Transition-metal chalcogenides (TMCs) materials have attracted increasing interest both for fundamental research and industrial applications. Among all these materials, two-dimensional (2D) compounds with honeycomb-like structure possess exotic electronic structures. Here, we report a systematic study of TMC monolayer AgTe fabricated by direct depositing Te on the surface of Ag(111) and annealing.

Three-dimensional (3D) topological insulators (TIs) have been studied for approximately fifteen years, but those made from group-IV elements, especially Ge and Sn, seem particularly attractive owing to their nontoxicity, sizable intrinsic spin-orbit coupling (SOC) strength and natural compatibility with the current semiconductor industry. However, group-IV elemental TIs have rarely been reported, except

Negative thermal expansion (NTE) of materials is an intriguing phenomenon challenging the concept of traditional lattice dynamics and of importance for a variety of applications. Progresses in this field develop markedly and update continuously our knowledge on the NTE behavior of materials. In this article, we review the most recent understandings on the underlying mechanisms (anharmonic phonon vibration

Spiral spin liquids are unique classical spin liquids that occur in many frustrated spin systems, but do not comprise a new phase of matter. Owing to extensive classical ground-state degeneracy, the spins in a spiral spin liquid thermally fluctuate cooperatively from a collection of spiral configurations at low temperatures. These spiral propagation wavevectors form a continuous manifold in reciprocal

Two-dimensional van der Waals magnetic materials are intriguing for applications in the future spintronics devices, so it is crucial to explore strategy to control the magnetic properties. Here, we carried out first-principles calculations and Monte Carlo simulations to investigate the effect of biaxial strain and hydrostatic pressure on the magnetic properties of the bilayer CrI3. We found that the

Based on the random phase approximation calculation in two-orbital honeycomb lattice model, we investigate the pairing symmetry of Ni-based transition-metal trichalcogenides by electron doping access to type-II van Hove singularities (vHs). We find that chiral even-parity d + id-wave (Eg) state is suppressed by odd-parity p + ip-wave (Eu) state when electron doping approaches the type-II vHs. The type-II

This supplement contains 222 (angel number) further papers on false or unconfirmed ferroelectric properties in single crystals, ceramics and polymers and only concerns bulk materials. Thus, the number of such papers has reached huge value 727. The papers marked in red have drastically broken the principles of symmetry because they reported the existence of ferroelectricity in crystals without the polar

I discuss the scope and naturalness of the proton mass decomposition (or sum rule) published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 74, 1071 (1995) and answer a few criticisms that appeared recently in the literature, focusing particularly on its interpretation and the quantum anomalous energy contribution. I comment on the so-called frame-independent or invariant-mass decomposition from the trace of the energy-momentum

In conventional quantum mechanics, quantum no-deleting and no-cloning theorems indicate that two different and nonorthogonal states cannot be perfectly and deterministically deleted and cloned, respectively. Here, we investigate the quantum deleting and cloning in a pseudo-unitary system. We first present a pseudo-Hermitian Hamiltonian with real eigenvalues in a two-qubit system. By using the pseudo-unitary

Alkaline-earth-like (AEL) atoms with two valence electrons and a nonzero nuclear spin can be excited to Rydberg state for quantum computing. Typical AEL ground states possess no hyperfine splitting, but unfortunately a GHz-scale splitting seems necessary for Rydberg excitation. Though strong magnetic fields can induce a GHz-scale splitting, weak fields are desirable to avoid noise in experiments. Here

Nonlinear heat transfer can be exploited to reveal novel transport phenomena and thus enhance people’s ability to manipulate heat flux at will. However, there has not been a mature discipline called nonlinear thermotics like its counterpart in optics or acoustics to make a systematic summary of relevant researches. In the current review, we focus on recent progress in an important part of nonlinear

In this work, we demonstrate surface plasmon resonance properties and field confinement under a strong interaction between a waveguide and graphene nanoribbons (GNRs), obtained by coupling with a nanocavity. The optical transmission of a waveguide-cavity-graphene structure is investigated by finite-difference time-domain simulations and coupled-mode theory. The resonant frequency and intensity of the

We employ the Lippmann-Schwinger formalism to derive the analytical solutions of the transmission and reflection coefficients through a one-dimensional open quantum system, in which particle loss or gain on one lattice site located at x = 0, or particle loss and gain on the lattice sites located at \(x = \pm {\textstyle{L \over 2}}\) are considered respectively. The gain and loss on the lattice site

Remote state preparation (RSP) provides a useful way of transferring quantum information between two distant nodes based on the previously shared entanglement. In this paper, we study RSP of an arbitrary single-photon state in two degrees of freedom (DoFs). Using hyper-entanglement as a shared resource, our first goal is to remotely prepare the single-photon state in polarization and frequency DoFs

We study theoretically the single impurity effect on graphene-based superconductors. Four different pairing symmetries are discussed. Sharp in-gap resonant peaks are found near the impurity site for the d + id pairing symmetry and the p + ip pairing symmetry when the chemical potential is large. As the chemical potential decreases, the in-gap states are robust for the d + id pairing symmetry while

Two-dimensional (2D) materials, due to its excellent mechanical, unique electrical and optical properties, have become hot materials in the field of photocatalysis. Especially, 2D heterostructures can well inhibit the recombination of photogenerated electrons and holes in photocatalysis because of its special energy band structures and carrier transport characteristics, which are conducive to enhancing

Considering a double-headed Brownian motor moving with both translational and rotational degrees of freedom, we investigate the directed transport properties of the system in a traveling-wave potential. It is found that the traveling wave provides the essential condition of the directed transport for the system, and at an appropriate angular frequency, the positive current can be optimized. A general

Simulation of open quantum dynamics for various Hamiltonians and spectral densities are ubiquitous for studying various quantum systems. On a quantum computer, only log2N qubits are required for the simulation of an N-dimensional quantum system, hence simulation in a quantum computer can greatly reduce the computational complexity compared with classical methods. Recently, a quantum simulation approach

Organic phototransistors (OPTs), compared to traditional inorganic counterparts, have attracted a great deal of interest because of their inherent flexibility, light-weight, easy and low-cost fabrication, and are considered as potential candidates for next-generation wearable electronics. Currently, significant advances have been made in OPTs with the development of new organic semiconductors and optimization

With the rapidly increasing integration density and power density in nanoscale electronic devices, the thermal management concerning heat generation and energy harvesting becomes quite crucial. Since phonon is the major heat carrier in semiconductors, thermal transport due to phonons in mesoscopic systems has attracted much attention. In quantum transport studies, the nonequilibrium Green’s function

In the past two decades, the revolutionary technologies of creating cold and ultracold molecules have provided cutting-edge experiments for studying the fundamental phenomena of collision physics. To a large degree, the recent explosion of interest in the molecular collisions has been sparked by dramatic progress of experimental capabilities and theoretical methods, which permit molecular collisions

Explosive astrophysical transients at cosmological distances can be used to place precision tests of the basic assumptions of relativity theory, such as Lorentz invariance, the photon zero-mass hypothesis, and the weak equivalence principle (WEP). Signatures of Lorentz invariance violations (LIV) include vacuum dispersion and vacuum birefringence. Sensitive searches for LIV using astrophysical sources

Plasmon-free surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) substrates have attracted tremendous attention for their abundant sources, excellent chemical stability, superior biocompatibility, good signal uniformity, and unique selectivity to target molecules. Recently, researchers have made great progress in fabricating novel plasmon-free SERS substrates and exploring new enhancement strategies to improve

The tunable bandgap from 0.3 eV to 2 eV of black phosphorus (BP) makes it to fill the gap in graphene. When studying the properties of BP more comprehensive, scientists have discovered that many two-dimensional materials, such as tellurene, antimonene, bismuthene, indium selenide and tin sulfide, have similar structures and properties to black phosphorus thus called black phosphorus analogs. In this

As high-performance organic semiconductors, π-conjugated polymers have attracted much attention due to their charming advantages including low-cost, solution processability, mechanical flexibility, and tunable optoelectronic properties. During the past several decades, the great advances have been made in polymers-based OFETs with p-type, n-type or even ambipolar characterics. Through chemical modification

Ferromagnetism and superconductivity are generally considered to be antagonistic phenomena in condensed matter physics. Here, we theoretically study the interplay between the ferromagnetic and superconducting orders in a recent discovered monolayered CoSb superconductor with an orthorhombic symmetry and net magnetization, and demonstrate the pairing symmetry of CoSb as a candidate of non-unitary superconductor

Traditional simulation methods have made prominent progress in aiding experiments for understanding thermal transport properties of materials, and in predicting thermal conductivity of novel materials. However, huge challenges are also encountered when exploring complex material systems, such as formidable computational costs. As a rising computational method, machine learning has a lot to offer in

Zirconia has many important phases with Zr coordination varying from six-fold in the orthorhombic phase to eight-fold in the cubic and tetragonal phases. Development of empirical potentials to describe these zirconia phases is an important but long-standing challenge, and it is a bottleneck for theoretical investigation of large zirconia structures. Here, instead of using the standard core—shell model

Brownian particles suspended in disordered crowded environments often exhibit non-Gaussian normal diffusion (NGND), whereby their displacements grow with mean square proportional to the observation time and non-Gaussian statistics. Their distributions appear to decay almost exponentially according to “universal” laws largely insensitive to the observation time. This effect is generically attributed

There are some similarities between bursts of repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs) and giant pulses (GPs) of pulsars. To explore possible relations between them, we study the cumulative energy distributions of these two phenomena using the observations of repeating FRB 121102 and the GPs of Crab pulsar. We find that the power-law slope of GPs (with fluence ≥130 Jy·ms) is 2.85±0.10. The energy distribution

Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) has been widely studied due to its unique advantages such as remote sensing, real-time multi-elemental detection and none-to-little damage. With the efforts of researchers around the world, LIBS has been developed by leaps and bounds. Moreover, in recent years, more and more Chinese LIBS researchers have put tremendous energy in promoting LIBS applications

Nuclear clusters or voids in the inner crust of neutron stars were predicted to have various shapes collectively nicknamed nuclear pasta. The recent review in Ref. [1] by López, Dorso and Frank summarized their systematic investigations into properties especially the morphological and thermodynamical phase transitions of the nuclear pasta within a Classical Molecular Dynamics model, providing further

The magnetic and electronic properties of strontium titanate with different carbon dopant configurations are explored using first-principles calculations with a generalized gradient approximation (GGA) and the GGA+U approach. Our results show that the structural stability, electronic properties and magnetic properties of C-doped SrTiCO3 strongly depend on the distance between carbon dopants. In both

Nonlocal quantum correlations among the quantum subsystems play essential roles in quantum science. The violation of the Svetlichny inequality provides sufficient conditions of genuine tripartite nonlocality. We provide tight upper bounds on the maximal quantum value of the Svetlichny operators under local filtering operations, and present a qualitative analytical analysis on the hidden genuine nonlocality

In this short review we elaborate the significance of resummation in kT factorization theorem, and summarize the recent progresses in the calculations of the next-to-leading order contributions to B meson decays from the perturbative QCD (PQCD) approach. We also comment on the current status of the PQCD approach and highlight some key issues to develop it in the near future for more phenomenological

Clathrate hydrates (CHs) are one of the most promising molecular structures in applications of gas capture and storage, and gas separations. Fundamental knowledge of mechanical characteristics of CHs is of crucial importance for assessing gas storage and separations at cold conditions, as well as understanding their stability and formation mechanisms. Here, the tensile mechanical properties of structural

We use an interferometic scheme to extract the phase distribution of the electron wave packet from above-threshold ionization in elliptically polarized laser fields. In this scheme, an electron wave packet released from a circularly polarized laser pulse acts as a reference wave and interferes with the electron wave packet ionized by a time-delayed counter-rotating elliptically polarized laser field

In this paper, we visit the thermodynamic criticality and thermodynamic curvature of the charged AdS black hole in a new phase space. It is shown that when the square of the total charge of the charged black hole is considered as a thermodynamic quantity, the charged AdS black hole also admits a van der Waals-type critical behavior without the help of thermodynamic pressure and thermodynamic volume

Quantum secure direct communication provides a direct means of conveying secret information via quantum states among legitimate users. The past two decades have witnessed its great strides both theoretically and experimentally. However, the security analysis of it still stays in its infant. Some practical problems in this field to be solved urgently, such as detector efficiency mismatch, side-channel

We retrospect three abstract models for heat engines which include a classic abstract model in textbook of thermal physics, a primary abstract model for finite-time heat engines, and a refined abstract model for finite-time heat engines. The detailed models of heat engines in literature of finite-time thermodynamics may be mapped into the refined abstract model. The future developments based on the

Carbon has three hybridization forms of sp−, sp2− and sp3−, and the combination of different forms can obtain different kinds of carbon allotropes, such as diamond, carbon nanotubes, fullerene, graphynes (GYs) and graphdiyne (GDY). Among them, the GDY molecule is a single-layer two-dimensional (2D) planar structure material with highly π-conjugation formed by sp− and sp2− hybridization. GDY has a carbon

One of the most important multipartite entangled states, Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state (GHZ), serves as a fundamental resource for quantum foundation test, quantum communication and quantum computation. To increase the number of entangled particles, significant experimental efforts should been invested due to the complexity of optical setup and the difficulty in maintaining the coherence condition

In view of wide applications of structured light fields and plasmonic vortices, we propose the concept of compound plasmonic vortex and design several structured plasmonic vortex generators. This kind of structured plasmonic vortex generators consists of multiple spiral nanoslits and they can generate two or more concentric plasmonic vortices. Different from Laguerre-Gaussian beam, the topological

Measuring the orbital angular momentum (OAM) of vortex beams, including the magnitude and the sign, has great application prospects due to its theoretically unbounded and orthogonal modes. Here, the sign-distinguishable OAM measurement in optomechanics is proposed, which is achieved by monitoring the shift of the transmission spectrum of the probe field in a double Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) rotational-cavity