Within the Gross-Pitaevskii theory, we study precursory pattern formations to the nucleation of vortex dipoles in a two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate stirred by a Gaussian potential. We introduce a smooth superfluid vorticity field and its conservative current, which capture very well the gradual process of vortex nucleation as a mechanism of topological singularities acquiring smooth cores. This is characterized by the localization of the superfluid vorticity into core regions which harbor the phase slips. For more impenetrable obstacles, we find that there are additional phase slips that do not acquire cores, thus remaining pinned as ghost vortices to the potential. We show that the vortex kinematics is slaved to the superfluid vorticity current, which determines not only the onset of nucleation but also the shedding dynamics.

Localization of electronic wave functions in modern two-dimensional (2D) materials such as graphene can impact drastically their transport and magnetic properties. The recent localization landscape (LL) theory has brought many tools and theoretical results to understand such localization phenomena in the continuous setting, but with very few extensions so far to the discrete realm or to tight-binding Hamiltonians. In this paper, we show how this approach can be extended to almost all known 2D lattices and propose a systematic way of designing LL even for higher dimensions. We demonstrate in detail how this LL theory works and predicts accurately not only the locations, but also the energies of localized eigenfunctions in the low- and high-energy regimes for the honeycomb and hexagonal lattices, making it a highly promising tool for investigating the role of disorder in these materials.

We explore the quasi-one-dimensional (thin torus, or TT) limit of fractional Chern insulators (FCIs) as a starting point for their adiabatic preparation in quantum simulators. Our approach is based on tuning the hopping amplitude in one direction as an experimentally amenable knob to dynamically change the effective aspect ratio of the system. Similar to the TT limit of fractional quantum Hall systems in the continuum, we find that the hopping-induced TT limit adiabatically connects the FCI state to a trivial charge density wave (CDW) ground state. This adiabatic path may be harnessed for state preparation schemes relying on the initialization of a CDW state followed by the adiabatic decrease of a hopping anisotropy. Our findings are based on the calculation of the excitation gap in a number of FCI models, both on a lattice and consisting of coupled wires. By analytical calculation of the gap in the limit of strongly anisotropic hopping, we show that its scaling is compatible with the preparation of large-size FCIs for sufficiently large hopping anisotropy, where the amenable system sizes are only limited by the maximal hopping amplitude. Our numerical simulations in the framework of exact diagonalization explore the full anisotropy range to corroborate these results.

We present an exact analytic expression for the Hong-Ou-Mandel manifold (HOMM) for any number of identical microring resonators (MRRs) in a linear chain. The HOMM is the higher-dimensional manifold of solutions for which the HOM effect is obtained; for the types of MRR systems investigated in this work, it is a one-dimensional curve. We investigate the extreme stability of this HOMM, showing that the HOM effect in linear arrays of MRRs is highly robust. We further use this expression to derive three figures of merit for the HOMM of linear chains of MRRs: the minimum MRR coupling value ${\tau }_c$, the curvature of the one-dimensional HOMM ${\overline{\xi }}_N$, and the 5% tolerance in the probability for complete destructive interference to occur on the HOMM $\delta {\tau }_N$. We promote these metrics to characterize the pros and cons of various linear chains of MRRs and inform design and fabrication.

Topological properties of quantum systems are among the most intriguing emerging phenomena in condensed matter physics. A crucial property of topological systems is the symmetry-protected robustness towards local noise. Experiments have demonstrated topological phases of matter in various quantum systems. However, using the robustness of such modes to stabilize quantum correlations is still a highly sought-after milestone. In this work, we put forward a concept of using topological modes to stabilize fully entangled quantum states, and we demonstrate the stability of the entanglement with respect to parameter fluctuations. Specifically, we see that entanglement remains stable against parameter fluctuations in the topologically nontrivial regime, while entanglement in the trivial regime is highly susceptible to local noise. We supplement our scheme with an experimentally realistic and detailed proposal based on coupled superconducting resonators and qubits. Our proposal sets an approach for generating long-lived quantum modes with robustness towards disorder in the circuit parameters via a bottom-up experimental approach relying on easy-to-engineer building blocks.

Quantum simulation of lattice gauge theories has been proposed and used as a method to overcome theoretical difficulties in dealing with the nonperturbative nature of such models. In this work we focus on two important bottlenecks that make developing such simulators hard: one is the difficulty of simulating fermionic degrees of freedom, and the other is the redundancy of the Hilbert space, which leads to a waste of experimental resources and the need to impose and monitor the local symmetry constraints of gauge theories. This has previously been tackled in one-dimensional settings, using nonlocal methods. Here we show an alternative procedure for dealing with these problems, which removes the matter and the Hilbert space redundancy, and is valid for higher space dimensions. We demonstrate it for a ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$ lattice gauge theory and implement it experimentally via the IBMQ cloud quantum computing platform.

Parafermions are ${\mathbb{Z}}_n$ generalizations of Majorana quasiparticles, with fractional non-Abelian statistics. They can be used to encode topological qudits and perform Clifford operations by their braiding. Here we investigate the generation of quantum gates by allowing ${\mathbb{Z}}_3$ parafermions to interact in order to achieve universality. In particular, we study the form of the nontopological gate that arises through direct short-range interaction of the parafermion edge modes in a ${\mathbb{Z}}_3$ parafermion chain. We show that such an interaction gives rise to a dynamical phase gate on the encoded ground space, generating a non-Clifford gate which can be tuned to belong to even levels of the Clifford hierarchy. We illustrate how to access highly noncontextual states using this dynamical gate. Finally, we propose an experiment that simulates the braiding and dynamical evolutions of the ${\mathbb{Z}}_3$ topological states with Rydberg atom technology.

Electron-electron interactions in graphene are sufficiently strong to induce a correlated and momentum-conserving flow such that charge carriers behave similarly to the Hagen-Poiseuille flow of a classical fluid. In the current work, we investigate the electronic signatures of such a viscous charge flow in high-mobility graphene field effect transistors (FETs). In two complementary measurement schemes, we monitor differential resistance of graphene for different channel widths and for different effective electron temperatures. By combining both approaches, the presence of viscous effects is verified in a temperature range starting from 178 K and extending up to room temperature. Our experimental findings are supported by finite element calculations of the graphene channel, which also provide design guidelines for device geometries that exhibit increased viscous effects. The presence of viscous effects near room temperature opens up avenues for functional hydrodynamic devices such as geometric rectifiers like a Tesla valve and charge amplifiers based on the electronic Venturi effect.

Nonradiative recombination leads to losses in efficiency in optoelectronic devices such as photovoltaic cells and light-emitting diodes. Charges trapped at point defects or self-trapped as a small polaron may act as recombination centers. Using various phases of titanium dioxide as an example, we provide first-principles predictions that small hole polarons in the bulk of the crystal would exhibit significant rates of recombination with electrons in the conduction band. However, small hole polarons trapped at a model grain boundary are predicted to have much higher nonradiative recombination rates, which can be attributed to softer phonon modes in the vicinity of the boundary as well as greater electron-phonon coupling. These findings have ramifications in materials other than titanium dioxide, and we propose strategies to reduce the degree of recombination that would occur at grain boundaries.

Cooperative emission of coherent radiation from multiple emitters (known as superradiance) has been predicted and observed in various physical systems, most recently in ${\mathrm{CsPbBr}}_3$ nanocrystal superlattices. Superradiant emission is coherent and occurs on timescales faster than the emission from isolated nanocrystals. Theory predicts cooperative emission being faster by a factor of up to the number of nanocrystals ($N$). However, superradiance is strongly suppressed due to the presence of energetic disorder, stemming from nanocrystal size variations and thermal decoherence. Here, we analyze superradiance from superlattices of different dimensionalities (one-, two-, and three-dimensional) with variable nanocrystal aspect ratios. We predict as much as a 15-fold enhancement in robustness against realistic values of energetic disorder in three-dimensional (3D) superlattices composed of cuboid-shaped, as opposed to cube-shaped, nanocrystals. Superradiance from small $(N\lesssim {10}^3)$ two-dimensional (2D) superlattices is up to ten times more robust to static disorder and up to twice as robust to thermal decoherence than 3D superlattices with the same $N$. As the number of $N$ increases, a crossover in the robustness of superradiance occurs from 2D to 3D superlattices. For large $N(>{10}^3)$, the robustness in 3D superlattices increases with $N$, showing cooperative robustness to disorder. This opens the possibility of observing superradiance even at room temperature in large 3D superlattices, if nanocrystal size fluctuations can be kept small.

We present a classification of bilinear Majorana representations for spin-$S$ operators, based on the real irreducible matrix representations of SU(2). We identify two types of such representations: While the first type can be straightforwardly mapped onto standard complex fermionic representations of spin-$S$ operators, the second type realizes spin amplitudes $S=s(s+1)/4$ with $s\in \mathbb{N}$ and can be considered particularly efficient in representing spins via fermions. We show that for $s=1$ and $s=2$ this second type reproduces known spin-$1/2$ and spin-$3/2$ Majorana representations and we prove that these are the only bilinear Majorana representations that do not introduce any unphysical spin sectors. While for $s>2$, additional unphysical spin spaces are unavoidable they are less numerous than for more standard complex fermionic representations and carry comparatively small spin amplitudes. We apply our Majorana representations to exactly solvable small spin clusters and confirm that their low-energy properties remain unaffected by unphysical spin sectors, making our representations useful for auxiliary-particle based methods.

Ultracold atoms loaded into higher Bloch bands provide an elegant setting for realizing many-body quantum states that spontaneously break time-reversal symmetry through the formation of chiral orbital order. The applicability of this strategy remains nonetheless limited due to the finite lifetime of atoms in high-energy bands. Here we introduce an alternative framework, suitable for bosonic gases, which builds on assembling square plaquettes pierced by a $\pi$ flux (half a magnetic-flux quantum). This setting is shown to be formally equivalent to an interacting bosonic gas loaded into $p$ orbitals, and we explore the consequences of the resulting chiral orbital order, both for weak and strong on-site interactions. We demonstrate the emergence of a chiral superfluid vortex lattice, exhibiting a long-lived gapped collective mode that is characterized by local chiral currents. This chiral superfluid phase is shown to undergo a phase transition to a chiral Mott insulator for sufficiently strong interactions. Our work establishes coupled $\pi$-flux plaquettes as a practical route for the emergence of orbital order and chiral phases of matter.

We investigate the spectrum of spin conductivity for a miscible two-component Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) that exhibits spin superfluidity. By using the Bogoliubov theory, the regular part being the spin conductivity at finite ac frequency and the spin Drude weight characterizing the $\delta$-function peak at zero frequency are analytically computed. We demonstrate that the spectrum exhibits a power-law behavior at low frequency, reflecting gapless density and spin modes specific to the binary BEC. At the phase transition points into immiscible and quantum-droplet states, the change in quasiparticle dispersion relations modifies the power law. In addition, the spin Drude weight becomes finite, indicating zero spin resistivity due to spin superfluidity. Our results also suggest that the Andreev-Bashkin drag density is accessible by measuring the spin conductivity spectrum.