Narrow escape from confinement through a nanochannel is the critical step of complex transport processes including size-exclusion-based separations, oil and gas extraction from the microporous subsurface environment, and ribonucleic acid translocation through nuclear pore complex channels. While narrow escape has been studied using theoretical and computational methods, experimental quantification is rare because of the difficulty in confining a particle into a microscopic space through a nanoscale hole. Here, we studied narrow escape in the context of continuous nanoparticle diffusion within the liquid-filled void space of an ordered porous material. Specifically, we quantified the spatial dependence of nanoparticle motion and the sojourn times of individual particles in the interconnected confined cavities of a liquid-filled inverse opal film. We found that nanoparticle motion was inhibited near cavity walls and cavity escape was slower than predicted by existing theories and random-walk simulations. A combined computational-experimental analysis indicated that translocation through a nanochannel is barrier controlled rather than diffusion controlled.

The Anderson localization transition is one of the most well studied examples of a zero temperature quantum phase transition. On the other hand, many open questions remain about the phenomenology of disordered systems driven far out of equilibrium. Here we study the localization transition in the prototypical three-dimensional, noninteracting Anderson model when the system is driven at its boundaries to induce a current carrying nonequilibrium steady state. Recently we showed that the diffusive phase of this model exhibits extensive mutual information of its nonequilibrium steady-state density matrix. We show that this extensive scaling persists in the entanglement and at the localization critical point, before crossing over to a short-range (area-law) scaling in the localized phase. We introduce an entanglement witness for fermionic states that we name the mutual coherence, which, for fermionic Gaussian states, is also a lower bound on the mutual information. Through a combination of analytical arguments and numerics, we determine the finite-size scaling of the mutual coherence across the transition. These results further develop the notion of entanglement phase transitions in open systems, with direct implications for driven many-body localized systems, as well as experimental studies of driven-disordered systems.

We show that using complex, spin-restricted orbitals in Kohn-Sham (KS) density functional theory allows one to access a new class of densities that is not accessible by either spin-restricted (RKS) or spin-unrestricted (UKS) orbitals. We further show that the real part of a complex RKS (CRKS) density matrix can be nonidempotent when the imaginary part of the density matrix is not zero. Using CRKS orbitals shows significant improvements in the triplet-singlet gaps of a benchmark set, called TS12, for well-established, widely used density functionals. Moreover, it was shown that RKS and UKS yield qualitatively wrong charge densities and spin densities, respectively, leading to worse energetics. We demonstrate that representative modern density functionals show surprisingly no improvement even with a qualitatively more accurate density from CRKS orbitals. To this end, our work not only provides a way to escape the symmetry dilemma whenever there exists a CRKS solution, but also suggests a new route to design better approximate density functionals.

We present an experimental study on nonequilibrium dynamics of a spinor condensate after it is quenched across a superfluid to Mott insulator (MI) phase transition in cubic lattices. Intricate dynamics consisting of spin-mixing oscillations at multiple frequencies are observed in time evolutions of the spinor condensate localized in deep lattices after the quantum quench. Similar spin dynamics also appear after spinor gases in the MI phase are suddenly moved away from their ground states via quenching magnetic fields. We confirm these observed spectra of spin-mixing dynamics can be utilized to reveal atom number distributions of an inhomogeneous system, and to study transitions from two-body to many-body dynamics. Our data also imply the nonequilibrium dynamics depend weakly on the quench speed but strongly on the lattice potential. This enables precise measurements of the spin-dependent interaction, a key parameter determining the spinor physics.

Through a combination of experimental measurements and theoretical modeling, we describe a strongly orbital-polarized insulating ground state in an ${({\mathrm{LaTiO}}_3)}_2/{({\mathrm{LaCoO}}_3)}_2$ oxide heterostructure. X-ray absorption spectra and ab initio calculations show that an electron is transferred from the titanate to the cobaltate layers. The charge transfer, accompanied by a large octahedral distortion, induces a substantial orbital polarization in the cobaltate layer of a size unattainable via epitaxial strain alone. The asymmetry between in-plane and out-of-plane orbital occupancies in the high-spin cobaltate layer is predicted by theory and observed through x-ray linear dichroism experiments. Manipulating orbital configurations using interfacial coupling within heterostructures promises exciting ground-state engineering for realizing new emergent electronic phases in metal oxide superlattices.

Unexpected light propagation effects, such as negative refraction, have been reported in artificial media. Leveraging on the intersubband resonances in heterostructured semiconductors, we show that all possible optical regimes, ranging from classical dieletric and metal to hyperbolic metamaterial types 1 and 2, can be achieved. As a demonstration, we prove that the negative refraction effect can occur at a designed frequency by controlling the electronic quantum confinement.

We reconsider the tensionless limit on bosonic closed string theory, where the 3D Bondi-Metzner-Sachs (BMS) algebra appears as symmetries on the world sheet, as opposed to two copies of the Virasoro algebra in the case of the usual tensile theory. This is an ultrarelativistic limit on the world sheet. We consider the induced representations of the BMS algebra in the oscillator basis and show that the limit takes the tensile closed string vacuum to the “induced” vacuum, which is identified as a Neumann boundary state. Hence, rather remarkably, an open string emerges from closed strings in the tensionless limit. We also follow the perturbative states in the tensile theory in the limit and show that there is a Bose-Einstein-like condensation of all perturbative states on this induced vacuum. This ties up nicely with the picture of the formation of a long string from a gas of strings in the Hagedorn temperature, where the effective string tension goes to zero.

We experimentally demonstrate a method for realizing quantum squeezing enhancement which is induced by the interference in a two-beam phase-sensitive amplifier (PSA) based on a four-wave mixing process. Compared to the normal phase-insensitive amplifier with an intensity-difference squeezing (IDS) of $8.97\pm 0.24\mathrm{dB}$ or $8.76\pm 0.26\mathrm{dB}$, the IDS of our two-beam PSA is enhanced to $10.13\pm 0.21\mathrm{dB}$ under the same experimental situation. Furthermore, we study how various parameters influence the quantum squeezing enhancement of the PSA. These results clearly show that the physical mechanism inducing the IDS enhancement of the two-beam PSA is its intrinsic interference nature. Our results may find potential applications in improving the fidelity of quantum information processing and the precision of quantum metrology.

Studying the frictional properties of interfaces with dynamic chemical bonds advances understanding of the mechanism underlying rate and state laws, and offers new pathways for the rational control of frictional response. In this work, we revisit the load dependence of interfacial chemical-bond-induced (ICBI) friction experimentally and find that the velocity dependence of friction can be reversed by changing the normal load. We propose a theoretical model, whose analytical solution allows us to interpret the experimental data on timescales and length scales that are relevant to experimental conditions. Our work provides a promising avenue for exploring the dynamics of ICBI friction.

The contact process is a paradigmatic classical stochastic system displaying critical behavior even in one dimension. It features a nonequilibrium phase transition into an absorbing state that has been widely investigated and shown to belong to the directed percolation universality class. When the same process is considered in a quantum setting, much less is known. So far, mainly semiclassical studies have been conducted and the nature of the transition in low dimensions is still a matter of debate. Also, from a numerical point of view, from which the system may look fairly simple—especially in one dimension—results are lacking. In particular, the presence of the absorbing state poses a substantial challenge, which appears to affect the reliability of algorithms targeting directly the steady state. Here we perform real-time numerical simulations of the open dynamics of the quantum contact process and shed light on the existence and on the nature of an absorbing state phase transition in one dimension. We find evidence for the transition being continuous and provide first estimates for the critical exponents. Beyond the conceptual interest, the simplicity of the quantum contact process makes it an ideal benchmark problem for scrutinizing numerical methods for open quantum nonequilibrium systems.

We demonstrate a breakthrough in the capabilities of robust, broad-parameter space searches for continuous gravitational waves. With a large scale search for continuous gravitational waves on the O1 LIGO data, we prove that our Falcon search achieves the sensitivity improvements expected from the use of a long coherence length, while maintaining the computational expense within manageable bounds. On these data we set the most constraining upper limits in the gravitational wave amplitude in the band 100–200 Hz. We provide full outlier lists and upper limits near the 0-spin-down band suitable for analysis of signals with small spin-down such as boson condensates around black holes.

We propose that $\mathcal{O}(10M_{\odot })$ black holes observed by LIGO/Virgo originate from a first order phase transition at a temperature $T_{*}\lesssim 100\mathrm{MeV}$, associated with ${\mathrm{QCD}}^{\prime }$—an early Universe deformation of the standard model QCD. This is realized by keeping the quark masses small compared to confinement scale down to $T\sim T_{*}$, making ${\mathrm{QCD}}^{\prime }$ transition first order. We implement this scenario using a light scalar that could potentially be a good dark matter candidate.

We describe a new class of resonances for extreme mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs): tidal resonances, induced by the tidal field of nearby stars or stellar-mass black holes. A tidal resonance can be viewed as a general relativistic extension of the Kozai-Lidov resonances in Newtonian systems and is distinct from the transient resonance already known for EMRI systems. Tidal resonances will generically occur for EMRIs. By probing their influence on the phase of an EMRI waveform, we can learn about the tidal environmental of the EMRI system, albeit at the cost of a more complicated waveform model. Observations by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna of EMRI systems therefore have the potential to provide information about the distribution of stellar-mass objects near their host galactic-center black holes.

We present $\mathcal{O}({10}^{15})$ string compactifications with the exact chiral spectrum of the standard model of particle physics. This ensemble of globally consistent $F$-theory compactifications automatically realizes gauge coupling unification. Utilizing the power of algebraic geometry, all global consistency conditions can be reduced to a single criterion on the base of the underlying elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau fourfolds. For toric bases, this criterion only depends on an associated polytope and is satisfied for at least $\mathcal{O}({10}^{15})$ bases, each of which defines a distinct compactification.