The impact of disorder on collective phenomena depends crucially on whether it is quenched or annealed. In synchronization problems, quenched disorder in higher-dimensional Kuramoto models is known to produce unconventional dimensional effects, including a striking odd-even dichotomy: Synchronization transitions are continuous in even dimensions and discontinuous in odd dimensions. In contrast, the impact of annealed disorder has received comparatively little attention. Here, we study a $D$-dimensional Kuramoto model with both fundamental and higher-harmonic interactions under annealed disorder, and develop an arbitrary-dimensional center-manifold framework to analyze the nonlinear dynamics near the onset of collective behavior. We show that annealed disorder fundamentally alters the role of dimensionality. With fundamental coupling alone, it completely removes the odd-even dichotomy, yielding continuous synchronization transitions with universal mean-field scaling in all dimensions. Higher-harmonic interactions preserve this universality while rendering the synchronization transition tunable between continuous and discontinuous. At the same time, they give rise to a correlation-driven transition between a symmetry-protected incoherent phase and a symmetry-broken state lacking global synchronization, which is therefore invisible to the conventional Kuramoto order parameter. This transition is continuous in two dimensions but discontinuous in higher dimensions, revealing an emergent and previously unrecognized special role of two dimensions.

We examine the mechanical and statistical-mechanical structure of interacting particle systems composed of zero-thickness rigid rods with fixed orientations. Despite strong geometric interactions imposed by nonintersection constraints, such systems are expected to exhibit ideal-gas equilibrium behavior, a fact that has not been established on rigorous grounds. We show that the collision dynamics defines a symplectic mapping on the reduced phase space of translational degrees of freedom, implying an impulsive Hamiltonian system that preserves Liouville measure and samples the standard equilibrium ensemble without invoking Dirac-type formulations. We further demonstrate that the virial contribution from collisions vanishes identically at the level of individual events, as a direct consequence of the collision geometry, so that the equation of state coincides exactly with that of an ideal gas, independently of density. These results place on firm theoretical footing assumptions made in earlier numerical studies and clarify how constrained collision dynamics can remain consistent with equilibrium statistical mechanics.

Conventional acoustic waveguides rely on sound-hard cladding layers to suppress crosstalk and radiation loss, raising fundamental limitations for integration. Here, we demonstrate that such constraints can be released by exploiting boundary-selective wave transport in a glide-symmetry-induced double-zero-index acoustic metamaterial. Waves incident on different boundaries perceive the same metamaterial as fundamentally distinct effective media: Along the glide-symmetric direction, it behaves as a double-zero-index medium that supports near-unity transmission, whereas waves incident on lateral boundaries meet a band-gap material due to the anisotropic equal-frequency contour. Such a media duality enables efficient forward transport and intrinsic lateral isolation between adjacent channels. Based on this mechanism, we demonstrate acoustic waveguides without sound-hard claddings and zero-spacing multichannel waveguide arrays with tiny crosstalk. Furthermore, compact waveguide configurations with sharp bends are achieved by combining metamaterial and air channels. Our results establish a general strategy for wave manipulation and may facilitate the development of integrated acoustic platforms.

Superpositions of orbital angular momentum (OAM) eigenstates form a continuous state space characterized by the complex coefficients of the constituent modes. When such OAM superposition states propagate through a random medium, they produce speckle patterns. The random granular speckle patterns encode the complete information of the original superposition states. This work demonstrates that the complex coefficients of an arbitrary OAM superposition can be retrieved from a single-shot speckle image. The extraction is performed using custom-designed regression model and is validated through both experimental measurements and numerical simulations. The method remains effective for superpositions of high-dimensional OAM eigenstates, including intensity-degenerate states, demonstrating that speckle can serve as a robust information carrier for state characterization.

Cooperative magnetic behavior in nanomagnet networks is governed by the interplay between exchange interactions and topology, offering routes for information transmission without charge flow. We show that a magnetic field can drive deterministic domain-wall propagation in a hierarchical, loop-free network, proceeding through a ladder of configurations. In a Cayley tree, an effective longitudinal field drives a competition between Zeeman energy and exchange frustration that reshapes the energy landscape, causing magnetization reversal to nucleate at the central node and propagate outward in quantized, layer-by-layer radial steps. This topology-controlled mechanism produces robust domain-wall motion that rapidly resynchronizes after local exchange inhomogeneities. The loop-free geometry precludes closed paths for circulating currents and magnetostatic feedback, enabling direct analysis of domain-wall nucleation and depinning energetics. The propagation reported here is thresholded and state based, with the field magnitude selecting when and whether the wall advances, stops, or reverses. These results establish hierarchical spin networks as minimal surrogate platforms for studying field-controlled propagation of discrete spin interfaces, and identify topology and boundary pinning as control parameters for thresholded magnetic information routing.

Atomic interactions play an important role in the properties of ultracold atomic gases. In single-component bosonic systems, its effect is already present at the critical point for the Bose-Einstein condensate phase transition by shifting it to lower temperatures as a consequence of effective repulsion between the atoms. When considering atomic bosonic mixtures, interesting effects arise from the competition between intra- and interspecies interactions such as the miscible-immiscible phase transition and the particular case of self-bounded quantum droplets. In such a scenario, it is natural to expect that these interactions will also affect the critical point of each species composing the mixture. In this paper, we obtain semianalytical expressions for the critical temperature shift of the phase transition to a Bose-Einstein condensate in the presence of a second species considering the mean-field framework. We treat differently the cases in which the second species is above or below its own critical temperature and apply the obtained relations to the case of a ${}^{23}\mathrm{Na}\text{−}{}^{39}\mathrm{K}$ bosonic mixture that can be realized in current running experimental setups. Our findings can be easily extended to other atomic mixtures.

We examine the interaction between floating cylindrical objects and surface waves in the gravity regime. Since the impact of resonance phenomena associated with floating bodies, particularly at laboratory scales, remains underexplored, we focus on the influence of the floats’ resonance frequency on wave emission. First, we study the response of floating rigid cylinders to external mechanical perturbations. Using an optical reconstruction technique to measure surface wave fields in both space and time, we study the natural resonance frequency of floats with different sizes. The results indicate that the resonance frequency is influenced by the interplay between the cylinder geometry and the solid-to-fluid density ratio. Second, these floating objects are placed in an incoming wave field. These experiments demonstrate that floats diffract incoming waves, while radiating secondary waves that interfere with the incident wave field. Minimal wave generation is observed at resonance frequencies. These findings can provide insights for elucidating the behavior of larger structures, such as sea ice floes, in natural wave fields.

This work presents an experimental investigation of the morphological regimes of a two-dimensional granular pile subjected to bulk discharge through a small opening in its lower center. The granular material employed is clean stainless steel spheres of diameter $d=3\mathrm{mm}$, which are poured into a transparent Hele-Shaw cell to form a triangular pile of initial height $h_0=200\mathrm{mm}$. When a small orifice of width $w$ is made in the lower center of the pile, three morphological regimes—each associated with a different type of granular outflow—are observed, depending on $w/d$: When $w\lesssim 2.9d$, the flow jams after the release of a few particles and no morphological changes in the pile are observed (jamming flow regime), while for $w\gtrsim 5d$, two disjoint granular piles emerge after a continuous discharge event (catastrophic flow regime). In the intermediate range $2.9\lesssim w/d\lesssim 5.0$, the outflow leads to a transient regime characterized by a double-tip morphology with the average height $\langle h\rangle$ following a power-law relation with ${\left(w_{\mathrm{c}}-w\right)}^{\beta }$, where $\beta \approx 1.2$ and $w_{\mathrm{c}}\approx 5.0d$ denotes the critical opening size beyond which the flow regime is catastrophic. Our experiments corroborate, in addition, the continuous flow threshold, as predicted in previous numerical simulations, and suggest a connection between the morphology of a granular pile under bulk discharge and the frictional properties of its constituent particles.

Electric dipole moments (EDMs) are sensitive probes of fundamental symmetries and central to searches for physics beyond the standard model. We present a symmetry-based, Zeeman-analog operator framework that places magnetic and electric dipole physics on parallel footing under electromagnetic duality and introduce a polar-sector pseudo-angular-momentum degree of freedom in parity space together with an associated electric Landé $g$ factor, $g_E$, that organizes induced orbital dipoles. Following Ohanian's effective-current formulation of the Zeeman effect, we construct its electric dual: The wavefunction's microscopic polarization admits an equivalent effective magnetic probability-current representation, providing a field-equivalence description of parity-mixed charge displacement. In this notation, the total EDM expectation takes the unified form $\langle {\widehat{\vec{d}}}_{\mathrm{tot}}\rangle =d_B(g_E\frac{\langle {\widehat{\vec{J}}}_p\rangle }{\hslash }+g_E^e\frac{\langle \widehat{\vec{S}}\rangle }{\hslash })$, with $g_E^e=\frac{2d_{\mathrm{int}}}{d_B}$, where ${\widehat{\vec{J}}}_p$ captures Stark-induced pseudoangular momentum and $\widehat{\vec{S}}$ encodes any intrinsic (spin-aligned) EDM $d_{\mathrm{int}}$ from symmetry-violating interactions. We define a natural electric dipole unit (the “Bohr EDM”) as $d_B\equiv e{a}_0=\frac{2{\mu }_B}{c\alpha }$ ($a_0$ the Bohr radius and ${\mu }_B$ the Bohr magneton). As a canonical analytic benchmark, we show in the hydrogenic problem that a static electric field couples within a fixed $n$ manifold through the scaled Runge-Lenz structure, yielding a compact Landé-like description and reproducing the Stark doublet (e.g., $|\langle d_{\mathrm{orb}}\rangle |=3d_B$ for the $2s\text{–}2p_{m=0}$ mixing).

This work presents a digital quantum simulation of a three-level atomic system interacting with a single-mode electromagnetic field based on the Jaynes-Cummings model, implemented on IBM Quantum superconducting processors. A qutrit is encoded using two physical qubits to represent the atomic states, while an additional qubit encodes the truncated field mode, enabling the realization of effective $\mathrm{\Lambda }$-type atomic dynamics. The continuous-time light-matter interaction is implemented in a digital form by discretizing the evolution using Suzuki-Trotter decomposition. In contrast to an analog realization, the digital simulation replaces the continuous evolution with a sequence of quantum gates whose parameters are explicitly controlled. Phase evolution arising from the interaction Hamiltonian is digitally encoded using calibrated $R_Z$ gates, whose rotation angles are fixed by the physically relevant coupling scale and the chosen Trotter time step. State preparation is achieved using Hadamard and parametrized rotation gates, while the interaction dynamics are implemented through controlled operations. A comparative analysis between first- and second-order Trotter implementations reveals a trade-off between digital accuracy and hardware-induced noise. Overall, the results demonstrate that calibrated gate operations and noise-aware circuit design enable reliable digital simulation of multilevel light-matter interactions on noisy intermediate-scale quantum platforms.

Through two-dimensional, three-velocity-component particle-in-cell simulations of freely decaying subion turbulence, intermittent localized regions with $\mathbf{E}·\mathbf{B}\ne 0$ are found, in the early electron-scale interaction phase, to be statistically associated with decreases in $|H_{V_s}|$, the fixed-gauge structure-integrated magnetic-helicity diagnostic. This structure-level behavior coincides with a decline of the Saffman helicity-variance plateau value $I_H$. Motivated by these observations, we propose a source-compensated, history-dependent helicity density that satisfies an exact local balance identity by construction, enabling Saffman-type two-point correlation integrals, which, under standard flux-decorrelation assumptions, can exhibit intermediate-scale plateaus that are roughly time independent. In the simulations, such plateaus are observed to remain approximately invariant over the measured kinetic interval even as $I_H$ evolves during the early kinetic stage. Under approximate single-scale self-similarity, the plateau behavior of the magnetic integral is consistent with the two-dimensional decay constraint $BL\sim \text{const}$. For initially net-helical configurations, we observe rapid development of mixed-signed magnetic-helicity patches and a decrease of the global fractional helicity, such that the decay over the kinetic interval is again most consistent with the cancellation-dominated scaling constraint.

Unconventional superconductivity remains one of the central unsolved problems in quantum materials, and revealing its connection to the normal state is widely believed to be key to uncovering the pairing mechanism. Previous efforts have largely focused on the temperature range immediately above the superconducting transition, where specific scattering channels—such as strange-metal transport—have been identified as sharing a possible microscopic origin with superconductivity. Here, we use machine learning to explore possible correlations between normal-state resistivity and superconductivity in Fe-based compounds. We find that resistivity data in the temperature window of 150–300 K, far above the typical critical temperature ($T_c$) of this family, can be used to classify whether a compound becomes superconducting. Owing to the limited size of the dataset, the underlying physical origin of this correlation cannot yet be determined. Nevertheless, the results suggest that high-temperature resistivity may contain useful empirical information for superconductivity prediction, motivating larger and more systematic experimental datasets.

We theoretically investigate dispersion of plasma waves propagating in a lateral plasmonic crystal based on a two-dimensional electron system with grating gates. Two specific configurations are analyzed: a system with single grating gate having ungated gaps and a double-grating-gate structure. We calculate the dispersion relations for the fundamental and several higher-order plasma modes, classifying them as either bright or dark excitations. At the boundaries of the Brillouin zones, the dispersion of both types of excitations is shown to be quadratic, justifying the introduction of effective bright and dark plasmon masses. In the low-frequency limit, the plasmonic-crystal spectrum exhibits an acoustic plasma mode characterized by a certain velocity. We demonstrate that the effective plasmon mass and acoustic velocity are highly sensitive to both crystal geometry (specifically the lattice filling factor) and the gate voltages, enabling wide-range tunability.

Solitary waves are important phenomena for particle acceleration and energy transport in both astrophysical and laboratory laser plasmas. To investigate their characteristics, we introduce a physics-informed neural network (PINN)-based method to infer the governing partial differential equation that describes solitary waves in one-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations. Benchmark tests using numerical solutions of partial differential equations demonstrate that the PINN can successfully infer advection-diffusion, Burgers, and Korteweg–de Vries (KdV) equations with reasonable accuracy. We then apply the PINN to PIC simulation data modeling the irradiation of a femtosecond laser onto a carbon target, in which a laser-driven peak structure propagates as a solitary wave. Both the PINN-predicted data and the solution of the equation with the PINN-inferred coefficients agree well with the original simulation data. The inferred coefficients indicate that the governing equation is a nonlinear KdV-like equation and that the solitary waves are consistent with the theoretical properties of ion acoustic solitons. These results show that the solitary waves in laser-irradiated plasmas behave as KdV solitons, demonstrating that the proposed method is effective for understanding nonlinear plasma waves.

We present an implementation of an atomic magnetometer based on free spin precession of optically pumped ${}^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ atoms. The design features a microfabricated vapor cell with an effective volume of $7.1{\mathrm{mm}}^3$ containing isotopically enriched ${}^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ and nitrogen buffer gas. The magnetometer is designed to operate in the Earth-field range, exhibiting a magnetic noise floor of about $147\mathrm{fT}/\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}$ at field strengths comparable to Earth's magnetic field, i.e., around $50\mu \mathrm{T}$. This is in close agreement with the Cramér-Rao lower bound of $118\mathrm{fT}/\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}$. The good sensitivity as well as the high dynamic range enables a wide range of applications, including magnetocardiography and geomagnetic measurements.