The greatly increased grain boundary (GB) mobility in nanograined metals under mechanical loading is distinguished from that in their coarse-grained counterparts. The feature leads to softening of nanograined materials and deviation of strength from the classical Hall-Petch relationship. In this Letter, grain size dependences of GB migration in nanograined Ag, Cu, and Ni under tension were investigated quantitatively in a wide size range. As grain size decreases from submicron, GB migration intensifies and then diminishes below a critical grain size. The GB migration peaks at about 80, 75, and 38 nm in Ag, Cu, and Ni, respectively. The suppression of GB migration below a critical size can be attributed to GB relaxation during sample processing or by postthermal annealing. With relaxed GBs the governing deformation mechanism of nanograins shifts from GB migration to formation of through-grain twins or stacking faults. GB relaxation, analogous to GB segregation, offers a novel approach to stabilizing nanograined materials under mechanical loading.

We consider a Josephson junction bilayer consisting of two tunnel-coupled two-dimensional electron gas layers with Rashba spin-orbit interaction, proximitized by a top and bottom $s$-wave superconductor with phase difference $\varphi$ close to $\pi$. We show that, in the presence of a finite weak in-plane Zeeman field, the bilayer can be driven into a second order topological superconducting phase, hosting two Majorana corner states (MCSs). If $\varphi =\pi$, in a rectangular geometry, these zero-energy bound states are located at two opposite corners determined by the direction of the Zeeman field. If the phase difference $\varphi$ deviates from $\pi$ by a critical value, one of the two MCSs gets relocated to an adjacent corner. As the phase difference $\varphi$ increases further, the system becomes trivially gapped. The obtained MCSs are robust against static and magnetic disorder. We propose two setups that could realize such a model: one is based on controlling $\varphi$ by magnetic flux, the other involves an additional layer of randomly oriented magnetic impurities responsible for the phase shift of $\pi$ in the proximity-induced superconducting pairing.

We investigate the phase diagram of the Haldane-Falicov-Kimball model—a model combining topology, interactions, and spontaneous disorder at finite temperatures. Using an unbiased numerical method, we map out the phase diagram on the interaction-temperature plane. Along with known phases, we unveil an insulating charge ordered state with gapless excitations and a temperature-driven gapless topological insulating phase. Intrinsic—temperature-generated—disorder is the key ingredient explaining the unexpected behavior. Our findings support the possibility of having temperature-driven topological transitions into gapped and gapless topological insulating phases in mass unbalanced systems with two fermionic species.

We investigate the Gilbert damping parameter $\alpha$ for rare earth (RE)–transition metal (TM) ferrimagnets over a wide temperature range. Extracted from the field-driven magnetic domain-wall mobility, $\alpha$ was as low as the order of ${10}^{-3}$ and was almost constant across the angular momentum compensation temperature $T_A$, starkly contrasting previous predictions that $\alpha$ should diverge at $T_A$ due to a vanishing total angular momentum. Thus, magnetic damping of RE-TM ferrimagnets is not related to the total angular momentum but is dominated by electron scattering at the Fermi level where the TM has a dominant damping role. This low value of the Gilbert damping parameter suggests that ferrimagnets can serve as versatile platforms for low-dissipation high-speed magnetic devices.

X-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD) studies at the Er $L_{2,3}$ edges of ${\mathrm{Er}}_3{\mathrm{Fe}}_5{\mathrm{O}}_{12}$ exhibit a change of the spectral shape as a function of temperature and magnetic field. Using singular value decomposition, this variation is understood as a linear combination of two components. The dominating component is associated with the Er magnetization, while the second contribution is identified as an induced signal from the Fe sites. XMCD at either of the $L$ edges in ${\mathrm{Er}}_3{\mathrm{Fe}}_5{\mathrm{O}}_{12}$ provides information on the net magnetization of both sublattices. Their evolution in fields up to 30 T reveals details of the ferrimagnetic interactions on two very different scales.

We report on x-ray magnetic circular dichroism experiments in pulsed fields up to 30 T to follow the rotations of individual magnetic moments through the field-induced phase transition in the ferrimagnet ${\mathrm{HoFe}}_5{\mathrm{Al}}_7$. Near the ground state, we observe simultaneous stepwise rotations of the Ho and Fe moments and explain them using a two-sublattice model for an anisotropic ferrimagnet with weak intersublattice exchange interactions. Near the compensation point, we find two phase transitions. The additional magnetization jump reflects the fact that the Ho moment is no longer rigid as the applied field acts against the intersublattice exchange field.

We explore mechanisms of orbital-order decay in the doped Mott insulators $R_{1-x}(\mathrm{Sr},\mathrm{Ca}{)}_x{\mathrm{VO}}_3$ ($R=\mathrm{Pr},\mathrm{Y},\mathrm{La}$) caused by charged (Sr,Ca) defects. Our unrestricted Hartree-Fock analysis focuses on the combined effect of random charged impurities and associated doped holes up to $x=0.5$. The study is based on a generalized multiband Hubbard model for the relevant vanadium $t_{2g}$ electrons and includes the long-range (i) Coulomb potentials of defects and (ii) electron-electron interactions. We show that the rotation of $t_{2g}$ orbitals, induced by the electric field of defects, is a very efficient perturbation that largely controls the suppression of orbital order in these compounds. We investigate the inverse participation number spectra and find that electron states remain localized on few sites even in the regime where orbital order is collapsed. From the change of kinetic and superexchange energy, we can conclude that the motion of doped holes, which is the dominant effect for the reduction of magnetic order in high-$T_c$ compounds, is of secondary importance here.

We present a dynamical mean-field study of dynamical susceptibilities in the two-band Hubbard model. Varying the model parameters we analyze the two-particle excitations in the normal as well as in the ordered phase, an excitonic condensate. The two-particle dynamical mean-field theory spectra in the ordered phase reveal the gapless Goldstone modes arising from spontaneous breaking of continuous symmetries. We also observe the gapped Higgs mode, characterized by vanishing of the gap at the phase boundary. Qualitative changes observed in the spin susceptibility can be used as an experimental probe to identify the excitonic condensation.

The discontinuous jump in the bulk modulus $B$ at the jamming transition is a consequence of the formation of a critical contact network of spheres that resists compression. We introduce lattice models with underlying undercoordinated compression-resistant spring lattices to which next-nearest-neighbor springs can be added. In these models, the jamming transition emerges as a kind of multicritical point terminating a line of rigidity-percolation transitions. Replacing the undercoordinated lattices with the critical network at jamming yields a faithful description of jamming and its relation to rigidity percolation.

We examine the static dielectric constant of electrolyte solutions with a polar and/or polarizable small-molecule solvent using a classical field-theoretic approach. We compute corrections to the dielectric constant and screening length due to intra- and intermolecular correlations via a renormalized one-loop approximation, accounting for the excluded volume of both solvent and electrolyte. In the salt-free case, we verify the one-loop theory by comparison with full numerical solutions of the field theory. The one-loop theory predicts either a nonlinear dielectric decrement or increment with increasing salt, depending on whether the fluid correlations are dominated by the dipolar or polarizable nature of the solvent. These contrasting regimes of nonlinear dielectric behavior are consistent with experimental trends in high- and low-dielectric constant electrolyte solutions.

The more we learn about the cytoplasm of cells, the more we realize that the cytoplasm is not uniform but instead is highly inhomogeneous. In any inhomogeneous solution, there are concentration gradients, and particles move either up or down these gradients due to a mechanism called diffusiophoresis. I estimate that inside metabolically active cells, the dynamics of particles can be strongly accelerated by diffusiophoresis, provided that they are at least tens of nanometers across. The dynamics of smaller objects, such as single proteins, are largely unaffected.

We obtain the distribution of a number of atoms in an interval (full counting statistics) for interacting bosons in one dimension. Our results are valid in the weakly interacting regime in a parametrically large window of temperatures and interval lengths. The obtained distribution significantly deviates from a Gaussian away from the quasicondensate regime, and, for sufficiently short intervals, the probability of large number fluctuations is strongly enhanced.

Entanglement witnesses are operators that are crucial for confirming the generation of specific quantum systems, such as multipartite and high-dimensional states. For this reason, many witnesses have been theoretically derived which commonly focus on establishing tight bounds and exhibit mathematical compactness as well as symmetry properties similar to that of the quantum state. However, for increasingly complex quantum systems, established witnesses have lacked experimental achievability, as it has become progressively more challenging to design the corresponding experiments. Here, we present a universal approach to derive entanglement witnesses that are capable of detecting the presence of any targeted complex pure quantum system and that can be customized towards experimental restrictions or accessible measurement settings. Using this technique, we derive experimentally optimized witnesses that are able to detect multipartite $d$-level cluster states, and that require only two measurement settings. We present explicit examples for customizing the witness operators given different realistic experimental restrictions, including witnesses for high-dimensional entanglement that use only two-dimensional projection measurements. Our work enables us to confirm the presence of probed quantum states using methods that are compatible with practical experimental realizations in different quantum platforms.

The multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA) postulates the existence of quantum circuits that renormalize entanglement in real space at different length scales. Chern insulators, however, cannot have scale-invariant discrete MERA circuits with a finite bond dimension. In this Letter, we show that the continuous MERA (cMERA), a modified version of MERA adapted for field theories, possesses a fixed point wave function with a nonzero Chern number. Additionally, it is well known that reversed MERA circuits can be used to prepare quantum states efficiently in time that scales logarithmically with the size of the system. However, state preparation via MERA typically requires the advent of a full-fledged universal quantum computer. In this Letter, we demonstrate that our cMERA circuit can potentially be realized in existing analog quantum computers, i.e., an ultracold atomic Fermi gas in an optical lattice with light-induced spin-orbit coupling.

A mathematical extension of the weak value formalism to the simultaneous measurement of multiple parameters is presented in the context of an optical focused vector beam scatterometry experiment. In this example, preselection and postselection are achieved via spatially varying polarization control, which can be tailored to optimize the sensitivity to parameter variations. Initial experiments for the two-parameter case demonstrate that this method can be used to measure physical parameters with resolutions at least 1000 times smaller than the wavelength of illumination.

Direct numerical simulations of a liquid electrolyte with polymer additives demonstrate that viscoelasticity promotes an earlier transition from steady to unsteady electroconvective flow. Viscoelasticity also decreases the overlimiting current resulting from convection by up to 40%. Both of these effects would reduce the time-averaged spatial variability of ion flux suggesting that polymeric fluids may inhibit dendrite growth. Polymer relaxation near a surface destabilizes the flow structures and decreases the time duration of high current fluxes. This mechanism of polymer-induced flux reduction is general to wall bounded flows with transfer of mass, heat or momentum.