV and interpreted the $\mathrm{electron}+\text{positron}$ spectrum with possible contributions from pulsars and nearby sources. Above 4.8 TeV, a possible contribution from known nearby supernova remnants, including Vela, is addressed by an event-by-event analysis providing a higher proton-rejection power than a purely statistical analysis.

We report results of a search for dark-matter–nucleon interactions via a dark mediator using optimized low-energy data from the PandaX-4T liquid xenon experiment. With the ionization-signal-only data and utilizing the Migdal effect, we set the most stringent limits on the cross section for dark matter masses ranging from $30\mathrm{MeV}/{\mathrm{c}}^2$ to $2\mathrm{GeV}/{\mathrm{c}}^2$. Under the assumption that the dark mediator is a dark photon that decays into scalar dark matter pairs in the early Universe, we rule out significant parameter space of such thermal relic dark-matter model.

The quantum entangled $J/\psi \to {\mathrm{\Sigma }}^{+}{\overline{\mathrm{\Sigma }}}^{-}$ pairs from $(1.0087\pm 0.0044)\times {10}^{10}J/\psi$ events taken by the BESIII detector are used to study the nonleptonic two-body weak decays ${\mathrm{\Sigma }}^{+}\to n{\pi }^{+}$ and ${\overline{\mathrm{\Sigma }}}^{-}\to \overline{n}{\pi }^{-}$. The $CP$-odd weak decay parameters of the decays ${\mathrm{\Sigma }}^{+}\to n{\pi }^{+}$ (${\alpha }_{+}$) and ${\overline{\mathrm{\Sigma }}}^{-}\to \overline{n}{\pi }^{-}$ (${\overline{\alpha }}_{-}$) are determined to be $0.0481\pm 0.0031_{\mathrm{stat}}\pm 0.0019_{\mathrm{syst}}$ and $-0.0565\pm 0.0047_{\mathrm{stat}}\pm 0.0022_{\mathrm{syst}}$, respectively. The decay parameter ${\overline{\alpha }}_{-}$ is measured for the first time, and the accuracy of ${\alpha }_{+}$ is improved by a factor of 4 compared to the previous results. The simultaneously determined decay parameters allow the first precision $CP$ symmetry test for any hyperon decay with a neutron in the final state with the measurement of $A_{CP}=({\alpha }_{+}+{\overline{\alpha }}_{-})/({\alpha }_{+}-{\overline{\alpha }}_{-})=-0.080\pm 0.052_{\mathrm{stat}}\pm 0.028_{\mathrm{syst}}$. Assuming $CP$ conservation, the average decay parameter is determined as $⟨{\alpha }_{+}⟩=({\alpha }_{+}-{\overline{\alpha }}_{-})/2=-0.0506\pm 0.0026_{\mathrm{stat}}\pm 0.0019_{\mathrm{syst}}$, while the ratios ${\alpha }_{+}/{\alpha }_0$ and ${\overline{\alpha }}_{-}/{\overline{\alpha }}_0$ are $-0.0490\pm 0.0032_{\mathrm{stat}}\pm 0.0021_{\mathrm{syst}}$ and $-0.0571\pm 0.0053_{\mathrm{stat}}\pm 0.0032_{\mathrm{syst}}$, where ${\alpha }_0$ and ${\overline{\alpha }}_0$ are the decay parameters of the decays ${\mathrm{\Sigma }}^{+}\to p{\pi }^0$ and ${\overline{\mathrm{\Sigma }}}^{-}\to \overline{p}{\pi }^0$, respectively.