Discover the world’s best science and medicine | Nature.com

Discover the world’s best science and medicine | Nature.com

Discover the world’s best science and medicine | Nature.com

Discover the world’s best science and medicine | Nature.com

This study shows that initial atomic velocities as given by thermodynamics play an important role in the dynamics of phase transitions. We tracked the atomic motion during non-thermal laser-induced melting of InSb at different initial temperatures. The ultrafast atomic motion following bond breaking can in general be governed by two mechanisms: the random velocity of the atoms at the time of bond breaking (inertial model), and the forces acting on the atoms after bond breaking. The melting dynamics was found to follow the inertial model over a wide temperature range.

A remarkable feature of quantum many-body systems is the orthogonality catastrophe which describes their extensively growing sensitivity to local perturbations and plays an important role in condensed matter physics. Here we show that the dynamics of the orthogonality catastrophe can be fully characterized by the quantum speed limit and, more specifically, that any quenched quantum many-body system whose variance in ground state energy scales with the system size exhibits the orthogonality catastrophe. Our rigorous findings are demonstrated by two paradigmatic classes of many-body systems – the trapped Fermi gas and the long-range interacting Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick spin model.

We provide a strategy for the exact inference of the average as well as the fluctuations of the entropy production in non-equilibrium systems in the steady state, from the measurements of arbitrary current fluctuations. Our results are built upon the finite-time generalization of the thermodynamic uncertainty relation, and require only very short time series data from experiments. We illustrate our results with exact and numerical solutions for two colloidal heat engines.

Photo-electron spectra obtained with intense pulses generated by free-electron lasers through self-amplified spontaneous emission are intrinsically noisy and vary from shot to shot. We extract the purified spectrum, corresponding to a Fourier-limited pulse, with the help of a deep neural network. It is trained on a huge number of spectra, which was made possible by an extremely efficient propagation of the Schr"odinger equation with synthetic Hamilton matrices and random realizations of fluctuating pulses. \added{We show that the trained network is sufficiently generic such that it can purify atomic or molecular spectra, dominated by resonant two- or three-photon ionization, non-linear processes which are particularly sensitive to pulse fluctuations. This is possible without training on those systems.

Multicomponent reactions have become a mainstay in both academic and industrial synthetic organic chemistry owing to their step- and atom-economy advantages over traditional synthetic sequences1. Recently, bicyclo[1.1.1]pentane (BCP) motifs have come to the fore as valuable pharmaceutical bioisosteres of benzene rings, and, in particular, 1,3-disubstituted BCP moieties have become widely adopted in medicinal chemistry as para-phenyl ring replacements2. Often these structures are generated from [1.1.1]propellane via opening of the internal C–C bond, through the addition of either radicals or metal-based nucleophiles3–13. The resulting propellane-addition adducts are subsequently transformed to the requisite polysubstituted BCP compounds via a range of synthetic sequences that traditionally involve multiple chemical steps. While this approach has been effective so far, it is clear that a multicomponent reaction that enables single-step access to complex and diverse polysubstituted BCP products would be synthetically advantageous over the current stepwise approaches. Here we report a one-step three-component radical coupling of [1.1.1]propellane to afford diverse functionalized bicycles using various radical precursors and heteroatom nucleophiles via a metallaphotoredox catalysis protocol. The reaction operates on short timescales (five minutes to one hour) across multiple (>10) nucleophile classes and can accommodate a diverse array of radical precursors, including those which generate alkyl, α-acyl, trifluoromethyl, and sulfonyl radicals. This method has been used to rapidly prepare BCP analogues of known pharmaceuticals, one of which has pharmacokinetic properties substantially different to those of its commercial progenitor.

We report high-resolution angle resolved photoemission measurements on single crystals of Pt2HgSe3 grown by high-pressure synthesis. Our data reveal a gapped Dirac nodal line whose (001)-projection separates the surface Brillouin zone in topological and trivial areas. In the non-trivial k-space range we find surface states with multiple saddle-points in the dispersion resulting in two van Hove singularities in the surface density of states. Based on density functional theory calculations, we identify these surface states as signatures of a topological crystalline state which coexists with a weak topological phase.

Ratios of isospin amplitudes in hadron decays are a useful probe of the interplay between weak and strong interactions, and allow searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. We present the first results on isospin amplitudes in b-baryon decays, using data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 8.5 fb−1, collected with the LHCb detector in pp collisions at center of mass energies of 7, 8 and 13 TeV. The isospin amplitude ratio |A1(Λb0→J/ψΣ0)/A0(Λb0→J/ψΛ)|, where the subscript on A indicates the final-state isospin, is measured to be less than 1/20.9 at 95% confidence level. The Cabibbo suppressed Ξb0→J/ψΛ decay is observed for the first time, allowing for the measurement |A0(Ξb0→J/ψΛ)/A1/2(Ξb0→J/ψΞ0)|=0.44±0.06±0.02, where the uncertainties are statistical and systematic, respectively.

We propose a mechanism called axiogenesis where the cosmological excess of baryons over antibaryons is generated from the rotation of the QCD axion. The Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry may be explicitly broken in the early universe, inducing the rotation of a PQ charged scalar field. The rotation corresponds to the asymmetry of the PQ charge, which is converted into the baryon asymmetry via QCD and electroweak sphaleron transitions. In the concrete model we explore, interesting phenomenology arises due to the prediction of a small decay constant and the connections with new physics at the LHC and future colliders and with axion dark matter.

Negative thermal expansion is an unusual phenomenon appearing in only a handful of materials, but pursuit and mastery of the phenomenon holds great promise for applications across disciplines and industries. Here we report use of X-ray spectroscopy and diffraction to investigate the 4f-electronic properties in Y-doped SmS and employ the Kondo volume collapse model to interpret the results. Our measurements reveal an unparalleled decrease of the bulk Sm valence by over 20% at low temperatures in the mixed-valent golden phase, which we show is caused by a strong coupling between an emergent Kondo lattice state and a large isotropic volume change. The amplitude and temperature range of the negative thermal expansion appear strongly dependent on the Y concentration and the associated chemical disorder, providing control over the observed effect. This finding opens avenues for the design of Kondo lattice materials with tunable, giant and isotropic negative thermal expansion.

A powerful perspective in understanding non-equilibrium quantum dynamics is through the time evolution of its entanglement content. Yet apart from a few guiding principles for the entanglement entropy, to date, much less is known about the refined characteristics of entanglement propagation. Here, we unveil signatures of the entanglement evolving and information propagating out-of-equilibrium, from the view of the entanglement Hamiltonian. We investigate quantum quench dynamics of prototypical Bose-Hubbard model using state-of-the-art numerical technique combined with conformal field theory. Before reaching equilibrium, it is found that a current operator emerges in the entanglement Hamiltonian, implying that entanglement spreading is carried by particle flow. In the long-time limit the subsystem enters a steady phase, evidenced by the dynamic convergence of the entanglement Hamiltonian to the expectation of a thermal ensemble. Importantly, the entanglement temperature in steady state is spatially independent, which provides an intuitive trait of equilibrium. These findings not only provide crucial information on how equilibrium statistical mechanics emerges in many-body dynamics, but also add a tool to exploring quantum dynamics from the perspective of the entanglement Hamiltonian.

Bell’s Theorem rules out many potential reformulations of quantum mechanics, but within a generalized framework, it does not exclude all locally-mediated'' models. Such models describe the correlations between entangled particles as mediated by intermediate parameters which track the particle world-lines and respect Lorentz covariance. These locally-mediated models require the relaxation of an arrow-of-time assumption which is typically taken for granted. Specifically, some of the mediating parameters in these models must functionally depend on measurement settings in their future, \emph{i.e.}, on input parameters associated with later times. This option (often calledretrocausal’‘) has been repeatedly pointed out in the literature, but the exploration of explicit locally-mediated toy-models capable of describing specific entanglement phenomena has begun only in the past decade. A brief survey of such models is included here. These models provide a continuous and consistent description of events associated with spacetime locations, with aspects that are solved "all-at-once" rather than unfolding from the past to the future. The tension between quantum mechanics and relativity which is usually associated with Bell’s Theorem does not occur here. Unlike conventional quantum models, the number of parameters needed to specify the state of a system does not grow exponentially with the number of entangled particles. The promise of generalizing such models to account for all quantum phenomena is identified as a grand challenge.

The so-called stellar formalism allows us to represent the non-Gaussian properties of single-mode quantum states by the distribution of the zeros of their Husimi Q function in phase space. We use this representation in order to derive an infinite hierarchy of single-mode states based on the number of zeros of the Husimi Q function: the stellar hierarchy. We give an operational characterization of the states in this hierarchy with the minimal number of single-photon additions needed to engineer them, and derive equivalence classes under Gaussian unitary operations. We study in detail the topological properties of this hierarchy with respect to the trace norm, and discuss implications for non-Gaussian state engineering, and continuous variable quantum computing.

We study the gap closure with pressure of crystalline molecular hydrogen. The gaps are obtained from grand-canonical Quantum Monte Carlo methods properly extended to quantum and thermal crystals, simulated by Coupled Electron Ion Monte Carlo. Nuclear zero point effects cause a large reduction in the gap (∼2eV). the fundamental indirect gap closes 530GPa for ideal crystals and 330-380GPa for quantum crystals. Beyond this pressure the system enters into a bad metal phase where the density of states at the Fermi level increases with pressure up to $$450 GPa when the direct gap closes. Our work partially supports the interpretation of recent experiments in high pressure hydrogen.

We show – both theoretically and experimentally – that Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering can be distilled. We present a distillation protocol that outputs a perfectly correlated system – the singlet assemblage – in the asymptotic infinite-copy limit, even for inputs that are arbitrarily close to being unsteerable. As figures of merit for the protocol’s performance, we introduce the assemblage fidelity and the singlet-assemblage fraction. These are potentially interesting quantities on their own beyond the current scope. Remarkably, the protocol works well also in the non-asymptotic regime of few copies, in the sense of increasing the singlet-assemblage fraction. We demonstrate the efficacy of the protocol using a hyperentangled photon pair encoding two copies of a two-qubit state. This represents to our knowledge the first observation of deterministic steering concentration. Our findings are not only fundamentally important but may also be useful for semi device-independent protocols in noisy quantum networks.

Exploring the dynamic responses of a material is of importance to both understanding its fundamental physics at high frequencies and potential device applications. Here we develop a phase-field model for predicting the dynamics of ferroelectric materials and study the dynamic responses of ferroelectric domains and domain walls subjected to an ultrafast electric field pulse. We discover a transition of domain evolution mechanisms from pure domain growth at a relatively low field to combined nucleation and growth of domains at a high field. We derive analytical models for the two regimes which allow us to extract the effective mass and damping coefficient of ferroelectric domain walls. The exhibition of two regimes for the ferroelectric domain dynamics at low and high electric fields is expected to be a general phenomenon that would appear for ferroic domains under other ultrafast stimuli. The present work also offers a general framework for studying domain dynamics and obtaining fundamental properties of domain walls and thus for manipulating the dynamic functionalities of ferroelectric materials.

One of the major open questions in particle physics is the issue of the neutrino mass ordering (NMO). The current data of the two long-baseline experiments NOνA and T2K, interpreted in the standard 3-flavor scenario, provide a ∼2.4σ indication in favor of the normal neutrino mass ordering. We show that such an indication is completely washed out if one assumes the existence of neutral-current non-standard interactions (NSI) of the flavor changing type involving the e−τ flavors. This implies that the claim for a discovery of the NMO will require a careful consideration of the impact of hypothetical NSI.

In the linear regime, thermo-electric effects between two conductors are possible only in the presence of an explicit breaking of the electron-hole symmetry. We consider a tunnel junction between two electrodes and show that this condition is no longer required outside the linear regime. In particular, we demonstrate that a thermally-biased junction can display an absolute negative conductance (ANC), and hence thermo-electric power, at a small but finite voltage bias, provided that the density of states of one of the electrodes is gapped and the other is monotonically decreasing. We consider a prototype system that fulfills these requirements, namely a tunnel junction between two different superconductors where the Josephson contribution is suppressed. We discuss this nonlinear thermo-electric effect based on the spontaneous breaking of electron-hole symmetry in the system, characterize its main figures of merit and discuss some possible applications.