The discovery of massless Dirac electrons in graphene and topological Dirac-Weyl materials has prompted a broad search for bosonic analogues of such Dirac particles. Recent experiments have found evidence for Dirac magnons above an Ising-like ferromagnetic ground state in a two-dimensional (2D) kagome lattice magnet and in the van der Waals layered honeycomb crystal ${\mathrm{CrI}}_3$, and in a 3D Heisenberg magnet ${\mathrm{Cu}}_3{\mathrm{TeO}}_6$. Here, we report our inelastic neutron scattering investigation on a large single crystal of a stacked honeycomb lattice magnet ${\mathrm{CoTiO}}_3$, which is part of a broad family of ilmenite materials. The magnetically ordered ground state of ${\mathrm{CoTiO}}_3$ features ferromagnetic layers of ${\mathrm{Co}}^{2+}$, stacked antiferromagnetically along the $c$ axis. The magnon dispersion relation is described very well with a simple magnetic Hamiltonian with strong easy-plane exchange anisotropy. Importantly, a magnon Dirac cone is found along the edge of the 3D Brillouin zone. Our results establish ${\mathrm{CoTiO}}_3$ as a model pseudospin-$1/2$ material to study interacting Dirac bosons in a 3D quantum $\mathit{XY}$ magnet.

The coherence of electron spin qubits in semiconductor quantum dots suffers mostly from low-frequency noise. During the past decade, efforts have been devoted to mitigate such noise by material engineering, leading to substantial enhancement of the spin dephasing time for an idling qubit. However, the role of the environmental noise during spin manipulation, which determines the control fidelity, is less understood. We demonstrate an electron spin qubit whose coherence in the driven evolution is limited by high-frequency charge noise rather than the quasistatic noise inherent to any semiconductor device. We employ a feedback-control technique to actively suppress the latter, demonstrating a $\pi$-flip gate fidelity as high as $99.04\pm 0.23\%$ in a gallium arsenide quantum dot. We show that the driven-evolution coherence is limited by the longitudinal noise at the Rabi frequency, whose spectrum resembles the $1/f$ noise observed in isotopically purified silicon qubits.

Intense laser pulses have recently emerged as a tool to tune between different orders in complex quantum materials. Among different light-induced phenomena, transient superconductivity far above the equilibrium transition temperature in cuprates is particularly attractive. Key to those experiments was the resonant pumping of specific phonon modes, which was believed to induce superconducting phase coherence by suppressing the competing orders or modifying the structure slightly. Here, we present a comprehensive study of photoinduced nonequilibrium response in underdoped ${\mathrm{YBa}}_2{\mathrm{Cu}}_3{\mathrm{O}}_{6+x}$. We find that upon photoexcitations, the Josephson plasma edge in the superconducting state is initially removed accompanied by quasiparticle excitations, and subsequently reappears at a frequency lower than the static plasma edge within a short time. In the normal state, an enhancement or weaker edgelike shape is indeed induced by pump pulses in the reflectance spectrum accompanied by simultaneous rises in both real and imaginary parts of conductivity. We compare the pump-induced effects between near- and midinfrared excitations and exclude phonon pumping as a scenario for the photoinduced effects above. We further elaborate that the transient responses in the normal state are unlikely to be explained by photoinduced superconductivity.

Optical excitation in the cuprates has been shown to induce transient superconducting correlations above the thermodynamic transition temperature $T_C$, as evidenced by the terahertz-frequency optical properties in the nonequilibrium state. In ${\mathrm{YBa}}_2{\mathrm{Cu}}_3{\mathrm{O}}_{6+x}$, this phenomenon has so far been associated with the nonlinear excitation of certain lattice modes and the creation of new crystal structures. In other compounds, like ${\mathrm{La}}_{2-x}{\mathrm{Ba}}_x{\mathrm{CuO}}_4$, similar effects were reported also for excitation at near-infrared frequencies, and were interpreted as a signature of the melting of competing orders. However, to date, it has not been possible to systematically tune the pump frequency widely in any one compound, to comprehensively compare the frequency-dependent photosusceptibility for this phenomenon. Here, we make use of a newly developed nonlinear optical device, which generates widely tunable high-intensity femtosecond pulses, to excite ${\mathrm{YBa}}_2{\mathrm{Cu}}_3{\mathrm{O}}_{6.5}$ throughout the entire optical spectrum (3–750 THz). In the far-infrared region (3–24 THz), signatures of nonequilibrium superconductivity are induced only for excitation of the 16.4- and 19.2-THz vibrational modes that drive $c$-axis apical oxygen atomic positions. For higher driving frequencies (25–750 THz), a second resonance is observed around the charge transfer band edge at approximately 350 THz. These findings highlight the importance of coupling to the electronic structure of the ${\mathrm{CuO}}_2$ planes, mediated either by a phonon or by charge transfer.

Thin films promise new opportunities for the manipulation of surface states of topological semimetals with the potential to realize new states that cannot be obtained in bulk materials. Here, we report transport studies of gated Hall bar structures fabricated from approximately 50-nm-thick, (001)-oriented epitaxial films of cadmium arsenide, a prototype three-dimensional Dirac semimetal, in magnetic fields up to 45 T. The films exhibit a quantized Hall effect with pronounced odd-integer plateaus that is strikingly different from that of the more widely studied (112)-oriented films. We show that the unusual quantum Hall effect is a consequence of the inverted bulk band structure of cadmium arsenide that creates topological-insulator-like states at the bottom and top interfaces, each exhibiting a half-integer quantum Hall effect. A small potential offset between the two surfaces results in the crossing of the Landau levels and gives rise to the filling factor sequences observed in the experiments. Moreover, at large negative values of gate bias, the filling factor $\nu =1$ is abruptly preempted by an insulating state that is accompanied by the collapse of the well-developed quantum Hall effect. We suggest that this new phase cannot be explained within a single-particle picture and discuss the role of Coulomb interactions between spatially separated surface states.

We show that the combination of charge and dipole conservation—characteristic of fracton systems—leads to an extensive fragmentation of the Hilbert space, which, in turn, can lead to a breakdown of thermalization. As a concrete example, we investigate the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of one-dimensional spin-1 models that conserve charge (total $S^z$) and its associated dipole moment. First, we consider a minimal model including only three-site terms and find that the infinite temperature autocorrelation saturates to a finite value—showcasing nonthermal behavior. The absence of thermalization is identified as a consequence of the strong fragmentation of the Hilbert space into exponentially many invariant subspaces in the local $S^z$ basis, arising from the interplay of dipole conservation and local interactions. Second, we extend the model by including four-site terms and find that this perturbation leads to a weak fragmentation: The system still has exponentially many invariant subspaces, but they are no longer sufficient to avoid thermalization for typical initial states. More generally, for any finite range of interactions, the system still exhibits nonthermal eigenstates appearing throughout the entire spectrum. We compare our results to charge and dipole moment-conserving random unitary circuit models for which we reach identical conclusions.

Using quantum gas microscopy, we study the late-time effective hydrodynamics of an isolated cold-atom Fermi-Hubbard system subject to an external linear potential (a “tilt”). The tilt is along one of the principal directions of the two-dimensional square lattice and couples mass transport to local heating through energy conservation. Because of this coupling, the system quickly heats up to near infinite temperature in the lowest band of the lattice. We study the high-temperature transport and thermalization in our system by observing the decay of prepared initial density waves as a function of wavelength $\lambda$ and tilt strength and find that the associated decay time $\tau$ crosses over as the tilt strength is increased from characteristically diffusive to subdiffusive with $\tau \propto {\lambda }^4$. In order to explain the underlying physics and emphasize its universal nature, we develop a hydrodynamic model that exhibits this crossover. For strong tilts, the subdiffusive transport rate is set by a thermal diffusivity, which we are thus able to measure as a function of tilt in this regime. We further support our understanding by probing the local inverse temperature of the system at strong tilts, finding good agreement with our theoretical predictions. Finally, we discuss the relation of the strongly tilted limit of our system to recently studied 1D models that may exhibit nonergodic dynamics.

It is widely assumed that photons cannot be manipulated using electric or magnetic fields. Even though hybridization of photons with electronic polarization to form exciton-polaritons has paved the way to a number of groundbreaking experiments in semiconductor microcavities, the neutral bosonic nature of these quasiparticles has severely limited their response to external gauge fields. Here, we demonstrate polariton acceleration by external electric and magnetic fields in the presence of nonperturbative coupling between polaritons and itinerant electrons, leading to formation of new quasiparticles termed polaron-polaritons. We identify the generation of electron density gradients by the applied fields to be primarily responsible for inducing a gradient in polariton energy, which in turn leads to acceleration along a direction determined by the applied fields. Remarkably, we also observe that different polarization components of the polaritons can be accelerated in opposite directions when the electrons are in $\nu =1$ integer quantum Hall state.

We report a comprehensive muon spin rotation ($\mu \mathrm{SR}$) study of the prototypical magnetoelectric antiferromagnet ${\mathrm{Cr}}_2{\mathrm{O}}_3$. We find the positively charged muon (${\mu }^{+}$) occupies several distinct interstitial sites and displays a rich dynamic behavior involving local hopping, thermally activated site transitions, and the formation of a charge-neutral complex composed of a muon and an electron polaron. The discovery of such a complex has implications for the interpretation of $\mu \mathrm{SR}$ spectra in a wide range of magnetic oxides and opens a route to study the dopant characteristics of interstitial hydrogen impurities in such materials. We address implications arising from implanting a ${\mu }^{+}$ into a linear magnetoelectric and discuss the challenges of observing a local magnetoelectric effect generated by the charge of the muon.

At ambient pressure and zero field, tetragonal ${\mathrm{CeAuSb}}_2$ hosts stripe antiferromagnetic order at $T_N=6.3\mathrm{K}$. Here, we first show via bulk thermodynamic probes and x-ray diffraction measurements that this magnetic order is connected with a structural phase transition to a superstructure that likely breaks $C_4$ symmetry, thus signaling nematic order. The temperature-field-pressure phase diagram of ${\mathrm{CeAuSb}}_2$ subsequently reveals the emergence of additional ordered states under applied pressure at a multicritical point. Our phenomenological model supports the presence of a vestigial nematic phase in ${\mathrm{CeAuSb}}_2$ akin to iron-based high-temperature superconductors; however, superconductivity, if present, remains to be discovered.

The importance of the spin-orbit coupling (SOC) effect in Fe-based superconductors (FeSCs) has recently been under hot debate. Considering the Hund’s coupling-induced electronic correlation, the understanding of the role of SOC in FeSCs is not trivial and is still elusive. Here, through a comprehensive study of ${}^{77}\mathrm{Se}$ and ${}^{57}\mathrm{Fe}$ nuclear magnetic resonance, a nontrivial SOC effect is revealed in the nematic state of FeSe. First, the orbital-dependent spin susceptibility, determined by the anisotropy of the ${}^{57}\mathrm{Fe}$ Knight shift, indicates a predominant role from the $3d_{xy}$ orbital, which suggests the coexistence of local and itinerant spin degrees of freedom in the FeSe. Then, we reconfirm that the orbital reconstruction below the nematic transition temperature ($T_{\text{nem}}\sim 90\mathrm{K}$) happens not only on the $3d_{xz}$ and $3d_{yz}$ orbitals but also on the $3d_{xy}$ orbital, which is beyond a trivial ferro-orbital order picture. Moreover, our results also indicate the development of a coherent coupling between the local and itinerant spin degrees of freedom below $T_{\mathrm{nem}}$, which is ascribed to a Hund’s coupling-induced electronic crossover on the $3d_{xy}$ orbital. Finally, because of a nontrivial SOC effect, sizable in-plane anisotropy of the spin susceptibility emerges in the nematic state, suggesting a spin-orbital-intertwined nematicity rather than a simple spin- or orbital-driven nematicity. The present work not only reveals a nontrivial SOC effect in the nematic state but also sheds light on the mechanism of nematic transition in FeSe.

The interplay of symmetry and topology has been at the forefront of recent progress in quantum matter. Here, we uncover an unexpected connection between band topology and the description of competing orders in a quantum magnet. Specifically, we show that aspects of band topology protected by crystalline symmetries determine key properties of the Dirac spin liquid (DSL), which can be defined on the honeycomb, square, triangular, and kagome lattices. At low energies, the DSL on all of these lattices is described by an emergent quantum electrodynamics (${\mathrm{QED}}_3$) with $N_f=4$ flavors of Dirac fermions coupled to a $U(1)$ gauge field. However, the symmetry properties of the magnetic monopoles, an important class of critical degrees of freedom, behave very differently on different lattices. In particular, we show that the lattice momentum and angular momentum of monopoles can be determined from the charge (or Wannier) centers of the corresponding spinon insulator. We also show that for DSLs on bipartite lattices, there always exists a monopole that transforms trivially under all microscopic symmetries owing to the existence of a parent $SU(2)$ gauge theory. We connect our results to generalized Lieb-Schultz-Mattis theorems and also derive the time-reversal and reflection properties of monopoles. Our results indicate that recent insights into free-fermion band topology can also guide the description of strongly correlated quantum matter.

Periodically driven quantum systems are currently explored in view of realizing novel many-body phases of matter. This approach is particularly promising in gases of ultracold atoms, where sophisticated shaking protocols can be realized and interparticle interactions are well controlled. The combination of interactions and time-periodic driving, however, often leads to uncontrollable heating and instabilities, potentially preventing practical applications of Floquet engineering in large many-body quantum systems. In this work, we experimentally identify the existence of parametric instabilities in weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensates in strongly driven optical lattices through momentum-resolved measurements, in line with theoretical predictions. Parametric instabilities can trigger the destruction of weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensates through the rapid growth of collective excitations, in particular in systems with weak harmonic confinement transverse to the lattice axis. Understanding the onset of parametric instabilities in driven quantum matter is crucial for determining optimal conditions for the engineering of modulation-induced many-body systems.

We study the electronic structure of the nodal line semimetal ZrSiTe both experimentally and theoretically. We find two different surface states in ZrSiTe—topological drumhead surface states and trivial floating band surface states, which can be easily distinguished in ARPES experiments. Using the spectra of Wilson loops, we show that a nontrivial Berry phase that exists in a confined region within the Brillouin zone gives rise to the topological drumhead-type surface states. The ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$ structure of the Berry phase induces a ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$ “modular arithmetic” of the surface states, allowing surface states derived from different nodal lines to hybridize and gap out, which can be probed by a set of Wilson loops. Our findings are confirmed by ab initio calculations and angle-resolved photoemission experiments, which are in excellent agreement with each other and the topological analysis. This work is the first complete characterization of topological surface states in the family of square-net-based nodal line semimetals, and thus it fundamentally increases the understanding of the topological nature of this growing class of topological semimetals.

The recent observation of superconductivity in hole-doped ${\mathrm{NdNiO}}_2$ has generated considerable attention. The similarities and differences between this infinite-layer nickelates and cuprates are still an open question. To address this issue we derive, via-principles calculations, essential facts related to the electronic structure and magnetism of $R{\mathrm{NiO}}_2$ ($R=\mathrm{La}$, Nd) in comparison to their cuprate analog ${\mathrm{CaCuO}}_2$. From this detailed comparison, we find that $R{\mathrm{NiO}}_2$ are promising as cuprate analogs. Besides the much larger $d-p$ energy splitting, and the presence of $R$ $5d$ states near the Fermi energy in the parent compound, all other electronic-structure parameters seem to be favorable in the context of superconductivity as inferred from the cuprates. In particular, the large value of the longer-range hopping $t^{\prime }$ and the $e_g$ energy splitting are similar to those obtained in cuprates. Doping further acts to increase the cupratelike character of these nickelates by suppressing the self-doping effect of the $R$ $5d$ bands.

In this work we introduce two code families, which we call the heavy-hexagon code and the heavy-square code. Both code families are implemented by assigning physical data and ancilla qubits to both vertices and edges of low-degree graphs. Such a layout is particularly suitable for superconducting qubit architectures to minimize frequency collisions and cross talk. In some cases, frequency collisions can be reduced by several orders of magnitude. The heavy-hexagon code is a hybrid surface and Bacon-Shor code mapped onto a (heavy-) hexagonal lattice, whereas the heavy-square code is the surface code mapped onto a (heavy-) square lattice. In both cases, the lattice includes all the ancilla qubits required for fault-tolerant error correction. Naively, the limited qubit connectivity might be thought to limit the error-correcting capability of the code to less than its full distance. Therefore, essential to our construction is the use of flag qubits. We modify minimum-weight perfect-matching decoding to efficiently and scalably incorporate information from measurements of the flag qubits and correct up to the full code distance while respecting the limited connectivity. Simulations show that high threshold values for both codes can be obtained using our decoding protocol. Further, our decoding scheme can be adapted to other topological code families.

Heat conduction in dielectric crystals originates from the dynamics of atomic vibrations, whose evolution is well described by the linearized Boltzmann transport equation for the phonon populations. Recently, it was shown that thermal conductivity can be resolved exactly and in a closed form as a sum over relaxons, i.e., collective phonon excitations that are the eigenvectors of Boltzmann equation’s scattering matrix [A. Cepellotti and N. Marzari, Phys. Rev. X 6, 041013 (2016)]. Relaxons have a well-defined parity, and only odd relaxons contribute to the thermal conductivity. Here, we show that the complementary set of even relaxons determines another quantity—the thermal viscosity—that enters into the description of heat transport, and is especially relevant in the hydrodynamic regime, where dissipation of crystal momentum by umklapp scattering phases out. We also show how the thermal conductivity and viscosity parametrize two novel viscous heat equations—two coupled equations for the temperature and drift-velocity fields—which represent the thermal counterpart of the Navier-Stokes equations of hydrodynamics in the linear, laminar regime. These viscous heat equations are derived from a coarse graining of the linearized Boltzmann transport equation for phonons, and encompass both the limit of Fourier’s law and that of second sound, taking place, respectively, in the regime of strong or weak momentum dissipation. Last, we introduce the Fourier deviation number as a descriptor that captures the deviations from Fourier’s law due to hydrodynamic effects. We showcase these findings in a test case of a complex-shaped device made of graphite, obtaining a remarkable agreement with the recent experimental demonstration of hydrodynamic transport in this material, and also suggesting that hydrodynamic behavior can appear at room temperature in micrometer-sized diamond crystals. The present formulation rigorously generalizes Fourier’s heat equation, extending the reach of physical and computational models for heat conduction also to the hydrodynamic regime.

We address the long-standing problem of the structure of the low-energy eigenstates and long-time coherent dynamics in quantum spin-glass models. Below the spin-glass freezing transition, the energy landscape of the spin system is characterized by a proliferation of local minima where classical dynamics gets trapped. A theoretical description of quantum dynamics in this regime is challenging due to the complex nature of the distribution of the tunneling matrix elements between the local minima of the energy landscape. We study the transverse-field-induced quantum dynamics of the following “impurity band” (IB) spin model: zero energy of all spin configurations except for a small fraction of spin configurations (“marked states”) that form a narrow band at a large negative energy. At a zero transverse field, the IB model demonstrates the freezing transition at inverse temperature ${\beta }_f\sim 1$ characterized by a nonzero value of the Edwards-Anderson order parameter. At a finite transverse field, the low-energy dynamics can be described by the effective down-folded Hamiltonian that acts in the Hilbert subspace involving only the marked states. We obtain in an explicit form the heavy-tailed probability distribution of the off-diagonal matrix elements of the down-folded Hamiltonian. This Hamiltonian is dense and belongs to the class of preferred basis Levy matrices. Analytically solving nonlinear cavity equations for the ensemble of down-folded Hamiltonians allows us to describe the statistical properties of the eigenstates. In a broad interval of transverse fields, they are nonergodic, albeit extended. It means that the band of marked states splits into a set of narrow minibands. Accordingly, the quantum evolution that starts from a particular marked state leads to a linear combination of the states belonging to a particular miniband. An analytical description of this qualitatively new type of quantum dynamics is a key result of our paper. Based on our analysis, we propose the population transfer (PT) algorithm: The quantum evolution under constant transverse field $B_{\perp }$ starts at a low-energy spin configuration and ends up in a superposition of $\mathrm{\Omega }$ spin configurations inside a narrow energy window. This algorithm crucially relies on the nonergodic nature of delocalized low-energy eigenstates. In the considered model, the run-time of the best classical algorithm (exhaustive search) is $t_{\mathrm{cl}}=2^n/\mathrm{\Omega }$. For $\sqrt{n}\gg B_{\perp }\gg 1$, the typical run-time of the quantum PT algorithm $\sqrt{t_{\mathrm{cl}}}{e}^{n/(2B_{\perp }^2)}$ scales with $n$ and $\mathrm{\Omega }$ as that of Grover’s quantum search, except for the small correction to the exponent. Unlike the Hamiltonians proposed for analog quantum unstructured search algorithms, the model we consider is nonintegrable and the transverse field delocalizes the marked states. As a result, our PT protocol does not require fine-tuning of the transverse field and may be initialized in a computational basis state. We find that the run-times of the PT algorithm are distributed according to the alpha-stable Levy law with tail index 1. We argue that our approach can be applied to study the PT protocol in other transverse-field spin-glass models, with a potential quantum advantage over classical algorithms.

Here, we report the investigation of the anomalous Hall effect in the magnetically doped topological insulator $(\mathrm{V},\mathrm{Bi},\mathrm{Sb}{)}_2{\mathrm{Te}}_3$. We find it contains two contributions of opposite sign. Both components are found to depend differently on carrier density, leading to a sign inversion of the total anomalous Hall effect as a function of applied gate voltage. The two contributions are found to have different magnetization reversal fields, which in combination with a temperature dependent study points towards the coexistence of two ferromagnetic orders in the system. Moreover, we find that the sign of total anomalous Hall response of the system depends on the thickness and magnetic doping density of the magnetic layer. The thickness dependence suggests that the two ferromagnetic components originate from the surface and bulk of the magnetic topological insulator film. We believe that our observations provide insight into the magnetic behavior, and thus will contribute to an eventual understanding of the origin of magnetism in this material class. In addition, our data bear a striking resemblance to anomalous Hall signals often associated with skyrmion contributions. Our analysis provides a straightforward explanation for both the magnetic field dependence of the Hall signal and the observed change in sign without needing to invoke skyrmions, and thus suggest that caution is needed when making claims of effects from skyrmion phases.

A microscopic-level understanding of the high-pressure states achieved under shock compression, including comparisons with static compression, is a long-standing and important scientific challenge. Unlike hydrostatic compression, uniaxial strains inherent to shock compression result in plastic deformation and abundant lattice defects. At high pressures ($>50\mathrm{GPa}$), the role of shock-induced deformation and defects remains an open question. Because of the nanosecond time scales in shock experiments, real-time in situ observations of shock-induced lattice defects have been challenging. Here, we present synchrotron x-ray diffraction measurements on laser-shock-compressed gold that provide the first unambiguous in situ measurements of stacking faults (SFs), likely formed by partial dislocations, during shock compression. SF abundance increases monotonically with shock compression up to 150 GPa, where SFs comprise almost every 6th atomic layer. Our results show that SFs play an important role in the plastic deformation of face-centered-cubic metals shocked to high stresses, providing a quantitative benchmark for future theoretical developments.