Spatial tailoring of the material constitutive properties is a well-known strategy to mold the local flow of given observables in different physical domains. Coordinate-transformation-based methods (e.g., transformation optics) offer a powerful and systematic approach to design anisotropic, spatially inhomogeneous artificial materials (metamaterials) capable of precisely manipulating wave-based (electromagnetic, acoustic, elastic) as well as diffusion-based (heat) phenomena in a desired fashion. However, as versatile as these approaches have been, most designs have thus far been limited to serving single-target functionalities in a given physical domain. Here, we present a step towards a “transformation multiphysics” framework that allows independent and simultaneous manipulation of multiple physical phenomena. As a proof of principle of this new scheme, we design and synthesize (in terms of realistic material constituents) a metamaterial shell that simultaneously behaves as a thermal concentrator and an electrical “invisibility cloak.” Our numerical results open up intriguing possibilities in the largely unexplored phase space of multifunctional metadevices, with a wide variety of potential applications to electrical, magnetic, acoustic, and thermal scenarios.

The problem of targeted network immunization can be defined as the one of finding a subset of nodes in a network to immunize or vaccinate in order to minimize a tradeoff between the cost of vaccination and the final (stationary) expected infection under a given epidemic model. Although computing the expected infection is a hard computational problem, simple and efficient mean-field approximations have been put forward in the literature in recent years. The optimization problem can be recast into a constrained one in which the constraints enforce local mean-field equations describing the average stationary state of the epidemic process. For a wide class of epidemic models, including the susceptible-infected-removed and the susceptible-infected-susceptible models, we define a message-passing approach to network immunization that allows us to study the statistical properties of epidemic outbreaks in the presence of immunized nodes as well as to find (nearly) optimal immunization sets for a given choice of parameters and costs. The algorithm scales linearly with the size of the graph, and it can be made efficient even on large networks. We compare its performance with topologically based heuristics, greedy methods, and simulated annealing on both random graphs and real-world networks.

The interaction of fluid membranes with a scaffold, which can be a planar surface or a more complex structure, is intrinsic to a number of systems from artificial supported bilayers and vesicles to cellular membranes. In principle, these interactions can be either discrete and protein mediated, or continuous. In the latter case, they emerge from ubiquitous intrinsic surface interaction potentials as well as nature-designed steric contributions of the fluctuating membrane or from the polymers of the glycocalyx. Despite the fact that these nonspecific potentials are omnipresent, their description has been a major challenge from experimental and theoretical points of view. Here, we show that a full understanding of the implications of the continuous interactions can be achieved only by expanding the standard superposition models commonly used to treat these types of systems, beyond the usual harmonic level of description. Supported by this expanded theoretical framework, we present three independent, yet mutually consistent, experimental approaches to measure the interaction potential strength and the membrane tension. Upon explicitly taking into account the nature of shot noise as well as the nature of finite experimental resolution, excellent agreement with the augmented theory is obtained, which finally provides a coherent view of the behavior of the membrane in the vicinity of a scaffold.

We demonstrate that wave-breaking dramatically affects the dynamics of nonlinear frequency conversion processes that operate in the regime of high efficiency (strong multiple four-wave mixing). In particular, by exploiting an all-optical-fiber platform, we show that input modulations propagating in standard telecom fibers in the regime of weak normal dispersion lead to the formation of undular bores (dispersive shock waves) that mimic the typical behavior of dispersive hydrodynamics exhibited, e.g., by gravity waves and tidal bores. Thanks to the nonpulsed nature of the beat signal employed in our experiment, we are able to clearly observe how the periodic nature of the input modulation forces adjacent undular bores to collide elastically.

We study the generation of 2D turbulence in Faraday waves by investigating the creation of spatially periodic vortices in this system. Measurements that couple a diffusing light imaging technique and particle tracking algorithms allow the simultaneous observation of the three-dimensional fluid motion and of the temporal changes in the wave-field topography. Quasistanding waves are found to coexist with a spatially extended fluid transport. More specifically, the destruction of regular patterns of oscillons coincides with the emergence of a complex fluid motion whose statistics are similar to that of two-dimensional turbulence. We reveal that a lattice of oscillons generates vorticity at the oscillon scale in the horizontal flow. The interaction of these vortices explains how 2D turbulence is fueled by almost standing waves. Remarkably, the curvature of Lagrangian trajectories reveals a “footprint” of the forcing-scale vortices in fully developed turbulence. Two-dimensional Navier-Stokes turbulence should be considered a source of disorder in Faraday waves. These findings also provide a new paradigm for vorticity creation in 2D flows.

The electronic circulator and its close relative the gyrator are invaluable tools for noise management and signal routing in the current generation of low-temperature microwave systems for the implementation of new quantum technologies. The current implementation of these devices using the Faraday effect is satisfactory but requires a bulky structure whose physical dimension is close to the microwave wavelength employed. The Hall effect is an alternative nonreciprocal effect that can also be used to produce desired device functionality. We review earlier efforts to use an Ohmically contacted four-terminal Hall bar, explaining why this approach leads to unacceptably high device loss. We find that capacitive coupling to such a Hall conductor has much greater promise for achieving good circulator and gyrator functionality. We formulate a classical Ohm-Hall analysis for calculating the properties of such a device, and show how this classical theory simplifies remarkably in the limiting case of the Hall angle approaching 90°. In this limit, we find that either a four-terminal or a three-terminal capacitive device can give excellent circulator behavior, with device dimensions far smaller than the ac wavelength. An experiment is proposed to achieve GHz-band gyration in millimeter (and smaller) scale structures employing either semiconductor heterostructure or graphene Hall conductors. An inductively coupled scheme for realizing a Hall gyrator is also analyzed.

The study of non-Abelian Majorana zero modes advances our understanding of the fundamental physics in quantum matter and pushes the potential applications of such exotic states to topological quantum computation. It has been shown that in two-dimensional (2D) and 1D chiral superconductors, the isolated Majorana fermions obey non-Abelian statistics. However, Majorana modes in a $Z_2$ time-reversal-invariant (TRI) topological superconductor come in pairs due to Kramers’s theorem. Therefore, braiding operations in TRI superconductors always exchange two pairs of Majoranas. In this work, we show interestingly that, due to the protection of time-reversal symmetry, non-Abelian statistics can be obtained in 1D TRI topological superconductors and may have advantages in applications to topological quantum computation. Furthermore, we unveil an intriguing phenomenon in the Josephson effect, that the periodicity of Josephson currents depends on the fermion parity of the superconducting state. This effect provides direct measurements of the topological qubit states in such 1D TRI superconductors.

Surface impedance is an important concept in classical wave systems such as photonic crystals (PCs). For example, the condition of an interface state formation in the interfacial region of two different one-dimensional PCs is simply$Z_{\mathrm{SL}}+Z_{\mathrm{SR}}=0$, where $Z_{\mathrm{SL}}(Z_{\mathrm{SR}})$is the surface impedance of the semi-infinite PC on the left-hand (right-hand) side of the interface. Here, we also show a rigorous relation between the surface impedance of a one-dimensional PC and its bulk properties through the geometrical (Zak) phases of the bulk bands, which can be used to determine the existence or nonexistence of interface states at the interface of the two PCs in a particular band gap. Our results hold for any PCs with inversion symmetry, independent of the frequency of the gap and the symmetry point where the gap lies in the Brillouin zone. Our results provide new insights into the relationship between surface scattering properties, the bulk band properties, and the formation of interface states, which in turn can enable the design of systems with interface states in a rational manner.

We use ideas from kinetic proofreading, an error-correcting mechanism in biology, to identify new kinetic regimes in nonequilibrium systems. These regimes are defined by the sensitivity of the occupancy of a state of the system to a change in its energy. In biological contexts, higher sensitivity corresponds to stronger discrimination between molecular substrates with different energetics competing in the same reaction. We study this discriminatory ability in systems with discrete states that are connected by a general network of transitions. We find multiple regimes of different discriminatory ability when the energy of a given state of the network is varied. Interestingly, the occupancy of the state can even increase with its energy, corresponding to an “antiproofreading” regime. The number and properties of such discriminatory regimes are limited by the topology of the network. Finally, we find that discriminatory regimes can be changed without modifying any “hard-wired” structural aspects of the system but rather by simply changing external chemical potentials.

We theoretically study spherical cavities composed of hyperbolic metamaterials with indefinite permittivity tensors. Such cavities are capable of electrodynamically confining fields with deep subwavelength cavity sizes. The supported resonant modes are analogous to the whispering-gallery modes found in dielectric microcavities with much larger physical sizes. Because of the nature of electrodynamical confinement, these hyperbolic metamaterial cavities exhibit quality factors higher than predicted in the electrostatic limit. In addition, confining electromagnetic fields into the small cavities results in an extremely high photonic local density of states.

Networks in the real world do not exist as isolated entities, but they are often part of more complicated structures composed of many interconnected network layers. Recent studies have shown that such mutual dependence makes real networked systems potentially exposed to atypical structural and dynamical behaviors, and thus there is an urgent necessity to better understand the mechanisms at the basis of these anomalies. Previous research has mainly focused on the emergence of atypical properties in relation to the moments of the intra- and interlayer degree distributions. In this paper, we show that an additional ingredient plays a fundamental role for the possible scenario that an interconnected network can face: the correlation between intra- and interlayer degrees. For sufficiently high amounts of correlation, an interconnected network can be tuned, by varying the moments of the intra- and interlayer degree distributions, in distinct topological and dynamical regimes. When instead the correlation between intra- and interlayer degrees is lower than a critical value, the system enters in a supercritical regime where dynamical and topological phases are no longer distinguishable.

A shortcut to adiabaticity is a driving protocol that reproduces in a short time the same final state that would result from an adiabatic, infinitely slow process. A powerful technique to engineer such shortcuts relies on the use of auxiliary counterdiabatic fields. Determining the explicit form of the required fields has generally proven to be complicated. We present explicit counterdiabatic driving protocols for scale-invariant dynamical processes, which describe, for instance, expansion and transport. To this end, we use the formalism of generating functions and unify previous approaches independently developed in classical and quantum studies. The resulting framework is applied to the design of shortcuts to adiabaticity for a large class of classical and quantum, single-particle, nonlinear, and many-body systems.

We study the nature of superfluid pairing in imbalanced Fermi mixtures in two spatial dimensions. We present evidence that the combined effect of Fermi surface mismatch and order parameter fluctuations of the superfluid condensate can lead to continuous quantum phase transitions from a normal Fermi mixture to an intermediate Sarma-Liu-Wilczek superfluid with two gapless Fermi surfaces—even when mean-field theory (incorrectly) predicts a first-order transition to a phase-separated “Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer plus excess fermions” ground state. We propose a mechanism for non-Fermi-liquid behavior from repeated scattering processes between the two Fermi surfaces and fluctuating Cooper pairs. Prospects for experimental observation with ultracold atoms are discussed.

A fundamental question in many-body physics is how closed quantum systems reach equilibrium. We address this question experimentally and theoretically in an ultracold large-spin Fermi gas where we find a complex interplay between internal and motional degrees of freedom. The fermions are initially prepared far from equilibrium with only a few spin states occupied. The subsequent dynamics leading to redistribution among all spin states is observed experimentally and simulated theoretically using a kinetic Boltzmann equation with full spin coherence. The latter is derived microscopically and provides good agreement with experimental data without any free parameters. We identify several collisional processes that occur on different time scales. By varying density and magnetic field, we control the relaxation dynamics and are able to continuously tune the character of a subset of spin states from an open to a closed system.

The universal critical behavior of the driven-dissipative nonequilibrium Bose-Einstein condensation transition is investigated employing the field-theoretical renormalization group method. Such criticality may be realized in broad ranges of driven open systems on the interface of quantum optics and many-body physics, from exciton-polariton condensates to cold atomic gases. The starting point is a noisy and dissipative Gross-Pitaevski equation corresponding to a complex-valued Landau-Ginzburg functional, which captures the near critical nonequilibrium dynamics, and generalizes model A for classical relaxational dynamics with nonconserved order parameter. We confirm and further develop the physical picture previously established by means of a functional renormalization group study of this system. Complementing this earlier numerical analysis, we analytically compute the static and dynamical critical exponents at the condensation transition to lowest nontrivial order in the dimensional $\epsilon$ expansion about the upper critical dimension $d_c=4$ and establish the emergence of a novel universal scaling exponent associated with the nonequilibrium drive. We also discuss the corresponding situation for a conserved order parameter field, i.e., (sub)diffusive model B with complex coefficients.

Stimulated emission in the terahertz frequency range has been realized from boron acceptor centers in silicon. Population inversion is achieved at resonant optical excitation on the $1{\mathrm{\Gamma }}_8^{+}\to 1{\mathrm{\Gamma }}_7^{-}$, $1{\mathrm{\Gamma }}_6^{-}$, $4{\mathrm{\Gamma }}_8^{-}$ intracenter transitions with a midinfrared free-electron laser. Lasing occurs on two intracenter transitions around 1.75 THz. The upper laser levels are the $1{\mathrm{\Gamma }}_7^{-}$, $1{\mathrm{\Gamma }}_6^{-}$, and $4{\mathrm{\Gamma }}_8^{-}$ states, and the lower laser level for both emission lines is the $2{\mathrm{\Gamma }}_8^{+}$ state. In contrast to $n$-type intracenter silicon lasers, boron-doped silicon lasers do not involve the excited states with the longest lifetimes. Instead, the absorption cross section for the pump radiation is the dominating factor. The four-level lasing scheme implies that the deepest even-parity boron state is the $2{\mathrm{\Gamma }}_8^{+}$ state and not the $1{\mathrm{\Gamma }}_7^{+}$ split-off ground state, as indicated by other experiments. This is confirmed by infrared absorption spectroscopy of Si:B.

Recently, a programmable quantum annealing machine has been built that minimizes the cost function of hard optimization problems by, in principle, adiabatically quenching quantum fluctuations. Tests performed by different research teams have shown that, indeed, the machine seems to exploit quantum effects. However, experiments on a class of random-bond instances have not yet demonstrated an advantage over classical optimization algorithms on traditional computer hardware. Here, we present evidence as to why this might be the case. These engineered quantum annealing machines effectively operate coupled to a decohering thermal bath. Therefore, we study the finite-temperature critical behavior of the standard benchmark problem used to assess the computational capabilities of these complex machines. We simulate both random-bond Ising models and spin glasses with bimodal and Gaussian disorder on the D-Wave Chimera topology. Our results show that while the worst-case complexity of finding a ground state of an Ising spin glass on the Chimera graph is not polynomial, the finite-temperature phase space is likely rather simple because spin glasses on Chimera have only a zero-temperature transition. This means that benchmarking optimization methods using spin glasses on the Chimera graph might not be the best benchmark problems to test quantum speedup. We propose alternative benchmarks by embedding potentially harder problems on the Chimera topology. Finally, we also study the (reentrant) disorder-temperature phase diagram of the random-bond Ising model on the Chimera graph and show that a finite-temperature ferromagnetic phase is stable up to 19.85(15)% antiferromagnetic bonds. Beyond this threshold, the system only displays a zero-temperature spin-glass phase. Our results therefore show that a careful design of the hardware architecture and benchmark problems is key when building quantum annealing machines.

We calculate the dynamical conductivity $\sigma (\omega )$ and the bosonic (pair) spectral function $P(\omega )$ from quantum Monte Carlo simulations across clean and disorder-driven superconductor-insulator transitions (SITs). We identify characteristic energy scales in the superconducting and insulating phases that vanish at the transition due to enhanced quantum fluctuations, despite the persistence of a robust fermionic gap across the SIT. Disorder leads to enhanced absorption in $\sigma (\omega )$ at low frequencies compared to the SIT in a clean system. Disorder also expands the quantum critical region, due to a change in the universality class, with an underlying $T=0$ critical point with a universal low-frequency conductivity ${\sigma }^{*}\simeq 0.5(4e^2/h)$.

We report a metrological-grade THz spectroscopy based on the combination of a THz frequency-comb synthesizer (FCS) and a THz quantum cascade laser (QCL). The QCL, emitting at 2.5 THz, is phase locked to the free-space THz FCS, and its frequency is swept across a methanol transition by tuning the comb-repetition rate, which is ultimately disciplined by the Cs primary frequency standard. The absolute frequency scale provides an uncertainty of a few parts in ${10}^{-11}$ on the laser frequency and ${10}^{-9}$ on the line-center determination, ranking this technique among the most precise ever developed in the THz range.

We experimentally investigate the dependence of the fragmentation behavior of the ethylene dication on the intensity and duration of the laser pulses that initiate the fragmentation dynamics by strong-field double ionization. Using coincidence momentum imaging for the detection of ionic fragments, we disentangle the different contributions of ionization from lower-valence orbitals and field-driven excitation dynamics to the population of certain dissociative excited ionic states that are connected to one of several possible fragmentation pathways towards a given set of fragment ions. We find that the excitation probability to a particular excited state and therewith the outcome of the fragmentation reaction strongly depend on the parameters of the laser pulse. This, in turn, opens up new possibilities for controlling the outcome of fragmentation reactions of polyatomic molecules in that it may allow one to selectively enhance or suppress individual fragmentation channels, which was not possible in previous attempts of controlling fragmentation processes of polyatomic molecules with strong laser fields.