Papers

Integrable partial differential equations, such as the Korteweg–De Vries (KdV) equation, admit infinite hierarchies of commuting higher symmetries. Their symmetry reductions give rise to integrable finite-dimensional dynamical systems solvable in terms of Abelian functions. This underlies the finite-gap integration method for the KdV equation, introduced by S.P. Novikov and subsequently extended to many other integrable systems. In this paper, I introduce the concept of reduction ideals and a new class of reductions for integrable differential–difference equations, leading to integrable finite-dimensional systems in both commutative and noncommutative settings. This class includes periodic reductions, symmetry reductions, and a broad family of other reductions defined in terms of the associated Lax operator. The reduction constraints define integrable maps that enable solutions of the reduced systems to be extended to solutions of the corresponding differential-difference equations. The construction is illustrated using the Volterra hierarchy.

We develop a surrogate-assisted workflow for millimeter-scale transport of a $^{87}$Rb Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) on a multi-wire atom chip. Gradient-based inverse optimization generates 42 current schedules spanning seven regularization strengths and six transport durations. A low-cost Gaussian phase-space model ranks these schedules by endpoint overlap at three atom numbers. A Thomas–Fermi scaling (Ermakov) model estimates cloud dimensions for case-specific moving-grid construction. We then evaluate selected schedules in detail with the three-dimensional Gross–Pitaevskii equation (GPE). At $N=10^3$ and $T=0.5$ s, the surrogate predicts a larger axial center-of-mass (COM) excursion than at longer durations. The GPE confirms this prediction and reveals sloshing that persists through delivery, with an endpoint fidelity $F_{3D}=0.9244$. For all five longer transports, the surrogate predicts near-unit endpoint overlap for the top-ranked schedules, and GPE propagation using these schedules gives $F_{3D}>0.9997$. At $N=10^4$ and $T=2.0$ s, the surrogate-selected schedule similarly gives $F_{3D}=0.999932$. These results demonstrate that the surrogate estimates provide a useful low-cost basis for candidate screening, while GPE propagation resolves the transport dynamics and the delivered condensate state.

Nuclear landscape is initially explored in the framework of relativistic Hartree-Bogoliubov theory under the spherical approximation, adopting the newly developed PCF-PK1 density functional. The functional effectively incorporates exchange terms via the Fierz transformation and explicitly includes the tensor coupling. We analyze the limits of the nuclear landscape and nuclear ground state properties including binding energies, charge radii, {\alpha}-decay energies, compared with other functionals and experiment. In the present calculations, 7210 nuclei are predicted to be bound with the root-mean-square deviation of binding energies 7.170 MeV. The removal of spurious shell closure at Z = 58 and 92 is discussed by shell gaps and single-particle spectra. For superheavy nuclei, potential magic numbers beyond 208Pb are studied. The inclusion of the tensor coupling in PCF-PK1 helps restore the pseudospin symmetry, leading to a less pronounced shell closure at Z = 120.

The hybridization of magnons and excitons would combine magnetic and optical degrees of freedom in a single composite quasiparticle. Such a hybridization is however difficult to achieve, because of their inherent energy mismatch. We propose that in biased bipolar ferromagnetic electron–hole bilayers the excitons and magnons can be brought into resonance, with the exciton energy lowered through the voltage bias to match the magnon energies. We demonstrate the linear hybridization of magnons and spin-flip excitons in this regime, starting from the microscopic exchange interactions between electrons and localized magnetic moments. We show that further increasing the gate voltage softens the hybrid magnon–exciton mode and realizes a magnon–exciton condensate, which manifests in both the magnon and exciton sectors and is associated with spin-superfluid transport. Ferromagnetic electron–hole bilayers therefore provide a new platform for the study of composite magnon–exciton quasiparticles and the realization of spinful condensates and associated spin superfluidity.

Interferometry is a powerful method for studying many fundamental phenomena ranging from gravitational waves to anyon excitations. Besides loss of coherence in the interferometer paths, quantum mechanics sets an incompressible bound for linear interferometry arising from the quantum noise of the light beam, called the shot noise limit. Here, we implement a non-linear quantum interferometer that uses a microwave cavity and a magnetic field resilient anharmonic superconducting quantum circuit made of granular aluminum. The circuit enables interferometry beyond the shot noise limit. A direct application of our findings is the detection of dark matter (axions or dark photons), high-frequency gravitational waves or astronomical masers.

We investigate the capability of variational quantum circuits in detecting a topological phase transition within the toric code model subjected to a uniform magnetic field. The detection is carried out via shot-based computations of both the ground state energy and the global entanglement. We begin by employing well-established renormalization techniques to construct a quantum circuit that accurately represents the pure toric code under periodic boundary condition. This circuit is subsequently parameterized to enable a shot-based variational simulation of the ground state in the presence of the magnetic field. Our results demonstrate that even for the minimal lattice sizes and a finite number of measurement shots, the ground state energy exhibits a distinct singularity at the transition point which can be reliably approximated through finite-size scaling analysis. Furthermore, we introduce a secondary variational circuit designed to compute the global entanglement of the generated ground state. We observe that both global entanglement and its conditional counterpart display the expected qualitative behavior at the transition point, consistent with the topological nature of the phase transition. To evaluate the practical viability of our variational approach on real quantum hardware, we systematically examine the detrimental effects of gate noise on the analysis. We find that the topological phase exhibits a notable robustness against noise, manifesting as a linear decrease in the transition point with increasing noise strength.

Robust entanglement at room temperature is a central challenge for solid-state quantum information processing and quantum-enhanced sensing. Here we demonstrate room-temperature storage of entanglement in a silicon carbide (SiC) quantum node by coherently transferring an electron-nuclear entangled state onto long-lived nuclear-spin memory qubits. Using a shallow single color center in 4H-SiC, conventionally denoted PL6, we realize a fully addressable three-qubit register composed of one electron-spin processor and two strongly coupled $^{29}$Si nuclear-spin memory qubits. This platform enables the deterministic generation of high-fidelity entangled states, including a nuclear-spin Bell state with a fidelity of $94 \pm 2\%$ and a three-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ)-type state with a fidelity of $89 \pm 4\%$. By implementing a SWAP-gate protocol in the strong hyperfine-coupling regime, the electron-nuclear entanglement is transferred to the nuclear-spin memory with a fidelity of $92.5 \pm 2.5\%$, extending the entanglement lifetime by a factor of 240. We further confirm the generality of this approach in an additional heterogeneous $^{29}$Si-$^{13}$C nuclear-spin register and, through a statistical survey of 200 single PL6 centers, show that multi-nuclear-spin registers occur naturally with probabilities above 10%. These results position shallow SiC color centers as a powerful platform for entanglement-assisted quantum sensing and scalable room-temperature quantum technologies.

Unraveling the partonic origin of the proton spin requires precise determinations of polarized parton distribution functions (PDFs), which depend on comparably precise theoretical predictions for polarized scattering, particularly in view of the high-precision measurements anticipated at the future Electron-Ion Collider. We present the first next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N$^3$LO) QCD predictions for longitudinally polarized semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering (SIDIS) in a fully differential form, together with next-to-next-to-leading order predictions for the hadron transverse-momentum spectrum. These results are obtained by extending the two-dimensional transverse-momentum subtraction framework to the spin-dependent cross section. Together with the corresponding unpolarized calculation, these results enable consistent N$^3$LO predictions for longitudinal double-spin asymmetries and provide a precision baseline for future analyses of helicity PDFs and transverse-momentum-dependent helicity distributions.

Studying the multistability of origami structures presents challenges due to the nonlinearity of their kinematics and the high-dimensional configuration spaces that are difficult to visualize and explore exhaustively. To address this, we utilize the Lagrangian framework for origami to exploit symmetries and obtain reduced-dimensional slices of the configuration space. Our analysis of degree-6 vertices with reflection symmetry reveals topological transitions in their kinematic space as sector angles are varied, with implications for the number of symmetry-constrained minima and the emergence of metastable regions. These lower-dimensional slices are amenable to exhaustive search and visualization. A subsequent full-space stability analysis shows that 18 of 41 degree-6 and 14 of 45 degree-8 symmetry-constrained minima remain minima when all locally compatible perturbations, including those that break symmetry, are admitted. The metastable regions, which would likely be overlooked by numerical optimization alone, are influenced by the interplay between the boundaries of admissible kinematic space and crease mechanical properties. We extend our analysis to cone-like vertices with higher symmetry and one-degree-of-freedom kinematics, exploring symmetry-breaking phenomena, combinatorial structure, and their consequences for branchwise stability. The stability landscapes uncovered have potential applications in mechanical metamaterials, mechanical computing, origami-based robotics, and structures designed to self-deploy and retain their shape.

The design of quantum materials to manipulate dimensionality and electronic correlations is a central focus in the exploration of emergent phenomena. We propose a new correlated quantum material platform for realizing a layer- and orbital-selective Mott transition (LOSMT) in a nickelate heterostructure by combining bilayer and monolayer LaNiO$_3$ separated by a monolayer LaAlO$_3$ spacer under compressive strain from the LaAlO$_3$ substrate. The LOSMT emerges from the layer-dependent dimensional confinement of the apical Ni($d$)-$z^2$ orbital and strain-induced lifting of the orbital degeneracy. The monolayer LaNiO$_3$ exhibits an orbital-selective Mott insulating phase with a Mott gap in the Ni($d$)-$z^2$ orbital, whereas the bilayer LaNiO$_3$ exhibits a multi-orbital metallic phase, triggering the orbital-selective Mott transition upon cooling $via$ inter-layer hybridization of the Ni($d$)-$z^2$ orbitals. Calculations within the density functional theory plus dynamical mean-field theory (DFT+DMFT) framework reveal that the LOSMT drives a dimensional crossover by enabling out-of-plane electronic transport through the metallization of the localized apical Ni($d$)-$z^2$ orbital, while the planar Ni($d$)-$x^2-y^2$ orbital remains itinerant across the transition. The emergence of the LOSMT provides a new pathway for engineering correlated quantum materials toward unconventional superconductivity and Mott-transistor functionalities.

Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP) uses pregroup grammars to translate grammatical structure into diagrammatic representations and quantum circuits. Recent Hindi QNLP work has shown that Hindi-specific pregroup grammars can support grammar-sensitive compositional models, but grammatical type assignment is still largely manual, limiting scalability. This paper formulates automatic Hindi pregroup supertagging as a token-level classification task. Using a manually annotated corpus of 380 Hindi sentences, we evaluate lexical, contextual, prompting-based, lexical-repair, and suffix/morphology-aware methods. Results show that simple lexical and contextual models are strong in this low-resource setting: contextual backoff achieves the best completed accuracy of 64.56%, while raw Qwen2.5 prompting reaches only 11.65%. Lexical repair raises LLM-assisted prediction to 64.08%, demonstrating the value of constraining generative outputs with symbolic grammar knowledge. Diagnostic analysis further shows that seen and unambiguous tokens are much easier than unseen tokens, and suffix/morphology features improve karaka-token accuracy but not overall performance. These results show that automatic Hindi pregroup assignment is feasible and can reduce reliance on manual annotation in future multilingual QNLP pipelines.

In this work, we investigate the thermodynamic consistency of the apparent horizon in effective loop quantum cosmology (LQC). By retaining the standard definitions of horizon thermodynamic quantities, we find that the modified LQC dynamics leads to a departure from the classical equilibrium thermodynamic description. This deviation can be naturally described by a nonequilibrium formulation characterized by an internal entropy production term. The resulting entropy production consistently recovers the classical and de Sitter limits. These results suggest that the apparent horizon in effective LQC admits a coherent nonequilibrium thermodynamic interpretation.

We consider two canonical market-microstructure regularities: the long-memory of trade signs and the square-root law of meta-order impact. The point is not to propose new empirical laws, but to separate the clocks on which existing laws are defined. The sign-memory law is an event-time statement about the ordering and fragmentation of hidden orders. The square-root impact law is an operational-time statement about front motion in a locally linear latent order book. Starting from a discrete-time random-walk bid/ask reaction–diffusion order book with a separate event clock, we identify an event-time imbalance reduction, derive the operational-time front and impact equations in the locally linear regime, and then subordinate both sign and impact observables to calendar time. Fractional or tempered clock effects enter through this event-to-calendar projection, not through a different operational-time impact mechanism. This gives a compact clock-aware framework in which event-time sign persistence, operational-time square-root impact, and anomalous calendar-time effects appear as distinct but compatible consequences of a common order-book representation.

We study inverse source reconstruction in generalized Vaidya spacetimes. A prescribed density fixes the mass and tangential pressure, while a two-sector decomposition determines a dimensionless radial balance function. We distinguish this function from a time-directed conversion rate and identify the additional null-flux information required for a covariant exchange vector. Positivity restricts the allowed target pressures: a de Sitter core cannot be represented by nonnegative sectors with nonnegative tangential equations of state. An explicit finite-density profile admits a positive vacuum-like completion, finite curvature invariants, and inner and outer trapping horizons above a calculable threshold. Its total source satisfies the null, weak, and dominant energy conditions during monotonic accretion, while the timelike convergence condition fails in the core. We check polytropic, bag-model-inspired, and condensate-inspired profiles and the corresponding cosmological reconstruction. Finally, we compute the stationary endpoint's shadow and compare its exterior deformation with published Sagittarius A* measurements. The construction establishes local curvature regularity and marginal-sphere formation, without claiming a microscopic formation mechanism, perturbative stability, or geodesic completeness.

Understanding the relationship between photospheric magnetic flux evolution and coronal emission remains an important problem in heliophysics. We investigate the decay of NOAA Active Region 12781 from 7 to 11 November 2020 using observations from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Coronal emission was measured from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) 193\~Å images, while the photospheric signed and unsigned magnetic flux was derived from Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) observations of the FeĨ 6173\~Å line. The unsigned magnetic flux and mean 193\~Å intensity showed a strong inverse relationship, with Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients of $r\_p=-0.771$ and $r\_s=-0.758$, respectively. During the five-day decay phase, the unsigned magnetic flux decreased by 36.54\% from its maximum value, while the coronal emission increased by 21.96\%. We also compared the remote-sensing observations with near-Earth solar-wind and interplanetary magnetic-field measurements from the OMNI database using an estimated propagation delay. The results show that the coronal emission did not vary directly with the photospheric magnetic flux during the decay of AR\~12781. The possible association with the solar wind is discussed cautiously because a direct source connection cannot be established from the time-delay estimate alone.

Vector meson dominance models describe the mixing of photons with vector mesons; the hadronic admixture frequently dominates the interactions of photons with nucleons. This mixing also makes it possible to test for new physics affecting the vector mesons using photon measurements. The possibilities for new physics to be contrained in this indirect fashion include potential Lorentz and CPT violations in the hadronic effective action. The characteristic scale of bounds on Lorentz violation coefficients in the $\rho^{0}$ meson sector is two orders of magnitude weaker than the corresponding photon bounds, three orders of magnitude weaker for $\phi$ vector mesons, and four orders of magnitude weaker for $\omega$ mesons.

Silicon, which is highly reflective and has negligible absorption at the microwave 2.45 GHz range, can be heated when it is turned into black-Si with a surface texture of nano-needles made by SF6/O2 plasma etching. Microwave heating of flat Si and of black-Si with vertical and with tilted (oriented) nano-needles was compared under identical conditions in a cylindrical TM010 resonator. Samples were placed horizontally on a 150-micrometer-thick cover glass, which standardized their height and position inside the cavity and allowed a common calibration of the radiation thermometer against a K-type thermocouple. Under a stepwise protocol of only 2-3-4 W of microwave power (60 s per step), black-Si with vertical needles reached ~ 260 C, systematically exceeding flat Si (~ 190 C), while black-Si with oriented needles showed a delayed but abrupt onset of heating at 3 W. In situ monitoring of the cavity resonance revealed a 2-3 MHz downshift of the resonance frequency f for all samples, with the drift consistently appearing once the sample temperature exceeded ~ 120 - 150 C, consistent with thermally activated carrier generation in Si. At a given temperature, each sample loads the cavity at a different f and quality factor Q, indicating an orientation-dependent effective permittivity of the nano-needle array, in line with the strong form birefringence of tilted black-Si. Application potential and challenges in the quantitative temperature and permittivity determination are discussed.

Coordinate time series of extragalactic radio sources from very long baseline interferometry observations are widely used to evaluate source positional stability, select stable sources for celestial reference frames, assess reference-frame axis stability, and investigate source-related astrometric variability. Their external consistency, realistic errors, and relation to processing strategies and analysis configurations remain to be investigated. We aim to compare coordinate time series solutions from different analysis centers and investigate how processing strategies and configurations contribute to their differences. We collected eight solutions from seven analysis centers and selected 496 common sources after data selection, reference-frame alignment, and extraction of common observing sessions. Inter-solution differences were characterized with pairwise positional offsets and correlation analysis, and realistic positional errors with the N-cornered-hat (NCH) method and bootstrap resampling. Most solutions have median weighted root mean square (WRMS) values of a few hundred microarcseconds $(\mathrm{\mu as})$, and the median NCH-derived precision is about 200-300 $\mathrm{\mu as}$ in right ascension and 250-400 $\mathrm{\mu as}$ in declination. Solutions with similar strategies, software, or source constraints show higher consistency, with more similar WRMS values, stronger correlations, and closer precision estimates. Consistency is affected not only by the global or independent mode distinction but also by detailed analysis configuration. NCH-derived precision depends on declination, being poorer in the southern sky, and stabilizes with more observing sessions. Processing strategies and configurations introduce marginal differences; solutions remain generally consistent. Inter-solution comparisons independently estimate realistic stochastic errors beyond formal errors.

Substrate surface preparation is a key step in the fabrication of electronic devices. In III–V semiconductor platforms, e.g. used in HEMTs and lasers, removal of the native substrate oxide is extremely important, where improper removal will negatively affect end-of-line device performance. However, the impact of substrate preparation in hybrid superconductor–semiconductor (S–Sm) systems relevant to quantum information applications remains poorly understood. This study compares three surface preparations for the deposition of sputtered Nb films on InP: (i) no intentional oxide removal (control), (ii) in-situ $\mathrm{Ar}^{+}$ milling, and (iii) S-passivation. In-situ $\mathrm{Ar}^{+}$ milling reduces the O concentration at the metal–substrate (MS) interface, but also roughens the InP surface, increasing the effective thickness of the Nb–InP interface and promoting O incorporation through extended defects in the Nb film. S-passivation suppresses interfacial O more effectively while preserving a sharper and smoother buried interface. It also yields Nb films with higher superconducting transition temperatures and less structural damage than the $\mathrm{Ar}^{+}$-milled samples. Despite these materials improvements, the microwave response is comparable across the three preparations. At single photon powers, the highest internal quality factors, $Q_i$, are approximately $1.30\times10^{5}$ ($130\mathrm{k}$) for the control resonators, $9.7\times10^{4}$ ($97\mathrm{k}$) for the S-passivated resonators, and $8.4\times10^{4}$ ($84\mathrm{k}$) for the $\mathrm{Ar}^{+}$-milled resonators. These results suggest that the present devices are not primarily limited by dielectric loss at the buried Nb–InP interface.

On a cloud-accessed quantum processor the classical optimizer of a variational algorithm communicates with the device through submitted jobs, and each job carries a queueing and turnaround overhead that does not depend on how many circuits it contains. We study a simple consequence of this for the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA). An optimizer whose next set of trial parameters is known before any result returns can evaluate the whole set in one job, whereas a sequential optimizer such as COBYLA spends one job per function evaluation. We compare a batched pattern search with COBYLA on IBM's \ibmfez\ processor for cardinality-constrained portfolio selection with six to twelve assets, giving both optimizers the same number of jobs and the same number of shots. At every size the batched search reaches, after its first job, a parameter quality that the serial optimizer takes several jobs to match, and the two methods converge to comparable final values; repeating the eight-asset comparison from four starting points gives the same ordering each time. The instances are small enough to be solved exactly, which lets us check that the device's output distribution is correlated with the true ranking of portfolios and is clearly separated from a control circuit of the same depth with the cost layer removed. A short scan over circuit depth at classically optimal parameters shows that on this device the measured solution quality peaks at two or three QAOA layers. The protocol is described in enough detail to be reproduced, and the notebooks and raw counts are released.

Thixotropic and viscoelastic materials both retain their deformation history and are difficult to distinguish. However, a stationary linear response obeys the Kramers-Kronig relations. A structure that evolves during a sweep renders the spectrum inconsistent with them, so the residual from one chirp and no model measures nonstationarity. It survives the small-amplitude limit, returns to its baseline at any stationary state, and, for bounded restructuring, peaks near the structural time. We verify this on eight models and demonstrate it on published spectra of a thixotropic silica suspension.

The kagome material has rapidly established itself as a research frontier in condensed matter physics, owing to its distinctive geometric structure and the rich array of unconventional physical phenomena. In the kagome AV3Sb5 (A = K, Rb, Cs) family, the charge-ordered state exhibits a remarkable characteristic, i.e., anomalous symmetry-breaking, which is tied to the topological nature of the electronic band structure. Here, we report the third-order nonlinear longitudinal and Hall responses that persist stably up to room temperature in the kagome material CsV3Sb5. Notably, the nonlinear responses demonstrate significant enhancement below the charge density wave (~ 77 K) order and anomalous symmetry-breaking (~ 39 K) state. The scaling analysis indicates that the third-order nonlinear transport is governed jointly by quantum geometric contribution and extrinsic scattering. This study realizes a giant third-order nonlinear response and provides a distinct method to detect anomalous symmetry-breaking in CsV3Sb5.

In this paper, we study the dimensional reduction of a nonlocal scalar field theory to 1+2 dimensions. This nonlocal model introduces a light mass parameter as a scale that primarily modifies the infrared regime of the theory. We constraint the external sources to a bidimensional plane to obtain the effective Green's function and propose an effective Lagrangian for the scalar field in 1+2 dimensions. Using the static propagator, we calculate the interaction energy between point-like charges in the planar space. Furthermore, we evaluate the causal and Feynman Green's functions, and discuss the unitarity of the effective planar model at tree level. Finally, we implement the Matsubara formalism to investigate the thermodynamics of the planar model. The exact thermal free energy shows the fractional degrees of freedom characteristic of kinematic confinement and imposes a strict low-temperature validity bound ($T \ll \Lambda$) to preserve the macroscopic thermodynamic stability.

We prove sharp dispersive $L^1 \to L^\infty$ estimates for the three-dimensional attractive Coulomb operator $H_Z=-\Delta-Z|x|^{-1}$, where $Z>0$. The absolutely continuous part of the Schrödinger evolution decays at the free rate for short times, whereas its leading contribution decays like $|t|^{-1}$ for long times, with amplitude proportional to $Z$. This slower decay is driven by the threshold and is sharp when $Z^2|t|\gg1$.

Axion-star mass-radius relations are commonly computed using different orders of relativistic approximation, making it important to determine where these descriptions remain reliable. We perform a unified numerical comparison of axion-star ground-state configurations in the Newtonian Schrödinger-Poisson description, first- and second-order relativistic effective field theories, and the full Einstein-Klein-Gordon system for a real scalar field. Using the same attractive quartic self-interaction in all four descriptions, we scan $|\widetilde{\lambda}|=(M_{\rm Pl}/f_a)^2$ and determine the maximum masses and corresponding enclosed-mass radii. All descriptions recover the common large-$|\widetilde{\lambda}|$ dilute-star scaling, while substantial differences appear at weak and moderate coupling. The relativistic EFTs interpolate systematically between the Newtonian and full-GR results. For part of the maximum-mass sequence where $\max|\phi|/f_a=O(1)$, we test the temporal-harmonic and potential truncations explicitly in full GR. The higher-harmonic expansion shows rapid convergence, while restoring the complete single-cosine potential changes the maximum mass only at the percent level and $R_{95}$ at the several-percent level. Together with the systematic convergence of the relativistic EFT descriptions toward full GR, these results show that the large weak-coupling departure from the Schrödinger-Poisson prediction reflects the breakdown of the nonrelativistic structural description. Our results provide a systematic benchmark for determining when Newtonian, relativistically corrected, or fully general-relativistic descriptions are required for axion-star structure. The numerical implementation used in this work is available in the Axion Star Solvers repository at https://github.com/Parisa-Arabameri/AxionStar.

The energy spectra of Galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) serve as critical probes of their astrophysical origins and propagation mechanisms through the interstellar medium. Among the key physical processes shaping the observed spectra, solar modulation, driven by turbulent heliospheric magnetic fields and the variability of the solar wind, plays a dominant role in modifying GCR fluxes within the inner heliosphere. The recent release of time-dependent flux measurements for He, Li, Be, B, C, N, and O by AMS-02 provides unprecedented precision to investigate solar modulation phenomena. In this study, we demonstrate that Li, Be, B, C, N, and O nuclei exhibit solar modulation parameters consistent with those of protons (p) and He within a modified force-field approximation (FFA) framework incorporating rigidity-dependent modulation potentials. By positing that GCRs with the same charge-sign sharing the solar modulation parameters, we further forecast daily fluxes of Ne, Mg and Si from 2011 to 2020.

We present a two-stage optimization framework that formalizes classical optical design strategies within a reproducible computational workflow. Starting point designs are constructed from paraxial and third-order models, providing optically consistent initial configurations. These configurations are refined through a physically grounded residual merit function evaluated by exact ray tracing, followed by RMS-based image refinement. Applied to a multi-channel astronomical focal reducer, the methodology provides a structured transition from aberration-based modeling to numerical optimization while preserving physically interpretable intermediate stages. By embedding classical optical design principles into an open computational pipeline, the approach reduces reliance on heuristic initial conditions and improves the reproducibility and interpretability of the design process.

Cohesive zone models are widely used to describe fracture and interfacial failure, yet most formulations prescribe problem-specific analytical traction-separation laws together with phenomenological rules for unloading and reloading, leading to specialized models for different cohesive behaviors. This work develops a unified learnable cohesive formulation within the generalized standard materials framework, in which the response is generated from learned constitutive functions while the underlying thermodynamic structure remains fixed. The surface free energy is decomposed into active and contact contributions, and irreversible damage evolution is governed by a learned mode-dependent damage resistance. The active energy is represented by an input-convex neural network, while the inverse damage resistance is represented by a monotone neural network. Convexity, monotonicity, normalization, and damage irreversibility are incorporated directly into the constitutive representation. Direct parameterization of the inverse resistance yields an explicit damage update and avoids local nonlinear inversion during constitutive evaluation. Material-point studies show that the formulation can represent qualitatively distinct cohesive responses, including plateaus, extended softening tails, irregular softening, nonlinear unloading, distinct Mode I and Mode II behaviors, and several classical mixed-mode cohesive laws. The framework therefore replaces law-specific model construction with a single thermodynamically structured representation capable of learning cohesive responses of broad functional complexity from data.

We study static and spherically symmetric black holes in nonconservative unimodular gravity, where the traceless field equations determine the source of a given geometry only up to a pure-trace term. We consider the Reissner-Nordström metric with an additional $1/r^{3}$ term and show that its coefficient fixes the Ricci scalar and, when the freedom in the source is restricted to the Rastall form, controls the nonconservation of energy and momentum. We find that only the null projections of the source are independent of how the geometry is divided between matter and vacuum. Therefore, no-go results based on the null energy condition hold in unimodular gravity, while those based on the strong or dominant conditions are generally split dependent. We identify the traceless source as the optimal split with respect to the energy conditions and determine the region in which all standard energy conditions can be satisfied. We also identify a combination of the shifts of the photon sphere and of the innermost stable circular orbit that measures the $1/r^{3}$ coefficient independently of the charge, although its detection requires a precision far beyond current observations.

Ferrons are collective excitations of polarization fluctuations that can enable terahertz communications and quantum transduction due to long propagation lengths. Although ferrons have been experimentally demonstrated in van der Waals ferroelectrics and relaxor ferroelectrics, there is no direct (sub)nanoscale experimental evidence of ferrons in three-dimensional ferroelectrics. Here, we detect two types of ferrons, Higgs and pseudo-Goldstone, at the (sub)nanoscale in lead titanate by measuring vibrational signals due to polarization fluctuations. By harnessing momentum transfer in electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS), we directly distinguish between soft-phonons and ferrons. We observe that the Higgs mode originates from the soft optical phonon parallel to the polar axis, whereas the pseudo-Goldstone mode originates from the soft optical phonon perpendicular to the polarization axis. Together with Landau theory, Raman spectroscopy measurements, and EELS, we observe that Higgs group velocities, in the bulk limit, are eight times greater than those of out-of-plane soft phonons and the pseudo-Goldstone ferrons have group velocities six times greater than in-plane soft phonons due to long-range dipole interactions. We further show that the domain size confinement effects lead to doubling of the respective bulk ferron group velocities, reaching up to approximately 15 km per second (almost 15 times higher than the out-of-plane soft phonon modes). Overall, this study opens a pathway to the detection of ferrons in three-dimensional ferroelectrics with domain engineering as a promising avenue for terahertz communication and transduction.