We use coupled micropillars etched out of a semiconductor microcavity to engineer a spin-orbit Hamiltonian for photons and polaritons in a microstructure. The coupling between the spin and orbital momentum arises from the polarization-dependent confinement and tunneling of photons between adjacent micropillars arranged in the form of a hexagonal photonic molecule. It results in polariton eigenstates with distinct polarization patterns, which are revealed in photoluminescence experiments in the regime of polariton condensation. Thanks to the strong polariton nonlinearities, our system provides a photonic workbench for the quantum simulation of the interplay between interactions and spin-orbit effects, particularly when extended to two-dimensional lattices.

The effort to understand network systems in increasing detail has resulted in a diversity of methods designed to extract their large-scale structure from data. Unfortunately, many of these methods yield diverging descriptions of the same network, making both the comparison and understanding of their results a difficult challenge. A possible solution to this outstanding issue is to shift the focus away from ad hoc methods and move towards more principled approaches based on statistical inference of generative models. As a result, we face instead the more well-defined task of selecting between competing generative processes, which can be done under a unified probabilistic framework. Here, we consider the comparison between a variety of generative models including features such as degree correction, where nodes with arbitrary degrees can belong to the same group, and community overlap, where nodes are allowed to belong to more than one group. Because such model variants possess an increasing number of parameters, they become prone to overfitting. In this work, we present a method of model selection based on the minimum description length criterion and posterior odds ratios that is capable of fully accounting for the increased degrees of freedom of the larger models and selects the best one according to the statistical evidence available in the data. In applying this method to many empirical unweighted networks from different fields, we observe that community overlap is very often not supported by statistical evidence and is selected as a better model only for a minority of them. On the other hand, we find that degree correction tends to be almost universally favored by the available data, implying that intrinsic node proprieties (as opposed to group properties) are often an essential ingredient of network formation.

In this paper, we provide experimental evidence of the effects of unintentional $p$-type doping on the performance and the apparent recombination dynamics of bulk-heterojunction solar cells. By supporting these experimental observations with drift-diffusion simulations on two batches of the same efficient polymer-fullerene solar cells with substantially different doping levels and at different thicknesses, we investigate the way the presence of doping affects the interpretation of optoelectronic measurements of recombination and charge transport in organic solar cells. We also present experimental evidence on how unintentional doping can lead to excessively high apparent reaction orders. Our work suggests first that the knowledge of the level of dopants is essential in the studies of recombination dynamics and carrier transport and that unintentional doping levels need to be reduced below approximately $7\times {10}^{15}{\mathrm{cm}}^{-3}$ for full optimization around the second interference maximum of highly efficient polymer-fullerene solar cells.

The nature of solid-solid phase transformations has been a long-standing question spanning the fields of metallurgy and condensed-matter physics, with applications from metallic alloys and ceramics to modern shape-memory materials. In spite of the importance of solid-to-solid transformations in many areas of materials science and condensed-matter physics and the numerous experimental and theoretical studies, a deep understanding of the microstructural changes and the underlying kinetic mechanisms is still missing. In this work, we establish a versatile model system composed of micron-scale ionic microgel colloids, where we not only probe the single-particle kinetics in real space and real time but also tune the phase transition in a multiple-parameter space. In the presence of an imposed electric field, a face-centered cubic (FCC) crystal transforms diffusively into a body-centered tetragonal (BCT) crystal via nucleation and growth. In the reverse direction, however, the BCT phase transforms cooperatively into a long-lived metastable body-centered orthorhombic phase, which only relaxes back to the equilibrium FCC when annealed at higher temperatures. The kinetics is thus either diffusive or martensitic depending on the path, and we believe that these two path-dependent transitions provide the first real-space, particle-level insights of diffusive and martensitic transformations, respectively, in a single system.

Cavity polaritons are mixed states, partially microcavity photon and partially material excitation, which behave as bosons up to a critical density. In the case of excitonic polaritons, the critical parameter is the Mott density, which cannot be tailored, in a given material system. Interestingly, in the case of intersubband polaritons, such critical density can be engineered to a large extent via the doping. We show that this observation has crucial implications for intersubband polariton lasers, and we make a strong case in favor of their development.

Based on first-principle calculations, we show that a family of nonmagnetic materials including TaAs, TaP, NbAs, and NbP are Weyl semimetals (WSM) without inversion centers. We find twelve pairs of Weyl points in the whole Brillouin zone (BZ) for each of them. In the absence of spin-orbit coupling (SOC), band inversions in mirror-invariant planes lead to gapless nodal rings in the energy-momentum dispersion. The strong SOC in these materials then opens full gaps in the mirror planes, generating nonzero mirror Chern numbers and Weyl points off the mirror planes. The resulting surface-state Fermi arc structures on both (001) and (100) surfaces are also obtained, and they show interesting shapes, pointing to fascinating playgrounds for future experimental studies.

Strongly correlated electron systems are one of the central topics in contemporary solid-state physics. Prominent examples for such systems are Kondo lattices, i.e., intermetallic materials in which below a critical temperature, the Kondo temperature $T_K$, the magnetic moments become quenched and the effective masses of the conduction electrons approach the mass of a proton. In Ce- and Yb-based systems, this so-called heavy-fermion behavior is caused by interactions between the strongly localized $4f$ and itinerant electrons. A major and very controversially discussed issue in this context is how the localized electronic degree of freedom gets involved in the Fermi surface (FS) upon increasing the interaction between both kinds of electrons or upon changing the temperature. In this paper, we show that the FS of a prototypic Kondo lattice, ${\mathrm{YbRh}}_2{\mathrm{Si}}_2$, does not change its size or shape in a wide temperature range extending from well below to far above the single-ion Kondo temperature $T_K\sim 25\mathrm{K}$ of this system. This experimental observation, obtained by means of angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, is in remarkable contrast to the widely believed evolution from a large FS, including the $4f$ degrees of freedom, to a small FS, without the $4f$’s, upon increasing temperature. Our results explicitly demonstrate a need to further advance in theoretical approaches based on the periodic Anderson model in order to elucidate the temperature dependence of Fermi surfaces in Kondo lattices.

To comprehend interconnected systems across the social and natural sciences, researchers have developed many powerful methods to identify functional modules. For example, with interaction data aggregated into a single network layer, flow-based methods have proven useful for identifying modular dynamics in weighted and directed networks that capture constraints on flow processes. However, many interconnected systems consist of agents or components that exhibit multiple layers of interactions, possibly from several different processes. Inevitably, representing this intricate network of networks as a single aggregated network leads to information loss and may obscure the actual organization. Here, we propose a method based on a compression of network flows that can identify modular flows both within and across layers in nonaggregated multilayer networks. Our numerical experiments on synthetic multilayer networks, with some layers originating from the same interaction process, show that the analysis fails in aggregated networks or when treating the layers separately, whereas the multilayer method can accurately identify modules across layers that originate from the same interaction process. We capitalize on our findings and reveal the community structure of two multilayer collaboration networks with topics as layers: scientists affiliated with the Pierre Auger Observatory and scientists publishing works on networks on the arXiv. Compared to conventional aggregated methods, the multilayer method uncovers connected topics and reveals smaller modules with more overlap that better capture the actual organization.

A quantum critical point (QCP) occurs upon chemical doping of the weak itinerant ferromagnet ${\mathrm{Sc}}_{3.1}\mathrm{In}$. Remarkable for a system with no local moments, the QCP is accompanied by non-Fermi liquid behavior, manifested in the logarithmic divergence of the specific heat both in the ferro-and the paramagnetic states, as well as linear temperature dependence of the low-temperature resistivity. With doping, critical scaling is observed close to the QCP, as the critical exponents $\delta$, $\gamma$, and $\beta$ have weak composition dependence, with $\delta$ nearly twice and $\beta$ almost half of their respective mean-field values. The unusually large paramagnetic moment ${\mu }_{\mathrm{PM}}\sim 1.3{\mu }_B/\mathrm{F}.\mathrm{U}.$ is nearly composition independent. Evidence for strong spin fluctuations, accompanying the QCP at $x_c=0.035\pm 0.005$, may be ascribed to the reduced dimensionality of ${\mathrm{Sc}}_{3.1}\mathrm{In}$, associated with the nearly one-dimensional Sc-In chains.

Sea-salt aerosols are a source of atmospheric bromine responsible for ozone depletion. The availability of bromine from sea-salt aerosols to heterogeneous phase chemical reactions is determined by its local concentration at the aerosol surface. We report here complete surface segregation of bromine in mixed $\mathrm{NaCl}/\mathrm{NaBr}$ aerosols grown by drying droplets, thus mimicking the atmospheric process by which solid sea-salt aerosols are generated. For $d=70\mathrm{nm}$ solid aerosols, complete surface segregation is observed for solution $\mathrm{Br}/\mathrm{Cl}$ ratios below 2%. These findings set a size-dependent upper limit on the bromine surface enrichment that can be reached in solid salt aerosols grown from sea-water droplets in the atmosphere.

We present an operational procedure to transform global symmetries into local symmetries at the level of individual quantum states, as opposed to typical gauging prescriptions for Hamiltonians or Lagrangians. We then construct a compatible gauging map for operators, which preserves locality and reproduces the minimal coupling scheme for simple operators. By combining this construction with the formalism of projected entangled-pair states (PEPS), we can show that an injective PEPS for the matter fields is gauged into a $\mathsf{G}$-injective PEPS for the combined gauge-matter system, which potentially has topological order. We derive the corresponding parent Hamiltonian, which is a frustration-free gauge-theory Hamiltonian closely related to the Kogut-Susskind Hamiltonian at zero coupling constant. We can then introduce gauge dynamics at finite values of the coupling constant by applying a local filtering operation. This scheme results in a low-parameter family of gauge-invariant states of which we can accurately probe the phase diagram, as we illustrate by studying a ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$ gauge theory with Higgs matter.

Application of an oscillatory electric field is known to alter the separation distance between micron-scale colloidal particles and an adjacent electrode. This behavior is believed to be partially due to a lift force caused by electrohydrodynamic flow generated around each particle, with previous work focused on identifying a single steady-state “height” of the individual particles over the electrode. Here, we report the existence of a pronounced bifurcation in the particle height in response to low-frequency electric fields. Optical and confocal microscopy observations reveal that application of a $\sim 100\mathrm{Hz}$ field induces some of the particles to rapidly move several particle diameters up from the electrode, while the others move closer to the electrode. Statistics compiled from repeated trials demonstrate that the likelihood for a particle to move up follows a binomial distribution, indicating that the height bifurcation is random and does not result from membership in some distinct subpopulation of particles. The fraction of particles that move up increases with increased applied potential and decreased frequency, in a fashion qualitatively consistent with an energy landscape predicated on competition between electrohydrodynamic flow, colloidal interactions, and gravitational forces. Taken together, the results provide evidence for the existence of a deep tertiary minimum in the effective electrode-particle interaction potential at a surprisingly large distance from the electrode.

Interacting spin systems are of fundamental relevance in different areas of physics, as well as in quantum information science and biology. These spin models represent the simplest, yet not fully understood, manifestation of quantum many-body systems. An important outstanding problem is the efficient numerical computation of dynamics in large spin systems. Here, we propose a new semiclassical method to study many-body spin dynamics in generic spin lattice models. The method is based on a discrete Monte Carlo sampling in phase space in the framework of the so-called truncated Wigner approximation. Comparisons with analytical and numerically exact calculations demonstrate the power of the technique. They show that it correctly reproduces the dynamics of one- and two-point correlations and spin squeezing at short times, thus capturing entanglement. Our results open the possibility to study the quantum dynamics accessible to recent experiments in regimes where other numerical methods are inapplicable.

Molecular transport in living systems regulates numerous processes underlying biological function. Although many cellular components exhibit anomalous diffusion, only recently has the subdiffusive motion been associated with nonergodic behavior. These findings have stimulated new questions for their implications in statistical mechanics and cell biology. Is nonergodicity a common strategy shared by living systems? Which physical mechanisms generate it? What are its implications for biological function? Here, we use single-particle tracking to demonstrate that the motion of dendritic cell-specific intercellular adhesion molecule 3-grabbing nonintegrin (DC-SIGN), a receptor with unique pathogen-recognition capabilities, reveals nonergodic subdiffusion on living-cell membranes In contrast to previous studies, this behavior is incompatible with transient immobilization, and, therefore, it cannot be interpreted according to continuous-time random-walk theory. We show that the receptor undergoes changes of diffusivity, consistent with the current view of the cell membrane as a highly dynamic and diverse environment. Simulations based on a model of an ordinary random walk in complex media quantitatively reproduce all our observations, pointing toward diffusion heterogeneity as the cause of DC-SIGN behavior. By studying different receptor mutants, we further correlate receptor motion to its molecular structure, thus establishing a strong link between nonergodicity and biological function. These results underscore the role of disorder in cell membranes and its connection with function regulation. Because of its generality, our approach offers a framework to interpret anomalous transport in other complex media where dynamic heterogeneity might play a major role, such as those found, e.g., in soft condensed matter, geology, and ecology.

Compressing a porous, fluid-filled material drives the interstitial fluid out of the pore space, as when squeezing water out of a kitchen sponge. Inversely, injecting fluid into a porous material can deform the solid structure, as when fracturing a shale for natural gas recovery. These poromechanical interactions play an important role in geological and biological systems across a wide range of scales, from the propagation of magma through Earth’s mantle to the transport of fluid through living cells and tissues. The theory of poroelasticity has been largely successful in modeling poromechanical behavior in relatively simple systems, but this continuum theory is fundamentally limited by our understanding of the pore-scale interactions between the fluid and the solid, and these problems are notoriously difficult to study in a laboratory setting. Here, we present a high-resolution measurement of injection-driven poromechanical deformation in a system with granular microsctructure: We inject fluid into a dense, confined monolayer of soft particles and use particle tracking to reveal the dynamics of the multiscale deformation field. We find that a continuum model based on poroelasticity theory captures certain macroscopic features of the deformation, but the particle-scale deformation field exhibits dramatic departures from smooth, continuum behavior. We observe particle-scale rearrangement and hysteresis, as well as petal-like mesoscale structures that are connected to material failure through spiral shear banding.

Superconductivity in heavy-fermion materials can sometimes appear in the incoherent regime and in proximity to an antiferromagnetic quantum critical point. Here, we study these phenomena using large-scale determinant quantum Monte Carlo simulations and the dynamical cluster approximation with various impurity solvers for the periodic Anderson model with frustrated hybridization. We obtain solid evidence for a $d_{x^2-y^2}$ superconducting phase arising from an incoherent normal state in the vicinity of an antiferromagnetic quantum critical point. There is a coexistence region, and the width of the superconducting dome increases with frustration. Through a study of the pairing dynamics, we find that the retarded spin fluctuations give the main contribution to the pairing glue. These results are relevant for unconventional superconductivity in the Ce-115 family of heavy fermions.

A Laser Ion Source and Trap (LIST) for a thick-target, isotope-separation on-line facility has been implemented at CERN ISOLDE for the production of pure, laser-ionized, radioactive ion beams. It offers two modes of operation, either as an ion guide, which performs similarly to the standard ISOLDE resonance ionization laser ion source (RILIS), or as a more selective ion source, where surface-ionized ions from the hot ion-source cavity are repelled by an electrode, while laser ionization is done within a radio-frequency quadrupole ion guide. The first physics application of the LIST enables the suppression of francium contamination in ion beams of neutron-rich polonium isotopes at ISOLDE by more than 1000 with a reduction in laser-ionization efficiency of only 20. Resonance ionization spectroscopy is performed directly inside the LIST device, allowing the study of the hyperfine structure and isotope shift of ${}^{217}\mathrm{Po}$ for the first time. Nuclear decay spectroscopy of ${}^{219}\mathrm{Po}$ is performed for the first time, revealing its half-life, $\alpha$-to-$\beta$-decay branching ratio, and $\alpha$-particle energy. This experiment demonstrates the applicability of the LIST at radioactive ion-beam facilities for the production and study of pure beams of exotic isotopes.

Fluids of exciton polaritons, excitations of two-dimensional quantum wells in optical cavities, show collective phenomena akin to Bose condensation. However, a fundamental difference from standard condensates stems from the finite lifetime of these excitations, which necessitates continuous driving to maintain a steady state. A basic question is whether a two-dimensional condensate with long-range algebraic correlations can exist under these nonequilibrium conditions. Here, we show that such driven two-dimensional Bose systems cannot exhibit algebraic superfluid order except in low-symmetry, strongly anisotropic systems. Our result implies, in particular, that recent apparent evidence for Bose condensation of exciton polaritons must be an intermediate-scale crossover phenomenon, while the true long-distance correlations fall off exponentially. We obtain these results through a mapping of the long-wavelength condensate dynamics onto the anisotropic Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation.

Organisms use a variety of strategies to adapt to their environments and maximize long-term growth potential, but quantitative characterization of the benefits conferred by the use of such strategies, as well as their impact on the whole population’s rate of growth, remains challenging. Here, we use a path-integral framework that describes how selection acts on lineages—i.e., the life histories of individuals and their ancestors—to demonstrate that lineage-based measurements can be used to quantify the selective pressures acting on a population. We apply this analysis to Escherichia coli bacteria exposed to cyclical treatments of carbenicillin, an antibiotic that interferes with cell-wall synthesis and affects cells in an age-dependent manner. While the extensive characterization of the life history of thousands of cells is necessary to accurately extract the age-dependent selective pressures caused by carbenicillin, the same measurement can be recapitulated using lineage-based statistics of a single surviving cell. Population-wide evolutionary pressures can be extracted from the properties of the surviving lineages within a population, providing an alternative and efficient procedure to quantify the evolutionary forces acting on a population. Importantly, this approach is not limited to age-dependent selection, and the framework can be generalized to detect signatures of other trait-specific selection using lineage-based measurements. Our results establish a powerful way to study the evolutionary dynamics of life under selection and may be broadly useful in elucidating selective pressures driving the emergence of antibiotic resistance and the evolution of survival strategies in biological systems.

It has been suggested that the extended intensity profiles surrounding Bragg reflections that arise when a series of finite crystals of varying size and shape are illuminated by the intense, coherent illumination of an x-ray free-electron laser may enable the crystal’s unit-cell electron density to be obtained ab initio via well-established iterative phasing algorithms. Such a technique could have a significant impact on the field of biological structure determination since it avoids the need for a priori information from similar known structures, multiple measurements near resonant atomic absorption energies, isomorphic derivative crystals, or atomic-resolution data. Here, we demonstrate this phasing technique on diffraction patterns recorded from artificial two-dimensional microcrystals using the seeded soft x-ray free-electron laser FERMI. We show that the technique is effective when the illuminating wavefront has nonuniform phase and amplitude, and when the diffraction intensities cannot be measured uniformly throughout reciprocal space because of a limited signal-to-noise ratio.