Papers

Thermoelectric heat harvesting provides in principle a flexible, reliable way to convert heat into electric energy, thus recovering waste heat and powering off-net devices. However, thermoelectricity conversion efficiency is still low, despite the major efforts deployed over the last two decades to improve materials performances. A largely unexplored opportunity to increase harvesting efficiency is offered by converting heat flux dynamically. It was shown [D. Narducci et al., Mater. Today Phys. 54, 101713 (2025)] that when the temperature of the heat source is sinusoidally modulated, this leads to an increase of the maximum power by up to 50 %. In this paper we show how this approach can be further and significantly enhanced. We found that sinusoidal modulation can be outperformed by a different periodic modulation, leading to an increase of the power output by up to 100 % compared to the stationary case. Furthermore, we extended our analyses beyond the constant-property approximation, showing that the power output enhancement is robust, applying to any real material where the temperature dependence of all phenomenological coefficients is accounted for. This major power output enhancement offers a novel, immediately applicable pathway to overcome the efficiency limits of thermoelectric devices.

De novo crystal generation (DNG) models decide where to search in composition space and how to generate structures with one set of weights. We argue that discovery is better served by separating the two. A crystal structure prediction (CSP) model is a physical prior that should be improved by likelihood training, while rewards, including novelty measured against the search's own history, should act on a search over compositions. We introduce ANCHOR, a GRPO composition policy trained with multi-objective rewards around a frozen CSP model, and continuous adaptive novelty (CAN), a graded novelty score against known structures and a growing discovery history. Using the frozen CSP model as a fixed ruler under one evaluator, we test where adaptation should act. Replacing DNG compositions with ANCHOR's policy on the same CSP backbone raises MSUN from 11.4% to 47.6% and SUN from 1.1% to 22.1% at 99.9% formula uniqueness. Fine-tuning DNG models directly on the same rewards instead moves their composition marginal without raising their on-hull fraction. We show that KL-regularized fine-tuning of a DNG model can only reweight chemistry the pretrained model already supports by a bounded factor, while unregularized DNG fine-tunes move toward known or less stable chemistry. Even a stability-only reward routed into ANCHOR's CSP backbone roughly halves SUN relative to the frozen backbone, whereas likelihood training on structures found during search can improve a CSP backbone. Under MatterGen's evaluation pipeline, ANCHOR raises state-of-the-art MSUN from 29.2% to 41.3%, transfers without retraining to two further CSP backbones, and reaches 47.1% after distillation into Crystalite-CSP. As with any model optimised against a potential, its on-hull rate depends on that potential.

Marcuse theory of pulse distortion in singlemode fibers provides closed-form results for Gaussian pulses launched from sources of arbitrary spectral width. We extend the theory to supergaussian pulses of arbitrary order with linear or edge-concentrated chirp, single or multiline sources and an arbitrary number of dispersion coefficients. The rms output width is obtained exactly from the moments of the Wigner distribution, and all the pulse moments involved reduce to finite sums of Gamma functions. Supergaussian pulses are considerably more sensitive than Gaussian pulses to higher order dispersion and are compressed less efficiently by chirp. Near the zero-dispersion wavelength their rms width is governed by weak spectral side lobes and overestimates the broadening of the pulse energy. For pulse sequences, interference between neighboring pulses leaves all time moments unchanged when the input pulses do not overlap, but it redistributes energy locally with a visibility set by the source spectrum filtered by the pulse spectrum.

Strong coupling generally drives a subsystem away from the Gibbs state of its bare Hamiltonian at the bath temperature. We formulate a temperature–Hamiltonian ambiguity: the reduced equilibrium state fixes the dimensionless Gibbs generator, but does not by itself uniquely determine the local Hamiltonian and temperature entering a Gibbs representation. We propose an operational resolution in which the local Hamiltonian is identified from physical information independent of the stationary Gibbs parametrization. Whenever the exact reduced state is compatible with the Gibbs family generated by that independently identified Hamiltonian, it then determines a unique local temperature. An exactly solvable two-level-system–oscillator model makes the ambiguity explicit through state-equivalent descriptions based on temperature renormalization relative to a specified local Hamiltonian and Hamiltonian-of-mean-force level renormalization at the bath temperature. An exact bosonic model provides the complementary case in which retarded dynamics independently fixes a renormalized local excitation scale and thereby specifies the local Hamiltonian before the stationary populations determine the temperature. These results distinguish state representation from thermodynamic assignment and provide an operational framework for local thermodynamics beyond weak coupling.

Quadratically nonlinear systems driven by additive noise arise throughout science and engineering, both as stochastic dynamical systems in their own right and as reduced-order models (ROMs) of turbulent flows. We propose stochastic physics-constrained operator inference (SPOpInf), a non-intrusive method that learns a stochastic differential equation, i.e., a quadratic–linear drift and a diffusion amplitude, from data. Unlike operator inference (OpInf), which fits a deterministic drift by least squares, SPOpInf maximizes an Euler–Maruyama increment likelihood in which the residual covariance is itself an unknown, so the deterministic and stochastic components are calibrated jointly; it enforces the energy-preserving quadratic structure exactly, through linear equality constraints imposed inside the optimization; and it works in an upper-triangular parametrization that removes the structural non-identifiability of the full quadratic tensor. The resulting optimization is solved by an expectation–maximization (EM)-based iterative learning algorithm that updates the drift coefficients and the noise levels in turn: each iteration requires only an inexpensive weighted least-squares solve for the drift and a residual-variance update for the noise. With five stochastic benchmark systems that show intermittency and chaos, SPOpInf recovers the deterministic operators more accurately than OpInf, satisfies the imposed constraints to machine precision, accurately estimates the noise amplitudes, and reproduces long-time statistics. Applied to a stochastic Burgers equation and a quasi-geostrophic double-gyre flow, the same estimator yields non-intrusive stochastic ROMs that remain stable over long times where unconstrained alternatives blow up.

The cosmic-ray (CR) knee at a few petaelectronvolts (PeV) is commonly associated with the acceleration limit of Galactic protons. Recent detection of multi-PeV photons from the microquasar Cygnus X-3 suggests proton acceleration to tens of PeV. However, the contribution of such type of sources to CRs remains unclear. Here we analyse proton and helium spectral data spanning from 0.1 to 1000~PeV and find that the knee strongly disfavours a single terminal cutoff. Full-spectrum analyses incorporating measurements down to tens of gigaelectronvolts (GeV) require a proton contribution extending beyond $100\,\mathrm{PeV}$. This contribution either extends continuously from GeV to 100~PeV energies or belongs to a distinct component whose spectrum has a spectral break at the knee. Within source-population interpretations, its connection to lower-energy Galactic cosmic rays suggests a Galactic origin. The component from GeV energies is conventionally associated with supernova remnants, but extending it beyond $100\,\mathrm{PeV}$ challenges acceleration theory and $\gamma$-ray observations of ordinary remnants . A spectral break, by contrast, can arise naturally from rigidity-dependent transport. This interpretation makes the knee a probe of Galactic CR transport, and connects the extended proton spectrum to extreme Galactic accelerators, such as super-Eddington X-ray binaries, that can also produce PeV $\gamma$ rays and neutrinos.

Criticality in the Ising model is conventionally generated by Hamiltonian dynamics and controlled by temperature. Here we show that critical like behavior can emerge in an Ising system whose dynamics is completely independent of the Ising Hamiltonian and contains no temperature like parameter. We introduce an adaptive cluster dynamics in which spin connectivity is controlled by a local quiet time variable, the time elapsed since a spin was last updated. The Ising Hamiltonian enters only as an observable characterizing the resulting configurations. As the parameter $\alpha$, controlling the connectivity strength, is varied, the system undergoes spontaneous symmetry breaking accompanied by strong collective fluctuations. The cluster size distribution develops an extended power law regime, terminated by a small finite size hump at the largest scales, while the Ising energy exhibits a singular response to the variation of $\alpha$. These results show that memory dependent connectivity alone can generate collective critical behavior, revealing a route to nonequilibrium criticality without energy based dynamics.

We prove that the simple affine vertex algebra $L_k(\mathfrak{sl}_2)$ is classically free at the boundary admissible level, which confirms a conjecture of Andrews, van Ekeren, and Heluani.

The tokamak, a toroidal magnetic device confining a hot plasma, is one of the most advanced approaches to fusion energy. A central obstacle is turbulent transport driven by the ion-temperature-gradient (ITG) mode. Operation scenarios that rely on a weak or zero magnetic shear core, such as the ITER hybrid scenario, have achieved markedly improved confinement, yet the underlying mechanism has remained unclear. Here we show that the radial width of ITG poloidal harmonics is constrained not only by the familiar parallel Landau damping, but also by the isotropy of micro-turbulence in the plane perpendicular to the magnetic field. In the weak-shear limit, micro-isotropy dominates and constrains the radial width at one poloidal wavelength, yielding a critical magnetic shear $s_{\text{crit}} \approx 1/(2\pi)$. Above this threshold, the extended Type II ballooning modes prevail; below it, the localized Type I modes emerge, comprising only two or three harmonics. Global gyrokinetic simulations spanning DIII-D, JET~and ITER parameters confirm this geometric criterion. Nonlinear simulations with sustained heating show that weak-shear plasmas spontaneously form internal transport barriers with the turbulence suppressed in the radial region determined by $|s| < s_{\text{crit}}$. This geometric criterion defines the weak-magnetic-shear regime and offers a fresh perspective on turbulent transport in fusion plasmas.

Whether orthogonalising the moment basis changes a central-moment lattice Boltzmann scheme is decided by the geometry of the velocity set. The basis enters the collision only through the conjugate $\mathit{T}^{-1} \Lambda \mathit{T}$, so two bases related by a constant matrix $\mathit{A}$ define exactly the same scheme if and only if $[\Lambda,\mathit{A}]_{ij}=\mathit{A}_{ij}(\lambda_i-\lambda_j)$ vanishes, and on physical states only its columns for the non-conserved moments matter. We prove that on lattices with velocities in $\{0,\pm1\}^d$ and symmetric weights orthogonalisation reaches the shear moments only through the face and body diagonals: whatever the orthogonalisation, the shear rate is free on D2Q9 and D3Q15, whereas on D3Q19 and D3Q27 the scheme changes whenever the fourth-order moments do not relax at the shear rate. On rectangular lattices, where the symmetry is broken, an independent bulk rate yields an orthogonal counterpart that does not share the transport coefficients of the published scheme, which is itself orthogonal in the inner product of the rest equilibrium up to the one relaxation entry that consistency requires. Where the formulations differ but share their hydrodynamics, a basis orthogonal in the inner product of the rest equilibrium, which guarantees linear stability at rest, was never less robust in the least stable flow direction by more than a few per cent, often much more robust, and the more accurate against a Taylor-Green DNS. Computed through the non-orthogonal transforms with a conjugated relaxation matrix, it costs at most $2\%$ more on D3Q27.

We extend Marcuse analysis of pulse fluctuations of randomly phased multimode sources to arbitrary chromatic dispersion, chirp, finite mode linewidth, mode partition noise and finite receiver bandwidth. On long fibers the fluctuations depend only on the shape of the group delay curve, a monotonic delay separates the modes, whereas a symmetric delay leaves pairs of modes with identical intensity profiles and a persistent beat noise. Dispersion downconverts the beats of overlapping modes to baseband, where receivers cannot filter them. The detected power follows random phasor statistics, and Gaussian estimates of fade probability can be wrong by orders of magnitude. Mode partition noise grows with dispersion and dominates in band limited links.

Solar cycle variation of earth's atmosphere, particularly the ionosphere is of particular interest in the field of space science and space weather studies. In this article, we present the outcome of our detailed quantitative study on solar cycle variation of lower ionospheric properties using numerical investigation. First, we seek to model and compare the collective D-region ionization rates (q's) due to the individual contributions from the ionizing sources, namely, (a) solar extreme ultraviolet (EUV) radiation including the Lyman-alpha irradiation and (b) solar X-ray irradiation throughout the 24th solar cycle (C24). Then, we compute the electron density (Ne) profiles using the ionization rates. We report significant solar cycle variation in ionization rate and electron density profiles for the entire span of C24. We use the sunspot number (SPN) profile to substantiate the finer details of Ne profile during C24. For the segments of the D-region above two different geographic coordinates, we report that Ne profiles show a consistent "dual peak" nature. It is very similar to the SPN profile during C24. As a next-order validation, we compare our modeled Ne profiles with their IRI-2020 counterpart (Ne,iris). Their overall trends are found to be in agreement. Finally, we discuss the response of the D-region in terms of Ne due to C24. The work lays the foundation for our upcoming studies on D-region response to solar cycle variation with Very Low Frequency (VLF) observation.

We investigated the low-temperature thermal expansion of the $\alpha$ phase and the $\omega$ phase, a high-pressure polymorph of titanium, by X-ray diffraction measurements from approximately 5 to 300 K, together with first-principles calculations. Single-phase bulk polycrystalline $\omega$-Ti was synthesized at 7.7 GPa and 500 $^\circ$C and recovered to ambient pressure. Although the two phases exhibit very similar volumetric thermal expansion, their axial responses are markedly different. In $\alpha$-Ti, the $c$-axis thermal expansion coefficient becomes negative below approximately 50 K and reaches a minimum of $-0.71 \times 10^{-6}$ K$^{-1}$ at 20 K. Both experiment and theory indicate substantially smaller $c$-axis negative thermal expansion than previously reported from single-crystal length measurements. In contrast, $\omega$-Ti expands nearly isotropically along the $a$ and $c$ axes, and its $c/a$ ratio remains nearly temperature independent and close to the ideal bcc-derived value. The $c$/$a$ ratio of $\alpha$-Ti decreases with increasing temperature. Debye-Grüneisen analysis yielded Debye temperatures of $427 \pm 5$ K and $409 \pm 12$ K and effective Grüneisen parameters of $1.33 \pm 0.04$ and $1.23 \pm 0.04$ for $\alpha$-Ti and $\omega$-Ti, respectively. The first-principles calculations reproduce the volumetric thermal expansion of both phases and capture the overall trends of their axial responses.

Dipolar optical forces can confine Rayleigh-sized dielectric particles towards or away from intensity maxima, commonly known as bright and dark trapping. Structured light illumination opens up opportunities for customized trapping landscapes, unveiling the possibility of gray trapping, especially for larger Mie particles that can excite a higher-order multipolar response. While previous studies have primarily focused on calculations of the gradient force for some exemplary, focused scalar beams, we not only extend these analyses by combining vectorial focusing with generalized Lorenz-Mie theory, but also consider more complex trapping fields. Motivated by their unique tight focusing behavior, shaping strong transverse intensity gradients and three-dimensional electric field components, we explore higher-order cylindrical scalar and vector beams. We theoretically investigate multipolar trapping of Mie-regime silicon nanospheres in water, calculating the three-dimensional net radiation force and assess local trapping stability through the force Jacobian. Near an octupolar Mie resonance, we predict stable gray trapping with enhanced efficiency for vector beams. Further, we find field geometries enabling configurable, particle-size-dependent gray/dark trapping with subwavelength inter-particle spacing. These results establish polarization, illumination structure and particle parameters as complementary controls for radius-dependent multipolar trapping, providing a basis for potential applications in sub-wavelength particle sorting, trapping-assisted nanopatterning and optical binding investigations.

High-energy, dense, spin-polarized positron beams with attosecond duration are highly desirable for advanced accelerator physics, laboratory astrophysics, and ultrafast matter-antimatter studies, yet remain beyond the capability of conventional source and injection-based plasma-acceleration schemes. We propose an integrated in-situ method for production, trapping, and accelerating polarized attosecond positron bunches in a single plasma stage. An ultraintense hollow laser propagating in a plasma channel drives a radiative wakefield, where longitudinally injected electrons emit a dense MeV gamma-ray bath through nonlinear Compton scattering. Subsequent photon-photon collisions induce linear Breit-Wheeler pair production, while linear and nonlinear radiative processes mediate polarization transfer to the produced positrons. Spin-resolved QED particle-in-cell simulations indicate that the laser-modulated wakefield naturally captures positrons born in the frontier bubble wake, forming collimated bunch trains with hundred-attosecond duration, GeV-level energies, and densities up to 10^17 cm^-3. Parameter scans demonstrate robustness against variations of laser intensity and plasma-channel density. This single-shot, source-free approach simultaneously addresses positron production, polarization, temporal compression, and plasma injection, offering a compact route toward polarized attosecond antimatter beams.

Can a system with more stored energy cool faster than one with less? An overdamped resistor–inductor–capacitor (RLC) circuit offers a classical, experimentally accessible spectral Mpemba analogue: both states lose energy monotonically, yet the initially higher-energy state can cross below the lower-energy one. The reason is that initial energy alone does not determine the relaxation path; initial charge and current set how strongly the slow and fast decay modes are excited. We develop this mechanism from deterministic to stochastic and open-system descriptions. For the classical circuit, we derive the modal preparation conditions and crossing criterion, explain geometrically why equal-energy states can relax differently, and confirm the effect experimentally by reconstructing charge, current, and energy from oscilloscope traces. The inversion survives when the circuit is driven by externally injected white noise. An equilibrium Ornstein–Uhlenbeck treatment separates information carried by the ensemble mean from that stored in its covariance: centered Gibbs preparations preserve mean-energy ordering, while displaced or anisotropic Gaussian states can encode distinct slow and fast sectors. A Fokker–Planck generator then bridges to Markovian quantum dynamics. For a thermally damped quantum harmonic oscillator, the mean bare-energy excess decays with a single exponential factor, forbidding energy-order inversion for finite mean occupation. A below-threshold parametric oscillator restores slow and fast quadrature sectors, allowing crossings controlled by displacement and covariance. The Liouvillian formulation shows that observed relaxation depends jointly on the generator spectrum, the modes populated by preparation, and the modes visible to the observable.

We investigate the dynamics of a clean mobile impurity coupled to a bath subjected to a linear Stark potential as well as asymmetric hopping in one dimension. The impurity mediates resonant tunnelling in the bath whenever the interaction strength matches the Stark potential and leads to loss in the memory of the initial state of the bath particles. The non-Hermitian asymmetry does not shift these resonances but reshapes them directionally, and it destroys the bath's Stark-induced memory through the non-Hermitian skin effect. On the other hand, we find that the impurity is localised only within an intermediate range of Stark potential. At very weak tilt strengths the bath offers no potential to trap the impurity, while at strong tilt the bath freezes into a nearly periodic charge density wave that pushes the impurity towards partial localisation. Counterintuitively, the impurity localises in the intermediate regime where the bath's initial-state memory is strongly suppressed, yet a spatially inhomogeneous density profile persists. The interaction amplifies these density fluctuations, dressing the impurity with an effective disordered potential that traps it. Since the skin effect degrades this intermediate density distribution, the impurity localisation window shifts toward stronger tilt in the non-Hermitian regime.

We study scalar and electromagnetic quasinormal modes of the Hayward black hole and the axial spectrum of a specified Regge–Wheeler-type effective model, from the Schwarzschild limit to exact extremality. Multiprecision Chebyshev collocation reproduces most available low-lying oscillatory benchmarks and supplies further overtone candidates. The spin-2 equation is model dependent. It differs from the effective-source potential used in recent Hayward studies, and we quantify representative frequency differences. The discretisation also produces purely imaginary eigenvalue sequences, whose physical classification requires special care because highly reproducible imaginary-axis ladders need not be poles of the continued Green function. Accordingly, the imaginary-axis entries reported here are retained as unclassified spectral candidates, not established QNMs. We quantify their finite-table gap dispersion and sensitivity to the number of included gaps. Their spacings near one quarter in $M\omega$, and the extremal product near $1/3$ with the throat radius, remain properties of the tabulated candidates, and they do not establish universal QNM spacing or throat-controlled damping.

Quantum computing has in recent years evolved from a purely theoretical field to an active area in both academia and industry. As a result, Quantum Software Engineering has emerged as an area that aims to organize the process of building, testing, and running quantum software. However, writing quantum software still requires programming with quantum gates and qubits, as well as knowledge specific to quantum software frameworks such as Qiskit, Cirq, Qrisp, pyQuil and PennyLane, each of which reaches quantum hardware through its own toolchain. We present Quanifi, which packages the high-level routines of these frameworks as components on the Apache NiFi dataflow canvas. The components exchange circuits as OpenQASM 2.0, so a circuit built by one framework can be executed by another. This allows for two types of redundancy: several frameworks implement the same algorithm, and several engines (simulators or real hardware) execute the same circuit. We describe N$\times$M program execution, which crosses the two: a single NiFi flow runs each of the $N$ implementations on each of the $M$ engines, and because every result is labelled with its implementation and its engine, a disagreement can be linked to an implementation, to an engine, or to a single implementation-engine pair. We ran Grover's algorithm built by three frameworks on three quantum computers from IBM, IQM and Quantum Inspire, and a matrix of three adder builders on one IQM device reached through two routes. N$\times$M execution helped us discover three real defects: an incorrect gate-set declaration in the Quantum Inspire adapter, execution consistent with negated $R_x$ angles on Tuna-17, and circuit modification through Open Quantum. The latter two returned wrong answers without reporting an error. We reported all three defects and Open Quantum's provider confirmed and fixed its QASM parsing defect.

Achieving high-fidelity and robust qubit manipulations is a crucial requirement for realizing faulttolerant quantum computation. Here, we demonstrate a single-hole spin qubit in a germanium quantum dot and characterize its control fidelity using gate set tomography. The maximum control fidelities reach 97.48%, 99.81%, 99.88% for the I, X/2 and Y /2 gate, respectively. These results reveal that off-resonance noise during consecutive I gates in gate set tomography sequences severely limits qubit performance. Therefore, we introduce geometric quantum computation to realize noiseresilient qubit manipulation. The geometric gate control fidelities remain above 99% across a wide range of Rabi frequencies. The maximum fidelity surpasses 99.9%. Furthermore, the fidelities of geometric X/2 and Y /2 (I) gates exceed 99% even when detuning the microwave frequency by +-2.5 MHz (+-1.2 MHz), highlighting the noise-resilient feature. These results demonstrate that geometric quantum computation is a potential method for achieving high-fidelity qubit manipulation reproducibly in semiconductor quantum computation.

It remains an open question whether the modular data $(S,T)$ together with the Whitehead-link matrix $W$ determine a modular tensor category up to ribbon equivalence. We answer negatively by constructing two braided-inequivalent Dijkgraaf–Witten modular categories for $(\mathbb Z/p\mathbb Z)^3$ for prime $p\ge5$ with identical $(S,T,W)$ and, more generally, identical Reshetikhin–Turaev invariants of all framed oriented links with at most two components under a single bijection of simple objects. The construction varies an alternating $3$-cocycle while fixing a quadratic cohomology class, using restriction to subgroups of rank at most two to match link invariants and the quadratic and alternating classes together to obstruct braided equivalence. A complete classification of modular tensor categories up to ribbon equivalence therefore requires invariants beyond those of colored framed links with at most two components. We also analytically evaluate an uncolored partition function on a closed oriented three-manifold that separates all $(p-1)/2$ equivalence classes in the family.

Hole spin qubits based on semiconductor quantum dots are promising for building future large-scale quantum computers owing to their all-electrical manipulation. However, abundant physical mechanisms of valence band holes lead to anisotropic qubit properties. There is an opportunity to prolong the coherence time and achieve high-fidelity qubit manipulations. Here, we report a single-hole spin qubit in a planar germanium quantum dot and investigate its anisotropic susceptibility to charge noise under an in-plane magnetic field. By correlating the longitudinal spin-electric susceptibility with qubit coherence and control performance, we identify an optimal operating point where the sensitivity to charge noise is minimized. We find that optimizing the magnetic-field orientation reduces the spin-electric susceptibility, resulting in a five-fold enhancement of the Hahn-echo coherence time and a nearly tenfold suppression of control infidelity. At the optimal operating point, gate set tomography demonstrates the maximum gate fidelity of 99.82 %. Our finding enhances the prospects of hole spin qubits for scalable quantum information processing.

Flux-pumped Josephson circuits provide a versatile platform for parametric photon generation and multimode bosonic control. We identify an occupation-conditioned pair interaction that arises when two harmonic normal modes participate in the same driven SQUID coordinate. We consider a degenerate pair process in which two photons are created or annihilated in a signal mode while the occupation of a second harmonic mode remains unchanged. Although it does not exchange excitations, this controller mode modifies both the resonance frequency and the strength of the pair transition. The two effects have different physical origins: diagonal Josephson nonlinearities shift the pair resonance, whereas the nonlinear Josephson matrix element makes the avoided-crossing gap itself depend on the controller occupation. Starting from the full Josephson cosine, we develop complementary time-dependent Schrieffer–Wolff and Magnus descriptions that expose the direct and virtual processes responsible for this interaction, and benchmark the resulting effective theory against a numerically converged Floquet treatment of the unexpanded two-mode circuit Hamiltonian. The occupation dependence produces a two-dimensional pair spectrum that enables selective transitions within the bosonic Fock lattice. When the controller is prepared in a coherent superposition, the same interaction converts this conditional dynamics into signal–controller entanglement and controller-dependent non-Gaussian state generation. Observable-level comparisons further show that the variation of the pair-transition strength cannot be reproduced by occupation-dependent resonance shifts alone. These results establish a boson-controlled parametric interaction in which the state of one harmonic mode controls both the spectral position and the coupling strength of a nonlinear process in another.

This study investigates the role of internal structures, such as stellar bars and active galactic nuclei (AGN), in shaping galaxy evolution using 7,408 galaxies (2,641 barred) from the SDSS-IV MaNGA survey. Our analysis spans a wide stellar mass range, from dwarf to massive galaxies, examining how internal and environmental processes regulate galaxy evolution. Galaxies are categorized by morphology (ellipticals (E), lenticulars (S0s), early-type spirals (ETS), and late-type spirals (LTS)), environment, and the presence of a bar. We find that barred galaxies have higher median specific star formation rate (sSFR) than unbarred galaxies across most stellar mass intervals. This difference varies with host morphology, with LTS and S0 galaxies showing different trends across stellar mass intervals. The environmental trends of barred and unbarred galaxies are broadly similar within the same mass intervals. In AGN hosts, barred Seyferts tend to lie near the star-forming$-$green valley boundary, while barred LINERs preferentially occupy the green valley. We further examine the relation between stellar bars and black hole mass and find that barred galaxies host systematically lower black hole masses than unbarred galaxies, with environmental effects appearing to play a secondary role in shaping these differences. A multivariate regression analysis also shows that the positive bar$-$sSFR association remains statistically significant for star-forming galaxies after accounting for stellar mass, local density, AGN activity, and morphology. Our results highlight the interconnected roles of stellar bars, stellar mass, morphology, and environment in shaping galaxy star formation, providing new insights into the role of stellar bars in galaxy evolution.

Radio continuum emission traces star formation in galaxies, but cosmic-ray electron (CRE) propagation between the disk and halo complicates this connection. We present a wide-band, spatially resolved analysis of 19 nearby edge-on galaxies, combining LOFAR observations at 144 MHz with CHANG-ES VLA imaging at 1.575, 3.0, and 6.0 GHz, and hybrid H$\alpha$+22 $\mu$m star formation rate (SFR) maps. All maps are convolved to a common 2.1 kpc resolution for pixel-by-pixel analysis of the nonthermal spectral index $\alpha_{\mathrm{nth}}$ and the SFR surface density $\Sigma_{\mathrm{SFR}}$. All 19 galaxies exhibit statistically significant nonthermal spectral flattening with increasing $\Sigma_{\mathrm{SFR}}$, with a sample median slope of $0.19_{-0.03}^{+0.09}$ that traces the contrast between CRE injection in the star-forming disk and cooling in the halo. The galaxy-to-galaxy scatter in this slope shows no dependence on global galaxy properties and instead appears to be modulated by the local dynamical environment, with the largest $\alpha_{\mathrm{nth}}$-$\Sigma_{\mathrm{SFR}}$ slopes appearing in tidally perturbed systems. The resolved radio-SFR slope steepens from 0.57 at 144 MHz to 0.95 at 6 GHz, approaching linearity at high frequencies. This trend is consistent with energy-dependent CRE cooling and transport, with the deviation from linearity most pronounced at low frequencies, where the edge-on line of sight blends midplane and halo CRE populations. These results are robust against thermal contamination, beam smearing, and spectral curvature. Together, our analysis establishes $\alpha_{\mathrm{nth}}$ as an observational probe of projected disk-to-halo CRE transport in edge-on galaxies and quantifies how this transport reshapes the frequency dependence of resolved radio-SFR calibrations.

With the growing number of binary black hole (BBH) candidates in the Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog 5.0 (GWTC-5.0), an increasing number of BBH systems with distinct properties have been reported. The individual spins are relatively less constrained in the parameter estimations for most events. While the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration (LVK) adopts a uninformative spin prior by default, some binary evolution scenarios have strong predictions on component spins. In this work, we perform Bayesian parameter inference for a subset of BBH events spanning a broad range of properties in the chirp mass, mass ratio, and effective inspiral spin ($\mathcal{M}_{\rm c}$-$q$-$\chi_{\rm eff}$) parameter space. We consider three different spin priors: the LVK spin prior and two astrophysically motivated priors, assuming a non-spinning primary BH ($\chi_1 = 0$) or a non-spinning secondary BH ($\chi_2 = 0$). We find that the non-spinning primary BH prior is disfavored by the data for several systems with high effective inspiral spins, including GW190517_055101, GW190412, GW241113_163507, and GW231028_153006. We suggest that standard common-envelope evolution represents a promising formation channel that can be tested with gravitational-wave observations, and propose a novel method for estimating the merger rate of systems formed through alternative evolutionary channels. We further suggest that the binary evolution involving mass-ratio reversal may provide a possible formation pathway for these systems.

Screened scalar fields provide a possible connection between dark energy and laboratory-scale new physics while remaining compatible with existing fifth-force constraints. Solar production offers a direct probe of these models, and ionization-only measurements extend the sensitivity of liquid-xenon detectors into the sub-keV regime. We present the first search for solar chameleons using low-energy S2-only data, based on the 7.83 tonne-year XENONnT ionization-only data set. The predicted electronic-recoil spectrum is folded through the run-dependent detector response and tested directly in corrected-S2 (cS2) space. A joint binned likelihood combines the seven cS2 bins of science runs SR0, SR1, and SR2. We sample the five-dimensional parameter space $\{\beta_e,\beta_\gamma,M_e,\Lambda,n\}$ and derive posterior constraints on the conformal and disformal electron couplings. The data extend the recoil-energy reach to approximately $0.04~{\rm keV}_{ee}$, where the few-electron detector response and instrumental backgrounds must be modeled explicitly. In the disformal-dominated regime, the result is expressed in terms of $\beta_{\rm eff}\equiv\beta_\gamma({\rm eV}/M_e)^4$. We obtain the upper limit $\log_{10}\beta_{\rm eff}<-3.64$. Although the present analysis reaches a lower energy threshold than our previous XENONnT electronic-recoil analysis, the resulting constraint is weaker, primarily because the disformal absorption rate decreases rapidly toward low recoil energies, where the background rate also becomes larger. This analysis establishes low-energy ionization data as a new experimental channel for testing solar chameleons and screened dark-energy models.

How many directions in weight space does training need? The intrinsic dimension answers this with the smallest number of random directions in which training still reaches a target accuracy, and small values have motivated parameter-efficient methods such as LoRA. We measure it for variational Monte Carlo (VMC), which trains a neural network to represent the ground state of a quantum many-body system. VMC is a demanding test, because the network generates its own training samples and every gradient is noisy, and a revealing one, because the exact answer is known and every run can be scored. We train only a small latent vector that a frozen random map turns into the network's weights, with no change to the standard natural-gradient optimizer. We find that a small dimension can be misleading, while the stability it brings is real. On a magnet with a hard sign pattern, a network that cannot represent signs reaches its best energy in 8 of 28,642 directions, but only because no such network can go lower; once signs are learnable, neither the signs nor the magnitudes are cheap. The dimension rises across a quantum phase transition, so it tracks how difficult a state is at far less compute than fitting a scaling law, yet it never falls below a floor set by the random subspace itself, even where the ground state is nearly trivial. Training in the subspace, in contrast, never diverged in our experiments, whereas full-parameter training with the same settings did, and a control with matched solvers attributes the difference to the reduced dimension.

Scientific code generation can produce executable programs that fail to compute the intended scientific object. We study this problem in language-model synthesis of Clifford circuits, which prepare the stabilizer states used in quantum error correction and admit exact classical verification. In our target-conditioned framework, each target is given as compact signed stabilizer generators, and an exact verifier checks the generated OpenQASM circuits. We supervise models with Aaronson-Gottesman chain-of-thought (AG-CoT) traces checked by the verifier, and continue training on model generations that the verifier accepts. Across two independently trained model families (3B and 7B), AG-CoT supervision multiplies greedy-decode state-equivalence accuracy by four to six times over circuit-only baselines, and verifier-filtered continuation training adds a further consistent gain atop both. A complementary 32B study shows that supervised models achieve near-perfect syntax and Clifford validity while the strongest direct model reaches 6.14% state equivalence per target, rising to over 10% under verifier-guided selection with multiple candidates. These results show that algorithmic trace supervision gives a large, statistically significant gain in both model families and that verifier-filtered continuation adds a further repeated gain. The persistent gap between Clifford validity and state equivalence confirms that exact verification is necessary: a circuit can be syntactically and physically valid yet prepare the wrong quantum state.

Entanglement harvesting transfers quantum field correlations to localized probes, yet whether these correlations can alter stable strategic behavior has remained unclear. We formulate a quantum-input game in which two Unruh-DeWitt detectors harvest vacuum entanglement from a free massless scalar field in $(3+1)$-dimensional Minkowski spacetime. A referee converts this state into payoffs using independent question qubits and phase-calibrated local Bell measurements. To leading perturbative order, the mean reward is proportional to the signed entanglement margin $\sqrt{\mathcal{H}^2+\mathcal{Q}^2}-\mathcal{P}$, where $\mathcal{H}$ is the Hadamard correlation contribution, $\mathcal{Q}$ is the Pauli-Jordan causal contribution, and $\mathcal{P}$ is the local excitation noise. Away from payoff degeneracies, allowing each player to exit or to choose an early or late interaction yields $1+2n_+$ trembling-hand perfect equilibria, where $n_+$ counts the positive-reward timing equilibria. For one fixed protocol, five analytically certified settings realize the sequence $7\to3\to1\to7\to1$. They represent the spacelike region, the first commutator lobe, central carrier cancellation, the second lobe, and the post-wavefront Huygens regime. Thus, within this fixed quantum-input verification protocol, distinct field-correlation regimes generate different stable strategic structures.