Papers

The problem of thermal equilibrium in general relativity is discussed and the unique role played by the fluid associated with the cosmological constant is emphasized. In addition to being the only fluid that is always in thermal equilibrium, it is shown here that its energy can also be seen as a universal quantity given by $E_\Lambda=\rho_\Lambda V$, where $V$ is a spatial volume. Furthermore, if the cosmological constant turns out to be a universal constant, then the conclusion that any spatial volume $V$ has an intrinsic energy follows naturally from the approach considered here. A possible application to quantum theories of gravity that postulate the existence of a minimal length scale is discussed. In studying the energies, the so-called teleparallel equivalent of general relativity is used, and the difficulty with the zero-point energy is discussed in light of the gravitational energy problem. The quasi-local energies of the Reissner-Nordström-de Sitter black hole and of a regular black hole are calculated. The results obtained here with the teleparallel theory are consistent with our expectations.

Networks of interacting Hebbian networks have recently been shown to perform a task beyond associative memory, namely pattern disentanglement: when fed with a spurious mixture of stored patterns, the different modules spontaneously specialize on, and retrieve, the different constituents of the mixture. So far, this capability has only been established for pairwise interactions, which limits the number of patterns that can be handled. Here we introduce a dense extension of these modular networks, in which both the auto-associative couplings within each module and the hetero-associative couplings among modules are promoted to higher-order Hebbian interactions. We show that, with a suitable choice of the interaction orders, the network disentangles mixtures while storing a number of patterns that scales linearly with the module size, a regime where its pairwise counterpart fails. Through a statistical-mechanical analysis based on Guerra's interpolation, we derive the self-consistency equations for the order parameters and draw the phase diagrams identifying the region where disentanglement is achieved; these predictions are confirmed by Monte Carlo simulations. Finally, we show that disentanglement provides a natural decoding primitive, and we illustrate it with two applications: the explicit reconstruction of all the hidden patterns from the Hebbian tensors and a stream of unlabeled mixtures, and a proof-of-concept communication protocol in which each message token is transmitted as a masked mixture of hidden patterns and decoded by the network dynamics. Owing to its attractor-based decoding, the protocol degrades gracefully under strong channel corruption, where conventional secure-transmission pipelines fail abruptly.

Quantum information enables many cryptographic primitives that are impossible in the classical world. A line of works has developed cryptographic protocol under the assumption that quantum adversaries are restricted to noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computing power, enabling strong one-time functionalities. But the advent of early fault-tolerant quantum computers eras will allow deeper logical quantum circuits, calling into questions the applicability of these NISQ-based assumptions. In this work, we adapt the classically accessible random oracle model (CAROM) as in [BDF+11] and [AK22], in which adversaries are only allowed to classically query the random oracle. The restriction is well motivated for NISQ quantum adversaries and may remain plausible in the presence of early fault-tolerant quantum computers. Then, we show that an efficient simulation-secure one-time memory (OTM) is possible under CAROM. Our protocol uses only BB84 states and has quadratic communication: for a $\lambda$-bit message and integer-valued parameters $n=n(\lambda)$ and $\ell=\ell(\lambda)$, the construction uses $n\ell$ qubits and $(n+2)\lambda$ classical bits, and for any quantum adversary with at most $2^{\ell/2-1}-1$ classical queries to the random oracle, its simulation advantage is at most $(n+3)\left(\frac{3}{4}\right)^n.$ Hence exponentially small simulation advantage in $n$.

We investigate the internal structure of the newly observed charm-strange meson $D_{s1}(2933)^{+}$, which was reported by the LHCb Collaboration in $B^{0}\to D^{+}D^{-}K^{+}\pi^{-}$, in the quark model by treating it as the $2P_{1}$ state of the $c\bar{s}$ system. The coupled-channel corrections to the ${}^{1}P_1$–${}^{3}P_1$ mass matrix are evaluated through the two-point self-energy loops involving the $DK^{*}$, $D^{*}K$, $D^{*}K^{*}$, $D_{s}\phi$, $D_{s}^{*}\phi$ and $D_{s}^{*}\eta$ intermediate channels. Requiring the corrected eigenvalue to reproduce the measured mass yields a cutoff scale of about $0.82~\mathrm{GeV}$, a $2P_{1}^{\prime}$ partner state at $3012~\mathrm{MeV}$, and a mixing angle of $-12.9^{\circ}$ that deviates significantly from the heavy-quark ideal-mixing angle. Moreover, the predicted three-body branching ratio fraction $R_{\text{th}}=1.98$ for $D_{s1}(2933)\to D^{+}K^{+}\pi^{-}$ via the $DK^{*}$ and $D_{2}^{*}K$ intermediate states is consistent with the experimental value $R_{\text{exp}}=1.27^{+1.29}_{-0.95}$ within uncertainties. These results support the assignment of $D_{s1}(2933)$ as the $2P_{1}$ excited state of the $c\bar{s}$ system with final state interactions.

Foundation models trained on optical astronomical data have not previously been applied to X-ray cluster thermodynamics. We show that embeddings from AstroCLIP, a contrastive vision-language model trained on optical galaxy images and spectra, retain physically meaningful structure when applied to mock Chandra X-ray images of simulated galaxy clusters - a significant shift in observational modality and physical scale. We target the central cooling time ($t_{\mathrm{cool},0}$) of the intracluster medium, a key diagnostic of cluster thermodynamics traditionally requiring X-ray spectroscopy. We present a machine learning framework that predicts $t_{\mathrm{cool},0}$ directly from X-ray images, applied to 711 projections from TNG300 and 993 from TNG-Cluster from the IllustrisTNG simulations. AstroCLIP embeddings form a structured latent space in which clusters with similar thermodynamic properties are naturally grouped, with no equivalent separation by halo mass. Building on this, we introduce a dot-product $k$-nearest neighbour attention model that retrieves similar clusters from the training set and adaptively reweights their cooling times. This model achieves root-mean-square errors of 0.24 (TNG300) and 0.23 (TNG-Cluster) in $\log(t_{\mathrm{cool},0})$, and demonstrates strong out-of-distribution generalisation, outperforming a fine-tuned convolutional neural network trained on raw images (RMSE 0.50 versus 0.73). These results demonstrate that pretrained foundation model embeddings transfer across astrophysical domains and encode thermodynamic information sufficient for inference of cluster cooling properties - offering a scalable path toward cool-core characterisation in all-sky surveys such as eROSITA.

The waveguide-integrated architecture holds promise for scalable on-chip integration of a charger, a transmission channel, and a quantum battery in a modular, independently optimizable design. We investigate a minimal charging configuration consisting of two emitters coupled to a semi-infinite waveguide and identify the optimal charging mechanism, wherein non-Markovian dynamics driven by out-of-band bound states give rise to single-frequency oscillations of the stored energy. We show that near-unity charging efficiency is achievable at weak to moderate coupling strengths via detuning control, provided that the battery-to-boundary separation $n$ is less than three times the charger-to-boundary separation $m$ ($n<3m$)—a constraint imposed by the mirror-induced feedback—while the average charging power decays exponentially with the spatial separation $n-m$. These findings offer useful insights for monolithic solid-state quantum energy storage and transport.

Ovarian follicle development has been modeled either by compartmental models, where developmental stages are represented by discrete compartments, or by physiologically structured population models (PSPMs), formulated as transport PDEs describing follicles along a continuous maturation variable. Compartmental models reproduce full-cycle hormonal and follicular dynamics but cannot describe cellular features. PSPMs capture multiscale behavior, yet lack a direct link to compartmental descriptions, making hormonal feedback difficult to incorporate. Here, we introduce a class of ODE systems derived as finite-dimensional reductions of PSPMs via a perturbative moment closure. These systems provide backbone approximations of the structured dynamics, retaining key nonlinear mechanisms governing recruitment, selection for dominance, and atresia while projecting maturation onto macroscopic variables. Zero- and first-order moments, derived from phenomenological assumptions regarding follicular maturation, allow us to realistically model follicle sizes and blood estradiol concentrations over one follicular wave. This application is supported by bovine data and likely generalizable to other mammalian species.

Angular momentum in solids is carried by (quasi)particles such as magnons, plasmons, and phonons, and coupling between these reservoirs enables diverse hybrid phenomena. Here, we introduce the transfer of angular momentum from lattice vibrations to magnetic order through the phonon angular momentum transfer torque (PAMTT), generated by a polarized phonon bath. We identify thermal routes for generating phonon angular momentum: a phonon Edelstein accumulation in noncentrosymmetric crystals and temperature-gradient-induced PAM currents with longitudinal Seebeck-like and transverse Hall components. Using realistic order-of-magnitude estimates, we find that PAMTT could produce measurable ferromagnetic-resonance frequency shifts and, for favorable interfacial coupling, drive magnetization reversal on nanosecond timescales.

In this paper, we study the evolution of curvature and entropy perturbations in three-field inflation with non-canonical kinetic terms. Using the kinematic basis in field space, we characterize the background trajectory through its turning rate and non-planar torsion. We also emphasize the inherited structure of perturbations from the kinematic system, which detaches the distinct roles of turning rate and torsion in the interactions among perturbations. We present and study numerically a three-phase model with an intermediate decelerated expansion stage in which two separated transient epochs amplify two distinct families of modes, generating a double-peaked curvature power spectrum. This double-peaked power spectrum leads to the formation of primordial black holes with two characteristic masses, $M_1\sim2\times10^{-12}M_\odot$ and $M_2\sim52M_\odot$ explaining, simultaneously, both dark matter and the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA binary black hole mass range.

A spectator spin-2 field can mix linearly with the metric tensor perturbations. We study the coupled tensor system in an inflationary background, including a parity violating effect parametrised by $\theta$. Without expanding in the linear mixing between the two fields, we solve the system exactly for arbitrary mass while treating the mixing strength nonperturbatively. The mode functions of both helicities are constructed by acting with an operator-valued Gauss hypergeometric function ${}_2F_1$ on Whittaker modes, and the late-time power spectrum of each graviton helicity is expressed in closed form in terms of the generalised hypergeometric function ${}_3F_2$. We find that one helicity is exponentially enhanced, showing that strong mixing with a spectator spin-2 field can generate a large and highly chiral primordial gravitational wave spectrum. The degree of circular polarisation is bounded by $\tanh(\pi\theta)$, independently of the spin-2 mass and the mixing strength. The same solution also gives the late-time power spectrum of the spectator field and its cross spectrum with the graviton. In the weak mixing limit, our exact result reproduces the perturbative Schwinger-Keldysh result. These solutions provide a nonperturbative framework for studying primordial gravitational waves sourced by additional tensor modes.

Improvised explosives used for fishing on shallow Indonesian reefs shatter coral skeleton, yet the damage they cause has been described largely through empirical radii and ecological surveys. We formulate an idealized model of how free gas held within a coral canopy modifies the shock loading that such a charge delivers to skeletal plates. The canopy is treated as a relaxed bubbly mixture whose shock impedance follows from the conservation of mass and momentum, and the reef is represented as a layered column of water, canopy, skeletal plate, and canopy struck at normal incidence. Three closed-form results emerge. Above a crossover pressure set by the void fraction and the stiffness of seawater, the canopy becomes nearly transparent to the shock. The impulse transmitted through any lossless layered stack is independent of the canopy, so gas redistributes the pulse in time without changing its total push. A plate carries tension after reflection from its lower face only when the canopy impedance falls below a threshold fixed by the plate thickness and the pulse duration, which defines a critical thickness. For a one-kilogram charge directly overhead, a gas-rich canopy more than triples the standoff at which a twelve-centimeter plate spalls while shortening the standoff at which it is crushed. A prescribed daily cycle of photosynthetic gas makes the same charge markedly more damaging at noon than at night. Bubble dynamics show that the canopy does not reach equilibrium within the pulse, so the results are best read as upper bounds.

We study the effects of the moat regime on meson and quark correlation functions and the quark-antiquark potential in low-energy QCD, building on the two-flavor quark meson model in a random-phase approximation. We investigate the relation between the moat regime and Friedel oscillations in the quark-antiquark potential at large density and zero temperature. As it turns out, oscillations from the moat regime are a distinct phenomenon, arising from poles on unphysical Riemann sheets in this region. Furthermore, we find that in addition to pions and the sigma meson, also other mesons, including vector mesons and the eta, are sensitive to the moat regime. This leads in particular to an enhancement of the meson spectral function in the spacelike region. The quarks, on the other hand, appear to be essentially insensitive. This can have far-reaching consequences for the phase diagram, as for example the chiral phase boundary, including the location of the critical endpoint, can be affected in the moat regime even in absence of inhomogeneous instabilities.

We propose a paradigm for quantum enhanced axion dark matter search, which does not rely on power measurements. We propose to measure directly the axion amplitude and phase in an interferometric protocol at the quantum limit, using a non-linear cavity. In addition, we introduce gyromagnetic modes as wide mass range transducers for axion signals compatible with standard haloscope designs. We expect this scheme to offer an improvement of at least 4 orders of magnitude in figure of merit and at least 2 orders of magnitude in mass window with respect to standard haloscopes. Owing to its generality, our proposed protocol has the potential to speed up axion search but also the search for dark photons or other cosmological objects, such as galactic masers.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are used as analytical tools to investigate the relationship between the progress variable field and the local chemical source term in lean premixed hydrogen flames. Rather than employing machine learning for modelling, CNNs are leveraged to analyse the physical information contained in spatially resolved fields from direct numerical simulations. CNNs are particularly well suited for this task because they exploit spatial correlations and multi-scale structures, allowing an assessment of how spatial organisation influences the source term. The analysis demonstrates that the progress variable based on water, $C_{\rm H_2O}$, contains all the information required to accurately parametrise the chemical source term whereas $C_{\rm H_2}$ alone does not. The inclusion of the mixture fraction $Z$ improves the accuracy of the latter but provides no significant additional information to the CNN when the spatial field of $C_{\rm H2O}$ is used as input. The same behaviour is observed in both a laminar thermodiffusively unstable flame and a turbulent slot-jet hydrogen flame, indicating that $C_{\rm H_2O}$ is a robust single variable for parametrisation. A complementary scale analysis in the laminar case shows that spatial features extending over at least two laminar flame thicknesses are required to reconstruct the source term accurately, thereby identifying the characteristic scale in the progress variable field that carries this information. These results demonstrate how machine learning can uncover physical dependencies that remain hidden to classical statistical analyses.

In the nonlinear source of the pressure Poisson equation the fluctuating enstrophy and strain nearly cancel. We ask where the cancellation is complete, which we call silent, and how the source escapes it. Pointwise the source depends only on the eigenvalues of the velocity gradient. Pure shear has none, so it is silent. It is the origin of the normalised invariant plane, whose second-invariant coordinate is the normalised source. Let $f$ be the shear fraction of the gradient and $m$ its distance from that origin. We prove that $m\le1-f\le3m$ at every point of every incompressible flow. Wherever the source nearly vanishes and the third invariant is small, the gradient is nearly pure shear. Otherwise the cancelling gradient is a balanced vortex, a swirl its own strain cancels at any strength. At a no-slip wall the silent object is exact: the wall shear-stress fluctuation, a rank-one sheet. Away from the wall we assume the same sheet, dressed with a small residual, and derive how it escapes. The escape passes through one element of the residual, the along-sheet variation of the sheet-normal velocity. Its amplitude is the geometric mean of sheet and residual, and its sign selects swirl or strain. A rank-two silent object has the same source through the same gates but balanced eigenvalues, so the assumption fixes the escape's topology, not its source. The shear fraction is thus a pointwise proxy for cancellation by shear, and a model of the source must be built on what escapes.

Space-time-varying electromagnetic structures unlock wave-control mechanisms inaccessible to static media, including frequency conversion, harmonic generation, and joint control over frequency and momentum. Here, we introduce an inverse-design framework for multilayer space-time-periodic structures in which the spatial permittivity distribution and temporal modulation profile are optimized jointly. The proposed platform comprises multiple pixelated layers that are periodic along one or both transverse directions and harmonically modulated in time, enabling the direct synthesis of complex multichannel frequency-momentum scattering responses. We demonstrate two representative functionalities: independent control over the amplitudes and phases of three transmitted spatiotemporal channels and the generation of a frequency-momentum comb. Across these examples, we consider both continuous and binary permittivity distributions. To facilitate reproducibility and further development, we make the numerical implementation of the optimization framework freely available. These results demonstrate that inverse-designed time-varying multilayers provide a compact and versatile route toward programmable frequency-momentum multiplexing and the synthesis of space-time wave packets. The optimization code is made openly available to facilitate reproducibility and further development of the proposed inverse-design framework.

Charged lepton flavor violation (CLFV) is forbidden in the Standard Model (SM) due to massless neutrinos and absence of right-handed neutrinos. The discovery of neutrino oscillations established that the neutrinos are massive and the lepton flavor is not an exact symmetry of nature. A minimal extension of the SM that incorporates right-handed neutrinos gives rise to CLFV through loop-level diagrams involving neutrinos. However, such processes are extremely rare, for instance, the branching fraction of $\mu \to e\gamma$ is expected to be at the level of $10^{-54}$, far beyond the sensitivity of current collider experiments. In contrast, several new physics models predict CLFV decay rates within the sensitivity of current experiments, such as the Belle and Belle II experiments, which have collected the world's largest asymmetric $e^+e^-$ collision data near the $\Upsilon(4S)$ resonance. The large data sample has utilized to explore the possibility of CLFV decays of $\tau$ leptons, $B$ mesons, and bottomonium states. The report reviews some latest results on these CLFV decays at Belle and Belle II.

We prove an exponential strong converse for the unassisted private capacity of every finite-dimensional degradable quantum channel. We use a single error criterion: the infidelity between the actual message-estimate-environment state and an ideal state consisting of uniformly distributed, perfectly correlated messages that are independent of the environment. At every rate strictly above the channel's maximum coherent information, the optimized fidelity to this ideal state decays exponentially in the number of channel uses. The same bound holds when the ideal environment state is fixed to the actual environment marginal. The proof applies to arbitrary mixed-state encoders and arbitrary collective decoders. Its main operator ingredient is an overlap bound for privacy tests: two receiver placements with a common subsystem of dimension $d_C$ have overlap at most $d_C/M$, where $M$ is the key size, independently of both shield dimensions. We combine this bound with the signed averaging construction presented in arXiv:2608.01308 and a single-filter reduction to symmetric states. A Gaussian filter replaces the common receiver subsystem by a system of controlled dimension from which the original correlations can be approximately recovered using quantum side information. The filter preserves exact exchange symmetry, and a uniform smooth-entropy estimate bounds its output dimension for arbitrary correlated channel inputs. We also obtain an exponential strong converse at zero for antidegradable channels under the same joint criterion and, consequently, for the private capacity of the quantum erasure channel throughout its parameter range.

We demonstrate that heterogeneous double-wire metamaterials, comprising two dissimilar and nonconnected wire arrays, enable loss-asymmetric hyperbolic dispersion and strongly asymmetric negative refraction. We unveil that, owing to their strongly nonlocal response and distinctive microstructure, such geometry supports two independent hyperbolic propagation channels with unequal losses, which can be selectively excited by free-space propagating waves incident at opposite angles. This angular selectivity gives rise to asymmetric negative refraction at the air-metamaterial interfaces, characterized by strong angular asymmetry in transmission and absorption, while preserving reciprocity. This phenomenon is scalable and can be realized with metallic wire arrays over a broad frequency spectrum extending from microwave to infrared frequencies, showing that nonlocality can emulate shear-like dissipative asymmetry that, in local media, requires lower spatial symmetry. Our findings open new avenues for directional energy transport and angle-selective wave control in photonic platforms.

The planar loop equations of a Hermitian one-matrix model leave finitely many low moments undetermined. Hankel positivity constrains these moments but does not reveal how a fixed multicut family is embedded in moment space. We introduce a finite-plane diagnostic using the Cauchy kernels $f_n(x)=(z_n-x)^{-1}$ which we use as spectral probes. Their Gram matrix is the positive-semidefinite Pick matrix $P_{mn}$, whose positivity defines a finite-node bootstrap analogous to the Hankel bootstrap. For a fixed regular multicut topology, the nonbranching double zeros of the spectral discriminant, which we call dressed saddles, impose transverse constraints on the corresponding moment-space locus, while its remaining directions are filling fractions. Writing $z=E+i\eta$, $E$ selects a spectral region and $\eta>0$ sets a continuous resolution scale. We use $P(z,z)$ as a finite-plane spectral response and interpret $\nabla_{\mathbf m}P(z,z)$ as a moment-space susceptibility. Near a regular real dressed saddle, this susceptibility is enhanced as $\eta^{-2}$ and aligns with a conormal to the filling-fraction manifold, whereas the leading enhancement cancels along tangent deformations. Responses near several independent saddles can therefore reconstruct the conormal space and, through their common kernel, its tangent space. Combining Pick positivity with reality and analyticity of the resolvent, we obtain alternative analytic derivations of known planar results in quartic and sextic models. The asymmetric quartic makes the one-dimensional filling-fraction geometry explicit, while sextic models exhibit independent conormal directions. These results clarify how local consistency conditions constrain the low moments before global period matching and the equilibrium variational inequality select the equilibrium measure.

The Kerr-Bertotti-Robinson black hole is an exact Einstein-Maxwell solution describing a rotating black hole in an asymptotically uniform magnetic field. It differs from the Kerr black hole in the Wald solution: the magnetic field lines are no longer cylindrical, with the constant-\(A_\phi\) lines saturating at large distances, and the interface \(\vec{E}\cdot\vec{B}=0\) is no longer a cone but contracts with radius and eventually disappears. Determining the acceleration of charged particles pointwise, we find that protons are driven outward and electrons inward in the polar region, and vice versa in the equatorial region; the polar region shrinks as the magnetic field grows. Captured protons carry negative energy and angular momentum, whereas captured electrons carry positive energy and angular momentum. Fixing the capture domain by the gauge-invariant flux criterion and integrating over the \((r,\theta)\) plane, we find that in weak magnetic fields the black hole gains mass, while in strong magnetic fields energy extraction occurs. Energy extraction can be achieved under the usual spherically symmetric density, without introducing the anisotropic density distribution required in the Wald solution for a Kerr black hole.

We propose a training recipe that treats charged-particle trajectory parameter regression on high-energy physics detector data as a sequence-modeling task. Kalman filters and linearized least-squares fits have been the classical standard approach for this task: they are optimal estimators for sparsely sampled linear-Gaussian data and are commonly used for trajectory parameter regression (fitting). The classical fitting techniques implemented for this domain reach a final precision of one part in $10^5$ through detailed modeling of detector geometry, material, detection effects and precise numerical integration of the equations of motion through the detector's inhomogeneous magnetic field. With this study, we demonstrate that using a bidirectional gated linear recurrent encoder, one is able to reproduce the full precision of classical track fitting techniques. Using a custom kernel, we also achieve significantly higher throughput during GPU inference, compared to classical fitting software running on similarly priced multi-core CPU servers representing typically employed hardware. Such a speedup would lead to considerable cost savings for the pattern recognition at the Large Hadron Collider. To our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end learned track fit to reach the full precision and, at the same time, offer the opportunity to reduce the computing costs.

The collisional lifetimes of asteroids larger than $\sim 10$ km in the present-day main belt are estimated to exceed the age of the solar system, suggesting that their shapes may preserve memories of the collisional environment in the primordial solar system. Recent studies performed systematic simulations of equal-mass and low-velocity ($50$–$400\,\mathrm{ms}^{-1}$) collisions between 50-km-radius asteroids using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), identifying the impact conditions that produce irregular shapes. As an alternative approach, we here employ the Material Point Method (MPM), a particle-grid method well suited to large deformation of solids and free from tensile instability, and we assess its applicability to such systems by direct comparison with the established SPH results. We integrate a previously established rock model combined with a fracture model, the Tillotson equation of state, and Drucker-Prager friction, with the efficient non-associative Drucker-Prager plasticity solver originally developed for granular flows. We perform 135 collision simulations of equal-mass rocky asteroids spanning 15 impact velocities ($50$–$400\,\mathrm{ms}^{-1}$) and 9 impact angles ($5$–$45^\circ$), following the setup of the previous SPH simulations. The mass, axis ratio, and shape classification of the largest remnants closely reproduce the trends of the previous SPH simulations. Since most material transitions into a granular state early in the collision, this agreement appears to depend primarily on the validity of the frictional treatment of the granular material, rather than on the details of the fracture model. These results demonstrate the applicability of MPM to low-velocity asteroid collision simulations and support cross-validation between MPM- and SPH-based approaches.

Galactic activity has been shown to play a fundamental role in galaxy and cluster evolution throughout the history of the Universe. In the last decades, a number of works have tackled the determination of radio luminosity functions and their evolution, with the aim to understand and quantify this role. In this work we propose a different approach, based on the application of a semi-analytical model to produce mock populations of radio loud active galaxies throughout several orders of magnitude in power, and the comparison with observational samples. The aim of this work is to test the ability of our semi-analytical model to reproduce luminosity and size distributions of large numbers of sources from the radio-loud active galactic nuclei sample from the LoTSS survey. We apply our semi-analytical model for the evolution of radio galaxies and generate hundreds of thousands of sources applying random selection of parameters within probability distributions for each of them. Our results show that the model is able to reproduce the main features of the observed sample, and identifies jet mass-load included in our model and activity periods as critical parameters that should be addressed in more detail in future work. These initial results allow us to establish a maximum activity period ranging from 10 to 200 Myr within an active time distribution probability p(t_max) \propto 1/t_{max}. We also reproduce the radio luminosity function for the z<0.6 population, and the jet power spectrum from 10^{34.5} W to 10^{38} W. Our results show that mass-load is a fundamental parameter in the determination of radio source luminosities with distance, mainly in the low-power regime. Our model predicts that at least 3-4 x 10^{5} radio galaxies must exist in the LoTSS field in order to obtain the 17045 observed ones. This population is vastly dominated by low power sources.

[An extended abstract is provided in-text] Motivated by topological insulators, this paper analyzes classification schemes for projection-valued maps on $d$-dimensional tori, $d \le 2$, subject to Altland-Zirnbauer-Cartan (AZC) symmetries (time-reversal, particle-hole, and chiral). The main objective is to compare three notions of equivalence for these maps: Murray-von Neumann, unitary, and homotopy equivalence. The analysis relies on constructing symmetric bases for the projection ranges under a pseudo-periodicity constraint, where select basis vectors pick up a phase when looped around the torus. If $d=1$, fully periodic symmetric bases exist across all AZC classes. If $d=2$, topological obstructions appear as non-trivial phases characterized by $\mathbb{Z}$ (Chern number) or $\mathbb{Z}_2$ (Fu-Kane-Mele) invariants. These serve as absolute invariants that classify both Murray-von Neumann and unitary equivalences. For homotopy equivalence, the behavior depends on the ambient Hilbert space: if this has non-minimal dimension, homotopy equivalence reduces directly to unitary equivalence, while in minimal ambient spaces additional relative homotopy invariants emerge. Their precise values change under unitary conjugation, leaving only relative topological phases between maps well-defined. Ultimately, this provides a unified geometric framework for gapped quantum systems in low dimensions, demonstrating how distinct equivalence relations generate specific absolute and relative topological invariants.

This letter proposes a 20-kV 4H-SiC optical-injection-enhanced reverse-conducting IGBT (OIE-RC-IGBT) with snapback-free operation and low on-state voltage. Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are integrated into the gate structure to provide optical injection during forward conduction. The emitted light generates a high concentration of photogenerated carriers in the carrier-storage layer (CSL) and drift region, thereby reducing the resistance of the JFET and drift regions and increasing the device current. Consequently, the collector-side P+/N junction is turned on earlier, effectively suppressing the snapback effect and facilitating the transition to bipolar conduction. After bipolar conduction is established, the photogenerated carriers further enhance conductivity modulation, resulting in a reduced on-state voltage. TCAD simulation results show that, compared with the conventional RC-IGBT (C-RC-IGBT), the proposed device achieves snapback-free operation while reducing the required number of MOS cells from 25 to 5. Moreover, the on-state voltage, turn-off fall time, and turn-off energy loss are reduced by 22.37%, 25.06%, and 19.69%, respectively. These results demonstrate the potential of optical injection for improving the conduction and turn-off performance of ultrahigh-voltage SiC RC-IGBTs.

We interpret the $248~\mathrm{keV_{nr}}$ nuclear-recoil candidate reported by LZ through elastic dark matter scattering mediated by a light Majoron. The Majoron provides a natural origin for the required pseudoscalar interaction: it is the pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson associated with spontaneous lepton number breaking, directly connecting the recoil signal to neutrino mass generation. After a model independent analysis of this idea, we present a concrete realization in a scotogenic ultraviolet completion in which the lightest singlet Majorana fermion is dark matter and acquires both its mass and Majoron coupling from the symmetry breaking dynamics. A vector like up type quark and a type-I Dirac seesaw in quark sector communicate the Majoron interaction to the up quark. At low energies, the resulting portal generates the nonrelativistic operator $\mathcal O_6$, whose momentum dependence reproduces the high-recoil event without overpopulating the lower energy bins. Its spin structure removes the dominant heavy element solar capture channels, while capture on hydrogen is suppressed by poor kinematic matching and small momentum transfer. This construction simultaneously reproduces the LZ recoil spectrum and the observed thermal relic abundance while strongly suppressing solar capture.

Feedback-based ALgorithm for Quantum OptimizatioN (FALQON) is a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm for solving combinatorial optimization problems, which circumvents classical parameter optimization but requires a deep quantum circuit. To reduce circuit depth, Arai et al. proposed second-order FALQON (SO-FALQON), achieving the best depth reduction among existing approaches. However, SO-FALQON brings a 2.3 times per-step measurement overhead, as it needs to calculate an additional second-order control coefficient. In this paper, inspired by the Backtracking Line Search (BLS) theory, we propose another method called BLS-FALQON, which not only reduces circuit depth to a comparable extent, but also achieves fewer measurements than SO-FALQON. Numerical simulations on max-cut problem with 8 to 20 vertices demonstrate that BLS-FALQON reduces the total measurement count by 37.7% compared to SO-FALQON, while maintaining a comparable circuit depth. Furthermore, we conduct real quantum hardware experiments on the Tianyan-176 quantum computer, which uses the zuchongzhi2 superconducting quantum processor, confirming that BLS-FALQON remains effective under real quantum hardware conditions.

We study the entanglement structure of $\Omega^-\bar{\Omega}^+$ pairs produced in $e^+e^-\to\psi(3686)$, focusing on whether the entanglement requires the full four-dimensional spin space of each spin-$3/2$ baryon. Beam polarization controls the parent-state populations and coherence, thereby modifying helicity interference. Using the negativity criterion $\Neg>1$ and the measured BESIII helicity parameters, we find critical polarizations of about $0.65$ per beam for equal transverse polarization and $0.57$ per beam for equal-and-opposite longitudinal polarization. Full transverse polarization gives a near-maximal peak negativity, $\Neg_{\rm peak}\simeq1.50$, with a production-rate-weighted angular fraction of $0.60$ satisfying the witness. At the optimal production directions, destructive interference removes the unequal-helicity channels, while the near equality of the relevant equal-helicity amplitudes yields nearly equal Schmidt coefficients. Constituent-quark benchmarks further show that the angular extent of the witness is more sensitive to relative phases than the peak negativity. These results link polarization-controlled helicity interference to four-dimensional entanglement in high-spin baryon production.

The oscillation spectra of rapidly rotating $\delta$ Scuti stars are difficult to interpret because rotation modifies both the frequencies and spatial structure of the modes. Although theoretical studies predict that acoustic modes should organize into approximately equally spaced frequency sequences, systematic searches for such patterns have been limited by the absence of scalable, statistically robust detection methods. We present an automated statistical framework for identifying approximately equally spaced mode sequences in stellar oscillation spectra while quantifying the significance of each candidate detection. We apply this method to oscillation spectra of 4,681 $\delta$ Scuti stars observed by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The analysis identifies regular mode sequences in a large number of stars and, in many cases, reveals multiple independent regular frequency spacings within the same oscillation spectrum. While the existence of regular sequences is broadly consistent with theoretical expectations for rapidly rotating acoustic modes, the occurrence of multiple dissimilar spacings is not readily explained by current models. Differences in acoustic travel times between known island-mode families appear insufficient to account for the observed diversity of spacings, suggesting that additional mode families or other physical effects contribute to the organization of oscillation spectra of $\delta$ Scuti stars. Our results provide a scalable framework for studying regular mode sequences in large stellar surveys and new observational constraints on oscillations in rapidly rotating stars.