Papers

Hydrogen-rich superluminous supernovae without narrow emission lines (SLSNe-II) are rare transients whose powering mechanisms remain debated, particularly the role of circumstellar medium (CSM) interaction. We present photometric and spectroscopic observations of SN 2019cqc to investigate its power source and progenitor mass loss. We model the lightcurve using MOSFiT with the csm and csmni models to constrain the explosion and CSM parameters. SN 2019cqc peaked at $M_g = -20.21 \pm 0.07$ and emitted $\sim 1.7 \times 10^{50}\,\mathrm{erg}$ of energy in the form of radiation. Photometric and spectroscopic modeling indicates that CSM interaction dominates in both scenarios, with best-fit CSM and ejecta masses of $\sim 4.5~ M_\odot$ and $\sim 32~ M_\odot$, respectively. The inferred CSM properties imply an extreme eruptive mass loss at a rate of $\sim 0.2--0.3 ~M_\odot\,\mathrm{yr^{-1}}$ in the years preceding the core collapse, consistent with a variable progenitor of luminous blue variable progenitor. We observe a persistent blueshifted asymmetry in the H$\alpha$ emission line. At early times ($\lesssim +110$~d), this is attributed to electron scattering with bulk Velocity of ejecta, while the profile at late epochs ($\gtrsim +402$~d onward) suggests the subsequent formation of dust in the ejecta. Additionally, we identify a distinct, short-lived feature at $\sim$ 4600 Å , likely a blend of ionized C III/N III lines powered by the interaction of the SN-shock with the extended atmosphere.

We study the stabilizability of a N -level quantum systems using an indirect control ar- chitecture mediated by a noisy ancilla. After outlining the general theoretical framework for arbitrary N , we focus on the two-level case (N = 2), for which we derive a complete set of necessary and sufficient conditions for asymptotic stability. Finally, we illustrate the analyti- cal results with a simple numerical example on a two-spin system, showing convergence to a Bell state for a set of random initial conditions.

We investigate the ground state properties of a superconducting ring embedded with a quantum dot (QD) by using a variational wave-function approach. A theoretical formulation for the treatment of the finite-U Anderson impurity coupled with a superconducting ring are presented. We demonstrate singlet-doublet transitions of the ground state for this system with the QD in the mixed valence regime. It is shown that the supercurrent in the superconductor ring shows oscillations with the external enclosed magnetic flux and exhibits abrupt jumps at the singlet-doublet phase transition points.

We compare the sensitivity of fibre interferometers to vibrations using microwave oscillators and state of the art lasers over distances up to 70 km. High spectral purity lasers outperform only above 10 Hz, highlighting microwave advantages at low frequencies and the potential of hybrid microwave optical interferometry systems

Interfaces of crystalline materials are strongly affected by the anisotropy of interface energy. A key quantity in this context is the interface stiffness tensor, which characterizes the response of the interface energy to changes in interface orientation and plays a role in determining the driving force for interface migration. The latter is expressible via contraction of the stiffness tensor and interface curvature tensor. Practical computations involving tensors necessarily rely on their individual components. In this work, an explicit component-wise expression is derived for the contraction of the stiffness and curvature tensors, valid in arbitrary coordinate systems. Within this formulation, to get the driving force, the curvature tensor is contracted with the pullback of a stiffness-related tensor - originally defined in three-dimensional Euclidean space - onto the interface manifold. This covariant treatment establishes a physically consistent foundation for three-dimensional computational models involving interface stiffness.

Viscoelastic fluid flows over micro-textured surfaces - densely covered by slender protrusions like cilia lining the body airways or villi covering the intestinal epithelium - underpin essential biological processes including transport, mixing, and absorption. Despite their ubiquity, the dynamics generated by the interplay between fluid elasticity and these complex geometries remain largely unexplored. Here we combine fully resolved numerical simulations with microfluidic experiments to reveal the flow dynamics established above dense arrays of microscopic pillars (canopies) immersed in the low-Reynolds-number flow of a viscoelastic liquid. We observe that the flow above the canopy tips spontaneously develops elastic turbulence. Remarkably, the chaotic state coexists with elastic waves emerging from the coupling between fluid elasticity and the heterogeneous shear induced by the canopy geometry. These ordered fluid motions persist across a broad range of flow conditions and canopy configurations. Our results demonstrate that coherent wave propagation and elastic turbulence are complementary manifestations of viscoelastic fluid flow. Beyond their fundamental significance, these mechanisms have broad implications for transport in biological and engineered environments, and reveal how structured geometries can harness the spontaneous dynamics of viscoelastic liquids to manipulate complex flows.

Quantum Annealing (QA) has already put into practical use and considered useful for solving many social issues, such as reduction of traffic congestion and delivery optimization. But in QA, when the energy difference between the ground state and the first excited state is small, the transition probability between them increases. Therefore, in order to decrease the transition, QA has to be performed at extremely low temperatures. To simulate the situation, it has the problem in that it takes much time. Many studies are underway to accelerate QA theoretically, one of which is to incorporate non-stoquastic Hamiltonian. On the other hand, I proposed Nested Simulated Annealing (NSA) inspired by Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC). I showed the computational speedup could be achieved dramatically, by considering the idea that the effect of flipping a spin preferentially influenced the spins directly interacting with it. Although NSA was based on such classical concept of causality, the hybrid computation both quantum and classical approach worked well. In this paper, in order to discuss the relationship between NSA and non-stoquastic Hamiltonian like XX-interaction, the spins are treated as continuous variables. I derive the formula to calculate the total energy in both with a problem Hamiltonian and the perturbation Hamiltonian induced by a transverse electromagnetic field. And I will show a clear relationship between local-maxima and the convergence speed when calculating it with the binary spin. More precisely, the annealing path with the smallest local-maxima converges fast, even though it consumes fewer computational resources. Therefore, it is possible to induce an optimal adiabatic phase transition by selecting NSA parameters appropriately. This paper shows an effective method to choose the parameters when simulating QMC on a classical computer.

A single atom undergoing spontaneous four-wave mixing near a chiral waveguide can efficiently channel an emitted Stokes-anti-Stokes photon pair into two tightly confined waveguide modes, yielding thus enhanced biphoton generation without requiring loss suppression or stringent phase matching. We develop a perturbative treatment, valid for a four-level atomic system under experimentally realistic conditions, to explain physical origins and clarify relevant constraints of such an enhancement determined by the interplay of atomic decay rates toward guided and unguided modes. Besides achieving optimal generation rates equivalent to a cold atomic ensemble hundreds of micrometers long in free space, our biphoton source naturally fulfills key requirements for next-generation on-chip quantum light sources, namely low-loss operation, robustness, compactness, and scalability.

For centuries, the scientific community has predominantly relied on visual tools to communicate empirical results and complex datasets. While visual representations dominate bibliometric analyses, the human auditory system possesses sensitive capacities for processing complex temporal information, distinguishing intricate patterns, and tracking parallel data streams. Data sonification translates data relations into acoustic signals, offering an alternative method for data exploration, pattern recognition, and scientific communication. This paper applies this concept to the field of bibliometrics through metrics sonification-the auditory translation of bibliometric information-and introduces SoniMet (Sonifying Metrics), a web-based tool designed to visualize and sonify the publication and citation data of individual scientists (see https://sonimet.kennebec.co.uk). SoniMet connects to the OpenAlex database to retrieve bibliometric records and displays them on an interactive chronological timeline. The tool employs direct parameter mapping to translate citation impact indicators into non-speech sound: field-weighted citation impact and citation counts determine the pitch and volume of a synthesized note and are mapped to the acoustic echo strength. Although SoniMet expands the methodological toolkit for research evaluation, current limitations include its restriction to individual scholar profiles and the challenge of integrating transient audio files into traditional, text-based scientific publishing workflows. Future empirical user studies are necessary to systematically evaluate the analytical utility and cognitive benefits of metrics sonification compared to established visual methods.

Purified Gibbs states provide a bridge between finite-temperature physics, dissipative dynamics, and ground-state methods. In this work, we study the exact finite sum-of-squares (SoS) construction of their parent Hamiltonians and the associated Lindbladian based on modular annihilators. Given a finite set of Hermitian generators, the corresponding modular annihilators yield a frustration-free SoS representation without continuous time integrals or an explicit decomposition into Bohr-frequency sectors. The purified Gibbs state remains a common zero mode while the freedom to choose and combine the generators can be used to optimize the spectral properties of the parent Hamiltonian. For free-fermion Hamiltonians, modular transformations act linearly on Majorana operators, leading to an analytically solvable family of parent Hamiltonians parameterized by a real symmetric coefficient matrix \(S\). For the scalar-functional subclass $S=f(h)$, we show that, at fixed operator norm, the choice $S_{\mathrm{opt}}\propto 1/\sqrt{\cosh(2\beta h)}$ has mixing time upper bound $2\log(2N/\epsilon)$ for any $\beta$, which exhibits rapid mixing and is irrelevant to the inverse temperature $\beta$. For interacting systems, where the modularly dressed generators are not available in closed form, we introduce a Krylov–Lanczos approximation scheme and bound the resulting ground-state error in terms of the modular-approximation error and the parent-Hamiltonian gap. Numerical results illustrate the free-fermion spectral advantage and show how the accuracy of the interacting construction depends on temperature, interaction strength, and Krylov dimension.

We compute the thermal photon production rate from a chirally asymmetric quark gluon plasma. We estimate the hard part from scattering of chiral quarks and demonstrate the cut-off independence of the total thermal photon emission rate. This is achieved by combining the hard with the soft contribution evaluated in our previous work using the Braaten-Pisarski method of hard thermal loop perturbation theory. It is observed that the presence of chiral imbalance leads to an overall enhancement in the emission rate of thermal photons.

In 2004, Khoroshkin proved that the extremal projector is equivalent to the dynamical twist. The Arnaudon-Buffenoir-Ragoucy-Roche (ABRR) equation, satisfied by the dynamical twist, yields a recursive formula for the coefficients in the extremal projector. The resulting summation formula is uniform and powerful in its applications to representation theory and Mickelsson-Zhelobenko reduction algebras. In this paper we generalize this recursive formula to the relative extremal projector, introduced by Conley and Sepanski in 2003. When the Levi subalgebra is the Cartan subalgebra, we recover the usual ABRR recursion. We also find a compact and explicit expression for the solution to the recursion. Our setting includes infinite-dimensional contragredient Lie superalgebras, Kac-Moody algebras, basic classical Lie superalgebras, and finite-dimensional reductive Lie algebras.

M-dwarfs produce frequent flares, and their associated mass ejections are expected to significantly affect the habitability of close-in exoplanets. Recent spectroscopic observations have revealed several prominence eruptions-indicative of stellar mass ejections-on M-dwarfs through Doppler shifts of the H$\alpha$ line. However, systematic and statistical studies, particularly regarding their association with white-light flares, have been limited due to the lack of intensive and continuous simultaneous photometric and spectroscopic monitoring of the same target star. We conducted one month of continuous spectroscopic observations of the active M-dwarf YZ CMi using the 3.8-m Seimei telescope with an unprecedentedly high time cadence of $\sim$1 min, simultaneously with TESS. We detected four prominence eruptions, among which two events showed rapid, short-duration eruptions with velocities of $\sim$300-500 km s$^{-1}$ and durations of $\sim$5 min. Such short-duration events may have been missed in previous observations due to insufficient time cadence. We further performed a systematic analysis using 35 H$\alpha$ flares on YZ CMi observed simultaneously with TESS. Notably, most prominence eruptions (6 out of 7) were not associated with detectable white-light flares. This result suggests that most observed prominence eruptions on M-dwarfs may have occurred near the stellar limb, where white-light flares are difficult to detect, which may imply a potential observational bias in their detectability due to low contrast with the background emission. These first statistical constraints, together with the discovery of rapid, short-duration prominence eruptions, indicate that previous observations may have underestimated both the frequency and velocities of mass ejections on M-dwarfs due to observational biases and highlight the necessity of reassessing their impact on close-in exoplanets.

Searches for weak spin-dependent forces are commonly interpreted in terms of a basis of sixteen rotationally invariant two-fermion potentials, including potentials which violate parity (P) and time-reversal (T) invariance. We derive finite-range coordinate-space potentials generated by a massive spin-1 boson with vector, axial-vector, tensor, and pseudotensor couplings to Dirac fermions. In addition to the familiar vector–vector, vector–axial-vector, and axial-vector–axial-vector interactions, we obtain the mixed vector–tensor, vector–pseudotensor, axial-vector–tensor, and axial-vector–pseudotensor potentials, together with tensor–tensor, tensor–pseudotensor, and pseudotensor–pseudotensor terms. We retain the contact terms needed in atomic-scale applications and give compact expressions that include both orderings of inequivalent fermion vertices. We then extend the analysis to a massive spin-2 mediator described by a symmetric Fierz–Pauli field. Besides the conventional coupling to the conserved fermion energy–momentum tensor, we consider a symmetric axial-tensor current. Its nonconservation for massive fermions makes the longitudinal spin-2 helicities contribute to axial-tensor–axial-tensor exchange. The leading minimal spin-2 interactions are either P,T even or P odd and T even; in particular, they do not generate a T-odd potential. We map the resulting interactions onto the sixteen-potential Dobrescu–Mocioiu basis and use this mapping to translate existing experimental constraints into numerical limits on spin-1 and spin-2 coupling products in the small- and large-mediator-mass regimes, together with representative limits at finite mediator masses. The derived relations between the boson-exchange coupling constants and the coefficients of the basis potentials also allow published exclusion curves to be rescaled to arbitrary mediator masses.

Canonical neural circuit motifs are usually described functionally: divisive normalization rescales population activity by a pooled signal, and winner-take-all competition selects one pattern through recurrent excitation and shared inhibition. We represent them, and their compositions, algebraically as finite transformation systems and analyze the transition monoids generated by their input-conditioned updates, distinguishing structure already present in a generator from structure that appears only through composition, and, on a joint state space, structure inherited from one factor from structure that lives on a joint configuration. Individually aperiodic updates can generate non-aperiodic monoids. In the WTA, every frozen-drive generator collapses to fixed points, yet short input sequences create local cycles of winner-dependent inhibitory gating: globally dissipative dynamics with a reversible action. The strongest result arises in WTA-to-DN composition. The composed monoid then contains a genuinely composite local cycle in which normalization state and the winner's gating state change together, although every primitive generator is aperiodic. Holonomy analysis certifies this as a group component of the Krohn-Rhodes cascade rather than an incidental cycle, and finds most group-carrying image sets on joint configurations, whereas the uncoupled product has none. An exhaustive interface sweep shows that the composite cycle is a property of the coupling rather than of a chosen map. If motifs are building blocks of neural computation, composing them is a form of programming: one chooses primitives and interfaces so that the generated algebra has the intended repertoire. The transition monoid is that repertoire - what a primitive presents to any later construction. Recurrent circuits are compositional transformation systems; their algebra constrains what they can be programmed to compute.

Lattice surgery compilation plays a central role in translating fault-tolerant quantum programs into efficient surface code realizations, where both spatial and temporal resources directly determine the cost of execution. Recent work has demonstrated the benefits of using ZX-diagrams as an intermediate representation for lattice surgery compilation, enabling semantics-preserving transformations that reduce spacetime cost. However, existing compilation restricts ZX reduction to preserve diagram structures that can be directly embedded as lattice surgery junctions. We present SpiderLS, which extends prior approach by leveraging full ZX reduction. To translate the resulting diagram into executable lattice surgery operations, SpiderLS applies a sequence of compiler passes that derives an execution order, generates target code by grouping compatible interactions into multi-target operations, and lowers the target code to Pauli-product measurements. The resulting explicit patch and Pauli-boundary requirements guide logical scheduling and structure-aware spacetime routing. Across representative algorithmic and random workloads, SpiderLS achieves average reductions of 49.2% in spacetime volume and 99.8% in compilation time compared with the prior ZX-based compiler.

Financial markets are complex systems whose return distributions exhibit heavy tails, traditionally described by power laws. An alternative framework based on Tsallis nonextensive statistical mechanics allows both the central region and the tails of the distribution to be represented by a single q-Gaussian functional form. In this work, we systematically compare these two descriptions across different time scales, considering stock markets from Brazil and the United States, as well as traditional assets and cryptocurrencies. The q-Gaussian parameters are estimated using the method of moments ratio, whereas the power-law parameters are obtained by maximum likelihood estimation in the asymptotic region. The quality of the fits is assessed using goodness-of-fit measures, bootstrap resampling, and the Vuong test. When the analysis is restricted exclusively to the extreme tails, the power law generally provides a better description, as expected from the asymptotic power-law behavior of the q-Gaussian itself. However, this superiority is not sufficiently pronounced to outweigh the main advantage of the q-Gaussian: its ability to provide a consistent description of the entire distribution, including the central peak, bulk, and tails, over all investigated time scales. Moreover, the evolution of the parameter $q$ offers a simple and direct characterization of aggregational Gaussianity and of the transition between heavy- and short-tailed statistical regimes, without requiring separate fits for different regions of the distribution. These results indicate that, although the power law remains particularly suitable for describing extreme events, the q-Gaussian provides a broader and more practical framework for characterizing the statistical evolution of financial returns.

Localized extreme precipitation is a major trigger of urban flash floods and landslides, yet producing nowcasts that combine fine spatial detail with probabilistic uncertainty remains challenging. Here we introduce exPreCast-ENS, a conditional residual diffusion framework that transforms the deterministic 4 km radar nowcaster exPreCast into a 1 km probabilistic ensemble while correcting systematic forecast errors. Conditioning on both the forecast and preceding radar observations lets the ensemble-mean correct the baseline rather than perturb it, while members represent unresolved fine-scale variability. Over the Korean Peninsula, skill improves with ensemble size. In two high-impact events in 2023, a 30-member ensemble recovers 38-47% of heavy-rain pixels missed by exPreCast while retaining approximately 95% of its correct detections and alarming on under 1% of the pixels it correctly left clear. The method generates a 1-h forecast in 3.4 s on a single GPU and yields consistent improvements on the French regional MeteoNet radar dataset.

A large sample of OB stars plays an important role in studying the stellar parameters of massive stars, as well as the formation and evolution of the Milky Way. With the help of the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) Data Release 10 (DR10), we are able to construct a large sample of OB stars with spectroscopic data. In this study, we identify 48,463 spectra of 34,550 OB stars from LAMOST DR10, based on the Hertzsprung-Russell (H-R) diagram constructed with Gaia DR3 data and spectral line indices measured from LAMOST DR10 low-resolution spectra. Among these, 6907 OB stars are newly identified. We use the MKCLASS tool to derive the spectral subtypes of the OB sample. The spatial distribution of 25,287 OB stars and the Toomre diagram of 20,397 OB stars indicate that the majority of these stars are located in the Galactic disk. Based on their peculiar velocities, we identify 1960 runaway star candidates.

In this paper, we construct the lattice Kadomtsev-Petviashvili (KP) type eigenfunction equations. A homogeneous nonlocal $\bar{\partial}$ problem is considered, from which we are able to define the eigenfunction of the Lax pair of the lattice KP equation. The eigenfunction together with its expansions at infinity and at a finite analytic point provide formulations of the lattice modified KP equation, the lattice Schwarzian KP equation and the Nijhoff-Quispel-Capel KP (NQC-KP) equation. We also consider an inhomogeneous nonlocal $\bar{\partial}$ problem. It defines the eigenfunction of the Lax pair of the lattice modified KP equation. This eigenfunction generates a direct formulation for the NQC-KP equation, which is different from the previous ones. Explicit solutions of these equations are obtained, from which we can see the difference of the different formulations for same equations.

For periodic Schrödinger operators $H_V=-\Delta+V$ with bounded real-valued potentials on $\mathbb R^d$ with $d\ge2$, we show that for generic potentials, each endpoint of every spectral gap is attained by a single Bloch band at only finitely many quasimomenta, and has a nondegenerate Hessian at every attaining point. This proves the Spectral Edge Conjecture for periodic Schrödinger operators.

Lightweight channel attention mechanisms are widely used in image classification, yet their effectiveness in fine-grained visual recognition (FGVR) remains limited. Most modules summarize each channel by global average pooling (GAP), which captures activation magnitude but ignores spatial concentration, so channels with different spatial distributions but identical means receive the same descriptor. We propose Concentration-Aware Channel Attention (ConCA), which pairs the mean with a shift-invariant negative-input entropy (NegEnt), computed via a softmax over the negated activations, forming a dual descriptor that jointly encodes magnitude and concentration. A depthwise 1-D convolutional multi-layer perceptron (MLP), whose parameter count is linear in the number of channels, maps the pair to a per-channel weight. On six fine-grained benchmarks, ConCA improves over attention-free, SE-Net, and ECA-Net baselines as well as four richer descriptor-based modules under a controlled from-scratch protocol, and it generalizes across eight backbones on iNat2021-mini. These results indicate that the channel descriptor, together with the per-channel gating that maps it to attention weights, is an important but underexplored aspect of lightweight channel attention in FGVR.

Dicke states are multipartite entangled states in which a fixed number of quantum excitations is coherently shared among many qubits. Originally introduced in the context of cooperative emission and superradiance, they are now important resources for quantum sensing, networking, and collective quantum phenomena. Preparing prescribed Dicke states with high fidelity, however, remains challenging, particularly as the system size and excitation number increase. Here we present an open dataset and accompanying code for preparing Dicke states using a collision-based quantum protocol. The dataset covers systems from five to fourteen qubits over a broad range of excitation numbers and records how the best-found noiseless preparation fidelity changes with circuit depth. It also provides circuit-resource estimates and experimental measurements for selected states on the 54-qubit IQM Emerald superconducting processor. The accompanying code reproduces the processed data and validation checks, providing a reusable benchmark for studying the trade-off between state-preparation fidelity, circuit cost, and hardware noise.

Electric and magnetic control of transport properties at atomic interfaces is central to the development of next generation electronics and spintronics. Van der Waals multiferroics materials that simultaneously host dielectric and magnetic orders down to the monolayer limit offer a promising platform for such interfacial control, yet the realization of electronic functionalities that exploit the unique attributes of van der Waals multiferroics has largely remained elusive. Here, we realize a van der Waals heterostructure comprising graphene and the multiferroic CuCrP2S6, enabling gate-switchable magnetoelectric transport in graphene, mediated by the multiferroic layer. The charge-neutrality resistance peak of graphene exhibits pronounced hysteresis arising from polarization flip in the multiferroic state. Application of an in-plane magnetic field shifts this peak in a polarization-dependent manner, revealing magnetic-field-induced polarization modulation a direct signature of the magnetoelectric effect. Furthermore, cooling the device under an applied electric field enables domain control of the multiferroic order, allowing reversible switching of the interfacial magnetoelectric transport. These results provide the first demonstration of interfacial magnetoelectric transport in a vdW heterostructure, and establish a pathway for engineering two-dimensional van der Waals interfaces for functional device applications.

Within the framework of quasi-topological gravity, we systematically investigate the correspondences among three classes of observables—the shadow, the quasinormal modes, and the graybody factors—of regular black holes in $D = 5$ dimensions. Using the WKB approximation and GrayHawk numerical integration, we test the applicability of the GBF–QNM correspondence and the shadow–GBF correspondence in the low-mode ($l=2$) and higher-dimensions ($D=5$): the difference between the GBF–QNM correspondence and the numerical results remains small in magnitude; we apply the known Langer correction (replacing $l$ by the effective angular momentum $\kappa = \sqrt{l(l+D-3)} \simeq l + (D-3)/2$), which reduces the error of the shadow–GBF correspondence at low modes to a level comparable with that of the GBF–QNM correspondence. Our work extends the shadow–GBF correspondence to higher-dimensional regular black holes, providing a viable route to predict the black hole spectrum and the Hawking radiation profile from a single observable, and thereby to realize multi-messenger tests of gravity.

We establish the existence of smooth solutions to the symmetric maximal surface equation with degenerate boundary conditions. Moreover, we prove that these solutions maximize the associated area functionals. This result serves as the Lorentzian analogue of minimal graphs in hyperbolic spaces together with their associated area minimizing problem.

Time-resolved terahertz (THz) spectroscopy is used to probe polaron formation in CeO$_2$. The ultrafast THz photoconductivity is dominated by contributions from large hole and small electron polarons. Delocalized large hole polarons are formed on a $820 \pm 50$ fs time scale and are of Fröhlich type, with optical conductivity well described by a simple Drude model and a transient hole mobility of $100$ cm$^2$/Vs. Small electron polarons form via localized coupling to Ce lattice sites, revealed by reduction in the lattice Born effective charge causing a transient phonon softening. These results establish the dual polaron nature of CeO$_2$ and provide a basis for understanding charge transfer dynamics in metal oxide photocatalysts.

We introduce a two-coupling generalization of $\mathbb{C}P^{N-1}$ model that continuously interpolates between the self-dual ($\epsilon=0$) and the physical ($\epsilon=g$) theories as a useful nonperturbative tool. At $\epsilon \neq g$, this model possesses a chiral imbalance, which may be viewed as a real topological deformation (imaginary-$\theta$). We demonstrate that exact quantum equivalence between first- and second-order formulations strictly requires a topological counterterm sourced by a bosonic chiral anomaly. Solving this deformed theory at large $N$ yields two primary results. First, we analytically determine the nonperturbative vacuum structure of the self-dual theory, a self-dual vacuum with a dynamically generated field-strength condensate. Second, we resolve a fundamental paradox where saddles with $(\theta + 2\pi n) \sim O(N)$ ($n$ is branch number) spuriously yield lower energy densities than the physical ground state. Because the effective action possesses an essential singularity at $F=0$, we show that the Lefschetz thimble analysis must be generalized to include boundary thimbles. A boundary Stokes phenomenon renders the problematic saddles topologically inactive, fully restoring the validity of the large-$N$ expansion for strongly coupled theories.

Helicity in gravity is a multifaceted concept, and several inequivalent definitions exist in the literature. In this work, we reduce the topological Pontryagin and Nieh-Yan terms to a constant time spacelike hypersurface. Remarkably, upon applying the SVT decomposition at the linearized level, we obtain four distinct helicity densities. The helicity density arising from the Nieh-Yan term is termed the spin-1 and spin-2 gravitomagnetic helicity density, depending on whether it originates from vector or tensor modes. Meanwhile, the helicity density arising from the Pontryagin term is termed the spin-1 and spin-2 gravito-current helicity density, according to the corresponding mode contributions. We study the mode and multipole expansions of these helicity functionals and apply them to leading order Newtonian two-body systems, weak field boosted Kerr, a locally defined slowly varying gyratonic pp-wave model, and a linearized gravitational Hopfion.

Granular particles typically feature contact friction, which gives rise to various nontrivial properties of granular materials. In this work, we investigate the linear stability of static packings composed of frictional spheres, whose interactions are modeled using the discrete element method. We discuss a key difficulty in properly modeling static friction and address the problem of identifying rattlers. We also explore the spectrum of the energy matrix, which governs the linear viscoelastic response of the system. The intermediate- and high-frequency regimes of the spectrum remain qualitatively independent of both the friction coefficient and the packing fraction.