Papers

The carbon-enhanced metal-poor stars with hybrid enrichments of slow- and rapid neutron-capture elements, the so-called CEMP-rs stars, still raise many questions due to their elusive abundance signatures. In our recent analysis, we found that heavy r process elements are enhanced in these objects and can be explained by the intermediate neutron-capture process (i-process) occurring in low-mass, very low-metallicity asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars. However, the origin of actinides such as thorium and uranium is typically associated with explosive nucleosynthesis in highly neutron-rich environments, and their detection in stellar spectra remains challenging due to severe line blending from other elements and carbon-bearing molecules. In this work, we investigate the presence of thorium and uranium abundances in a sample of CEMP-rs stars using their high-resolution spectra obtained with the UVES spectrograph mounted on the UT2 (Kueyen) ESO VLT. Thorium is robustly detected in three stars, while uranium remains marginally detected, allowing only upper limits to be derived. Comparison with theoretical i-process nucleosynthesis models demonstrates that the observed abundances can be reproduced within uncertainties, supporting an i-process origin for these elements. This study reports the first detection of actinides in stars confirmed as CEMP-rs stars, providing new constraints on their nucleosynthetic history. Furthermore, these detections provide a potential way to estimate in the future the time elapsed since the proton-ingestion episode in AGB stars using cosmochronometry techniques, and more generally to place lower limits on the ages of the resulting white dwarf remnants.

The ITER tokamak project includes a Thomson scattering diagnostic designed to measure electron temperature and density in the plasma core. The system is required to provide measurements over a wide temperature range while meeting stringent accuracy requirements. A previous study analyzed the errors of electron temperature measurements to assess the feasibility of these requirements. The analysis concluded that the central electron temperature could be measured with the required accuracy of 10% for temperatures up to 40 keV at a minimum electron density of 3*10^19 m^-3. However, those results were based on an overestimation of the number of photoelectrons generated in detectors by the scattered radiation due to the incorrect application of the Thomson scattering cross-section. As a consequence, the temperature measurement errors were significantly underestimated. In the present work, the accuracy of electron temperature measurements in the ITER plasma core is reassessed using the corrected photoelectron yield derived from published data and incorporating the effects of background radiation. The revised analysis shows that the proposed diagnostic system can achieve the required accuracy of 10% for temperatures up to 20 keV at low plasma background radiation, whereas under high background radiation this accuracy can only be maintained up to 1 keV. To achieve the 10% accuracy across the full temperature range while preserving the current diagnostic configuration, either the energy of the probing laser pulse must be increased by a factor of 2-4 or the least electron density must be raised to 6*10^19 m^-3.

Emission lines that "echo" variations in the ionizing flux produced close to black holes are powerful probes of the central engine. In the Seyfert-1.5 galaxy NGC 4151, high-resolution X-ray spectra and time lags in low-resolution X-ray data suggest that part of the narrow Fe K$_{\alpha}$ line originates close to the optical broad line region (BLR). We report on a sequence of nine XRISM observations of NGC 4151, obtained every other day in 2024. Swift monitoring was undertaken to sample the driving flux before, during, and after the XRISM sequence. Using suitable line kernels, we measure a mean BLR component width of $\sigma = 5.36\pm 0.48\times 10^{3}~{\rm km}~ {\rm s}^{-1}$. Modeling the Swift continuum and XRISM line flux trends gives a lag of $\tau = 3.5^{+2.8}_{-1.7}$ days ($r=3.6^{+3.0}_{-1.7}\times 10^{3}~GM/c^{2}$ for $M_{BH} = 1.7\times 10^{7}~M_{\odot}$), significant at the $2\sigma$ level via Monte Carlo simulations, and consistent with prior measurements and direct spectral fits. This lag implies a black hole mass of $M_{BH}/f_{X} = 2.0^{+1.4}_{-1.0}\times 10^{7} M_{\odot}$, where $f_{X}$ is a geometrical factor. A standard optical value for this factor gives a mass that is nominally higher than typical H$\beta$ mass estimates, but formally consistent. Our results suggest that XRISM can measure lags and black hole masses in both unobscured and obscured AGN.

Density matrix embedding theory (DMET), which is usually based on a Schmidt decomposition of Slater determinants by partitioning the full system into impurity and environment in terms of local orthogonal orbitals (LOs), has demonstrated considerable promise in electronic structure studies because it enables the extraction of local properties using a high-level solver within an embedded impurity subsystem with greatly reduced degrees of freedom, thereby achieving a balance between accuracy and computational cost. However, its application to excited states of strongly correlated systems, such as lanthanide complexes, remains challenging because the errors relative to all-electron results can still be significant. Motivated by the success of the previously developed atomic orbitals (AOs) based DMET framework (Ai, Li, and Jiang, Phys. Rev. Lett. 2025, 135, 026502.), termed AO-DMET, which attains improved accuracy by constructing the embedded subspace based on a non-orthogonal decomposition of the Slater determinant in terms of AOs, we propose a new LO-based partitioning scheme that fully preserves the impurity space spanned by corresponding AOs and can achieve accuracy closely matching that of AO-DMET while retaining the orthogonal partition and its associated computational efficiency. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated through excitation energy calculations for several representative lanthanide complexes. These results establish an efficient and accurate partitioning scheme for describing excited states in strongly correlated systems within the DMET framework.

We investigate the $\mathrm{SU}(d)$ spin exchange model describing ultra-cold fermionic atoms with spin $s\ge 1$ in a one-dimensional optical lattice. The model emerges from the Fermi-Hubbard model in the strongly interacting regime with one atom in each lattice site. The central result of this work is the systematic construction of eigenstates in terms of magnetic sub-level populations, which we call population eigenstates. Exploiting this framework, we derive effective light-induced Hamiltonians via a second-order Schrieffer-Wolff transformation projected onto the population eigenstates. The resulting models reveal a qualitative difference between spin-1/2 and higher-spin systems: whereas spin-1/2 dynamics remains confined to the maximal-spin Dicke manifold, the extensive $\mathrm{SU}(d)$ degeneracies for $s\ge 1$ allow coherent population transfer across sectors of different collective spin length, generating unconventional spin dynamics that cannot be captured by any fixed-spin-manifold description. Agreement with exact Fermi-Hubbard dynamics confirms the framework as a practical foundation for quantum-enhanced correlations and metrological protocols in high-spin fermionic systems.

Bell's theorem reveals that quantum theory is in tension with classical causal reasoning and, in particular, the notion of local causality. This is now understood as a particular example of non-classicality in the study of correlations in (Bayesian) networks with both unobserved and observed nodes: the correlations are probability distributions over the observed nodes. There is a great deal of work aiming to understand the bounds on quantum and classical correlations in such networks and one approach is to consider outer approximations to the former. Along these lines, we consider quasiprobabilistic models for Bayesian networks, which can be seen as classical models but the probability distributions involving unobserved nodes are "replaced" with quasiprobabilities that respect normalisation but not positivity. We denote the set of correlations resulting from these models as the quasi set. Such models have a history in the study of Bell-type non-classicality where it has been shown that they can produce all non-signalling correlations. We show a generalisation of this result for a broad class of networks, which motivates a conjecture that the quasi set recovers the so called nested Markov model. Our work utilises a connection to tensor network decompositions, which may be of independent interest.

In this paper, we consider two classes of hyperkähler manifolds: moduli spaces of central-Levi parabolic Higgs bundles on the punctured sphere and star-shaped Nakajima quiver varieties. We produce a map $\mathcal T$ from a given star-shaped quiver variety $\mathcal X$ to a central-Levi parabolic Higgs bundle moduli space $\mathcal M$. We verify that $\mathcal T$ preserves stability and we show that it is a homeomorphism onto the locus of Higgs bundles with trivial underlying holomorphic structure. We then prove our main theorem: that $\mathcal T$ identifies the natural holomorphic symplectic structures on the two spaces. This theorem generalizes work by Biswas, Florentino, Godinho, Mandini from the rank 2, full flag, strongly parabolic case to arbitrary rank, partial flag, and weakly parabolic cases – namely, those whose Higgs field residues project to the centers of their respective Levi subalgebras.

Neutrals in the plasma edge are commonly modeled by kinetic equations, with quantities of interest given by macroscopic quantities such as density, velocity, and temperature. In reactor-relevant regimes, fully kinetic descriptions solved by Monte Carlo (MC) methods, although accurate, become computationally expensive, whereas fluid-limit approximations are computationally more efficient but may lose accuracy due to boundary effects or low-collisional regimes. Hybrid fluid-kinetic approaches aim to combine the strengths of both descriptions. However, existing simulation methods face challenges, including interface handling in domain decomposition, unphysical assumptions, and iterative coupling in distribution decomposition. In this work, we propose a distribution-decomposition hybrid model constructed at the particle level based on the kinetic-diffusion Monte Carlo (KDMC) method. The model inherits key properties of KDMC: it is asymptotic-preserving and does not require iterative coupling between the fluid and kinetic components. To improve the accuracy of the fluid-part quantities estimation, a Navier-Stokes-type fluid system is derived via Hilbert-Chapman-Enskog expansions, tailored for KDMC. In the considered one-dimensional tests, the resulting fluid system has comparable accuracy to the AFN model used in SOLPS-ITER while requiring substantially fewer nonlinear iterations. Additionally, a tunable reflective boundary condition is introduced that allows balancing accuracy and efficiency. The model exhibits at least 500 times speedup over the kinetic MC, while maintaining relative L2 errors around 10% in a charge exchange (CX)-dominant test case. In non-CX-dominant regimes, the accuracy becomes increasingly sensitive to boundary treatment due to the inherent limitations of the fluid approximation near the boundary, motivating further refinement of the KDMC boundary conditions.

Compact electron linear accelerators are being increasingly investigated as enabling platforms for localized X-ray generation and energy-controlled irradiation, due to the demand for a reduced footprint and improved beam control. In this work, a conceptual compact LINAC architecture with a fixed total length of 0.5 m is investigated through comprehensive Monte Carlo beam dynamics simulations, focusing on the comparative performance of two operating modes delivering electron beams at 60 keV and 300 keV, respectively. The study aims to isolate energy-dependent beam transport effects within an identical lattice configuration, emphasizing transverse and longitudinal phase-space evolution, emittance growth, beam envelope stability, and target spot formation. Particle tracking is performed using a statistical Monte Carlo framework incorporating RF cavity acceleration, simplified quadrupole focusing, and space-charge-induced diffusion effects. Transverse and longitudinal phase spaces are analyzed at multiple locations along the accelerator, and key beam quality metrics are extracted at the exit. The results demonstrate that low-energy operation at 60 keV is strongly influenced by collective effects, leading to pronounced emittance growth and halo formation, whereas the 300 keV mode exhibits significantly enhanced beam rigidity, improved phase space preservation, and a compact beam spot at the target.

Precise knowledge of nuclear structure is essential across fundamental physics, yet probing these structures is notoriously difficult. To address this challenge, ultra-peripheral collisions (UPCs) provide a femtoscopic tomography for imaging the atomic nucleus. UPCs offer a pristine electromagnetic pathway: coherent vector-meson photoproduction generates patterns of diffraction and two-source interference that directly encode the nuclear spatial density. Turning these patterns into quantitative constraints is, however, a challenging inverse problem, complicated by correlated sensitivities to deformation and neutron skin, phase smearing, and experimental backgrounds. Here we introduce an interpretable Multitask deep-learning framework that maps transverse momentum distributions to multiple nuclear-structure indicators simultaneously and identifies the kinematic regions driving each inference. We demonstrate the approach with coherent $J/\psi$ photoproduction in $^{96}_{40}\text{Zr} + ^{96}_{40}\text{Zr}$ collisions, showing that the learned features separate diffraction-dominated and interference-dominated information and provide analysis-ready observables for future high-luminosity data.

Detailed balance underlies conventional Markov-chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. Yet in classical systems, breaking detailed balance generates irreversible probability currents and can accelerate sampling. Whether irreversibility can similarly enhance quantum MCMC remains an intriguing question. Here we show that irreversibility provides a new route to improving the recent quantum-enhanced MCMC (QEMC), which combines quantum proposals with classical acceptance. By introducing state-dependent proposals that break detailed balance while preserving the target stationary distribution, we develop an irreversible quantum-enhanced Monte Carlo (IQEMC). Guided by Landau-Zener transitions, IQEMC promotes large energy descents from high-energy states while maintaining stable transitions near low-energy states. On spin-glass benchmarks, IQEMC outperforms QEMC without increasing computational complexity and, unlike the annealing baseline, exhibits a spectral gap that increases with system size and annealing speed. These results establish irreversibility as a physically grounded mechanism for enhancing quantum MCMC.

We report classical molecular dynamics simulations of NaCl association and dissociation in supercritical aqueous fluids over a wide range of salt concentrations, from moderate salinity to highly concentrated H2O-NaCl mixtures attainable at high temperatures. The degree of dissociation a and the corresponding ideal dissociation constant Kd, derived directly from a, were calculated as functions of the stoichiometric NaCl mole fraction at selected pressure-temperature (PT) conditions from 673.15 to 1273.15 K and from 0.1 to 2 GPa. At moderate salinity corresponding to a molality of approximately 1 mol/kg, NaCl remains largely dissociated a = 0.3-0.7 depending on pressure and temperature). In contrast, when the mole fraction of NaCl increases up to xNaCl = 0.333 (27.8 mol/kg), the degree of dissociation tends towards zero, and most ions form Na$^+$Cl$^-$ contact pairs and multi-ion clusters. As a result of these competing trends, the mole fraction of structurally dissociated Na$^+$ and Cl$^-$ ions is a non-monotonic function of the stoichiometric NaCl concentration and typically reaches a maximum at xNaCl = 0.06-0.10. This result shows that increasing salinity does not necessarily increase the abundance of structurally available chloride ions in supercritical aqueous fluids. Additional fixed density simulations at 1 and 7 mol/kg extend the analysis up to 1673.15 K and separate the effects of temperature and density on the associate/dissociate state of the ions. The obtained concentration dependences provide molecular-level constraints for thermodynamic descriptions of concentrated supercritical electrolytes and for evaluating chloride availability in high-temperature aqueous fluids.

We perform a realistic KiDS-Legacy mock analysis with field-level neural compression and simulation-based inference using just 60 $N$-body simulations. The weak lensing shear field encodes substantially more cosmological information than standard two-point summary statistics such as the power spectrum. Field-level inference can fully exploit this information, but physical realism at the field-level requires very high-fidelity simulations. This poses a major challenge for simulation-based inference (SBI): accurate empirical density modelling and deep-learning-based neural compression require tens of thousands of training samples, but achieving physical realism at the field level makes each simulation extremely costly. We demonstrate that multifidelity SBI can alleviate this tension by substantially reducing the number of high-fidelity simulations needed for accurate cosmological inference. We pre-train neural inference models on realistic KiDS-Legacy-like shear mocks using fast log-normal GLASS simulations and fine-tune them on a small set of high-fidelity $N$-body simulations. We show that $60$ high-fidelity simulations are sufficient to obtain informative and well-calibrated cosmological posteriors, enabling at least an order-of-magnitude reduction in simulation cost for accurate field-level inference in a realistic setting.

Far away from solid boundaries, energy can be transferred between different flow scales due to the non-linear self-advection of velocity. This energy transfer can be quantified using well-established Fourier diagnostics or filtering methods. However, these diagnostic tools fail to provide a physical representation of the linear energy transfer that may occur during the formation of oceanic boundary layers or Rossby wave reflections. In this document, I outline a novel filtering methodology that is able to quantify this linear energy transfer by combining coarse-graining with volume-penalization. Its utility is illustrated by quantifying the down-scale energy transfer occuring during a Rossby wave reflection off a western boundary. The conceptual framework developed here is thought to be broadly applicable to the study of multi-scale energetics of bounded geophysical fluid flows.

Recent studies Vorticity packing effects on long time turbulent transport in decaying two dimensional incompressible Navier Stokes fluids, Phys. Fluids 38, 045159 (2026) demonstrated that, at a fixed high Reynolds number (Re), the initial vorticity packing fraction (VPF) governs the coupled Eulerian flow evolution and Lagrangian tracer particle transport in decaying two dimensional incompressible Navier Stokes fluids, revealing a strong Eulerian Lagrangian relationship during the nonequilibrium inverse cascade regime and a direct Eulerian Lagrangian correspondence in the late time coherent vortex quasi equilibrium regime, wherein increasing VPF drives transitions from point vortex to patch vortex equilibria and from subdiffusive to superdiffusive transport. In the present work, we investigate how these Eulerian Lagrangian connections evolve across a broad (VPF, Re) parameter space. The results show that the Eulerian Lagrangian relationship remains largely preserved during the nonequilibrium inverse-cascade regime, where transport increases systematically with VPF and remains primarily controlled by VPF despite secondary Re dependent oscillatory modulation. In contrast, the late-time coherent-vortex quasi-equilibrium regime exhibits Eulerian statistical equilibria that remain largely insensitive to Re, while the corresponding tracer-particle transport displays a strong Re dependence characterized by strong oscillatory and nonmonotonic variations across the (VPF, Re) parameter space, substantially weakening the VPF-ordered transport hierarchy observed in the inverse-cascade regime. Consequently, for the parameter range, spatial resolutions, and integration times explored in the present study, the direct Eulerian Lagrangian correspondence identified at fixed high Re is not universally maintained across the broader (VPF, Re) parameter space.

Controlled, reproducible generation of luminescent defect centres in hBN remains a key challenge for scalable quantum-photonic technologies. Here, we report Kr$^{+}$ ion implantation as a tunable, annealing-free, and chemically inert route to room-temperature near-infrared luminescent spin defects in hBN, requiring no pre- or post-implantation annealing. SRIM Monte Carlo simulations were used to optimise the parameters for 40 keV Kr$^{+}$ irradiation of hBN flakes. The implanted samples exhibit a stable near-infrared photoluminescence (PL) band centred at $\sim$830 nm whose intensity increases with implantation fluence over $10^{11}$-$10^{15}$ions/cm$^{2}$. Temperature-dependent PL measurements (20-300 K) reveal a linewidth broadening well described by a $T^{3}$ dependence, consistent with acoustic-phonon-mediated dephasing. Raman spectra show the characteristic $E_{2g}$ mode of pristine hBN at $\sim$1366 cm$^{-1}$ alongside an implantation-induced defect feature at $\sim$1295 cm$^{-1}$, confirming irradiation-induced lattice disorder. Electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) measurements reveal a paramagnetic centre with a $g$-factor of 2.003, and density functional theory (DFT) calculations indicate that a spatially separated $V_{\mathrm{N}}$-$C_{\mathrm{B}}$ donor-acceptor pair complex is a viable origin of the observed optical and magnetic signatures. Overall, Kr$^{+}$ implantation offers an effective, annealing-free, and scalable platform for generating stable room-temperature luminescent defects, providing a promising route toward quantum photonics.

The Transition Density Amplitude (TDA) method of Griesshammer et al. is applied to compute scattering observables for Compton scattering, threshold neutral pion photoproduction, and elastic pion scattering on the light nuclei Hydrogen 3, Helium 3, Helium 4, and Lithium 6. In this formalism the amplitude factorizes into an irreducible few-body kernel, which encodes the interaction of the probe with the active nucleons, and a transition density amplitude, which carries the nuclear structure information. Because the densities are computed once per nucleus and momentum transfer and then convolved with any process-specific kernel, the same nuclear input is reused across reactions, yielding substantial computational savings over direct evaluation. This factorization is realized in the publicly available Fortran suite DensityScattering, developed as part of the present work; a researcher implementing a new reaction need only supply the corresponding kernel in a prescribed format, with infrastructure for density handling, integration, quantum-number summation, and output already provided. The TDAs are constructed from nuclear wave functions using the semilocal momentum-space regularized chiral potential of Reinert, Krebs, and Epelbaum at cutoffs of 450 and 500 MeV. For Lithium 6, no-core shell model wave functions are evolved under a Similarity Renormalization Group (SRG) transformation; a back-transformation scheme ("SRG-And-Back"), co-developed for the present work, returns the densities to the physical momentum scale and thereby preserves the original chiral ordering. The induced uncertainty is validated against exact Helium 4 results at the 2% level, and convergence studies for Lithium 6 Compton scattering bound the residual uncertainty below 6%.

High-spin alkaline-earth fermions in optical lattices are promising platforms for spin squeezing beyond the spin-1/2 paradigm. We show that spin-squeezing dynamics is qualitatively modified by degeneracies inherent to the extended internal spin structure. We identify these degeneracies as the microscopic origin of the breakdown of the conventional maximal-spin description and develop an effective population-eigenstate framework that quantitatively reproduces the spin-squeezing dynamics. Our results establish degeneracy as a generic driver of collective spin dynamics in high-spin systems.

Black phosphorus and its two dimensional counterpart, phosphorene, are typically synthesized through chemical vapor transport using Sn and I2 additives. Chemical vapor deposition synthesis of phosphorene and allotropes is still yet not well understood. Investigating the atomistic mechanisms underlying phosphorus transport and early stage processes is difficult experimentally. In this study, a reactive force field for the PSnI system was developed and applied using ReaxFF based molecular dynamics to explore the early stage phase of the pre nucleation relevant to BP-phosphorene growth. The force field parameters were trained on a comprehensive quantum mechanical dataset covering bond dissociation, angle and torsion profiles, and tin condensed phase equation of state and cluster formation energies, showing strong agreement in both gas and condensed phases. We demonstrate that iodine and density together control phosphorus recombination. Under low density, atomic phosphorus dominates with minimal clustering. Adding I2 greatly increases P-P recombination, promotes the formation of PxIy motifs, and transient SnxPyIz compounds. Higher density systems favor the formation of larger Px clusters and support the development of ternary SnxPyIz compounds that grow by capturing transported phosphorus. At the highest density, the system produces condensed, Hittorf like phosphorus structures at the edges of SnxPyIz clusters, along with BP-like hexagons stabilized by iodine that may act as nucleation seeds. These results offer an atomistic view of transport and early stage steps in BP synthesis and provide a practical reactive model for studying growth conditions and additive effects in BP phosphorene vapor synthesis.

In this paper, the phenomenon generally classified as confirmation bias is formulated on the space of square-root probabilities (or equivalently, using the structures of quantum probability). In this framework, observations are modelled by matrices, rather than random variables on a probability space. In the problem of binary hypothesis testing, an optimal evidence choice minimises the expected error probability. We show that the resulting optimal choice of evidence leads to a confirmation bias, thus revealing a surprising aspect of rationality that encompasses confirmation bias. Specifically, in sequential evidence sampling, the implicit optimality leads to two remarkable evolutionary advantages, namely, (a) the decision maker requires only the smallest memory capacity, and (b) the error probability can be reduced exponentially in sample size. A complementary approach based on the framework of active inference – where the decision maker seeks evidence that provides maximum information – is then considered. The resulting optimal evidence is shown to agree with the one obtained by minimising error probability. Our framework provides an easy-to-implement protocol for an active quantum inference, whereby the optimal evidence choice for making an inference is sought over the space of matrices.

Shortcuts to adiabaticity have made topological edge-state transfer fast in the single-particle regime, but their extension to interacting systems is obstructed by nonlinear phase accumulation. We show that this obstruction can be removed in Su-Schrieffer-Heeger chains by making the next-nearest-neighbor shortcut hopping phase tunable. In the mean-field regime, this yields an exact nonlinear shortcut: one hopping quadrature keeps the state on the instantaneous dark-state trajectory, while the orthogonal quadrature cancels the interaction-induced self-phase modulation. The resulting protocol is nonperturbative in the mean-field interaction strength. When applied to the full Bose-Hubbard dynamics, the mean-field shortcut remains beneficial but saturates below unit fidelity, exposing genuinely many-body corrections beyond the product-state picture. We then optimize the transfer directly in the many-body Hilbert space and find that complex, phase-tunable next-nearest-neighbor hoppings recover near-perfect fidelity. Our results show that hopping phases are not merely a technical refinement, but a key control resource for fast and high-fidelity transport in interacting topological systems.

We investigate nonlinear electrodynamic effective field theories (EFTs) through the relative entropy evaluated in suitable background electromagnetic fields. In this setup, the relative entropy encodes information about the infinite tower of higher-dimensional operators and provides a systematic probe of nonlinear EFT effects. We study these features in fermionic QED, scalar QED, and Dirac-Born-Infeld theory using perturbative analyses, resummation techniques such as Borel–Laplace resummation, and non-perturbative approaches including the Schwinger proper-time method. In the weak-coupling regime, we show that the non-negativity of the perturbative relative entropy imposes sign constraints on finite truncations of higher-dimensional operators, generalizing familiar positivity bounds on leading EFT coefficients. We further show that violations of non-negativity in the strong-coupling regime admit qualitatively different interpretations depending on the framework: perturbatively analyzed violations diagnose the breakdown of the truncated EFT expansion, whereas violations in resummed or genuinely non-perturbative relative entropy signal physical instabilities of the system, such as the Schwinger effect. Extending the analysis to broader classes of UV completions, including theories with factorial or power-law growth of EFT coefficients, we derive general constraints on nonlinear electrodynamic EFT effects from the non-negativity of the resummed relative entropy. Our results suggest that relative entropy provides a unified diagnostic of perturbative consistency and non-perturbative stability in nonlinear EFTs.

Vortex electrons, characterized by a helical phase front, offer unique advantages for probing material structures. Such electrons can be generated via tunneling ionization in strong laser fields. In this paper, we investigate the rescattering dynamics of vortex photoelectrons by the parent ion. Specifically, we introduce vortex photoelectron holography, extending conventional strong-field photoelectron holography (SFPH) from plane-wave to vortex rescattering. By solving the time-dependent Schrödinger equation, we extract the vortex scattering phase from the SFPH fringes, showing excellent agreement with scattering calculations. Thus, our work provides direct access to the vortex scattering phase, paving the way for applying SFPH to structurally sensitive imaging with phase-engineered photoelectrons.

Recent observations have revealed that the Milky Way is embedded in a massive circumgalactic medium (CGM) extending to several hundred kiloparsecs. Such an extended gaseous halo acts as both a reservoir of baryons and potentially as a confinement volume for Galactic cosmic rays (CRs). We investigate CR transport in this giant Galactic halo and compare its properties with those of conventional small-halo models. In the giant-halo scenario, the halo height is no longer a free parameter, but instead relates to the extent of the source region. We show that CR transport within the source region remains similar to that in small-halo models, while substantial differences emerge at larger distances. In the giant-halo scenario, CRs develop an extended approximately 1/r spatial tail and exhibit a broader age distribution than the small-halo case. This model is shown to be consistent with current secondary-to-primary CR measurements. We further find that uncertainties associated with Galactic gas distributions are comparable to those arising from nuclear spallation cross sections. These results suggest that the giant-halo model provides a physically motivated alternative to conventional small-halo models and may have important implications for diffuse gamma-ray and neutrino emission from the Galactic environment.

The Dark Ages offer a uniquely clean window on primordial physics, making the redshifted 21-cm signal a promising probe of inflation models. Forecasts for interferometric 21-cm measurements must account for foreground wedge avoidance, which removes a substantial fraction of Fourier modes, and this effect is especially severe at high redshifts. We develop a wedge-aware Fisher framework in which this mode loss is propagated directly into the variances of the anisotropic 21-cm power spectrum and reduced bispectrum. As a case study, we apply the method to forecast constraints on two inflation models with different oscillatory features, a resonant model and a step model, for a lunar far-side array including thermal noise. Since these features affect both the power spectrum and the bispectrum, we apply wedge avoidance to both forecasts and compare their constraining power on oscillatory amplitudes in these feature models. We find that wedge avoidance reduces available Fourier modes significantly in both observables, leading to much weaker constraints on inflationary features. This framework is broadly applicable to 21-cm power spectrum and bispectrum forecasts across redshifts and is particularly useful in regimes where foreground wedge effect is severe, such as the epoch of reionization and the higher-redshift Dark Ages.

The spinor degree of freedom associated to exciton-polariton condensates can spontaneously self-oscillate breaking time translation symmetry, thus showing a continuous time-crystal (CTC) behavior. An open question in such driven-dissipative and non-linear quantum open systems is what happens when CTCs are brought together to interact. Here we experimentally study polariton condensates in coupled traps, evidencing mutual induction and synchronization of the pseudospin temporal GHz dynamics in the CTC phase. The individual and relative orientation of the (limit cycle) precessing pseudospins can be tuned by the optical excitation power, displaying both ferro and anti-ferro dynamical configurations. We theoretically show that the exciton reservoir, and both the coherent and long-range dissipative inter-trap coupling, play important roles in the CTC dynamics. The investigation of time-broken symmetry is thus extended here to more complex non-hermitian systems opening the path to study self-sustained collective dynamics in lattices of non-linear quantum condensates.

Barnard's Star is the nearest single star to the Sun (1.8 pc), and hosts four recently-discovered planets. The star also has well-characterized stellar abundances of important rock-forming elements, including Fe, Mg, and Si. For refractory elements like these, the planets have likely inherited similar bulk elemental abundance ratios to the star, facilitating modelling of their interior structures. We present here an analysis of the Barnard's Star planetary system on several fronts. We perform a detailed stability analysis of the system, ascertaining that all four planets likely have masses between 0.19 and 0.84 $M_{\oplus}$, and are likely tidally locked, whereas a 4:3 mean-motion resonance chain for the inner three planets cannot be ruled out. Using atmospheric evolution models, we show that the prospect of extant primary atmospheres is highly unlikely on any of the planets. Barnard's Star's abnormally high Mg/Si ratio and low Th/Mg ratio imply planetary mantles which (a) are rich in (Mg,Fe)O ferropericlase; (b) have less than half the water capacity as Earth; (c) generate about half of the radiogenic heating as Earth; and (d) are cool and unlikely to have outgassed secondary atmospheres. Our analysis of this system presents an accessible set of first steps for the study of other nearby exoplanetary systems, as well as sub-Earth planets which will be increasingly discovered over the coming years.

We predict that twisted bilayer graphene with large twist angle and small superlattice cell can be superconducting. Such a bilayer graphene can have a gap in the spectrum. This gap appears due to the hybridization of electrons moving in different layers with Fermi momenta close to the Dirac points which are equivalent to each other in the superlattice Brillouin zone. Small doping of the bilayer introduces charge carries having large density of states. We show that the screened Coulomb interaction is enough to stabilize superconducting state in the material. The symmetry of the order parameter is of the $d$-wave type. Application of the bias voltage increases the superconducting transition temperature. For realistic values of the model parameters the transition temperature can be as large as several hundreds of milikelvin.

Generating an appreciable abundance of primordial black holes (PBHs) requires a substantial enhancement of primordial curvature perturbations on small scales. In this Letter, we propose a new post-inflationary mechanism in which such an enhancement arises during a stiff, or kination, epoch. The mechanism is driven by metric vector perturbations sourced by the vector component of the electromagnetic stress-energy tensor associated with primordial magnetic fields (PMFs). Since these first-order vector modes remain approximately constant during kination, they act as persistent nonlinear sources for second-order scalar perturbations. We show that the resulting vector-induced curvature perturbations are amplified toward the infrared cutoff of the kination band and exhibit the characteristic scaling $\mathcal P_{\mathcal R}(k)\propto k^{-5}$. As a concrete realization, we consider PMFs generated in a Ratra-type magnetogenesis scenario and find that the induced curvature perturbations can produce PBHs with an abundance large enough to constitute a substantial fraction of the dark matter.

In this work, we investigate the features present in the joint primary mass and effective spin distribution of binary black holes without relying on specific modelling assumptions. We make use of non-parametric methods, flexible models capable of approximating arbitrary probability densities with minimal mathematical assumptions, applying it to the newly released GWTC-5.0. Our analysis supports, albeit with large uncertainties, the presence of at least two separate sub-population of binary black holes showing different effective spin distributions: one of them, preferring positive $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ values, points towards the direction of systems formed in a non-spherically-symmetric, dynamical environment.