Fracture typically signifies mechanical failure in engineering materials, whereas controlled cracking may actively sculpt tissues through precise biological regulation. Here, we establish a multiscale nonlinear peridynamic theory that accounts for cellular mechanosensing to decipher the spontaneous fracture of active tissues. We show that tissues cultured in a ring-shaped domain can undergo periodic fracture to generate multicellular aggregates with regular spacing, recapitulating prior morphogenetic experiments on avian dermal cell collectives. It is found that the number of cracks varies nonmonotonically with the substrate stiffness. We predict that a narrow tissue favors equally spaced radial cracking, while such ordered cracks deflect, branch, and randomize increasingly as the tissue broadens, attributable to the anisotropy-isotropy transition of tissue stresses induced by the interplay of active contraction and domain geometry. Backed by energetic arguments, we identify the factors that control the characteristic size of tissue fracture. Our Letter reveals a synergy of physics, geometry, and cellular mechanosensing in controlling active tissue fracture to achieve tissue-level organization.

We present the bilinear phase map, a concept that generalizes the Kramers-Wannier transformation to investigate unconventional gapped phases of qudit spin chains. Encoding the transformation in a matrix, the bilinear phase map enables the exploration of a broader spectrum of generalized quantum phases and dualities, including the nonunitarity in duality transformations, and derivation of general noninvertible fusion rules. Furthermore, we obtain strong constraints on anomaly conditions of qudit models with a general class of duality symmetries. This establishes a microscopic anomaly classification for a broad class of lattice dualities.

We report the unique properties of cosmic phosphorus (P), chlorine (Cl), argon (Ar), potassium (K), and calcium (Ca) fluxes in the GV to TV rigidity range collected by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) on the International Space Station. With a total of one million events collected over 13.5 years, we observed that the rigidity dependencies of the five fluxes are well described by the sums of a primary cosmic ray component and a secondary cosmic ray component. The abundance ratios of all five elements to Si at the source are accurately determined independent of cosmic ray propagation. The source abundance of Ar and Ca (even-$Z$ elements) is larger than P, Cl, and K (odd-$Z$ elements). The secondary components of the P and the Cl fluxes are each $\sim 1/3$ of the F flux, and the secondary components of the Ar, K, and Ca fluxes are each $\sim 1/2$ of the F flux. The twenty elements measured by AMS, from He to Ca and Fe, can be categorized into four classes, two primary and two secondary, based on their rigidity dependence.

Scalar-mediated interactions may exist among neutrinos, dark matter particles, or between the two. Double $\beta$-decay experiments provide a powerful tool to probe such exotic interactions. Using ${}^{136}\mathrm{Xe}$ double $\beta$-decay data from PandaX-4T, we perform the first direct spectral search in the energy range of 20 to 2800 keV, setting the most stringent limits to date on scalar-mediated neutrino self-interactions for mediator masses below $2\mathrm{MeV}/c^2$. These results place significant constraints on models invoking such interactions to alleviate the Hubble tension. Assuming the same scalar also mediates dark matter self-interactions, constraints on the dark matter-scalar interactions can be placed in conjunction with cosmological constraints.

We report the first evidence of spin interference in exclusive $J/\psi \to e^{+}{e}^{-}$ photoproduction in ultraperipheral heavy-ion collisions at STAR at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=200\mathrm{GeV}$. In $\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}$ collisions, a negative $\cos (2\varphi )$ modulation is found for $p_T<120\mathrm{MeV}/c$ with a significance of $3.2\sigma$, while the isobar data ($\mathrm{Ru}+\mathrm{Ru}$, $\mathrm{Zr}+\text{Zr}$) show a consistent negative modulation with a significance of $1.9\sigma$, opposite in sign to that in ${\rho }^0\to {\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}$ photoproduction. This establishes for the first time that the interference sign is controlled by the spin structure of the final-state daughters, resolving the ambiguity present in the all-boson ${\rho }^0$ channel. The compact $J/\psi$ probes gluon distributions at perturbative scales, resulting in a weaker modulation and providing stringent constraints on color glass condensate calculations. These findings demonstrate that spin-dependent interference in heavy vector mesons provides a new, experimentally accessible handle on gluon structure beyond traditional cross-section measurements.

A century ago, Wigner’s SU(4) symmetry was introduced to explain the properties of atomic nuclei. Despite recent revived interest, its impact on nuclear structure, transitions, and reactions has not been fully explored. Here, we show that a variety of high-fidelity nuclear interactions predict nuclear states that have $\ge 90\%$ probability of being in a single SU(4) irreducible representation. Meanwhile, our analysis of axial current operators in chiral effective field theory ($\chi \mathrm{EFT}$) reveals that one-body currents at low momentum transfer act only within SU(4) irreducible representations, while two-body currents connect different representations. These selection rules interfere with the expected convergence pattern of the $\chi \mathrm{EFT}$ expansion and explain key phenomenological observations, e.g., the unnaturally large two-body corrections to the axial-current matrix elements in eight-body nuclei.

We describe a semidefinite relaxation method which finds lower bounds to the ground state energy of a quantum Hamiltonian subject to Hermitian linear constraints along with approximations of ground state expectation values. We show that symmetry can be used to significantly reduce the computational requirements, and we include unitary, antiunitary, discrete, and continuous symmetries in our analysis. We demonstrate our method using the 1D Hubbard model and find quantitative agreement with both exact diagonalization and the Bethe ansatz.

Controlling exciton transport—especially intralayer excitons with strong light-matter interactions—is challenging due to the lack of efficient, tunable driving mechanisms, hindering practical excitonic device development. In this Letter, we demonstrate all-optical steering of intralayer excitons in monolayer ${\mathrm{MoS}}_2$ through optically driven, highly excited excitonic phase transitions. Combining spatial emission, microscopic theory, and drift-diffusion modeling, we show that spatial screening from high-excitation phase transitions generates exciton binding energy gradients, driving excitons toward higher binding energy regions. The engineered screening profile creates an energy landscape that drives excitons and unbound electrons and holes in opposite directions. This counterflow, enabled by their distinct responses, can be optically switched via the exciton-Mott transition. Our findings disentangle the transport mechanisms of excitons and unbound electrons and holes, demonstrating that excitons in 2D semiconductors propagate as cohesive quasiparticles, while free carriers move along band edges. This enables all-optical control of photocarrier transport and provides a new approach to engineer energy landscapes, paving the way for reconfigurable excitonic interconnects and quantum optical devices.

We develop an ab initio approach to describe the statistical behavior of finite-size fluctuations in the deterministic Kuramoto-Sakaguchi model. We obtain explicit expressions for the covariance function of fluctuations of the complex order parameter and determine the variance of its magnitude entirely in terms of the equation parameters. Our results rely on an explicit complex-valued formula for the solution of the Adler equation. We present analytical results for both the sub- and the supercritical case. Moreover, our framework does not require any prior knowledge about the structure of the partially synchronized state. We corroborate our results with numerical simulations of the full Kuramoto-Sakaguchi model. The proposed methodology is sufficiently general such that it can be applied to other interacting particle systems.

Trajectory mutual information is frequently used to quantify information transfer in biochemical systems. Tractable solutions of the trajectory mutual information can be obtained via the widely used linear-noise approximation (LNA) using Gaussian channel theory. This approach is expected to be accurate for sufficiently large systems. However, recent observations show that there are cases, where the mutual information obtained this way differs qualitatively from results derived using an exact Markov jump process formalism, and that the differences remain even in the large copy number regime. In this Letter, we show that these differences can be explained by introducing the notion of reaction- versus state-based descriptions of trajectories. In chemical systems, the information is encoded in the sequence of reaction events, and the reaction-based trajectories of Markov jump processes capture this information. We show that within the Gaussian formalism, trajectories can be defined either based on individual reaction channels, or on a state-based level, where different reaction channels are summarized into a single noise term. While both definitions agree in terms of copy number fluctuations, state-based trajectories contain in general less information than reaction-based trajectories. The commonly used Gaussian mutual information via the linear-noise approximation is consistent with a state-based trajectory notion, which causes a systematic loss of information independent of system size. We show that an alternative, reaction-based variant of the Gaussian mutual information prevents this loss of information. We illustrate the consequences of different trajectory descriptions for two common cellular reaction motifs and discuss their connection with Berg-Purcell and maximum-likelihood sensing.

Bell inequality tests based on high-dimensional entanglement usually require measurements that can resolve multiple possible outcomes. However, the implementation of high-dimensional multioutcome measurements is often only emulated via a collection of “click or no-click” measurements. This reduction of multioutcome measurements to binary-outcome measurements opens a loophole in high-dimensional tests Bell inequalities that can be exploited by local hidden variable models [Tavakoli et al., Phys. Rev. A 111, 042433 (2025)]. Here, we close this loophole by using four-dimensional photonic path-mode entanglement and multioutcome detection. We test both the well-known Collins-Gisin-Linden-Massar-Popescu inequality and a related Bell inequality tailored for maximally entangled states in high dimension. We observe violations that are large enough to also rule out any quantum model based on entanglement of lower dimension, thereby demonstrating genuinely high-dimensional nonlocality free of the binarization loophole.

The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) achieves monotonically improving performance with circuit depth $p$, yet the study of the high-depth regime has been obstructed by the exponential in $p$ cost of existing exact evaluation techniques. In this Letter, we prove that, in the infinite-size limit, the depth-$p$ QAOA state for the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) model converges to the state of a spin coupled to $p$ bosonic modes. We simulate the spin-boson system using matrix product states and provide numerical evidence that QAOA obtains a ($1-\epsilon$) approximation to the optimal energy of the SK model with circuit depth $\mathcal{O}(n/{\epsilon }^{1.13})$ in the average case. The modest computational cost of our approach allows us to optimize QAOA parameters and observe that QAOA achieves $ϵ\lesssim 2.2\%$ at $p=160$ in the infinite-size limit, extending far beyond $p\le 20$ accessible to prior exact methods. Our mapping provides a many-body route to study and optimize high-depth QAOA in regimes previously inaccessible to exact evaluation.

The leading corrections to general relativity can be parametrized by higher-derivative interactions in a low-energy effective field theory, in a way that is general and agnostic to the precise UV completion of gravity. Using numerical methods, we compute the leading-order corrections to the Kerr metric across the entire range of subextremal values of spin and analyze their impact on physical quantities. We find that rapidly rotating black holes are most affected by the higher-derivative corrections, making them especially sensitive probes of new physics. A dataset of solutions and the code used to produce them are publicly available.

Does a conformal manifold imply the existence of exactly marginal operators? We answer this question affirmatively under the assumption that there exists a conformal interface with certain properties connecting nearby conformal field theories. We show that the exactly marginal operator that connects the conformal field theories can be reconstructed from the interface displacement operator. Our construction is model independent and based on the general principles of conformal symmetry.

Permanent electric dipole moments (EDMs) provide a sensitive probe of physics beyond the standard model and are directly linked to additional sources of $CP$ violation that could explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the Universe. EDM measurements of charged particles in storage rings rely on detecting a small tilt of the invariant spin axis with respect to the ring plane. In this Letter, we present the experimental determination of the invariant spin axis of an ensemble of deuterons in the Cooler Synchrotron (COSY), a conventional magnetic storage ring, using a combination of a radio-frequency Wien filter, a superconducting Siberian snake, and an electron-cooler solenoid. The measurements reveal tilts of a few milliradians, which are dominated by systematic effects. From the observed tilts, we derive the first experimental limit on the deuteron EDM, $|d^d|<2.5\times {10}^{-17}e\mathrm{cm}(95\%\text{C}\mathrm{.}\text{L}\mathrm{.})$. This result demonstrates the feasibility of using storage rings to search for EDMs of charged stable hadrons and provides a foundation for future dedicated facilities.

Locally probing pairing in fermionic superfluids, ranging from micro- to macroscopic scales, has been a long-standing challenge. Here, we investigate a new approach that uses Rydberg impurities as a spectroscopic sensor of the surrounding strongly correlated state of ultracold paired fermions. The extended wave function of the Rydberg electron induces a finite-range potential that can bind atoms from the BCS medium, forming molecular states. As a consequence, the optical absorption spectrum of the impurity encodes key many-body properties. Using the functional determinant approach, we provide a direct measure of the superfluid gap through frequency shifts of dimer and trimer peaks. The spectra also reveal whether the Cooper pairs are broken or trapped intact. For static Rydberg atoms, we relate this signature of pairing to the suppression of the orthogonality catastrophe due to the superconducting gap resulting in the formation of well-defined polaron quasiparticles. Our Letter establishes Rydberg atom spectroscopy as a powerful local probe of strongly correlated matter.

Quantum non-Gaussian states, which cannot be written as mixtures of Gaussian states, are necessary to achieve a quantum advantage in continuous variable systems. They represent an important benchmark for the realization of an advanced quantum light source, as they cannot be made by simple means such as displacement and squeezing. We introduce an attenuation-resistant sufficient criterion for quantum non-Gaussian states based on the second- and third-order correlation functions, $g^{(2)}$ and $g^{(3)}$. The general nonlinear bound for classical mixtures of Gaussian states is $\sqrt{g^{(3)}}+3\sqrt{g^{(2)}}\ge 2$. Any mixture of Gaussian states must fulfill this inequality, thus, the violation of it represents a direct confirmation of quantum non-Gaussianity. We experimentally show the non-Gaussianity of the state produced by a quantum dot single-photon source, where we obtain $\sqrt{g^{(3)}}+3\sqrt{g^{(2)}}=0.174(13)$, which represents a statistical significance of more than 100 standard deviations.