Physiological states of bacterial cells exhibit a wide spectrum of timescale. Under nutrient-rich conditions, most of the cells in an isogenic bacterial population grow at certain rates, while a small subpopulation sometimes falls into a dormant state where the growth rates slow down by orders of magnitude. The dormant cells have unique characteristics: The metabolic activity is quite slow, and the dormant cells typically exhibit a high tolerance for a range of stresses, such as antibiotics applications. To reveal the origins of such heterogeneity of timescales, we constructed a kinetic model of Escherichia coli central carbon metabolism, including the dynamics of the energy currency molecules, and asked if perturbations of the metabolites' concentrations lead to the distinct metabolic states. By numerically studying the relaxation dynamics, we found that the model robustly exhibits two qualitatively distinct relaxation dynamics depending on the initial conditions generated by the perturbations. In the first type, the concentrations of metabolites reach the steady state quickly, resembling the growing dynamics. On the other hand, the other type of dynamics takes a much longer time to reach the steady state, and during the relaxation, cell growth almost halts, reminding us of the dormant cells. In order to unveil the mechanism of distinct behaviors, we reduced the metabolic network model into a minimal model without losing the emergence of distinct dynamics. Analytical and numerical studies of the two-variable minimal model revealed the necessary conditions for the distinct behavior, namely, the depletion of energy due to the futile cycle and its nonuniform impact on the kinetics because of the coexistence of the energy currency-coupled and uncoupled reactions as well as branching of the network. The result is consistent with the experimental reports that the dormant cells commonly exhibit low ATP levels and provides a possible explanation for the appearance of dormant cells that causes antibiotic persistence.

In isolated Hermitian systems, the bulk-boundary correspondence is generally thought of as a compelling principle guiding the occurrence of robust edge states through the topological invariants of the bulk. However, in open non-Hermitian systems that support non-Hermitian skin effects, the universality of the bulk-boundary correspondence has so far remained disputable in spite of being subjected to intensive studies. Here we provide analytical and numerical evidence of bulk-boundary correspondences for both skin and edge modes in 1D two-band non-Hermitian systems within the framework of a prototypical non-Hermitian Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model. Two different topological winding numbers, one on a Brillouin zone and the other on a generalized Brillouin zone, are defined to fully characterize the topological phases of matter and to understand such deterministic correspondences. In addition to the exact solutions for bulk states, we also obtain explicit solution forms for edge modes along with analytical conditions for their existence and localization, all exhibiting remarkable agreement with numerical results. Our results solve the elusive non-Hermitian topology and may facilitate experimental investigations of bulk-boundary correspondence in a wide range of non-Hermitian systems.

High-connectivity circuits are a major roadblock for current quantum hardware. We propose a hybrid classical-quantum algorithm to simulate such circuits without swap-gate ladders. As the main technical tool, we introduce quantum-classical-quantum interfaces. These replace an experimentally problematic gate (e.g., a long-range one) with single-qubit random measurements followed by state preparations sampled according to a classical quasiprobability simulation of the noiseless gate. Each interface introduces a multiplicative statistical overhead which, remarkably, is independent of the on-chip qubit distance. Hence, by applying interfaces to the longest-range gates in a target circuit, significant reductions in circuit depth and gate infidelity can be attained. We numerically show the efficacy of our method for a Bell-state circuit for two increasingly distant qubits and a variational ground-state solver for the transverse-field Ising model on a ring. Our findings provide a versatile toolbox for error-mitigation and circuit boosts tailored for noisy, intermediate-scale quantum computation.

Non-Hermitian topological systems simultaneously possess two antagonistic features: ultrasensitivity due to exceptional points and robustness of topological zero-energy modes, and it is unclear which one prevails under different perturbations. We study that question by applying the pseudospectrum theory on the prototypical non-Hermitian Su-Schrieffer-Heeger lattice. Topological modes around the underlying third-order exceptional point (EP3) are robust with respect to chiral perturbations but sensitive to diagonal perturbations. In fact, exactly at the EP3 the chiral symmetry leads to a suppressed sensitivity, that corresponds to an EP2. Finally, for nonlinearly induced perturbations we provide a connection between the pseudospectrum approach and a nonlinear phase shift, which is relevant for experiments.

Fault-tolerant quantum computing will require accurate estimates of the resource overhead under different error correction strategies, but standard metrics such as gate fidelity and diamond distance have been shown to be poor predictors of logical performance. We present a scalable experimental approach based on Pauli error reconstruction to predict the performance of concatenated codes. Numerical evidence demonstrates that our method significantly outperforms predictions based on standard error metrics for various error models, even with limited data. We illustrate how this method assists in the selection of error correction schemes.

The persistent spin helix (PSH) is the stable spin state protected by SU(2) spin-rotation symmetry. Long-lived spin textures, referred to as helical and homogeneous spin modes, emerge as a result of this symmetry. These textures are potential candidates for the development of quantum and topological phenomena as well as information carriers in semiconductors. To this end, revealing the lifetime of all spin modes is of great importance. We experimentally reveal the lifetime of both helical and homogeneous spin modes in the vicinity of the PSH state by fully electrical means through quantum corrections to the conductivity. In a (001)-grown GaAs/AlGaAs two-dimensional electron gas, we measure the weak antilocalization in the condition where Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit (SO) interactions coexist. According to the latest theory on magnetoconductance [Kammermeier et al., Phys. Rev. B 104, 235430 (2021)], the Cooperon triplet mode in the quantum corrections can be decoupled into helical and homogeneous spin modes in the vicinity of the PSH state, which allows each mode lifetime to be determined from the quantum interference effect. By using a real-space simulation in tandem with the experiment, we were able to simultaneously evaluate the relaxation rates of the two spin modes. Our results show that the ratio of Rashba and Dresselhaus SO coefficients is modulated by the top gate and that this quadratically changes the relaxation rates of the helical and homogeneous spin modes, which is consistent with theoretical predictions. These findings pave the way for exploring electron spin textures in various bandgap materials from semiconductors to metals.

Machine learning is emerging as a technology that can enhance physics experiment execution and data analysis. Here, we apply machine learning to accelerate the production of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of ${}^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ atoms by Bayesian optimization of up to 55 control parameters. This approach enables us to prepare BECs of $2.8\times {10}^3$ optically trapped ${}^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ atoms from a room-temperature gas in 575 ms. The algorithm achieves the fast BEC preparation by applying highly efficient Raman cooling to near quantum degeneracy, followed by a brief final evaporation. We anticipate that many other physics experiments with complex nonlinear system dynamics can be significantly enhanced by a similar machine-learning approach.

Bell inequality with a self-testing property has played an important role in quantum information processing with both fundamental and practical significance. However, it is generally challenging to find Bell inequalities used for self-testing multipartite states, and actually, there are not many known candidates. In this work we propose a systematic framework to construct Bell inequalities from stabilizers which are maximally violated by general stabilizer states, with two observables for each local party. We show that the constructed Bell inequalities can self-test any stabilizer state if and only if these stabilizers can uniquely determine the state in a device-dependent manner. This bridges the gap between device-independent and device-dependent verification methods. Our framework can provide plenty of Bell inequalities for self-testing $N$-party stabilizer states. Among them, we give two families of Bell inequalities with different advantages: (1) a family of Bell inequalities with a constant ratio of quantum and classical bounds using $2N$ correlations, and (2) single pair inequalities improving on all previous robustness self-testing bounds using $N+1$ correlations, which are both efficient and robust for realizations in multipartite systems.

The possibility of electrically exciting and detecting magnon currents in magnetic insulators has opened exciting perspectives for transporting spin information in electronic devices. However, the role of the magnetic field and the nonlocal thermal gradients on the magnon transport remain unclear. Here, by performing nonlocal harmonic voltage measurements, we investigate magnon transport in perpendicularly magnetized ultrathin ${\mathrm{Tm}}_3{\mathrm{Fe}}_5{\mathrm{O}}_{12}$ (TmIG) films coupled to Pt electrodes. We show that the first harmonic nonlocal voltage captures spin-driven magnon transport in TmIG, as expected, and the second harmonic is dominated by thermoelectric voltages driven by current-induced thermal gradients at the detector. The magnon diffusion length in TmIG is found to be ${\lambda }_{\mathrm{m}}\sim 0.3\mu \mathrm{m}$ at 0.5 T and gradually decays to ${\lambda }_{\mathrm{m}}\sim 0.2\mu \mathrm{m}$ at 0.8 T, which we attribute to the suppression of the magnon relaxation time due to the increase of the Gilbert damping with field. By performing current-, magnetic field-, and distance-dependent nonlocal and local measurements we demonstrate that the second harmonic nonlocal voltage exhibits five thermoelectric contributions, which originate from the nonlocal spin Seebeck effect and the ordinary, planar, spin, and anomalous Nernst effects. Our work provides a guide on how to disentangle magnon signals from diverse thermoelectric voltages of spin and magnetic origin in nonlocal magnon devices, and establish the scaling laws of the thermoelectric voltages in metal/insulator bilayers.

Non-Hermitian degeneracies are classified as defective exceptional points (EPs) and nondefective degeneracies. While in defective EPs, both eigenvalues and eigenvectors coalesce, nondefective degeneracies are characterized merely by the emergence of degenerate eigenvalues. It is also known that all degeneracies are either symmetryprotected or accidental. In this paper, I prove that antiunitary symmetries protect all nondefective twofold degeneracies. By developing a 2D non-Hermitian tight-binding model, I have demonstrated that these symmetries comprise various symmetry operations, such as discrete or spatial point-group symmetries and Wick's rotation in the non-Hermitian parameter space. Introducing these composite symmetries, I present the protection of nondefective degeneracies in various parameter regimes of my model. This work paves the way to stabilizing nondefective degeneracies and offers a new perspective on understanding non-Hermitian band crossings.

Dual-unitary circuits have emerged as a minimal model for chaotic quantum many-body dynamics in which the dynamics of correlations and entanglement remains tractable. Simultaneously, there has been intense interest in the effect of measurements on the dynamics of quantum information in many-body systems. In this work we introduce a class of models combining dual-unitary circuits with particular projective measurements that allow the exact computation of dynamical correlations of local observables, entanglement growth, and steady-state entanglement. We identify a symmetry preventing a measurement-induced phase transition and present exact results for the intermediate critical purification phase.

Randomly diffusing atoms confined in a dissipative optical lattice are illuminated by a weak probe of light. The probe transmission spectrum reveals directed atomic propagation that occurs perpendicular to the direction of probe beam propagation. Resonant enhancement of this directed propagation is observed as we vary the random photon scattering rate. We experimentally characterize this stochastic resonance as a function of probe intensity and lattice well depth. A simple model reveals how the probe-excited atomic density waves and optical pumping rates conspire to create directed atomic propagation within a randomly diffusing sample.

While most work on the quantum simulation of chemistry has focused on computing energy surfaces, a similarly important application requiring subtly different algorithms is the computation of energy derivatives. Almost all molecular properties can be expressed an energy derivative, including molecular forces, which are essential for applications such as molecular dynamics simulations. Here, we introduce new quantum algorithms for computing molecular energy derivatives with significantly lower complexity than prior methods. Under cost models appropriate for noisy-intermediate scale quantum devices, we demonstrate how low-rank factorization and other tomography schemes can be optimized for energy derivative calculations. We numerically demonstrate that our techniques reduce the number of circuit repetitions required by many orders of magnitude for even modest systems, and that the cost of estimating an entire force vector may in some systems be lower than the cost of estimating the energy. In the context of fault-tolerant algorithms, we develop new methods of estimating energy derivatives with Heisenberg limited scaling, incorporating state-of-the-art techniques for block encoding fermionic operators. In contrast to our near-term results, we find that the cost of estimating forces with any of our Heisenberg-limited methods is bounded by the cost of estimating energies, due to inner loops requiring either energy estimation or reflections around the ground state. This implies that applications such as geometry optimization, coupling parameter estimation, and spectral prediction may be practical on fault-tolerant quantum devices, but tractable molecular dynamics simulations of large-scale systems requires further algorithmic advances.

We theoretically study the electronic structure of interface states in twisted stacks of three-dimensional topological insulators. When the center of the surface Dirac cone is located at a midpoint of a side of the Brillouin zone boundary, we find that an array of nearly independent one-dimensional channels is formed by the interface hybridization of the surface states, even when the moiré pattern itself is isotropic. The two counterpropagating channels have opposite spin polarization, and they are robust against scattering by spin-independent impurities. The coupling between the parallel channels can be tuned by the twist angle. The unique one-dimensional states can be understood as effective Landau levels where the twist angle works as a fictitious magnetic field.

In our modern world, we rely on the proper functioning of a variety of networks with complex dynamics. Many of them are prone to congestion due to high loads, which determines their operation and resilience to failures. In this article, we propose a fundamental model of congestion where travel times increase linearly with the load. We show that this model interpolates between shortest path and Ohmic flow dynamics, which both have a broad range of applications. We formulate the model as a quadratic programme and derive a generalization of Ohm's law, where the flow of every link is determined by a potential gradient in a nonlinear way. We provide analytic solutions for fundamental network topologies that elucidate the transition from localized flow to a branched flow. Furthermore, we discuss how to solve the model efficiently for large networks and investigate the resilience to structural damages.

The statistics of the fluctuations of quantum many-body systems are highly revealing of their nature. In driven-dissipative systems displaying macroscopic quantum coherence, as exciton polariton condensates under incoherent pumping, the phase dynamics can be mapped to the stochastic Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation. However, it was argued theoretically that in two dimensions the KPZ regime may be hindered by the presence of vortices, and a nonequilibrium Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless behavior was reported close to the condensation threshold. We demonstrate here that, when a discretized two-dimensional (2D) polariton system is considered, universal KPZ properties can emerge. We support our analysis by extensive numerical simulations of the discrete stochastic generalized Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We show that the first-order correlation function of the condensate exhibits stretched exponential behaviors in space and time with critical exponents characteristic of the 2D KPZ universality class and find that the related scaling function accurately matches the KPZ theoretical one, stemming from functional renormalization group. We also obtain the distribution of the phase fluctuations and find that it is non-Gaussian, as expected for a KPZ stochastic process.

Fractional statistics of quasiparticle excitations often plays an important role in the detection and characterization of topological systems. In this paper, we investigate the case of a three-dimensional (3D) ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$ gauge theory, where the excitations take the form of bosonic spinon quasiparticle and vison flux tubes, with mutual semionic statistics. We focus on an experimentally relevant intermediate temperature regime, where sparse spinons hop coherently on a dense quasistatic and stochastic vison background. The effective Hamiltonian reduces to a random-sign bimodal tight-binding model, where both the particles and the disorder are borne out of the same underlying quantum spin liquid (QSL) degrees of freedom, and the coupling between the two is purely driven by the mutual fractional statistics. We study the localization properties and observe a mobility edge located close to the band edge, whose transition belongs to the 3D Anderson model universality class. Spinons allowed to propagate through the quasistatic vison background appear to display quantum diffusive behavior. When the visons are allowed to relax, in response to the presence of spinons in equilibrium, we observe the formation of vison depletion regions slave to the support of the spinon wave function. We discuss how this behavior can give rise to measurable effects in the relaxation, response, and transport properties of the system and how these may be used as signatures of the mutual semionic statistics and as precursors of the QSL phase arising in the system at lower temperatures.