Papers

Symmetry-driven wave physics in open systems, exemplified by parity-time (PT) symmetry, has extended the landscape of crystalline phases in materials science to include gain-loss media. Given the growing interest in engineering disorder for wave manipulation, such non-Hermitian crystals motivate the extension of non-Hermitian frameworks into the realm of correlated disorder. Here, we propose hyperuniformity and stealthiness in non-Hermitian systems as a generalization of PT-symmetric crystals to correlated disorder. We extend the scattering-microstructure correspondence to open systems, formulating non-Hermitian hyperuniformity and stealthiness that encompass their Hermitian counterparts. This approach, incorporating a statistical crystallography framework for non-Hermitian materials, demonstrates that real-imaginary cross-correlations of the material potential are irrelevant for achieving hyperuniformity but are essential for characterizing stealthiness, revealing unidirectional scattering phases that are inaccessible in Hermitian materials and in non-Hermitian crystals. By analysing the microstructural statistics of the resulting materials, our results, building on non-Hermitian wave physics, establish a connection to materials science, encompassing conventional descriptors of correlated disorder.

We theoretically investigate the three-dimensional (3D) electron dynamics of graphene in real space under strong laser fields using time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT). We successfully reproduce the reversal of current direction originating from the cancellation of two oppositely directed residual currents, as previously predicted by Morimoto et al. [Y. Morimoto et al., New J. Phys. 24, 033051 (2022)]. By distinguishing contributions from individual orbitals, our results validate the two-level system approximation and also emphasize that the first-principles approach agrees better with experimental results for light-driven residual current, especially in extremely strong fields. Furthermore, our 3D model reveals that the real-space atomic-scale current induced by strong laser fields is concentrated slightly above and below the graphene basal plane, rather than strictly within it. The two oppositely directed currents exhibit a pronounced height separation in the out-of-plane direction, indicating that the ring current is not confined to the graphene plane but forms a rotating 3D circulation loop which is absent in the reduced-dimensional model.

We construct a generalized time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau model to demonstrate the possibility of inducing p- and d-wave components in an originally pure s-wave centrosymmetric superconductor via microwave radiation. In this framework, specializing to $O_h$ point-group symmetry, we introduce gradient terms that couple the s-wave superconducting order parameter with other symmetry-allowed components. The singlet-to-singlet gradient terms are quadratic in spatial derivatives, while, in the presence of spin-orbit coupling, linear-in-derivatives terms coupling singlet and triplet order parameters are also permitted. Through the minimal substitution procedure, these terms enable coupling between different superconducting order parameters via the vector potential, thereby leading to the generation of p-wave, d-wave, and other symmetry-allowed components. Such a manipulation of the superconducting state locally via a microwave beam could be considered as one more facet of the concept of quantum printing.

Altermagnets have recently emerged as a new class of magnetic materials that combine compensated magnetic order with spin-split electronic band structures. In this work, we employ molecular beam epitaxy to grow MnTe thin films with controlled thickness on InP(111)A substrates. Using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, we observe a large spin splitting of $\approx 230$ meV for bulk bands well below the Fermi level and identify surface states that cross the Fermi level. Electrical transport measurements show that a robust anomalous Hall (AH) effect persists down to 2 K and an AH sign reversal occurs near 175 K. By systematically tuning film thickness, growth conditions, and interfacial structure, we demonstrate that the AH response in MnTe films originates from surface states rather than bulk bands. Our first-principles calculations reveal that this surface-dominated AH effect is imprinted by the bulk altermagnetic order and remains unchanged for terminations with opposite Mn magnetic orientations. Our results establish a unique surface transport probe of bulk altermagnetism, demonstrate interface engineering as an effective route to generate and control the AH effect in altermagnets, and provide a unified understanding of the AH response in altermagnetic MnTe films.

The quantum size effect (QSE) and strain effect are two key factors influencing the surface morphology of thin films, which can increase film surface roughness through QSE-induced thickness oscillation and strain-induced island formation, respectively. Surface roughness usually manifests in the early stages of film growth and diminishes beyond a critical thickness. In this work, we employ molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) to grow Sn(100) islands with varying thickness N on bilayer graphene-terminated 6H-SiC(0001) substrates. Scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy measurements reveal an inverse surface roughness effect that highlights the interplay of QSE and misfit strain in shaping the surface morphology of Sn(100) islands. For N =< 10, the islands exhibit flat surfaces, while for N >= 26, the island surfaces become corrugated and patterned. For the intermediate range, i.e., 12 =< N =<24, both flat and patterned surfaces coexist, with the percentage coverage of the patterned surface oscillating as a function of N. By performing density functional theory calculations, we demonstrate that the unusual surface pattern evolution in our MBE-grown Sn(100) islands is a result of the interplay between QSE-induced surface roughing and tensile strain-induced smoothening effect.

We study two central qubits interacting with a transverse-field Ising chain that serves as their environment. The environment is driven linearly in time across its quantum critical points (QCPs) and, during the evolution, is subjected to quantum reset (QR), where it is returned at random times to its initial state. We investigate how such QR of the environmental spin chain modifies the dynamics of entanglement and quantum discord between the qubits. Our results show that in the strong-coupling regime, entanglement and discord exhibit pronounced revivals within the interval bounded by the Ising QCPs, but these revivals diminish as the QR rate increases. In contrast, weak coupling leads to a monotonic reduction of quantum correlations. Numerically, we find that the revival peaks of concurrence decay and scale exponentially with the QR rate, while quantum discord shows no clear scaling behavior. In the weak-coupling regime without QR, the correlations decay monotonically as the driven field crosses the second QCP. When QR is applied, however, both entanglement and discord undergo oscillatory suppression, with the oscillation period increasing as either the QR rate or the ramp time scale is reduced.

We study the half-filled Haldane-Holstein model, where a paradigmatic Chern insulator is coupled to fully dynamical phonons, and provide an unbiased characterization of how retarded electron-phonon interactions destabilize Chern topology. Using determinant quantum Monte Carlo, we find that increasing the coupling drives an abrupt, first-order transition from a Chern insulator to a staggered charge-density wave that acts as a dynamical sublattice (Semenoff) mass. The transition is simultaneously signaled by a nearly quantized many-body Bott index and a real-space local Chern marker constructed from the interacting Green's function, both of which collapse as the charge order parameter becomes extensive. Spectral and open-boundary calculations reveal concomitant gap closing and the loss of boundary spectral weight at the critical coupling. Despite the generic phase problem induced by broken time-reversal symmetry, we show that it remains mild in the low-frequency regime and that the average phase factor sharply tracks the Chern insulator-charge density wave boundary. Our results establish a concrete route by which electron-phonon coupling can trigger a discontinuous collapse of Chern topology and provide experimentally relevant signatures for correlated topological platforms.

Every generative model for crystalline materials harbors a critical structure size beyond which its outputs become unreliable; we call this the extrapolation frontier. Despite its consequences for nanomaterial design, this frontier has never been systematically measured. We introduce RADII, a radius-resolved benchmark of ~75,000 crystal-derived nanoparticle structures (33-11,298 atoms) that treats radius as a continuous scaling knob, tracing generation quality from in- to out-of-distribution under leakage-free splits. Each model is conditioned on target composition and atom count, isolating geometric extrapolation as the evaluation variable. RADII provides frontier-specific diagnostics: per-radius error profiles pinpoint each architecture's scaling ceiling, surface-interior decomposition separates boundary from bulk failures, and cross-metric sequencing reveals which aspect of structural fidelity breaks first. Benchmarking five state-of-the-art architectures, we find that: (i) well-behaved models degrade by ~13% in global positional error beyond training radii, while divergent models show poor fidelity across scales, with local bond fidelity ranging from negligible degradation to over 2x error growth; (ii) no two architectures share a failure sequence, revealing the frontier as a multi-dimensional surface shaped by model family; and (iii) well-behaved models follow the expected geometric scaling exponent alpha ~ 1/3, whose in-distribution fit predicts out-of-distribution error, making frontiers forecastable. Scaling MatterGen to its published parameter count stabilizes sampling but does not close the frontier, while DiffCSP remains unstable at published scale. These findings establish output scale as a first-class evaluation axis for geometric generative models. Code and data: https://github.com/KurbanIntelligenceLab/RADII.

The rotational diffusion of a rigid spherical body decorated with dimers in an explicit fluid environment is reported. This model acts as a simplified representation of an enveloped virus bearing peplomers immersed in a coarse-grained fluid. Using dissipative particle dynamics, we explicitly study the hydrodynamic effects on the rotational diffusion of this virus-inspired particle subjected to oscillatory shear flow and confined between two solid-like surfaces. Since the rotational response depends on the type of imposed flow, we first characterize the oscillatory shear, identifying distinct flow regimes in terms of the so-called Péclet number, $Pe$. Our findings indicate that, under confinement, the rotational diffusivity is strongly modulated by the oscillatory flow amplitude and only weakly affected by the number of peplomers, since their effect is mainly determined by their dimeric structure and associated effective size. For high $Pe$, the rotational diffusion coefficient, $D_{r}$, tends to decrease as the number of peplomers ($N_{s}$) increases, whereas at low $Pe$, rotational diffusion becomes weakly dependent on the number of peplomers. However, at intermediate values of $Pe$, the interplay between oscillatory forcing and thermal fluctuations prevents the emergence of a clear trend between $D_{r}$ and $N_{s}$. Our results provide a clear picture of how, in confined environments, the interplay between fluid flow and thermal fluctuations affects the rotational diffusion of spiked particles, thereby helping to explain how fluid conditions can modify the alignment of peplomers with their potential targets.

We present a non-perturbative approach to correlation functions and polyspectra of locally non-Gaussian fields and develop a semi-perturbative framework that does not rely on a local expansion. This enables the computation of $N$-point functions of non-Gaussian fields even when the mapping between the auxiliary Gaussian field $\zeta_{\rm G}$ and the non-Gaussian field $\zeta({\bf x}) = F(\zeta_{\rm G}({\bf x}))$ is non-analytic. As an example, we consider non-Gaussian fields with exponentially tailed distributions, which can arise, for instance, in ultra-slow-roll models of inflation, and derive some exact analytic results in the strongly non-Gaussian regime.

The coupling between electronic excitations and lattice deformation in van der Waals ferroelectrics is governed by a competition between the electron deformation potential and the inverse piezoelectric effect. While theory predicts that piezoelectric screening should drive a polar-axis contraction in monolayer group-IV monochalcogenides, we demonstrate that in multilayer SnS, the deformation potential provides the dominant contribution, driving a polar-axis expansion even within ferroelectric domains. By correlating polarization-resolved second-harmonic generation microscopy with ultrafast reflectance spectroscopy and first-principles calculations, we resolve the anisotropic lattice response and disentangle intrinsic photostrictive strain from extrinsic thin-film interference artifacts. These results establish a microscopic hierarchy of photostrictive mechanisms and position stacking-engineered SnS as a platform for ultrafast optomechanical transduction.

In contrast to hafnia (HfO2) thin films, where the appearance of switchable ferroelectric polarization can be induced by strain or defect engineering, reliable methods for controlling ferroelectricity are absent in HfO2 nanoparticles. Direct experimental observations of ferroelectric hysteresis and ferroelectric domains in these nanoparticles are also absent. To the best of our knowledge, stress-induced ferroelectric states in the HfO2 nanoparticles have not been explored. In this work, we study the influence of chemical stress on phase diagrams, dielectric and polar properties of spherical HfO2 core-shell nanoparticles using a Landau-Ginzburg-Devonshire free energy functional that includes trilinear and biquadratic couplings involving polar, antipolar, and nonpolar order parameters. The ferroelectric phase exhibits reentrant behavior as a function of nanoparticle size, such that the spontaneous polarization exists only within a limited range of core radii R_c, namely R_cr^min<R_c<R_cr^max. The minimal critical radius R_cr^min is primarily determined by the size dependence of the depolarization field and correlation effects; the maximal critical radius R_cr^max is primarily determined by the size dependence of chemical stresses induced by the elastic defects in the shell. Thus, this work identifies a stress-driven mechanism for reentrant ferroelectricity stabilization in nanoscale HfO2 systems, arising from the competition between depolarization field-induced suppression of ferroelectricity and its stabilization by shell-induced chemical stress. We revealed that relatively large compressive chemical strains are necessary to induce the ferroelectric phase in the HfO2 nanoparticles. Successful chemical strain engineering opens the way for significant enhancement of nanoscale HfO2 polar properties for applications in advanced memory cells and logic devices.

A Gamma-distribution based potential energy landscape (PEL) theory has recently been proposed for supercooled liquids and glasses. This new PEL theory introduces a singularity term in the equation of state (EoS) suitable for representing the pressure of a glassy or jammed system. Using this framework, a parameterised EoS, Z(eta J), is developed with the random-jammed-packing fraction, eta J, as an input. This EoS is capable of accurately calculating the compressibility (pressure) across the entire metastable and glassy region from eta J=0.62 to 0.66, while seamlessly passing through the stable fluid region. Two special cases (paths) are examined in detail. The first path exhibits a singularity at the random close packing eta J=eta rcp=0.64, traversing the metastable region explored by most simulations. Various thermodynamic properties calculated are compared to simulation data, showing excellent agreements. The second case addresses the first analytical EoS for the ideal glass transition in the hard sphere system. Finally, the transport properties of the hard sphere fluid are modeled using the Arrhenius law and the excess entropy scaling law. It is found that both laws fail (with slope changing) at eta=0.555, where the heat capacity peaks and the contributions of inherent structures and jamming effects begin to emerge.

Understanding how water interacts with graphene at the molecular level is essential for advancing nanomaterial applications in filtration, catalysis, and environmental technologies. This study establishes a quantitative baseline for assessing how structural defects, dopants, or surface functionalization may enhance water adsorption, providing insights for the rational design of graphene-based materials in water purification, sensing, and nanofluidic applications. In this work, we employed density functional theory (DFT) with the vdW-C09 functional to investigate the adsorption of a single water molecule on pristine graphene, accurately accounting for long-range dispersion forces. Three high-symmetry adsorption sites-the center of the hexagonal ring, the C-C bond, and the top site-were explored in combination with three molecular orientations: Down, H-bond, and Up configurations. The calculated adsorption energies range from -93 to -145 meV (milli-electron volts), indicating that the interaction is dominated by weak van der Waals forces characteristic of physisorption. The most stable configuration corresponds to the Down orientation above the center of the hexagonal ring, with an adsorption energy of -145 meV and an equilibrium distance of 3.27 A (angstrom), defined as the vertical separation between the oxygen atom of the water molecule and the graphene plane. These results are in close agreement with previous theoretical studies and confirm the non-reactive and hydrophobic nature of pristine graphene.

Mobile spin qubit architectures promise flexible connectivity for efficient quantum error correction and relaxed device layout constraints, but their viability rests on preserving spin coherence during transport. While shuttling transforms spatial disorder into time-dependent noise, its net impact on spin coherence remains an open question. Here we demonstrate systematic noise mitigation during spin shuttling in a linear $^{28}$Si/SiGe quantum dot device. First, by passively reducing magnetic field gradients, we minimize charge-noise coupling to the spin and double the spatially averaged dephasing time $T_2^*(x_n)$ from $4.4$ to $8.5\,\mu\text{s}$. Next, we exploit motional narrowing by periodically shuttling the qubit, achieving a further enhancement in coherence time up to $T_{2}^{*,sh} = 11.5\,\mu\text{s}$. Finally, we incorporate dynamical decoupling techniques while periodically shuttling over distances exceeding $200\,\text{nm}$, reaching $T_\text{2}^{H,sh}= 32\,\mu\text{s}$. For the same setup, we demonstrate that dressed-state shuttling provides robust protection against low-frequency noise with a decay time $T_R^{\text{sh}} = 21\,\mu\text{s}$, without the overhead of pulsed control and allowing protection during one-way spin transport. By preserving coherence over timescales exceeding typical gate and readout operations, the demonstrated strategies establish mobile spin qubits as a viable solution for scalable silicon quantum processors.

Stoichiometric materials of Eu(III) offer a promising platform for quantum memories attributable to their unique capability to display a distinctive, nondegenerate J = 0 transition, which enables precise mapping of optical quantum states into their hyperfine structure for reliable storage and retrieval on demand. However, placing Eu(III) into chiral polar structures, which are necessary for achieving narrow spectral linewidths and long optical lifetimes, is a daunting task. Here, we discover Eu2(SeO3)2(SO4)(H2O)2, a rare Eu(III) material that exhibits chiral polar symmetries encompassing both local and global structures. This unique structure is shaped by an appropriate combination of asymmetric ligands. The chirality fosters dipole-dipole interactions and J-mixing, as characterized by second-harmonic generation, photoluminescence, and magnetic susceptibility. The broken inversion symmetry is supported by the phase-matching behavior of second-harmonic generation. The J = 0 transition is observed at 578 nm with a narrow linewidth at 78 K and a microsecond-scale optical lifetime. The analysis of magnetic susceptibility data using Van Vleck theory results in an effective magnetic moment of 3.33 {\mu}B/Eu3+ and J-mixing. Heat capacity data reveal underlying phonon dynamics in the material. This study demonstrates a pathway toward realizing new stoichiometric Eu3+ compounds with potential for optically addressable quantum memory applications.

Recent experiments on crosslinked gels quenched from solvent-rich to solvent-poor conditions show solvent-rich domains embedded in a gel-rich matrix. These domains coarsen and then undergo kinetic arrest at micron scales for hours, before macroscopic drainage to equilibrium over even longer times. Motivated by these observations, we develop a minimal model that couples capillarity-driven Darcy permeation to the viscoelastic-to-elastic crossover of the polymer network. In the viscoelastic regime, the Young–Laplace traction at curved solvent–gel interfaces generates a pressure gradient in the solvent pores of the gel that drives solvent flow and coarsening. In the elastic regime, the same interfacial traction is balanced by elastic stress. This force balance eliminates pressure gradients in the solvent-filled pores of the gel, removing the Darcy driving force and arresting coarsening. Using the kinetic criterion $t(\lambda_{\rm arrest}) \sim \tau_{\rm el}$, we predict stiffness-dependent coarsening and arrest laws. For melt-like, polymer-rich gels, $\lambda(t)\sim G^{-1/2} t^{1/4}$ and $\lambda_{\rm arrest}\sim G^{-1/2}$. For low polymer fractions where the mesh size controls transport, $\lambda(t)\sim G^{-1/3} t^{1/3}$ and $\lambda_{\rm arrest}\sim G^{-1/3}$. The predicted $G^{-1/2}$ arrest scaling for melt-like gels agrees with experiment.

Analog Ising machines (AIMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for combinatorial optimization, utilizing physical dynamics to solve Ising problems with high energy efficiency. However, the performance of traditional optimization and sampling algorithms on these platforms is often limited by inherent measurement noise. We introduce BRAIN (Boltzmann Reinforcement for Analog Ising Networks), a distribution learning framework that utilizes variational reinforcement learning to approximate the Boltzmann distribution. By shifting from state-by-state sampling to aggregating information across multiple noisy measurements, BRAIN is resilient to Gaussian noise characteristic of AIMs. We evaluate BRAIN across diverse combinatorial topologies, including the Curie-Weiss and 2D nearest-neighbor Ising systems. We find that under realistic 3% Gaussian measurement noise, BRAIN maintains 98% ground state fidelity, whereas Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods degrade to 51% fidelity. Furthermore, BRAIN reaches the MCMC-equivalent solution up to 192x faster under these conditions. BRAIN exhibits $\mathcal{O}(N^{1.55})$ scaling up to 65,536 spins and maintains robustness against severe measurement uncertainty up to 40%. Beyond ground state optimization, BRAIN accurately captures thermodynamic phase transitions and metastable states, providing a scalable and noise-resilient method for utilizing analog computing architectures in complex optimizations.

Magnetic skyrmions in proximity to superconductors offer a route to engineering topological superconductivity due to the synthetic spin-orbit coupling engendered by the spin twist of the skyrmion texture. Previous theoretical works show that this leads to Majorana zero modes (MZMs) in skyrmion-vortex pairs for s-wave superconductors. Here we investigate this mechanism in fully gapped d+is and d+id superconductors. We find the surprising result that while stable MZMs are found in large parts of the phase diagram, strongly enhanced d-wave pairing or stronger skyrmion-induced spin twisting can in fact destroy topology unlike in s-wave superconductors. This effect can be understood from the non-trivial spatial structure of the d-wave pairing, and mixing of odd and even angular-momentum pairing channels in a rotated frame which untwists the skyrmion texture. Our results inform the feasibility of realizing MZMs with unconventional superconductors in such heterostructures.

Quantum annealing leverages the properties of interacting quantum spin systems to solve computational problems, typically optimisation problems. Current hardware now has capabilities that can be used to solve condensed matter physics problems, too. In this topical review, we provide an overview of quantum annealing aimed at condensed matter physicists, to show the mutual benefits of working together to understand and improve how quantum annealers work, and to use them to advance condensed matter physics.

Majorana zero modes, the elementary building blocks for the quantum bits of topological quantum computers, are known to suffer from hybridization as their wavefunctions begin to overlap. This breaks the ground state degeneracy, splitting their energy levels and leading to an accumulation of error when performing topological quantum gates. Here we show that the energy splitting of the Majorana zero modes can become negative, which can be utilized to reduce the average hybridization energy of the total gate. We present two illustrative examples where negative hybridization suppresses gate errors to such an extent that they remain below the fault-tolerance threshold. As an intrinsic property of Majorana zero modes, negative hybridization enables systems based on imperfect Majorana zero modes to regain functionality for quantum information processing.

RG flows and IR phases of QFTs can be constrained by generalized symmetries and their anomalies. Broken symmetries act on the space of coupling constants of families of theories, and can also have IR-constraining family anomalies. We generalize family anomaly considerations to cases of broken generalized/categorical symmetries, including higher-group and non-invertible symmetries. We consider the anomaly inflow and SymTFTs of such generalized families of QFTs, and their implications for RG flows and constraints on the IR phases. As examples, we apply family anomalies to study the IR phases of $4d$ QCD-like theories deformed by irrelevant, multi-fermion interactions.

High-temperature spin transport in integrable quantum spin chains exhibits a rich dynamical phase diagram, including ballistic, superdiffusive, and diffusive regimes. While integrability is known to survive in static and periodically driven systems, its fate in the complete absence of time-translation symmetry, particularly in interacting random quantum circuits, has remained unclear. Here we construct integrable random quantum circuits built from inhomogeneous XXZ R-matrices. Remarkably, integrability is preserved for arbitrary sequences of gate layers, ranging from quasiperiodic to fully random, thereby explicitly breaking both continuous and discrete time-translation symmetry. Using large-scale time-dependent density-matrix renormalization group simulations at infinite temperature and half filling, we map out the resulting spin-transport phase diagram and identify ballistic, superdiffusive, and diffusive regimes controlled by the spectral parameters of the R-matrices. The spatiotemporal structure of spin correlations within each regime depends sensitively on the inhomogeneity, exhibiting spatial asymmetry and sharp peak structures tied to near-degenerate quasiparticle velocities. To account for these findings, we develop a generalized hydrodynamics framework adapted to time-dependent integrable circuits, yielding Euler-scale predictions for correlation functions, Drude weights, and diffusion bounds. This approach identifies the quasiparticles governing transport and quantitatively captures both the scaling exponents and fine structures of the correlation profiles observed numerically. Our results demonstrate that exact Yang-Baxter integrability is compatible with stochastic quantum dynamics and establish generalized hydrodynamics as a predictive framework for transport in time-dependent integrable systems.

Computational discovery of magnetic materials remains challenging because magnetism arises from the competition between kinetic energy and Coulomb interaction that is often beyond the reach of standard electronic-structure methods. Here we tackle this challenge by directly solving the many-electron Schrödinger equation with neural-network variational Monte Carlo, which provides a highly expressive variational wavefunction for strongly correlated systems. Applying this technique to transition metal dichalcogenide moiré semicondutors, we predict itinerant ferromagnetism in WSe$_2$/WS$_2$ and an antiferromagnetic insulator in twisted $\Gamma$-valley homobilayer, using the same neural network without any physics input beyond the microscopic Hamiltonian. Crucially, both types of magnetic states are obtained from a single calculation within the $S_z=0$ sector, removing the need to compute and compare multiple $S_z$ sectors. This significantly reduces computational cost and paves the way for faster and more reliable magnetic material design.

Dissipative phase transitions are strongly shaped by the symmetries of the Liouvillian, yet a clear understanding of the quantitative impact of weak and strong symmetries on critical behavior is presently lacking. We study a squeezed-photon model with single- and two-photon losses, realizing weak and strong symmetries in the simplest possible setting. The two symmetries exhibit identical Gaussian static fluctuations, whereas the order parameter and the asymptotic decay rate display distinct scaling behaviors. Our one-loop Keldysh analysis, together with cumulant-expansion numerics, reveals sharply different critical scaling with respect to the thermodynamic scaling parameter. This shows that weak and strong symmetries lead to distinct dynamical universality classes despite originating from the same symmetry group in the closed system. Our results provide a clear quantitative demonstration that strong symmetries fundamentally reshape dissipative criticality.

Local observables and their translationally invariant counterparts are generally thought to provide the same predictions for experiments. While this equivalence holds for expectation values in clean systems (up to finite-size effects), it is often assumed to extend to correlation functions, where it need not hold. We examine this assumption from the perspective of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. Specifically, we explore the spectral functions of local and translationally invariant observables in the spin-1 tilted-field Ising chain with periodic and open boundary conditions. We identify the contexts in which these observables and boundary conditions differ and those in which they are interchangeable. We unveil an off-diagonal eigenstate thermalization in translationally invariant systems for matrix elements between energy eigenstates with different quasimomenta.

Although entanglement can boost metrological precision beyond the standard quantum limit, the advantage often disappears with particle loss. We demonstrate that scrambling safeguards precision by dispersing information about the encoded parameter into many-body correlations. For Haar-random scrambling unitaries, we derive exact formulas for the average quantum Fisher information (QFI) of the reduced state after tracing out lost particles. The result exhibits a threshold; any remaining subsystem larger than $N/2$ recovers the full QFI, while smaller subsystems contain negligible information. We link this threshold to the scrambling-induced transition from area-law to volume-law entanglement and the associated growth of the Schmidt rank. We outline two realizations – a brickwork circuit and chaotic XX-chain evolution – and demonstrate the protection of one-axis-twisted probes against the loss of up to half of the particles.

We study one-dimensional disordered systems with average non-invertible symmetries, where quenched disorder may locally break part of the symmetry while preserving it upon disorder averaging. A canonical example is the random transverse-field Ising model, which at criticality exhibits an average Kramers-Wannier duality. We consider the general setting in which the full symmetry is described by a $G$-graded fusion category $\mathcal{B}$, whose identity component $\mathcal{A}$ remains exact, while the components with nontrivial $G$-grading are realized either exactly or only on average. We develop a topological holographic framework that encodes the symmetry data of the 1D system in a 2D topological order $\mathcal{Z}[\mathcal{A}]$ (the Drinfeld center of $\mathcal{A}$), enriched by an exact or, respectively, average $G$ symmetry. Within this framework, we obtain a complete classification of anomalies and average symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases: when the components with nontrivial $G$-grading are realized only on average, the symmetry is anomaly-free if and only if $\mathcal{Z}[\mathcal{A}]$ admits a magnetic Lagrangian algebra that is invariant under the permutation action of $G$ on anyons. When an anomaly is present, we show that the ground state of a single disorder realization is long-range entangled with probability one in the thermodynamic limit, and is expected to exhibit power-law Griffiths singularities in the low-energy spectrum. Finally, we present an explicit, exactly solvable lattice model based on a symmetry-enriched string-net construction. It yields trivial ground state ensemble in the anomaly-free case, and exhibits exotic low-energy behavior in the presence of an average anomaly.

Many metal manufacturing processes involve phase change phenomena, which include melting, boiling, and vaporization. These phenomena often occur concurrently. A prototypical 1D model for understanding the phase change phenomena is the Stefan problem. There is a large body of literature discussing the analytical solution to the two-phase Stefan problem that describes only the melting or boiling of phase change materials (PCMs) with one moving interface. Density-change effects that induce additional fluid flow during phase change are generally neglected in the literature to simplify the math of the Stefan problem. In our recent work [1], we provide analytical and numerical solutions to the three-phase Stefan problem with simultaneous occurrences of melting, solidification, boiling, and condensation in Cartesian coordinates. Our current work builds on our previous work to solve a more challenging problem: the three-phase Stefan problem in spherical coordinates for finite-sized particles. There are three moving interfaces in this system: the melt front, the boiling front, and the outer boundary which is in contact with the atmosphere. Although an analytical solution could not be found for this problem, we solved the governing equations using a fixed-grid sharp-interface method with second-order spatio-temporal accuracy. Using a small-time analytical solution, we predict a reasonably accurate estimate of temperature (in the three phases) and interface positions and velocities at the start of the simulation. Our numerical method is validated by reproducing the two-phase nanoparticle melting results of Font et al. [2]. Lastly, we solve the three-phase Stefan problems numerically to demonstrate the importance of kinetic energy terms during phase change of smaller (nano) particles. In contrast, these effects diminish for large particles (microns and larger).

The electrical, magnetic and optical properties of edge channels consisting of spin circuits that contain single carriers in nanostructures of silicon, silicon carbide and cadmium fluoride are investigated. It is demonstrated that due to the presence of chains of negative-U dipole centers at the boundaries of the spin circuits, the latter are Andreev molecules for generating terahertz radiation.