Articles in 2023

Spontaneous symmetry breaking can give rise to unexpected properties in a physical system. Here, the authors consider spontaneous symmetry breaking in the 2D PT-symmetric fractional nonlinear Schrödinger equation, finding that the asymmetric solitons are ghost states whose propagation constants are complex and differ from that of an integral case.

Broken temporal symmetry (time irreversibility) of turbulent flow statistics has previously been investigated, but wall-bounded turbulence has received less attention. By adopting a multiscale approach, in this study, the authors find a connection between high time irreversibility levels and energetic coherent motions in the flow at characteristic scales.

The discovery of superconductivity in doped infinite-layer nickelates has recently garnered significant attention. Here, the authors employed a quantum many-body Green’s function-based approach to investigate the electronic and magnetic fluctuations in LaNiO₂ providing microscopic insight into the origin of suppressed long-range order and magnetic excitation spectrum in the nickelates, along with their potential correlation with the cuprates.

Dual frequency combs are a powerful tool for a range of optical measurements and technologies. The authors here generate orthogonally polarized dual combs with exceptionally high relative stability.

Martensitic crystal structures are usually obtained by rapid thermal quenching of certain alloys, as this induces local shear deformation. This paper reveals that the latter, and hence a martensitic structural transformation, can also be achieved by exciting a suitable transverse phonon mode, as is demonstrated in partially stabilized zirconia by using intense terahertz pulses.

The design of novel and tunable experimental systems for synthetic active materials is of immense interest. The authors present one such design that uses the physics of self-generated waves to realize a tunable active spinner system.

The Andreev reflection provides a deterministic teleportation process at an ideal normal-superconductor interface, making it behave like an information mirror. Here, the authors theoretically propose a regime to realize the laser-induced Andreev reflection via a synthetic normal-gas-superfluid junction in ultracold Fermi gases, which exhibits significantly different properties from tunneling at conventional junctions.

Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) techniques have been very successful in quantum simulation. This paper shows a pathway to provide orders of magnitude speedup to QMC simulations through massively parallel architectures (both digital and mixed signal) while maintaining a scaling advantage over QMC implemented in software.

The Möbius strip exhibits unique topological resonances, which are fundamental for topology-based signal processing. The authors realise a Möbius ring resonator via polarization-maintaining fibers, observing topological resonances emerging from the coupling between the two polarization modes along the fast and slow axes of the ring.

X-ray science at modern Synchrotrons and X-ray Free Electron Laser facilities are enabling the study of subtle structural changes of matter from the single atom to the macroscopic scale. This paper reviews new concepts in synchrotron storage rings design and reports on the successful commissioning and operation of the new X-ray storage ring of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble.

Majorana bound states have possible application in future quantum computing devices but designing platforms where their signatures can be isolated and observed is challenging. Here, the authors report experimental and calculated data for the screening of proximitized superconducting and strongly spin-orbit-coupled heavy metal layers with atom-by-atom assembled chains of transition metal atoms with the aim of realizing large topological minigaps protecting Majorana edge modes.

There have been recent studies reporting that Mn-doped MAPBI₃ houses a ferromagnetic phase mediated by a double exchange mechanism. Here, however, using X-ray magnetic circular dichroism and magnetic susceptibility measurements, the authors uncover contradicting experimental evidence to indicate an absence of magnetic ordering in this material, suggesting that our understanding of Mn-doped lead halide perovskites may need reassessing.

Determining and controlling the junction temperature is one of the primary issues in millikelvin scanning tunneling microscopy. The authors show how to deduce this temperature from scanning tunneling spectroscopy experiments, demonstrating that their junction reaches 77 mK in spite of being exposed to a much hotter 1.5 K environment.

Complex magnetic formations, termed ‘multi-q’ structures, can give rise to magnetic spin textures, such as skyrmions, but how they influence band structure and topology is less clear. Here, the authors use a combination of calculated and experimental data to reveal the origin of the unconventional surface state pairs that emerge for NdBi for different type-I AFM multi-q structures.

Heterodyning allows tailored electromagnetic fields to be generated by mixing two incoming fields. The authors show acoustoelectric heterodyning by combining electric and acoustic fields in electrolytic solutions. The resulting field can be controlled at distant highly focal locations, enabling new non-invasive biomedical applications.

The generation of entangled photon pairs in an integrated platform is important for quantum technologies. This work experimentally demonstrates time-energy entangled photon pair generation from a suspended InGaP photonic crystal cavity with high pair generation rate, using a bichromatic lattice and thermal tuning.

The brain is relatively slow and needs efficient information transfer to ensure survival. Here, the authors demonstrated a likely solution, namely the presence of turbulence in fast neuronal whole-brain dynamics, providing a fundamental principle to facilitate the necessary information transfer across spatiotemporal scales

Here, the authors report phonon transmission through a nonlocal material slab embedded in a local material and perform an analysis based on a one-dimensional mass-and-spring model. Evidence of rich phonon behaviours, including sharp resonances related to bound-states-in-the-continuum, are found and reproduced by a developed higher-order-gradient effective medium theory for nonlocal materials.

The authors present a method of prime factorization using quantum logic, based on parity-based gates. Using this approach, they formulate factorization as an optimization problem and show a quadratic advantage in the number of qubits required over other standard representations.

During the past decade, hyperbolic network models have received considerable attention due to their ability to capture many peculiar features of real complex networks, including for instance, the small-world and scale-free properties, or the high clustering coefficient. Here we show that for the popularity-similarity optimisation (PSO) model from this family, the generated networks do not only display the above properties but become also extremely modular in the thermodynamic limit, even though there is no explicitly built-in community formation mechanism in the model definition.