The association between productivity and impact of scientific production is a long-standing debate in science that remains controversial and poorly understood. Here we present a large-scale analysis of the association between yearly publication numbers and average journal-impact metrics for the Brazilian scientific elite. We find this association to be discipline specific, career age dependent, and similar among researchers with outlier and nonoutlier performance. Outlier researchers either outperform in productivity or journal prestige, but they rarely do so in both categories. Nonoutliers also follow this trend and display negative correlations between productivity and journal prestige but with discipline-dependent intensity. Our research indicates that academics are averse to simultaneous changes in their productivity and journal-prestige levels over consecutive career years. We also find that career patterns concerning productivity and journal prestige are discipline-specific, having in common a raise of productivity with career age for most disciplines and a higher chance of outperforming in journal impact during early career stages.

In the 35 years since the discovery of cuprate superconductors, we have not yet reached a unified understanding of their properties, including their material dependence of the superconducting transition temperature $T_{\text{c}}$. The preceding theoretical and experimental studies have provided an overall picture of the phase diagram, and some important parameters for the $T_{\text{c}}$, such as the contribution of the Cu $d_{z^2}$ orbital to the Fermi surface and the site-energy difference ${\mathrm{\Delta }}_{dp}$ between the Cu $d_{x^2-y^2}$ and O $p$ orbitals. However, they are somewhat empirical and limited in scope, always including exceptions, and do not provide a comprehensive view of the series of cuprates. Here we propose a four-band $d\text{−}p$ model as a minimal model to study material dependence in cuprates. Using the variational Monte Carlo method, we theoretically investigate the phase diagram for the ${\mathrm{La}}_2{\mathrm{CuO}}_4$ and ${\mathrm{HgBa}}_2{\mathrm{CuO}}_4$ systems and the correlation between the key parameters and the superconductivity. Our results comprehensively account for the empirical correlation between $T_{\text{c}}$ and model parameters, and thus can provide a guideline for new material design. We also show that the effect of the nearest-neighbor $d\text{−}d$ Coulomb interaction $V_{dd}$ is actually quite important for the stability of superconductivity and phase competition.

Motivated by the discovery of the quantum anomalous Hall effect in Cr-doped ${(\mathrm{Bi},\mathrm{Sb})}_2{\mathrm{Te}}_3$ thin films, we study the generic states for magnetic topological insulators and explore the physical properties for both magnetism and itinerant electrons. First-principles calculations are exploited to investigate the magnetic interactions between magnetic Co atoms adsorbed on the ${\mathrm{Bi}}_2{\mathrm{Se}}_3$ (111) surface. Due to the absence of inversion symmetry on the surface, there are Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya-like twisted spin interactions between the local moments of Co ions. These nonferromagnetic interactions twist the collinear spin configuration of the ferromagnet and generate various magnetic orders beyond a simple ferromagnet. Among them, the spin spiral state generates alternating counterpropagating modes across each period of spin states, and the skyrmion lattice even supports a chiral mode around the core of each skyrmion. The skyrmion lattice opens a gap at the surface Dirac point, resulting in the anomalous Hall effect. These results may inspire further experimental investigation of magnetic topological insulators.

Quantum dynamics is of fundamental interest and has implications in quantum information processing. The four-point out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC) is traditionally used to quantify quantum information scrambling under many-body dynamics. Due to the OTOC's unusual time ordering, its measurement is challenging. We propose higher-point OTOCs to reveal early-time scrambling behavior, and present protocols to measure any higher-point OTOC using the shadow estimation method. The protocols circumvent the need for time-reversal evolution and ancillary control. They can be implemented in near-term quantum devices with single-qubit readout.

Entangled photon pairs have promised to deliver a substantial quantum advantage for two-photon absorption spectroscopy. However, recent work has challenged the previously reported magnitude of quantum enhancement in two-photon absorption. We present a measurement of molecular absorption driven by isolated photon pairs using sum-frequency generation in a nonlinear optical crystal as a calibration device. We thereby establish an upper bound on the enhancement for entangled two-photon absorption in Rhodamine 6G, which lies well below previously reported values.

We study the enhancement of tunneling through a potential barrier $V\left(x\right)$ by a time-dependent electric field with special emphasis on pulse-shaped vector potentials such as $A_x\left(t\right)=A_0/{cosh}^2\left(\omega t\right)$. In addition to the known effects of preacceleration and potential deformation already present in the adiabatic regime, as well as energy mixing in analogy to the Franz-Keldysh effect in the nonadiabatic (impulse) regime, the pulse $A_x\left(t\right)$ can enhance tunneling by “pushing” part of the wave function out of the rear end of the barrier. Aside from the natural applications in condensed matter and atomic physics, these findings could be relevant for nuclear fusion, where pulses $A_x\left(t\right)$ with $\omega =1\mathrm{keV}$ and peak field strengths of ${10}^{16}\mathrm{V}/\mathrm{m}$ might enhance tunneling rates significantly.

We investigate the coexisting rogue wave dynamics associated with two fundamental-frequency optical waves interacting in a quadratic nonlinear medium. Using the vector Chen–Lee–Liu nonlinear Schrödinger equation model, we obtain exact rogue wave solutions at first and higher orders on the more general periodic backgrounds. We unveil that the inherent self-steepening effect may allow an omnipresent rogue wave coexistence over a broad range of parameters in both the normal and anomalous dispersion regimes, in addition to allowing ultrastrong peak amplitudes. We also demonstrate that such universality of coexistence can be anticipated by the appearance of two peaks in the modulation instability spectrum. We numerically confirm the robustness of the coexisting Peregrine solitons against initial noise as well as their excitation from a turbulent wave field caused by modulation instability. We expect that these findings will shed light on the generation of extreme wave events resulting from the interference of multiple continuous-wave fields.

Tasks such as classification of data and determining the ground state of a Hamiltonian cannot be carried out through purely unitary quantum evolution. Instead, the inherent nonunitarity of the measurement process must be harnessed. Post-selection and its extensions provide a way to do this. However, they make inefficient use of time resources—a typical computation might require $O\left(2^m\right)$ measurements over $m$ qubits to reach a desired accuracy and cannot be done intermittently on current (superconducting-based) NISQ devices. We propose a method inspired by thermalization that harnesses insensitivity to the details of the bath. We find a greater robustness to gate noise by coupling to this bath, with a similar cost in time and more qubits compared to alternate methods for inducing nonlinearity such as fixed-point quantum search for oblivious amplitude amplification. Post-selection on $m$ ancillae qubits is replaced with tracing out $O[log\epsilon /log(1-p\left)\right]$ (where $p$ is the probability of a successful measurement) to attain the same accuracy as the post-selection circuit. We demonstrate this scheme on the quantum perceptron, quantum gearbox, and phase estimation algorithm. This method is particularly advantageous on current quantum computers involving superconducting circuits.

We consider the annealing dynamics of a one-dimensional Ising ferromagnet induced by a temperature quench in finite time. In the limit of slow cooling, the asymptotic two-point correlator is analytically found under Glauber dynamics, and the distribution of the number of kinks in the final state is shown to be consistent with a Poissonian distribution. The mean kink number, the variance, and the third centered moment take the same value and obey a universal power-law scaling with the quench time in which the temperature is varied. The universal power-law scaling of cumulants is corroborated by numerical simulations based on Glauber dynamics for moderate cooling times away from the asymptotic limit, when the kink-number distribution takes a binomial form. We analyze the relation of these results to physics beyond the Kibble-Zurek mechanism for critical dynamics, using the kink-number distribution to assess adiabaticity and its breakdown. We consider linear, nonlinear, and exponential cooling schedules, among which the last provides the most efficient shortcuts to cooling in a given quench time. The nonthermal behavior of the final state is established by considering the trace norm distance to a canonical Gibbs state.

We develop a formalism to describe the scattering of dark matter (DM) particles by electrons bound in crystals for a general form of the underlying DM-electron interaction. Such a description is relevant for direct-detection experiments of DM particles lighter than a nucleon, which might be observed in operating DM experiments via electron excitations in semiconductor crystal detectors. Our formalism is based on an effective theory approach to general nonrelativistic DM-electron interactions, including the anapole, and magnetic and electric dipole couplings, combined with crystal response functions defined in terms of electron wave function overlap integrals. Our main finding is that, for the usual simplification of the velocity integral, the rate of DM-induced electronic transitions in a semiconductor material depends on at most five independent crystal response functions four of which are distinct from the usual scalar response. We identify these crystal responses and evaluate them using density functional theory for crystalline silicon and germanium, which are used in operating DM direct-detection experiments. Our calculations allow us to set 90% confidence level limits on the strength of DM-electron interactions from data reported by the SENSEI and EDELWEISS experiments. The crystal response functions discovered in this paper encode properties of crystalline solids that do not interact with conventional experimental probes, suggesting the use of the DM wind as a probe to reveal new kinds of hidden order in materials.

A crucial question is how objective and classical behavior arises from a fundamental physical theory. Here we provide a natural definition of a decoherence process valid in all causal theories and show how its behavior can be extremely different from the quantum one. Remarkably, despite this, we prove that the so-called spectrum broadcast structure characterizes all objective states in every fundamental causal theory, exactly as in quantum mechanics. Our results show a stark contrast between the extraordinarily diverse decoherence behavior and the universal features of objectivity.

A fundamental question in device-independent quantum cryptography is to determine the minimal physical principle upon which the security of such a cryptographic protocol (such as for key distribution or for randomness generation) may be based. Since the seminal work on device-independent quantum key distribution by J. Barrett, L. Hardy, and A. Kent [Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 010503 (2005)], a conjectured candidate for certification of device-independent security has been the principle of relativistic causality, namely the disallowance of causal loops. While this principle has thus far been equated with the no-signaling constraints, it has been shown recently that in multiparty Bell scenarios, the no-signaling constraints are sufficient but not necessary for relativistic causality, and a refined set of constraints has been proposed that more precisely capture the notion of relativistic causality. In this paper, we build upon this finding to show that, in contrast to the no-signaling constraints, the constraints of relativistic causality are not sufficient for certification of device-independent security. More specifically, we show that there exist correlations allowed by the causality principle that allow an adversary to gain complete information about the measurement outcomes of honest parties in any device-independent cryptographic protocol, thereby rendering the protocol completely insecure. As a tool to develop this adversarial attack strategy, we fully characterize the set of correlations allowed by relativistic causality in the tripartite Bell scenario of three parties, each performing two binary measurements, that may be of independent interest. We also demonstrate the difference between the relativistic causal correlations and those allowed by the usual no-signaling constraints by presenting explicit communication tasks wherein the two sets exhibit striking difference in their respective winning probabilities.

We study how chaos, introduced by a weak perturbation, affects the reliability of the output of analog quantum simulation. As a toy model, we consider the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model. Inspired by the semiclassical behavior of the order parameter in the thermodynamic limit, we propose a protocol to measure the quantum phase transition in the ground state and the dynamical quantum phase transition associated with quench dynamics. We show that the presence of a small time-dependent perturbation can render the dynamics of the system chaotic. We then show that the estimates of the critical points of these quantum phase transitions, obtained from the quantum simulation of its dynamics, are robust to the presence of this chaotic perturbation, while other aspects of the system, such as the mean magnetization, are fragile and therefore cannot be reliably extracted from this simulator. This can be understood in terms of the simulated quantities that depend on the global structure of phase space vs those that depend on local trajectories.

We study the Hall effect in square, planar type-II superconductors using numerical simulations of time dependent Ginzburg-Landau (TDGL) equations. The Hall field in some type-II superconductors displays sign-change behavior at some magnetic fields due to the induced field of vortex flow when its contribution is strong enough to reverse the field direction. In this paper, we use modified TDGL equations which couple an externally applied current, and also incorporate normal-state and flux-flow Hall effects. We obtain the profile of Hall angle as a function of applied magnetic field for six different sizes $(l\times l)$ of the superconductor: $l/\xi \in \{3,5,15,20,100,200\}$. We obtain vastly different profiles for different size regimes, proving that size is an important parameter that determines Hall behavior. We find that electric field dynamics provide an insight into several anomalous features including a sign change of the Hall angle, and leads us to the precise transient behavior of the order parameter responsible for them.

Smectic liquid crystal films a few molecular layers thick that are freely suspended in air are used as a model system to study the coalescence of fluids in two dimensions. High-speed video microscopy is used to observe the coalescence of islands, which are thicker, disk-shaped regions of the film, in a process driven by the line tension associated with edge dislocations along the island boundaries and limited by viscous dissipation in the liquid crystal and in the surrounding air. The early time growth of the bridge connecting the merging islands reveals much slower dynamics than predicted by Hopper's classical hydrodynamic model of coalescence of two infinitely long, fluid cylinders in vacuum, a discrepancy proposed to be due to significant dissipation in the background film and in the air that is not included in Hopper's theory. At late times, the elliptical merged island relaxes exponentially to a circular shape, at rates that are described quantitatively by a model originally developed to describe the evolution of fluid domains in Langmuir films.