The standard model prediction for muon-electron scattering beyond leading order requires the inclusion of QCD contributions which cannot be computed perturbatively. At next-to- and next-to-next-to-leading order, they arise from one- and two-loop diagrams with hadronic vacuum polarization insertions in the photon propagator. We present their evaluation using the dispersive approach with hadronic $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ annihilation data and estimate their uncertainty. We find that these corrections are crucial for the analysis of future high-precision muon-electron scattering data, like those of the recently proposed MUonE experiment at CERN.

We propose that the process of triple prompt $J/\psi$ hadroproduction is a very clean hard probe of multiple-parton scatterings at high-energy hadron colliders, especially the least known triple-parton scattering. A first complete study is carried out by considering single-, double-, and triple-parton scatterings coherently. Our calculation shows that it is a golden channel to probe double- and triple-parton scatterings, as the single-parton scattering is strongly suppressed. The predictions of the (differential) cross sections in proton-proton collisions at the LHC and future higher-energy hadron colliders are given. Our study shows that its measurement is already feasible with the existing data collected during the period of the LHC run 2. A method is proposed to extract the triple-parton scattering contribution, and therefore it paves a way to study the possible triple-parton correlations in a proton.

Electrodynamical processes induced in complex systems like semiconductors by strong electromagnetic fields have traditionally been described using semiclassical approaches. Although these approaches allowed the investigation of ultrafast dynamics in solids culminating in multipetahertz electronics, they do not provide any access to the quantum-optical nature of the interaction, as they treat the driving field classically and unaffected by the interaction. Here, using a full quantum-optical approach, we demonstrate that the subcycle electronic response in a strongly driven semiconductor crystal is imprinted in the quantum state of the driving field resulting in nonclassical light states carrying the information of the interaction. This vital step towards strong-field ultrafast quantum electrodynamics unravels information inaccessible by conventional approaches and leads to the development of a new class of nonclassical light sources.

We revisit the mechanism of high-harmonic generation (HHG) from solids by comparing HHG in laser fields with different ellipticities but a constant maximum amplitude. It is shown that the cutoff of HHG is strongly extended in a circularly polarized field. Moreover, the harmonic yield with large ellipticity is comparable to or even higher than that in the linearly polarized field. To understand the underlying physics, we develop a reciprocal-space-trajectory method, which explains HHG in solids by a trajectory ensemble from different ionization times and different initial states in the reciprocal space. We show that the cutoff extension is related to an additional preacceleration step prior to ionization, which has been overlooked in solids. By analyzing the trajectories and the time-frequency spectrogram, we show that the HHG in solids cannot be interpreted in terms of the classical recollision picture alone. Instead, the radiation should be described by the electron-hole interband polarization, which leads to the unusual ellipticity dependence. We propose a new four-step model to understand the mechanism of HHG in solids.

We show that metastable ring-shaped clusters can be constructed from two-dimensional quantum droplets in systems described by the Gross-Pitaevskii equations augmented with Lee-Huang-Yang quantum corrections. The clusters exhibit dynamical behavior ranging from contraction to rotation with simultaneous periodic pulsations, or expansion, depending on the initial radius of the necklace pattern and phase shift between adjacent quantum droplets. We show that, using an energy-minimization analysis, one can predict equilibrium values of the cluster radius that correspond to rotation without radial pulsations. In such a regime, the clusters evolve as metastable states, withstanding abrupt variations in the underlying scattering lengths and keeping their azimuthal symmetry in the course of evolution, even in the presence of considerable perturbations.

The fluid flow inside a thin liquid film can be dramatically modified by the hydrodynamic boundary condition at the interfaces. Aqueous systems can be easily contaminated by trace amounts of impurities, rendering the air-liquid interface immobile, thereby significantly resisting the fluid flow. Using high speed interferometry, rapid thinning of the liquid film, on the order of the collision speed, was observed between two fast approaching air bubbles in water, indicating negligible resistance and a fully mobile boundary condition at the air-water interface. By adding trace amounts of surfactants that changed the interfacial tension by ${10}^{-4}\mathrm{N}/\mathrm{m}$, a transition from mobile to immobile was observed. This provides a fundamental explanation why the bubble coalescence time can vary by over 3 orders of magnitude.

Atomic scale engineering of two-dimensional materials could create devices with rich physical and chemical properties. External periodic potentials can enable the manipulation of the electronic band structures of materials. A prototypical system is $(3\times 3)\text{−}\mathrm{silicene}/\mathrm{Ag}(111)$, which has substrate-induced periodic modulations. Recent angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements revealed six Dirac cone pairs at the Brillouin zone boundary of Ag(111), but their origin remains unclear [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 113, 14656 (2016)]. We used linear dichroism angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, the tight-binding model, and first-principles calculations to reveal that these Dirac cones mainly derive from the original cones at the $K$ ($K^{\prime }$) points of free-standing silicene. The Dirac cones of free-standing silicene are split by external periodic potentials that originate from the substrate-overlayer interaction. Our results not only confirm the origin of the Dirac cones in the $(3\times 3)\text{−}\mathrm{silicene}/\mathrm{Ag}(111)$ system, but also provide a powerful route to manipulate the electronic structures of two-dimensional materials.

The existence of backscattering-immune spin-wave modes is demonstrated in magnetic thin films of nanoscale thickness. Our results reveal that chiral magnetostatic surface waves (CMSSWs), which propagate perpendicular to the magnetization direction in an in-plane magnetized thin film, are robust against backscattering from surface defects. CMSSWs are protected against various types of surface inhomogeneities and defects as long as their frequency lies inside the gap of the volume modes. Our explanation is independent of the topology of the modes and predicts that this robustness is a consequence of symmetry breaking of the dynamic magnetic fields of CMSSWs due to the off-diagonal part of the dipolar interaction tensor, which is present both for long- (dipole-dominated) and short-wavelength (exchange-dominated) spin waves. Micromagnetic simulations confirm the robust character of the CMSSWs. Our results open a new direction in designing highly efficient magnonic logic elements and devices employing CMSSWs in nanoscale thin films.

We propose a novel type of composite light-matter interferometer based on a supersolidlike phase of a driven Bose-Einstein condensate coupled to a pair of degenerate counterpropagating electromagnetic modes of an optical ring cavity. The supersolidlike condensate under the influence of the gravity drags the cavity optical potential with itself, thereby changing the relative phase of the two cavity electromagnetic fields. Monitoring the phase evolution of the cavity output fields thus allows for a nondestructive measurement of the gravitational acceleration. We show that the sensitivity of the proposed gravimeter exhibits Heisenberg-like scaling with respect to the atom number. As the relative phase of the cavity fields is insensitive to photon losses, the gravimeter is robust against these deleterious effects. For state-of-the-art experimental parameters, the relative sensitivity $\mathrm{\Delta }g/g$ of such a gravimeter could be of the order of ${10}^{-10}-{10}^{-8}$ for a condensate of a half a million atoms and interrogation time of the order of a few seconds.

In holographic inflation, the 4D cosmological dynamics is postulated to be dual to the renormalization group flow of a 3D Euclidean conformal field theory with marginally relevant operators. The scalar potential of the 4D theory—in which inflation is realized—is highly constrained, with use of the Hamilton–Jacobi equations. In multifield holographic realizations of inflation, fields additional to the inflaton cannot display underdamped oscillations (that is, their wave functions contain no oscillatory phases independent of the momenta). We show that this result is exact, independent of the number of fields, the field space geometry, and the shape of the inflationary trajectory followed in multifield space. In the specific case where the multifield trajectory is a straight line or confined to a plane, it can be understood as the existence of an upper bound on the dynamical masses $m$ of extra fields of the form $m\le 3H/2$ up to slow roll corrections. This bound corresponds to the analytic continuation of the well-known Breitenlohner–Freedman bound found in anti–de Sitter spacetimes in the case when the masses are approximately constant. The absence of underdamped oscillations implies that a detection of “cosmological collider” oscillatory patterns in the non-Gaussian bispectrum would not only rule out single-field inflation, but also holographic inflation or any inflationary model based on the Hamilton–Jacobi equations. Hence, future observations have the potential to exclude, at once, an entire class of inflationary theories, regardless of the details involved in their model building.

We present a precision analysis of the ${}^{136}\mathrm{Xe}$ two-neutrino $\beta \beta$ electron spectrum above 0.8 MeV, based on high-statistics data obtained with the KamLAND-Zen experiment. An improved formalism for the two-neutrino $\beta \beta$ rate allows us to measure the ratio of the leading and subleading $2\nu \beta \beta$ nuclear matrix elements (NMEs), ${\xi }_{31}^{2\nu }=-0.26_{-0.25}^{+0.31}$. Theoretical predictions from the nuclear shell model and the majority of the quasiparticle random-phase approximation (QRPA) calculations are consistent with the experimental limit. However, part of the ${\xi }_{31}^{2\nu }$ range allowed by the QRPA is excluded by the present measurement at the 90% confidence level. Our analysis reveals that predicted ${\xi }_{31}^{2\nu }$ values are sensitive to the quenching of NMEs and the competing contributions from low- and high-energy states in the intermediate nucleus. Because these aspects are also at play in neutrinoless $\beta \beta$ decay, ${\xi }_{31}^{2\nu }$ provides new insights toward reliable neutrinoless $\beta \beta$ NMEs.

We propose a generalized Dicke model that supports a quantum tricritical point. We map out the phase diagram and investigate the critical behavior of the model through an exact low-energy effective Hamiltonian in the thermodynamic limit. As predicted by the Landau theory of phase transition, the order parameter shows nonuniversality at the tricritical point. Nevertheless, as a result of the separation of the classical and the quantum degrees of freedom, we find a universal relation between the excitation gap and the entanglement entropy for the entire critical line including the tricritical point. Here the universality is carried by the emergent quantum modes, whereas the order parameter is determined classically.

A large number of symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases have been hypothesized for strongly interacting $\mathrm{spin}\text{−}1/2$ systems in one dimension. Realizing these SPT phases, however, often demands fine-tunings hard to reach experimentally. And the lack of analytical solutions hinders the understanding of their many-body wave functions. Here we show that two kinds of SPT phases naturally arise for ultracold polar molecules confined in a zigzag optical lattice. This system, motivated by recent experiments, is described by a spin model whose exchange couplings can be tuned by an external field to reach parameter regions not studied before for spin chains or ladders. Within the enlarged parameter space, we find the ground state wave function can be obtained exactly along a line and at a special point, for these two phases, respectively. These exact solutions provide a clear physical picture for the SPT phases and their edge excitations. We further obtain the phase diagram by using infinite time-evolving block decimation and discuss the phase transitions between the two SPT phases and their experimental signatures.

We numerically study the level statistics of the Gaussian $\beta$ ensemble. These statistics generalize Wigner-Dyson level statistics from the discrete set of Dyson indices $\beta =1$, 2, 4 to the continuous range $0<\beta <\infty$. The Gaussian $\beta$ ensemble covers Poissonian level statistics for $\beta \to 0$, and provides a smooth interpolation between Poissonian and Wigner-Dyson level statistics. We establish the physical relevance of the level statistics of the Gaussian $\beta$ ensemble by showing near-perfect agreement with the level statistics of a paradigmatic model in studies on many-body localization over the entire crossover range from the thermal to the many-body localized phase. In addition, we show similar agreement for a related Hamiltonian with broken time-reversal symmetry.