Papers

High-order exceptional points (EPs) emerging in non-Hermitian systems have attracted broad interest for their significantly enhanced sensitivity to perturbations. However, quantum sensing schemes based on high-order EPs remain scarce, due to the experimental challenge of fine-tuning the system to such an extremely sensitive isolated point. Here we propose a four-channel dissipative coupling model that supports both fourth-order exceptional surfaces and second-order exceptional volumes. This non-Hermitian model can be realized in a thermal atomic system, and its complex energy spectra can be determined via electromagnetically induced transparency spectroscopy. The proposed model exhibits a characteristic fourth-order response to multiple physical quantities such as the laser detuning and the distance between optical channels, significantly surpassing the response of second-order EPs. We further reveal the sensitivity-robustness trade-off under experimental noise. Our work opens a route toward high-performance sensing leveraging higher-order EPs.

In the early universe, a primordial magnetic field undergoes a turbulent decay while its length scale increases due to an inverse cascade. The size of the largest processed eddy scales with the Alfvén speed and grows with time. In a diagram of Alfvén speed vs.\ length scale, all possible solutions must lie on a line through the origin with a slope proportional to the inverse of the present time. In principle, however, such lines can also be defined for earlier times. The lines for earlier times form isochrones that may be observationally accessible, for example through the magnetically driven stochastic gravitational wave background. However, the position and slope of these isochrones is sensitive to the zero point of the time. Here, we show that for any initial magnetic field, a proper time can be determined such that the resulting isochrones at early times are nearly parallel to those at late times, i.e., they have the same slope. We use two-dimensional numerical simulations of decaying MHD turbulence and vary the initial position of the peak of the magnetic energy spectrum. In this case, the evolution is governed by the conservation of anastrophy. A fit to the Alfvén time yields an accurate estimate of the factor by which the decay time is longer than the Alfvén time, while the offset in the fit provides an estimate of the proper time that needs to be added to the nominal time since the beginning of each simulation. We also find that the presence of an initial velocity field of realistic strength helps producing a more straight track from the beginning. The magnetic field parameters lie on universal isochrones even for early times. They provide a testable framework for magnetic fields generated at times as early as the end of inflation, starting with the time of reheating.

Dark matter subhalos and intermediate-mass black holes wandering in the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy are difficult to directly detect through electromagnetic observations, yet knowing their abundance is essential for understanding galaxy formation and evolution. We propose parallel stellar streams as dynamical imprints left on stellar streams by dark perturbers, including starless dark matter subhalos and wandering intermediate-mass black holes. We report that a single stream can split into two parallel structures after an encounter with a dark perturber. This scenario is supported by analytical modelling and N-body simulations. We also discuss how we can distinguish parallel stellar streams from other formation processes based on observables. We extend the theoretical picture of stream-subhalo interactions by showing that encounters with dark perturbers can generate density depletions perpendicular to the stream elongation, leading to parallel stellar stream morphologies beyond conventional gap-like signatures.

We present a new framework for extending Chapman-Enskog theory beyond the hard-sphere fluid model. Rather than relying on effective hard sphere diameters, the approach makes use of on an exchange function which can be related to the thermodynamic properties of the system. We show that two existing extensions, including modified Enskog theory (MET), fit into this new framework. Based on our approach, we propose an alternative to MET that takes into account the potential interaction energy associated with the inter-particle interactions in the fluid. The proposed expression is applied to predicting the shear viscosity of several different simulated fluid models across a wide set of densities $0.05 \leq \rho^* \leq 0.8$ and temperatures $1.5 \leq T^* \leq 4.0$ in Lennard-Jones units. The fluid models considered include both the Weeks-Chandler-Anderson (WCA) fluid and the Lennard-Jones (LJ) fluid. At low and intermediate density, here taken to be $\rho^* \leq 0.3$, we report mean relative prediction errors between $2\%$ and $4\%$ for both these. Across all densities considered, the largest mean relative errors reported are $4.4\%$ and $8.1\%$ for the WCA fluid and LJ fluid respectively. We also investigate other interaction models, including a diatomic molecular model, in order to better understand the limitations of our approach.

Pulsar Wind Nebulae (PWNe) are relativistic, magnetic winds comprised of radiating electrons and positrons, powered by an energetic pulsar. The pulsar continuously injects particles into the PWN that are accelerated at the termination shock. As the relativistic particles enter the PWN, they radiate away the energy received at the shock as they interact with the PWN environment, generating synchrotron emission from interactions with the magnetic field of the PWN and Inverse Compton Scattering (ICS) from interactions with the local photon fields. Synchrotron emission is observed from the majority of known PWNe from radio to X-ray energies, and the ICS is observed in the $\gamma$-ray bands, from MeV to TeV energies. The particle acceleration processes at the termination shock and elsewhere within the PWN remain to be understood. Recent progress in theoretical studies have provided the capability to explain broadband observations of several PWNe including their spectral and spatial features. This work reviews some of the most compelling outcomes of recent literature, outlining the outstanding questions that remain to be answered, and how the future prospects of $\gamma$-ray astronomy will be instrumental in advancing the current understanding of PWNe.

We theoretically show that circularly polarized phonons induce electronic magnetization and drive a topological phase transition via phonon Floquet engineering. Considering the electronic states modulated by circularly polarized phonons on a honeycomb lattice, we show that such lattice dynamics generates an effective next-nearest-neighbor electron hopping, leading to a Haldane-type mass term. Circularly polarized phonon breaks time-reversal symmetry (TRS) and opens a gap at valley points, undergoing phase transition from a trivial insulator to a Chern insulator. Moreover, the orbital and spin magnetizations emerge due to the breaking of TRS. Our results show that circularly polarized phonons serve as an effective magnetic field to engineer magnetism and topology, offering new opportunities for phonon Floquet approaches.

Fibre inflation, Poly-instanton inflation and (Loop) Blow-up inflation are among the most popular Kähler moduli based inflationary models realized in the standard LARGE volume scenarios (LVS). In this article, we present a unified framework in which all these three LVS inflationary models can be realized by using (different orientifolds of) a single Calabi-Yau (CY) threefold. In fact, the desired CY threefold needs to have a K3- or ${\mathbb T}^4$-fibration structure along with two diagonal del Pezzo divisors, and a so-called `Wilson' divisor which corresponds to a surface realized as a ${\mathbb P}^1$ fibration over ${\mathbb T}^2$s. For classification purpose, we perform a detailed scan of the CY geometries with $1 \leq h^{1,1}({\rm CY}) \leq 6$ that arise from the triangulation of the four-dimensional reflexive polytopes of the Kreuzer-Skarke database. In this regard, after scanning around 100,000 CY geometries and the corresponding topologies of around a million of toric divisors, we find two CY threefolds satisfying these requirements for $1 \leq h^{1,1}({\rm CY}) \leq 4$, while there are 14 and 45 candidate CY geometries for $h^{1,1}({\rm CY}) = 5$ and $h^{1,1}({\rm CY}) = 6$, respectively. We discuss the extended applications of such CY threefolds for cosmological model building in string theoretic frameworks.

We explore the merits of building the Bethe-Salpeter absorption spectrum in a specific energy range using analytic continuation techniques. Specifically, we calculate iteratively a few $\bar{\bar \alpha}(z_k)$ polarizability tensors for a coarse set of $(z_k)$ frequencies in the complex-plane. These data allow constructing a continued-fraction representation for $\bar{\bar{\alpha}}(z)$ that is used to calculate the absorption spectrum close to the real energy axis in the desired energy range. The number and location of these sampling complex frequencies are discussed. The importance of building a continued-fraction representation of the full polarizability tensor with matrix-valued coefficients is emphasized. We show how to extract the poles of the continued fraction as a tool for analyzing the resulting spectra. We study as examples the valence excitations of a paradigmatic dipeptide, the C$_{60}$ fullerene and its PCBM derivative, together with the description of the surface plasmon resonance of the Ag$_{20}$ silver cluster. Further, the high-energy C$_{60}$ X-ray absorption spectrum is explored.

Data-driven modeling shows significant promise for faster-than-real-time forecasting of fluid flows. For real-world engineering applications (e.g., flow control), models must contend with limited, imperfect, and incomplete experimental measurements. In this work, we present an analysis of data-driven surrogate models trained to forecast the time-evolution of experimentally measured cylinder wakes in the subcritical vortex shedding regime. Using a dataset of two-dimensional, two-component particle image velocimetry measurements, we train fully convolutional neural networks, U-Nets, Fourier neural operators, and dynamic mode decomposition-based models to forecast the development of experimentally measured velocity fields. To characterize data-driven approaches contending with transient flow features and limited, imperfect observations, the development of predictions over extended forecast horizons is examined at a fixed Reynolds number (Re = 590). Next, models are trained at a range of Reynolds numbers (Re = 230 to Re = 2920) to investigate the impact of increasingly turbulent and three-dimensional flow phenomena, and the challenges associated with measuring them, on forecast quality. We find that experimentally trained surrogate models can provide meaningful predictions over short time horizons, propagate low-frequency dynamics over longer forecast periods, and achieve faster-than-real-time evaluation. However, the data-driven models struggle to preserve transient flow features and high-frequency energy content when faced with noisy measurements and incomplete state observations. This emphasizes the underlying challenges that remain for data-driven modeling approaches to effectively contend with fluid dynamics in real-world engineering applications, where observations are often imperfect and limited.

Earthquake rupture propagation speed is an essential source parameter that fundamentally controls hazard and risk. In this paper, we develop and demonstrate the capability of a single near-fault seismic record in delineating earthquake rupture speed by inspecting displacement particle motion. We apply this method to near-fault strong-motion data in M7+ strike-slip earthquakes and identify diverse particle-motion signatures associated with subshear rupture, supershear rupture, supershear transition, initial rupture expansion, and potential multiple rupture fronts. This study highlights the value of near-fault observations for determining rupture speed.

A second extragalactic pulsar wind nebula (PWN) is discovered in the MeV-GeV band using the Fermi-LAT. Faint, point-like gamma-ray emission is detected at the location of the composite supernova remnant (SNR) B0453-685 from energies 300MeV-2TeV. The Fermi-LAT data analysis of the new gamma-ray source is presented together with a detailed multi-wavelength investigation to understand the nature of the observed emission. The observational evidence and physical implications from broadband modeling do not support an SNR gamma-ray origin. Semi-analytic radiative evolutionary models are explored to understand the potential for any pulsar or PWN component responsible for the observed gamma-ray emission. The modeling results favor an evolved PWN ($\tau\sim 14,000$ years) that has been impacted by the return of the SNR reverse shock with a possible substantial pulsar component below $5$GeV. The particle acceleration mechanisms and their efficiency within B0453-685 have important implications for the role PWNe play in generating Cosmic Rays (CRs), but constraints on the synchrotron cut-off are required to accurately characterize the underlying particle properties.

We investigate the dependence on wavelength of nondipole effects in triple ionization of Ne driven by intense infrared and mid-infrared laser pulses using a three-dimensional semiclassical model that fully accounts for nondipole effects and the Coulomb singularity in the electron-core interaction. We find in triple ionization of strongly driven Ne a large positive average momentum offset along the direction of laser propagation, which vanishes in the dipole approximation. This positive momentum offset significantly increases with increasing wavelength of the laser pulse. This increase is present for all triple ionization events as well as for the main direct and delayed pathways of triple ionization. We attribute the increase of the momentum offset to the contribution of the effect of the magnetic field of the laser pulse on the bound electrons. This contribution counterbalances the decrease of electron-electron correlation in recollisions with increasing wavelength. We find that 1200 nm is an ideal wavelength for experimentally measuring the momentum offset related to correlated three-electron escape.

Groundwater models are routinely non-identifiable: sparse subsurface observations leave many combinations of parameters, states, and boundary conditions equally consistent with the available data. Existing uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods address this by exploring a finite set of model realizations, but incomplete exploration can systematically underestimate the true range of admissible solutions. We propose a fundamentally different approach based on Optimization-based Bound Tightening (OBBT), which represents uncertainty directly as intervals and tightens them by extremizing variables over a constraint system encoding physical laws and observations. This yields guaranteed outer bounds on all uncertain variables without sampling, side-stepping the exploration problem entirely. To apply OBBT to groundwater flow, we discretize Darcy's law using a finite-volume scheme and handle the resulting bilinear terms through McCormick relaxations. We show that these relaxations can break the sign coupling between fluxes and head gradients, permitting non-physical rotational flow and failing to provide sufficient information for effective bound tightening. We identify flow sign prescription and irrotationality constraints as effective remedies and characterize their respective strengths and limitations. We demonstrate the framework on three numerical examples - a 1D steady-state model, a 2D steady-state model across four experimental configurations, and a 2D transient model on a hexagonal grid - and discuss computational performance, scalability, and directions for future research. OBBT offers a conservative, deterministic, and physically grounded alternative to ensemble-based UQ, with natural connections to null space theory and data assimilation.

We present a new study on the MeV-TeV gamma-ray origin of HESS J1857+026 using data collected from the Fermi-LAT, VERITAS, and HAWC observatories. A spatial and spectral study of HESS J1857+026 including radiative modeling of the MeV-TeV spectrum determines the likely dominant gamma-ray origin as a pulsar wind nebula (PWN) powered by the energetic pulsar PSR J1856+0245. The MeV-TeV spectrum is further characterized through basic evolutionary radiative modeling assuming a PWN origin to constrain the physical properties of the system such as the magnetic field strength and PWN age. The results of the PWN evolutionary model are consistent with the observational constraints of the system, finding an age of the system between t = [16,21]kyr and a magnetic field strength between B = [0.4,1.6]muG. These estimates support an evolved PWN scenario where the observed gamma-ray emission is generated by the relativistic electrons inverse Compton scattering (ICS) off local photon fields, however the low-energy (E < 10GeV) spectral component could be dominated by hadronic emission originating from a supernova remnant (SNR). For a PWN component above 10GeV, we measure the conditions for particle diffusion, finding that the local diffusion (D(50TeV) ~ $10^{28}cm^{-2}s^{-1}$) is suppressed compared to the interstellar medium (ISM) value, in agreement with similar TeV PWNe. By measuring the radial surface brightness profiles of the gamma-ray source across multiple instruments, we demonstrate that the combined MeV-TeV spatial information is a powerful tool to constrain particle diffusion properties.

In this work, we investigate controlled quantum teleportation in the presence of noisy channels acting on the three-qubit resource state. We employ a series of generalized noisy channels that bridge the dephasing channels and amplitude damping channels while encompassing extensive intermediate scenarios. We provide an in-depth analysis of the degradation of the maximal average fidelity and the optimal average fidelity in controlled quantum teleportation induced by such noisy channels by deriving the analytical expression and examining several special cases. The analytical expression shows that attaining the optimal average fidelity requires Charlie's cooperation in performing a measurement at suitably chosen angles, and is also related to the initial state and the channel parameters. Our analysis reveals that the optimal average fidelity does not always decrease monotonically with the evolution parameter, instead, it first decreases and then increases. This non-monotonic behavior depends on the entanglement of the initial resource state, as well as on the parameters of the channel traversed by the first qubit.

Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) have been proposed as efficient environments for the formation of binary black holes (BBHs). We present an updated semi-analytical framework for BBH formation and evolution in AGN disks, following the capture, migration, pair-up, gas-driven hardening, binary–single encounters, and merger of stellar-origin black holes. We systematically explore the dependence of the resulting BBH merger population on the main AGN parameters, namely the supermassive black hole mass $M_\bullet$, the Eddington ratio $\lambda_\bullet$, and the disk viscosity parameter $\alpha$, and construct an intrinsic BBH population by weighting the simulations according to observed low-redshift AGN properties. We find that AGN disks can produce repeated mergers and build a high-mass tail extending beyond the pair-instability mass gap and into the intermediate-mass range. Hierarchical growth is more efficient in lower-viscosity disks, with $\alpha=0.01$, while higher-viscosity disks suppress the formation of massive remnants. The merger efficiency generally increases with $\lambda_\bullet$, but its dependence on $M_\bullet$ is non-trivial. The AGN-assisted BBH population is characterized by increasingly unequal mass ratios at high primary mass, a correlation between primary mass and $|\chi_{\rm eff}|$, and an effective-spin distribution that depends strongly on the fraction of binaries born in prograde or retrograde configurations. We find that the AGN channel can reproduce systems broadly consistent with the massive BBH events GW190521 and GW231123. We test several variations of the physical model, including different formalisms for migration torques, gas hardening, and three-body encounters. The general properties of the population are robust across these variations, with the high-mass tail and spin signatures persisting in all cases except when gas hardening is switched off.

The spin-1/2 Ising-Heisenberg model on the extended Lieb lattice in a magnetic field is exactly mapped onto an effective spin-1/2 Ising model on the square lattice. The ground-state phase diagram comprises the quantum antiferromagnetic (QAF), quantum monomer-dimer (MD), classical ferrimagnetic (FRI), and classical ferromagnetic phase. The MD-FRI ground-state phase boundary extends to finite temperatures as a dome-shaped surface of discontinuous thermal transitions bounded by a line of Ising critical points. The QAF phase is enclosed by a surface of continuous thermal transitions evolving from the QAF-MD and QAF-FRI ground-state phase boundaries. Monte Carlo simulations fully confirm the existence and nature of both continuous and discontinuous thermal phase transitions obtained by exact and approximate analytical calculations.

Observations of (giant) planets accreting material within their natal environment are crucial to constrain models for their formation. WRAY 15-1880 (aka RX J1842.9-3532) in the Corona Australis (CrA) complex has a prominent pre-transitional disk, and an age of ~2.8+-0.7 Myr, computed by comparison with isochrones using the accurate dynamical mass derived from disk kinematics. Hence, this star is in the late phases of disk evolution and might host accreting planets. We acquire new polarimetric imaging data with VLT-SPHERE and analyze archive observations taken with VLT-SPHERE, VLT-MUSE, and ALMA, finding a candidate Jupiter-like companion within the disk gap from high-contrast imaging. The mass estimates of the candidate companion, derived from various methods, are consistent with an object in the range of 0.3-7.6 MJup. The spectrum of the candidate companion is consistent with a T3 spectral type, in agreement with expectations of an object of a few Jupiter masses. We find an emission blob North-West of the star in the ALMA data rotating solidly with the candidate companion, that can be interpreted as a vortex/dust trap at the m=1 Lindblad resonance of the planet. Accretion on the candidate planet is not detected from the VLT-MUSE archival data. This may be due to insufficient contrast, an observational geometry that is unfavorable for viewing the planet's surface, or it could indicate that we are merely observing irregularities within the disk. Finally, we identify a microjet extending from the star perpendicular to the disk in these data.

We consider transport through a multi-level interacting quantum dot (N-QD) in Kondo regime. Using the Kotliar-Ruckentein slave boson approach (SBMFA) for N-level Anderson model we define effectively noninteracting quasiparticles of the SU(N) Kondo system ($N=2,3,4,5,6$). Kondo resonance transmission coefficients determine linear noise describing quasiparticle partitioning. To discuss nonlinear conductance, susceptibilities and shot noise in the strong coupling regime, we apply Fermi liquid theory with parameters expressed by susceptibilities of pseudofermions determined within SBMFA. Nonlinear shot noise is dominated by two-quasiparticle scattering. However, we demonstrate that for occupation regions distant from the electron-hole symmetry point, the role of three-body correlations must be revealed.

The Kitaev model describing a one-dimensional topological superconducting chain is known to support two Majorana fermions localized at the systems endpoints when the parameters are tuned to the topological phase. In this work, we investigate the possibility that Majorana fermions may also emerge away from the physical boundaries of the chain. To this purpose, we generalize the Kitaev model by incorporating a local coupling between the electronic density and a classical elastic (lattice) field. This electron-lattice interaction can induce phase separation between superconducting regions characterized by distinct topological invariants, thereby generating internal interfaces that host Majorana bound states. Under these conditions, a dilute gas of Majorana fermions can be realized in the bulk of the system.

We present the Thousand Pulsar Array (TPA) single-pulse data set, obtained with the MeerKAT radio telescope and comprising time-series observations of 1192 pulsars, typically containing ~1000 consecutive pulses per source. We describe the MeerTime Single Pulse software pipeline which calibrates the data and automatically excises interference signals to produce data products suitable for typical single-pulse studies. To demonstrate the capabilities of the dataset, we carry out a population-level study of phase-averaged single-pulse energy distributions and nulling behaviour. Pulse energy distributions are modelled within a Bayesian framework choosing from a range of intrinsic energy distributions, and including an explicit nulling fraction. We find that approximately half of the pulsars require multi-component intrinsic energy distributions, while the remainder are consistent with single-component models. Nulling is detected or constrained for most pulsars in the sample, and both the occurrence and inferred nulling fraction show systematic variation across the P-$\dot{P}$ diagram. In particular, nulling fractions increase with spin period and exhibit only a weak dependence on period derivative. We also examine trends in the preferred forms of pulse energy distributions as a function of spin-down luminosity, finding modest evidence for population-level evolution. Estimates of single-pulse luminosities indicate that individual pulses can exceed the long-term average luminosity by large factors, particularly for low-$\dot{E}$ pulsars. These results characterise the statistical properties of single-pulse emission across a large pulsar sample and highlight the limitations of phase-averaged energy distributions for capturing the full complexity of pulsar emission variability.

We formulate a nonlinear geometric theory of visco-anelasticity that unifies viscoelastic and anelastic responses within a single thermodynamic framework. At each material point, the total deformation gradient is multiplicatively decomposed into elastic, viscous, and anelastic distortions, thereby generalizing the Bilby-Kröner-Lee decomposition to visco-anelasticity. The theory explicitly incorporates the material metric, which encodes the evolving natural configuration of the solid, the transformed structural tensors, and provides a consistent formulation of the constitutive equations, the balance laws, the thermodynamic potentials, and the kinetic equations. The first and second laws of thermodynamics are systematically applied to derive the constitutive and evolution equations without invoking observer invariance. Anisotropy is treated in full generality through structural tensors. As illustrative examples, we specialize the general framework to isotropic and transversely isotropic visco-anelastic solids. Two examples within the class of universal deformations, which admit closed or partially closed form solutions, show how the proposed framework can be used to model the coupled viscous and anelastic response of incompressible anisotropic solids with distributed eigenstrains and the associated residual stresses. This geometric framework unifies nonlinear viscoelasticity and anelasticity by coupling time-dependent and eigenstrain-driven effects within a single, fully consistent geometric formulation. In particular, the proposed framework clarifies the geometric structure of the elastic, viscous, and anelastic distortions and resolves ambiguities associated with intermediate configurations in existing formulations of nonlinear viscoelasticity and viscoplasticity.

We study the pair creation phenomenon for a real scalar field $\varphi$ in the presence of a surface that undergoes time-dependent deformations, while imposing Dirichlet-like boundary conditions. Including terms up to fourth order in the departure of the surface from an infinite plane, we present results for the angular dependence of the emission rate for the vacuum-to-pair process as a function of the geometry and the dynamics of the surface, as well as of the momenta of the emitted pair. We check the consistency of the leading contribution with previous results obtained from the imaginary part of the effective action, and clarify how the relation between exclusive probabilities and the imaginary part of the effective action is modified at fourth order by the opening of a two-pair channel.

We investigate the magnetic moments of octet baryons in isospin asymmetric strange hadronic matter under strong external magnetic fields within a unified theoretical framework by combining the chiral SU(3) quark mean field (CQMF) model with the chiral constituent quark ($\chi$CQM) model. At finite temperature, the inclusion of Dirac sea (DS) effect leads to magnetic catalysis attributing to the enhancement of scalar condensates with increasing magnetic field strength. As a consequence, the effective masses of the octet baryons exhibit a monotonic increase as a function of magnetic field. The results highlight the crucial role of vacuum polarization effects in determining the electromagnetic properties of baryons in strongly magnetized matter having relevance in heavy-ion collision and compact stars.

The Liouville solution in General Relativity with a scalar field is discussed. This solution is invariant with respect to global Lorentz transformations, and dependence on time cannot be removed. If the scalar field potential is exponential and unbounded from below, the Liouville solution describes the formation of spherically symmetric black hole. The event horizon is a sphere, which appears with infinitesimal radius at a finite moment of time and afterwards expands with the velocity of light to infinity. A distant observer can measure the geometric defect at the point where the horizon appears. It is similar to the defect produced by the monopole or spherical dislocation of space-time. Comparison with the Schwarzschild solution yields the mass function which is proportional to the time squared.

In GaAs/InAs core/shell nanowires, comprising a tubular conducting shell, interference phenomena observed under an axial field and originating from closed-loop states encircling the insulating core, provide an ideal platform for superconducting quantum devices that utilize effects such as Aharonov–Bohm or Altshuler–Aronov–Spivak-type conductance oscillations. Both effects are different in nature with respect to phase rigidity because of interference of non-time-reversed or time-reversed paths, respectively. Since their occurrence is largely governed by averaging effects, which depend on sample dimensions and the transport regime, we present a systematic study of flux-periodic oscillations of phase-pure zinc-blende GaAs/InAs core/shell nanowires as a function of gate voltage for samples with different contact separation lengths. Our analysis shows that with increasing contact separation length, averaging effects result in gradual reduction of $h/e$-periodic Aharonov–Bohm-type oscillations, while the $h/2e$-periodic Altshuler–Aronov–Spivak oscillations and its $h/4e$-periodic higher harmonics are enhanced. The additional phase rigidity seen in the $h/3e$-periodic oscillations is attributed to phase rigidity propagating from the neighbouring lower harmonics. Our tight-binding transport simulations on nanowires of different lengths which contain only a few scattering centers confirm the experimental observations regarding the different harmonics and their phase rigidity. Together, our experimental and simulation findings indicate quasi-ballistic transport with persistent Aharonov–Bohm-, and phase-rigid Altshuler–Aronov–Spivak-type oscillations despite few scattering centers.

In this work, we review and revisit the generating function techniques that provide exact analytical solutions for aggregation and fragmentation equations across several physical regimes including spontaneous and collisional shattering. For discrete coagulation-fragmentation equations with size-independent rates under monodisperse initial conditions, we show the derivation of several explicit closed-form solutions. We also briefly report the exact solutions for continuous, three-particle, $D$-particle collisions and two-component generalizations. Source-driven aggregation yields steady distributions featuring a universal $s^{-3/2}$ power-law decay and a cutoff mass scaling $s_{*} \sim t^{2}$. We also remind that exploitation of the low-rank representations of the aggregation kernel allows to organize efficient modelling the aggregation kinetics and extend this idea showing a simple way for the fast accounting of the spontaneous framentation terms. We exploit our numerical algorithm and study the numerical solutions for multiple models of spontaneous fragmentation and find a new example of temporal oscillations for the closed aggregation-fragmentation process.

Proteins and nucleic acids form non-Newtonian liquids with complex rheological properties that contribute to their function in vivo. Here we investigate the rheology of the transcription factor NANOG, a key protein to maintain embryonic stem cell pluripotency. We find that at high concentrations, NANOG forms macroscopic aging gels that are dependent on its intrinsically disordered domain. By combining molecular dynamics simulations, mass photometry and Cryo-EM, we also discover that – in contrast with unbounded condensates formed by other intrinsically disordered proteins – NANOG forms self-limiting micelles with exposed DNA-binding domains. We show that these micelles can stabilize DNA entanglements and in turn modulate DNA dynamics. Based on our findings, we conjecture that NANOG may contribute to regulate gene expression by creating local gel-like environments that restrict genome dynamics and that its aging may ingrain mechanical memory in gene regulatory networks.

Boson clouds formed via superradiance around spinning black holes offer a novel probe of ultralight particles. We show that such gravitational atoms can undergo a self-stimulated avalanche: a coherent quadrupolar transition is seeded by external gravitational waves and amplified by self-generated radiation feedback. We formulate an effective two-level description that captures the logistic population transfer and the resulting delayed gravitational-wave pulse with a characteristic envelope. This cooperative emission mechanism opens a new observational avenue into the ultralight dark sector.

Correlated real-time dynamics in large, spatially inhomogeneous quantum systems remain difficult to access with nonequilibrium many-body methods. Two-time nonequilibrium Green functions (NEGF) retain dynamical correlations but their computational runtime grows cubically with the number of time steps $N_\mathrm{t}$. This scaling bottleneck could recently be overcome by introducing the G1–G2 scheme that is linear in $N_\mathrm{t}$, but requires propagation of a two-particle correlation function and may suffer from numerical instabilities. This has restricted simulations to small systems with $N_\mathrm{b} \sim 10^2$ basis states. Here we introduce a quantum-fluctuation formulation of nonequilibrium Green functions, denoted $\delta$NEGF, that represents dynamical two-particle correlations through fluctuations of field-operator products, $\delta \hat G$. This guarantees stable dynamics by preserving the positivity of the reduced density matrices, avoids the explicit storage of the two-particle Green function, and reduces the propagation to a finite ensemble of Hartree-Fock-like trajectories. Combined with a stochastic low-rank decomposition of the correlation functions, the method retains time-linear scaling while extending dynamical $GW$ and particle-particle and particle-hole $T$-matrix simulations to basis sizes of order $N_\mathrm{b}\sim 10^4$. We benchmark $\delta$NEGF against exact and HF-GKBA results for lattice systems, finding stable correlated dynamics also at strong coupling. We further demonstrate large-scale simulations of diffusion in two-dimensional Hubbard lattices and ultrafast relaxation in graphene nanoribbon heterostructures with long-range Coulomb interactions. These results establish $\delta$NEGF as a scalable route to dynamical self-energy simulations of large, spatially inhomogeneous correlated quantum systems beyond the reach of existing NEGF implementations.