A theoretical understanding of the enigmatic linear-in-temperature ($T$) resistivity, ubiquitous in strongly correlated metallic systems, has been a long sought-after goal. Furthermore, the slope of this robust $T$-linear resistivity is also observed to stay constant through crossovers between different temperature regimes: a phenomenon we dub “slope invariance.” Recently, several solvable models with $T$-linear resistivity have been proposed, putting us in an opportune moment to compare their inner workings in various explicit calculations. We consider two strongly correlated models with local self-energies that demonstrate $T$ linearity: a lattice of coupled Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev models and the Hubbard model in single-site dynamical mean-field theory. We find that the two models achieve $T$ linearity through distinct mechanisms at intermediate temperatures. However, we also find that these mechanisms converge to an identical form at high temperatures. Surprisingly, both models exhibit “slope invariance” across the two temperature regimes. Thus not only do we reveal some of the diversity in the theoretical inner workings that can lead to $T$-linear resistivity, but we also establish that different mechanisms can result in “slope invarance.”

Artificial spin ices are ideal frustrated model systems in which to explore or design emergent phenomena with unprecedented characterization of the constituent degrees of freedom. In square spin ice, violations of the ice rule are topological excitations essential to the kinetics of the system, providing an ideal test bed for studying the dynamics of such defects under varied quench rates. In this work we examine possible scenarios including the Kibble-Zurek mechanism and critical coarsening in colloidal square and hexagonal ice under quenches from a weakly interacting liquid state into a strongly interacting regime. As expected, for infinitely slow quenches, the system is free of defects such as monopoles, while for increasing quench rate, an increasing number of defects in the form of monopoles or grain boundaries remain in the sample. For square ice, we find regimes in which the defect population decreases as a power law with decreasing quench rate. A detailed scaling analysis shows that for a wide range of parameters, including quench rates that are accessible by experiments, the behavior is best described by critical coarsening rather than the Zurek-Kibble scenario if we assume that the equilibrium phase transition in this system is in the Ising universality class. The appearance of critical coarsening is likely due to the strong defect interactions in the colloidal ice system leading to relevant defect dynamics during the quench. For hexagonal ice we do not find evidence for a power-law decay in the defect density, which is consistent with the absence of an equilibrium phase transition in the hexagonal ice as well as a lack of critical coarsening.

Using a numerically exact first-principles many-body approach, we revisit the “prototypical” Kondo case of a cobalt impurity on copper. Even though this is considered a well understood example of the Kondo effect, we reveal an unexpectedly strong dependence of the screening properties on the parametrization of the local Coulomb tensor. As a consequence, the Kondo temperature can vary by orders of magnitude depending on the complexity of the parametrization of the electron-electron interaction. Further, we challenge the established picture of a spin-1 moment involving two cobalt $d$ orbitals only, as orbital-mixing interaction terms boost the contribution of the remainder of the $d$ shell.

We study a model of a large number of strongly coupled phonons that can be viewed as a bosonic variant of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model. We determine the phase diagram of the model which consists of a glass phase and a disordered phase, with a first-order phase transition separating them. We compute the specific heat of the disordered phase, with which we diagnose the high-temperature crossover to the classical limit. We further study the real-time dynamics of the disordered phase, where we identify three dynamical regimes as a function of temperature. Low temperatures are associated with a semiclassical regime, where the phonons can be described as long-lived normal modes. High temperatures are associated with the classical limit of the model. For a large region in parameter space, we identify an intermediate-temperatures regime, where the phonon lifetime is of the order of the Planckian timescale $\hslash /k_{B}T$.

The in-plane anisotropy of the Seebeck ($S$) and Nernst (ν) coefficients of the nearly optimally doped cuprate superconductor ${\mathrm{La}}_{1.86}{\mathrm{Sr}}_{0.14}\mathrm{Cu}{\mathrm{O}}_4$ was measured under uniaxial pressure. Regardless of the qualitative differences between the $S\left(T\right)$ and $\nu \left(T\right)$ dependences, both the Seebeck and Nernst anisotropies evolve very similarly with temperature. Namely, they emerge slightly above the structural transition, then change their character, and eventually sign at the temperature close to the temperature of the pseudogap formation. We conclude that the pseudogap possibly breaks rotational symmetry and we indicate an important role played in this phase by small-angle inelastic scattering.

Measuring in a single location on Earth its angular rotation rate with respect to the celestial frame, with a sensitivity enabling access to the tiny Lense-Thirring effect, is an extremely challenging task. GINGERINO is a large frame ring laser gyroscope, operating as free running and unattended inside the underground laboratory of the Gran Sasso, Italy. The main geodetic signals, i.e., annual and Chandler wobbles, daily polar motion, and length of the day, are recovered from GINGERINO data using standard linear regression methods, demonstrating a sensitivity approaching tens of frad/s, therefore close to the requirements for Earth-based Lense-Thirring and Lorentz violation tests.

The superexchange theory predicts dominant antiferromagnetic kinetic interaction when the orbitals accommodating magnetic electrons are covalently bonded through diamagnetic bridging atoms or groups. Here we show that explicit consideration of magnetic and (leading) bridging orbitals, together with the electron transfer between the former, reveals a strong ferromagnetic kinetic exchange contribution. First-principles calculations show that it is comparable in strength with antiferromagnetic superexchange in a number of magnetic materials with diamagnetic metal bridges. In particular, it is responsible for a very large ferromagnetic coupling ($-10$ meV) between the iron ions in a ${\mathrm{Fe}}^{3+}\text{−}{\mathrm{Co}}^{3+}\text{−}{\mathrm{Fe}}^{3+}$ complex. Furthermore, we find that the ferromagnetic exchange interaction turns into antiferromagnetic by substituting the diamagnetic bridge with magnetic one. The phenomenology is observed in two series of materials, supporting the significance of the ferromagnetic kinetic exchange mechanism.

Given access to accurate solutions of the many-electron Schrödinger equation, nearly all chemistry could be derived from first principles. Exact wave functions of interesting chemical systems are out of reach because they are NP-hard to compute in general, but approximations can be found using polynomially scaling algorithms. The key challenge for many of these algorithms is the choice of wave function approximation, or Ansatz, which must trade off between efficiency and accuracy. Neural networks have shown impressive power as accurate practical function approximators and promise as a compact wave-function Ansatz for spin systems, but problems in electronic structure require wave functions that obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. Here we introduce a novel deep learning architecture, the Fermionic neural network, as a powerful wave-function Ansatz for many-electron systems. The Fermionic neural network is able to achieve accuracy beyond other variational quantum Monte Carlo Ansatz on a variety of atoms and small molecules. Using no data other than atomic positions and charges, we predict the dissociation curves of the nitrogen molecule and hydrogen chain, two challenging strongly correlated systems, to significantly higher accuracy than the coupled cluster method, widely considered the most accurate scalable method for quantum chemistry at equilibrium geometry. This demonstrates that deep neural networks can improve the accuracy of variational quantum Monte Carlo to the point where it outperforms other ab initio quantum chemistry methods, opening the possibility of accurate direct optimization of wave functions for previously intractable many-electron systems.

Despite previous extensive analysis of open quantum systems described by the Lindblad equation, it is unclear whether correlated topological states, such as fractional quantum Hall states, are maintained even in the presence of the jump term. In this paper, we introduce the pseudospin Chern number of the Liouvillian which is computed by twisting the boundary conditions only for one of the subspaces of the doubled Hilbert space. The existence of such a topological invariant elucidates that the topological properties remain unchanged even in the presence of the jump term, which does not close the gap of the effective non-Hermitian Hamiltonian (obtained by neglecting the jump term). In other words, the topological properties are encoded into an effective non-Hermitian Hamiltonian rather than the full Liouvillian. This is particularly useful when the jump term can be written as a strictly block-upper (-lower) triangular matrix in the doubled Hilbert space, in which case the presence or absence of the jump term does not affect the spectrum of the Liouvillian. With the pseudospin Chern number, we address the characterization of fractional quantum Hall states with two-body loss but without gain, elucidating that the topology of the non-Hermitian fractional quantum Hall states is preserved even in the presence of the jump term. This numerical result also supports the use of the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian which significantly reduces the numerical cost. Similar topological invariants can be extended to treat correlated topological states for other spatial dimensions and symmetry (e.g., one-dimensional open quantum systems with inversion symmetry), indicating the high versatility of our approach.

Microfocus Brillouin light scattering is a powerful technique for the spectroscopic and spatial characterization of elementary excitations in materials. However, the small momentum of light limits the accessible excitations to the center of the Brillouin zone. Here we utilize a metallic nanoantenna fabricated on the archetypal ferrimagnet yttrium iron garnet to demonstrate the possibility of Brillouin light scattering from large-wave-vector, high-frequency spin wave excitations that are inaccessible with free-space light. The antenna facilitates subdiffraction confinement of the electromagnetic field, which enhances the local field intensity and generates momentum components significantly larger than those of free-space light. Our approach provides access to high-frequency spin waves important for fast nanomagnetic devices, and can be generalized to other types of excitations and light-scattering techniques.

Spatial networks are ubiquitous in social, geographical, physical, and biological applications. To understand the large-scale structure of networks, it is important to develop methods that allow one to directly probe the effects of space on structure and dynamics. Historically, algebraic topology has provided one framework for rigorously and quantitatively describing the global structure of a space, and recent advances in topological data analysis have given scholars a new lens for analyzing network data. In this paper, we study a variety of spatial networks—including both synthetic and natural ones—using topological methods that we developed recently for analyzing spatial systems. We demonstrate that our methods are able to capture meaningful quantities, with specifics that depend on context, in spatial networks and thereby provide useful insights into the structure of those networks. We illustrate these ideas with examples of synthetic networks and dynamics on them, street networks in cities, snowflakes, and webs that were spun by spiders under the influence of various psychotropic substances.

Classification of matter through topological phases and topological edge states between distinct materials has been a subject of great interest recently. While lattices have been the main setting for these studies, a relatively unexplored realm for this physics is that of continuum fluids. In the typical case of a fluid model with a point spectrum, nontrivial topology and associated edge modes have been observed previously. However, another possibility is that a continuous spectrum can coexist with the point spectrum. Here we demonstrate that a fluid plasma model can harbor nontrivial topology within its continuous spectrum, and that there are boundary modes at the interface between topologically distinct regions. We consider the ideal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) model. In the presence of magnetic shear, we find nontrivial topology in the Alfvén continuum. For strong shear, the Chern number is $\pm 1$, depending on the sign of the shear. If the magnetic shear changes sign within the plasma, a topological phase transition occurs, and bulk-boundary correspondence then suggests a mode localized to the layer of zero magnetic shear. We confirm the existence of this mode numerically. Moreover, this reversed-shear Alfvén eigenmode (RSAE) is well known within magnetic fusion as it has been observed in several tokamaks. In examining how the MHD model might be regularized at small scales, we also consider the electron limit of Hall MHD. We show that the whistler band, which plays an important role in planetary ionospheres, has nontrivial topology. More broadly, this work raises the possibility that fusion devices could be carefully tailored to produce other topological states with potentially useful behavior.

We introduce a robust scheme for long-distance continuous-variable (CV) measurement-device-independent (MDI) quantum key distribution in which we employ postselection between distant parties communicating through the medium of an untrusted relay. We perform a security analysis that allows for general transmissivity and thermal noise variance of each link, in which we assume that an eavesdropper performs a collective attack and controls the excess thermal noise in the channels. The introduction of postselection enables the parties to sustain a secret key rate over distances exceeding those of existing CV MDI protocols. In the worst-case scenario in which the relay is positioned equidistant between them, we find that the parties may communicate securely over a range of 14 km in standard optical fiber. Our protocol helps to overcome the rate-distance limitations of previously proposed CV MDI protocols while maintaining many of their advantages.

We revisit the effects of short-ranged random quenched disorder on the universal scaling properties of the classical $N$-vector model with cubic anisotropy. We set up the nonconserved relaxational dynamics of the model, and study the universal dynamic scaling near the second-order phase transition. We extract the critical exponents and the dynamic exponent in a one-loop dynamic renormalization group calculation with short-ranged isotropic disorder. We show that the dynamics near a critical point is generically slower when the quenched disorder is relevant than when it is not, independent of whether the pure model is isotropic or cubic anisotropic. We demonstrate the surprising thresholdless instability of the associated universality class due to perturbations from rotational invariance breaking quenched disorder-order parameter coupling, indicating breakdown of dynamic scaling. We speculate that this may imply a novel first-order transition in the model, induced by a symmetry-breaking disorder.

Synchronization phenomena occur throughout nature. The van der Pol oscillator has been a paradigmatic model to investigate synchronization. Here we study the oscillator with additional single-photon dissipation in the deep quantum regime (defined to be ${\gamma }_2/{\gamma }_1\gtrsim 10$), and we contrast it with the quantum regime at ${\gamma }_2/{\gamma }_1\approx 1$. Our results show that in this regime: (i) the effect of squeezed driving effect on frequency entrainment is strongly suppressed, (ii) single-photon dissipation boosts synchronization, (iii) synchronization is bounded, and (iv) the limit-cycle is robust and insensitive to strong driving. We use these physical properties to define the crossover to the deep quantum regime. We also propose a synchronization measure based on directional statistics which is analytically calculated. These results reflect the intrinsic physical differences between synchronization in the quantum and deep quantum regimes.

We propose an orbital optimized method for unitary coupled cluster theory (OO-UCC) within the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) framework for quantum computers. OO-UCC variationally determines the coupled cluster amplitudes and also molecular orbital coefficients. Owing to its fully variational nature, first-order properties are readily available. This feature allows the optimization of molecular structures in VQE without solving any additional equations. Furthermore, the method requires smaller active space and shallower quantum circuits than UCC to achieve the same accuracy. We present numerical examples of OO-UCC using quantum simulators, which include the geometry optimization of water and ammonia molecules using analytical first derivatives of the VQE.

The concept of self-testing (or rigidity) refers to the fact that for certain Bell inequalities the maximal violation can be achieved in an essentially unique manner. In this work we present a family of Bell inequalities which are maximally violated by multiple inequivalent quantum realizations. We completely characterize the quantum realizations achieving the maximal violation and we show that each of them requires a maximally entangled state of two qubits. This implies the existence of a new, weak form of self-testing in which the maximal violation allows us to identify the state, but does not fully determine the measurements. From the geometric point of view the set of probability points that saturate the quantum bound is a line segment. We then focus on a particular member of the family and show that the self-testing statement is robust, i.e., that observing a nonmaximal violation allows us to make a quantitative statement about the unknown state. To achieve this we present a new construction of extraction channels and analyze their performance. For completeness we provide two independent approaches: analytical and numerical. The noise robustness, i.e., the amount of white noise at which the bound becomes trivial, of the analytical bound is rather small ($\approx 0.06\%$), but the numerical method takes us into an experimentally relevant regime ($\approx 5\%$). We conclude by investigating the amount of randomness that can be certified using these Bell violations. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that the qualitative behavior resembles the behavior of rigid inequalities such as the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality. This shows that rigidity is not strictly necessary for device-independent applications.

The quench dynamics of many-body quantum systems may exhibit nonanalyticities in the Loschmidt echo, a phenomenon known as dynamical phase transition (DPT). Despite considerable research into the underlying mechanisms behind this phenomenon, several open questions still remain. Motivated by this, we put forth a detailed study of DPTs from the perspective of quantum phase space and entropy production, a key concept in thermodynamics. We focus on the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model and use spin-coherent states to construct the corresponding Husimi-$Q$ quasiprobability distribution. The entropy of the $Q$ function, known as Wehrl entropy, provides a measure of the coarse-grained dynamics of the system and, therefore, evolves nontrivially even for closed systems. We show that critical quenches lead to a quasimonotonic growth of the Wehrl entropy in time, combined with small oscillations. The former reflects the information scrambling characteristic of these transitions and serves as a measure of entropy production. On the other hand, the small oscillations imply negative entropy production rates and therefore signal the recurrences of the Loschmidt echo. Finally, we also study a Gaussification of the model based on a modified Holstein-Primakoff approximation. This allows us to identify the relative contribution of the low-energy sector to the emergence of DPTs. The results presented in this article are relevant not only from the dynamical quantum phase transition perspective but also for the field of quantum thermodynamics, since they point out that the Wehrl entropy can be used as a viable measure of entropy production.

Understanding of laser-material interactions is a scientific evergreen in the fundamental research of physics and optics. We report here that the ultrafast dynamics of the Cu(110) crystal surface is permanently captured by the formation of subwavelength periodic structures using two collinear femtosecond laser irradiations with different linear polarizations. Surprisingly, such periodic structures are found to have slantwise orientation that is anomalously change as a function of the time delay between two laser beams. In the case of the shorter time delays, the time-dependent slantwise orientations oscillated with terahertz frequency, depending on the pulse width and the intersection angle of two polarization directions, whereas it only presents monotonic change for the larger time delays. Analyses suggests that the former case is attributed to the surface plasmon excitation of the temporally delayed femtosecond laser irradiation on the transient state of the metal surface, which is consequently modulated by some nonthermal effects such as shock wave and bond hardening, while the latter situation is predominated by thermal relaxation of the material lattice. The simulation results agree with the experimental measurements. This investigation not only allows us to sensitively record the transient spatiotemporal evolution on superheated metal surfaces, but also provides insights for the control of material microprocessing.

For a zero-temperature Landau symmetry-breaking transition in $n$-dimensional space that completely breaks a finite symmetry $G$, the critical point at the transition has the symmetry $G$. In this paper, we show that the critical point also has a dual symmetry—a $(n-1)$-symmetry described by a higher group when $G$ is Abelian or an algebraic $(n-1)$-symmetry beyond a higher group when $G$ is non-Abelian. In fact, any $G$-symmetric system can be viewed as a boundary of $G$-gauge theory in one higher dimension. The conservation of gauge charge and gauge flux in the bulk $G$-gauge theory gives rise to the symmetry and the dual symmetry, respectively. So any $G$-symmetric system actually has a larger symmetry called categorical symmetry, which is a combination of the symmetry and the dual symmetry. However, part (and only part) of the categorical symmetry must be spontaneously broken in any gapped phase of the system, but there exists a gapless state where the categorical symmetry is not spontaneously broken. Such a gapless state corresponds to the usual critical point of Landau symmetry-breaking transition. The above results remain valid even if we expand the notion of symmetry to include higher symmetries and algebraic higher symmetries. Thus our result also applies to critical points for transitions between topological phases of matter. In particular, we show that there can be several critical points for the transition from the 3 + 1-dimensional $Z_2$ gauge theory to a trivial phase. The critical point from Higgs condensation has a categorical symmetry formed by a $Z_2$ 0-symmetry and its dual, a $Z_2$ 2-symmetry, while the critical point of the confinement transition has a categorical symmetry formed by a $Z_2$ 1-symmetry and its dual, another $Z_2$ 1-symmetry.