High Energy Physics (Experiment)
A study of CMS analysis pipelines through the Integration Challenge
Mohamed Aly, Peter Elmer, Peter Fackeldey et al. (+1 more)
The upcoming High-Luminosity Large
Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) at CERN will deliver an unprecedented volume of data for High Energy Physics (HEP). This wealth of information offers significant opportunities for scientific discovery, but its scale challenges traditional analysis workflows. In this paper, we present CMS analysis pipelines being developed to meet HL-LHC demands. These pipelines build on the broader scientific Python ecosystem, complemented by solutions specifically designed for HEP. A central focus of this work is the Integration Challenge, an IRIS-HEP led effort aimed at assessing the readiness of developed software stack to be used in real world physics analysis and improving the readiness of analysis facilities for the HL-LHC era. The Integration Challenge acts as an end-to-end integration test: by implementing a complete physics analysis pipeline, it evaluates tool interoperability and the overall user experience for analysts. The current pipeline includes columnar data processing, machine learning, statistical inference, and visualization tasks covering a variety of CMS analysis scenarios. In addition, the Integration Challenge explores efficient strategies for delivering skimmed data using diverse tools and data formats, as well as evaluating the ServiceX data-delivery system for HEP analyses. Throughout the testing phase, we also investigated several prototype services, such as histogram-as-a-service capabilities, along with other emerging services that may support future HL-LHC analysis workflows.
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All authors Mohamed Aly, Peter Elmer, Peter Fackeldey, Oksana Shadura
High Energy Physics (Phenomenology)
Soft-Collinear Chiral Perturbation Theory for $B \to \pi$ form factors at large recoil
Thorsten Feldmann, Jack Jenkins and Jaime del Palacio Lirola
We develop an effective hadronic theory for heavy-
meson decays into energetic pions, organized by the approximate heavy-
quark and
chiral symmetries. The dynamical degrees of freedom of the theory consist of quasi-static heavy-
meson fields coupled to soft and collinear pions, relevant for exclusive $B \to \pi$ transitions at large
recoil energy ${E_\pi \simeq M_B/2}$. Our approach exploits the factorization of soft and collinear
quarks in Soft-Collinear Effective Theory (SCET), leading to an emergent duplication of
chiral symmetry in the two kinematic sectors. Promoting the soft and collinear
chiral transformations to local
symmetries enables us to systematically match non-local four-
quark operators in SCET – governing the soft-overlap contribution to heavy-to-light form factors – onto effective operators constructed from hadronic fields below the scale of
chiral symmetry breaking. As a first application, we compute the logarithmically enhanced pion-mass dependence of the $B \to \pi$ form factors at large
recoil by calculating the one-loop
matrix elements of the leading hadronic operators. We find that the non-local transition currents in our effective theory lead to a pattern of
chiral-logarithmic corrections that is not compatible with the existing formulation provided by Hard-Pion
Chiral Perturbation Theory.
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Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Energy distributions of precipitating electrons in Jupiter's auroral regions from combined Juno/JADE and Juno/JEDI measurements
B. Benmahi, V. Hue, N. André et al. (+17 more)
Jupiter's auroras are produced by magnetospheric electrons precipitating into its atmosphere. Juno/JADE and Juno/JEDI together measure these electrons from 100 eV to 1 MeV. However, their auroral spectra are poorly reproduced by the widely used kappa distribution, hereafter the classical single-kappa distribution. We aim to statistically characterize the energy flux distributions of precipitating auroral electrons and to derive a new phenomenological 4-kappa distribution better suited to JADE+JEDI data. We build mean energy flux distributions in six auroral sub-regions (polar, main, and outer emissions in both hemispheres), combining JADE and JEDI data from PJ3 to PJ35, mapped to the SIII frame with the JRM33 model including the current sheet. We fit them using MCMC with the classical single-kappa and 4-kappa distributions. The mean distributions show a monotonic power-law decay with an energy cutoff beyond ~500 keV in most sub-regions, although some individual spectra depart from it at intermediate energies. Mean energies range from ~21 to ~119 keV, and energy fluxes from ~9.5 to ~28.7 mW/m$^2$. The classical single-kappa fit fails in all sub-regions, with $\kappa$ converging to the lower bound of its prior range. We therefore introduce the 4-kappa distribution, a linear combination of four classical single-kappa distributions modulated by an exponential high-energy cutoff, which accurately fits all six sub-regions. At equal energy flux and mean energy, transport simulations show that the 4-kappa distribution deposits energy at lower altitude than the classical one and distributes it differently along the vertical, with implications for the UV color ratio, atmospheric chemistry and thermal structure, and ionospheric conductances. This distribution provides an analytical framework for realistic modeling of electron precipitation and UV auroral emissions at Jupiter.
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All authors B. Benmahi, V. Hue, N. André, B. Bonfond, M. Blanc, Z.-Y. Liu, B. H. Mauk, F. Allegrini, G. Clark, M. Devinat, G. Gronoff, T. Le Liboux, M. Barthélémy, C. Lefour, T. Cavalié, B. Benne, T. Gautier, T. Briand, J. A. Noble, J. A. Sinclair
Chemical Physics
Symmetry-Aware Flow Matching for End-to-end Molecular Crystal Generation
Wendi Cai and Fanyang Mo
Molecular
crystal packing shapes properties from drug bioavailability to charge transport, yet generating realistic structures requires coordinating molecular flexibility, intermolecular interactions and
symmetry. Here we introduce SALA, a flow-matching model built on state–context separation: it evolves only asymmetric-unit (ASU) atomic coordinates and
symmetry-compatible
lattice parameters while predicting their updates from the full periodic environment. Conditioned on molecular graphs and a space group, SALA generates molecular conformation,
lattice geometry and packing end to end while preserving the specified
symmetry. Across 799 held-out
crystals spanning four chemical classes and all seven
crystal systems, SALA achieves a 72.0% hit rate from 50 candidates per target, compared with 8.1% for an atomistic full-
cell generative baseline. Mean best-candidate packing root-mean-square deviation decreases from 4.48 to 1.70~Å, with the advantage widening as system size and
symmetry multiplicity increase. SALA thus enables end-to-end generation of complex,
symmetry-constrained molecular
crystals, with potential applications in CSP, structure-based pharmaceutical polymorph design and organic molecular materials discovery.
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Space Physics
P2D - A Two-Dimensional Multi-Spacecraft Solar Wind Persistence Model
Daniel Milošić, Manuela Temmer, Stephan G. Heinemann et al. (+2 more)
The background
solar wind is a key component in space weather
forecasting, as it contains geoeffective high-speed streams and provides the medium through which coronal mass ejections propagate and evolve in interplanetary space. Due to the
solar rotation and the slow
evolution of large-scale
solar wind structures,
solar wind properties exhibit an autocorrelation with a period of roughly 27 days, particularly at
solar minimum. We made use of this property to develop a
solar wind persistence model with input from multiple spacecraft (
Solar Orbiter, Parker
Solar Probe, STEREO-A, STEREO-B and the OMNI database). The model ballistically propagates in-situ data from the position of their measurement radially away from the Sun, as well as longitudinally with the
solar rotation rate, producing 2D maps of
solar wind parameters. These can be extracted at any point in the heliosphere for a
solar wind reconstruction. From Earth's perspective, the reconstruction performs with an MAE of 65.41 km/s and 3.51/cm^3 for speed and density, respectively. During high-speed streams, the peak hit rate is 50% and 48% for speed and density. It performs best during times when there are spacecraft located between Earth and Lagrange point L5. During these times, the mean absolute error of the predicted
solar wind speed decreases by roughly 35% in comparison to the
benchmark 27-day persistence model. Therefore, future L5 missions like Vigil are expected to provide a robust basis for reliable persistence forecasts.
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All authors Daniel Milošić, Manuela Temmer, Stephan G. Heinemann, Mathew Owens, Stefan J. Hofmeister
Quantum Physics
Depth-Optimal Quantum Compilation
Francisca Vasconcelos
We achieve the first constant-depth
circuit for arbitrary single-
qubit gate synthesis. Unlike prior approaches, the construction is fully
unitary and requires no pre-supplied catalyst. For any constant $\delta>0$, it $\varepsilon$-approximates an arbitrary single-
qubit gate using $O(\log^{1+\delta}(1/\varepsilon))$ clean ancillae, Hadamard and $T$ single-
qubit gates, $O(\log(1/\varepsilon))$-width generalized Toffoli gates, and sublogarithmic-width Fan-Out gates. We further eliminate Fan-Out entirely, showing that Hadamard, $T$, and generalized Toffoli gates alone suffice for constant-depth synthesis. When restricted to the standard bounded-width gate model, our construction has depth $O(\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$, and we prove a matching $\Omega(\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$-depth lower bound. Overall, we establish that $\Theta(\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$-depth is unavoidable with only bounded-width gates, yet allowing even logarithmic-width multi-
qubit gates suffices to achieve constant-depth synthesis. These results also reveal new structure in shallow
quantum circuit complexity. We give a depth-preserving real simulation of bounded-error decision computation, showing that every depth-$d$ QAC
circuit can be simulated in depth $O(d)$ using only Hadamard, $X$, and generalized Toffoli gates. Thus arbitrary single-
qubit rotations and complex amplitudes do not increase the bounded-error decision power of QAC, even at constant depth. In particular, this reduces the long-standing
conjecture Parity$\notin$QAC$^0$ to proving a Parity lower bound against
circuits consisting only of Hadamard, $X$, and generalized Toffoli gates. More generally, this real normal form exposes a direct correspondence between the standard shallow-depth
quantum circuit hierarchy and a hierarchy of Forrelation
circuits with restricted oracle families.
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Lattice Field Theory
Measuring Mass Splittings in Baryon SU(2) Multiplets
Constantia Alexandrou, Simone Bacchio, Antonio Evangelista et al. (+2 more)
The inclusion of isospin-breaking corrections arising from electromagnetic interactions and the up-down
quark mass difference is becoming increasingly important in
lattice QCD calculations, as the precision of observables is at or approaching the percent level. In this context, the RM123 method has been employed in recent years to take into account such isospin corrections. In this work, we study
baryon mass splittings using the RM123 approach. Preliminary results are presented for the mass splittings within
spin-1/2 and
spin-3/2
baryon SU(2) multiplets, obtained using twisted-mass ensembles tuned close to physical
quark masses. We consider only valence contributions, with the splittings computed at leading order in the isospin-breaking parameters.
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All authors Constantia Alexandrou, Simone Bacchio, Antonio Evangelista, Christos Iona, Christian Schneider
High Energy Physics (Phenomenology)
Radial Excitation Spectra of Light Pseudoscalar and Vector Mesons in Light-Front Holographic QCD
Abhisth Srivastava
The non-perturbative regime of
Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) poses significant challenges for analytical treatment. Light-Front
Holographic QCD (LFHQCD) offers an effective semiclassical framework for exploring hadronic structure through a
holographic dual description of confinement. While the standard soft-wall model, along with the Brodsky-de Téramond (BdT) longitudinal prescription, provides satisfactory results for
meson ground states, it shows deviations of around 17 to $18\%$ for radial excitations of the pion family. In this work, we extend the transverse confining potential by adding Coulombic and logarithmic contributions beyond the standard soft-wall framework. We solve the resulting light-front Schrödinger equation numerically, and we combine the transverse mass spectrum with the BdT longitudinal prescription to obtain the complete
meson mass spectrum. We compute the radial excitation spectra of the $\pi$, $\rho$, and $K^{*}$
meson families and analyze their Regge trajectories. The modified framework reduces the overall average deviation from experimental data from about $7.6\%$ to $5.2\%$ compared to the standard soft-wall model, representing a $\sim 32\%$ improvement for the fitted nine-state
dataset in describing radially excited states. The results show that short-range Coulombic and intermediate-range logarithmic contributions are important for refining the radial
meson spectrum within the light-front
holographic approach.
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Biological Physics
DNA geometry around highly transcribed bacterial genes
Marc Joyeux
Recent high-resolution (500 bp) Hi-C experiments reported contact maps with unusual patterns around highly expressed bacterial DNA loci. These patterns, described as arched stripes and bundled domains, extend over nearly 100 kbp. We performed Brownian Dynamics simulations with a specially designed coarse-grained model to rationalize these findings. The main feature of the model is that it takes explicitly into account the waves of positive (respectively, negative) supercoiling generated by the translocating polymerase downstream (respectively, upstream) of its position. Contact maps computed from the simulations also display the arched stripe and bundled domain patterns for above-threshold values of the rate of twist injection. Computed DNA conformations indicate that these patterns reflect an extraordinarily entangled DNA geometry, which involves both plectonemic and toroidal supercoiling, with some DNA segments experiencing both of them simultaneously. Moreover, DNA segments located on each side of the polymerase systematically wind around tracts located on the other side, which is a purely out-of-
equilibrium effect driven by the continuous injection of twist. The present work therefore reveals that repeated transcription of a DNA locus systematically brings into contact DNA segments separated by several tens of kbp, which may eventually contribute to allosteric modulation and long-range communication.
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Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Beyond gas dwarfs and water worlds: hybrid envelopes among the M-dwarf sub-Neptunes characterised with JWST
Juan F. Pagés Navarrete
Sub-Neptunes orbiting M
dwarfs are commonly interpreted either as rocky cores beneath
primordial H/He envelopes (gas
dwarfs) or as volatile-rich bodies formed beyond the water-ice line (water worlds). Because the two are degenerate in mass and radius once envelope
evolution is treated self-consistently, the atmospheric mean molecular weight $\mu$ is the more direct discriminant. We compile the eight M-
dwarf sub-Neptunes with published JWST transmission spectra and a constraint on $\mu$, grade each constraint by the quality of the underlying evidence, and combine it with the restricted Jeans parameter and with energy-limited escape integrated over the system lifetime, using XUV histories from M-
dwarf activity-age relations.
Planets are classified by what their present composition implies about their origin. At the $\mu = 3.8$ amu threshold adopted in the gas-
dwarf literature, four
planets fit neither end-member: their envelopes ($3.8 < \mu \le 18$ amu) are too heavy for
primordial H/He, yet neither their composition nor their escape history requires a volatile-rich origin. Two of these assignments rest on molecular detections (LP 791-18 c and TOI-270 d) and two on bounded or conditional
metallicities. One
planet, LHS 1140 b, requires a volatile-rich origin; one, TOI-776 c, is tentatively a gas
dwarf; two remain ambiguous. We propose the term hybrid worlds for the intermediate class, whose envelopes can be produced by magma-ocean equilibration, supercritical miscibility, preferential hydrogen loss or
accretion interior to the ice line. The count depends on the adopted threshold (three
planets at 5 amu, one at 10 amu), but no threshold leaves both end-member classes physically consistent. The sample is set by JWST target selection, so these fractions are not occurrence rates; a homogeneous survey testing whether $\mu$ is bimodal would test the proposed class directly.
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Applied Physics
Adaptive metamaterial resonators: a discrete and continuous mechanism
Vanessa Cool, Elke Deckers and Frank Naets
Locally resonant metamaterials are an established route to lightweight attenuation of vibration and noise, but their performance is tied to a bandgap fixed at the design stage. In practice, excitation frequencies are rarely constant, as they can vary with operating conditions and loading, causing fixed-frequency resonators to lose effectiveness as conditions drift from their design point. Existing strategies to address this rely on active control, introducing sensors, actuators, and a continuous power supply, or on broadband and multi-resonator designs that trade attenuation depth for bandwidth. A passive alternative, capable of adapting its resonance characteristics directly within the operating environment, would remove this trade-off and open locally resonant metamaterials to a much wider range of real-world, time-varying applications. In this work, we present two adaptive resonator concepts that enable in-situ modification of local resonance characteristics through discrete and continuous adaptation mechanisms.
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Soft Condensed Matter
Cell division sets a universal flow geometry in cell layers
Tianxiang Ma, Lasse Bonn, Valeriia Grudtsyna et al. (+4 more)
Collective flows in epithelial tissues contain a
geometric backbone of vortical interfaces whose statistics exhibit hallmarks of critical percolation and conformal invariance. Yet how fundamental cellular processes govern the breakdown of such
symmetry-rich flow geometry remains unclear. Here we show that
cell division plays a central physical role in regulating this universal flow organization by controlling both the
geometric and mechanical flexibility of the
cell-
cell network. Using pharmacological perturbations, we find that when proliferation is suppressed through two independent interventions, coherent flows persist but neighbor exchanges decline and conformally invariant geometry is lost. Blocking apoptosis does not affect universality, isolating division as the key control. A vertex model with tunable division quantitatively reproduces these effects and restores conformal invariance when division is allowed. We further trace this effect to changes in both the
geometric and mechanical organization of the
cell layer: Divisions act as intermittent topological renewals that loosen constraints, preserving the network's flexibility and capacity to rearrange across scales. Thus, beyond its canonical role in growth,
cell division acts as a structural and mechanical regulator of collective self-organization. These findings establish a direct connection between fundamental biological processes and emergent physical
symmetries.
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All authors Tianxiang Ma, Lasse Bonn, Valeriia Grudtsyna, Nigar Abbasova, Martin Cramer Pedersen, Nuno A. M. Araujo, Amin Doostmohammadi
Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
Power balance and anomalous exchange in post-AGB pulsations
Jan Zalewski
We develop a complex balance relation for
stellar pulsations whose real and imaginary parts give paired relations for the excitation rate and oscillation frequency. The formulation includes thermodynamic exchange, boundary power, and the inertial, compression, horizontal-area, and gravitational-stratification terms, without assuming weak nonadiabaticity. Applied to portions of an envelope, it provides cumulative diagnostics evaluated using the eigenfrequency and eigenfunctions of the complete pulsation problem. We show that a negligible global boundary contribution can coexist with substantial internal boundary power, which may largely compensate the thermodynamic exchange within the envelope. Applications to radial pulsations of post-AGB envelopes illustrate this behaviour for ordinary, strange, and anomalous-exchange modes. The latter have a negative effective norm and opposite signs of net exchange power and excitation rate. For a selected excited anomalous mode, the principal exchange occurs between the He II ionization region and the Z-bump, with less participation from the outer ionization layers than in the comparison modes. Classification by the largest response norm reveals distinct domains across the examined pulsation spectrum. The selected anomalous branch retains horizontal-area dominance across its transition from damping to excitation.
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Quantum Physics
Trotterisation Thresholds and Dissipative Quantum Chaos in Open-System Digital Quantum Simulation
Angsar Manatuly, Lukas M. Sieberer, Cahit Kargi et al. (+1 more)
Digital
quantum simulation (DQS) is one of the most promising applications of
quantum computing. Trotterised DQS models
quantum dynamics by decomposing the
evolution into a sequence of gate-based Trotter steps. Using larger Trotter steps reduces the required gate count, but it is now understood that the Trotterisation step size cannot be increased beyond a certain threshold value, beyond which there is a sudden breakdown in simulation accuracy, due to the onset of
quantum chaos. To date, this behaviour has only been studied for closed systems not subjected to the environmental noise and decoherence to which real-world
quantum computers are highly sensitive. In this work, we study a range of experimentally relevant open-system
quantum simulator models and show that Trotterisation thresholds persist even when open-system effects are included, even in the long-time, steady-state limit, once all coherence has been lost. We show that open DQS can accurately reproduce the dynamics of open target systems prior to the threshold, but still exhibits a sudden performance breakdown beyond it. We introduce new, statistical techniques to rigorously characterise the onset of
quantum chaos beyond the Trotterisation threshold for both approximately
unitary and genuine dissipative
quantum chaos, based on random
matrix theory (RMT), building on techniques developed for closed systems. Finally, we demonstrate that dissipative
quantum chaos emerges when the dissipation is in balance with the presence of underlying
unitary quantum chaos; the dissipation must be strong enough to induce genuinely dissipative behaviour, yet not so strong as to suppress the underlying chaotic structure.
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All authors Angsar Manatuly, Lukas M. Sieberer, Cahit Kargi, Nathan K. Langford
Quantum Physics
Quantum Entanglement in Variational Quantum Classification for Breast Cancer Diagnosis
Zineb Hazmoun, Zoubida Sakhi and Mohamed Bennai
This study looks at how the entangling structure of a variational
quantum classifier (VQC) relates to its performance in breast cancer diagnosis, using the Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer (WDBC)
dataset. We tested three three-
qubit configurations that share the same EfficientSU2 ansatz, COBYLA optimizer, and stratified five-fold cross-validation, but differ in their entangling structure: a single- repetition Ising-type coupling (A), a two-repetition linear Ising-type coupling (B), and a fully connected Heisenberg-type coupling (C).
Entanglement was measured with the von Neumann
entropy and the Wootters concurrence. From A to C, the mean
entropy rose from 0.40 to 0.71, accuracy rose from 92.98% to 93.68%, and F1-score rose from 90.32% to 91.28%. Configuration C was also the most stable across folds. However, the fold-level correlations between
entanglement and performance were weak and not significant. Richer
topologies also increase
circuit expressivity, so the two effects cannot be fully separated. These results show an association, not a proven causal link, between entangling structure and VQC performance.
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Astrophysics of Galaxies
KiDS-DR5: Exploring dust transport in dark matter halos of galaxies
Eray Genc, Angus H. Wright, Hendrik Hildebrandt et al. (+12 more)
We analyse a well-defined sample of
galaxies from the final data release of the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS-DR5), selected using magnitude, photometric
redshift, and
stellar mass cuts, to measure their mean
halo mass and circumgalactic
dust content as a function of
stellar mass. Our goal is to provide empirical constraints on
dust transport mechanisms, such as
stellar- and AGN-driven
outflows, operating in
galaxy halos. We develop and validate a new measurement and modelling framework using the MICE2 simulation, incorporating a realistic circumgalactic
dust extinction scenario. Using this framework, we jointly model multiband ($ugriZYJHK_{\rm s}$) magnitude shifts and
galaxy–
galaxy lensing signals to infer the mean
halo mass and
dust mass of lens
galaxies at $z_{\rm B} < 0.4$, analysed in five
stellar-mass bins in KiDS-DR5. The modelling jointly describes the
halo mass distribution and
dust extinction, including
dust associated with neighbouring
halos. We demonstrate that the inclusion of a satellite fraction and
dust extinction from neighbouring
halos is required by the data. We find a linear relation between
stellar mass and
dust mass, consistent with previous observational studies, but flatter than predictions from the semi-analytic model Dusty-SAGE. This difference may indicate that current implementations of
dust-related feedback in
galaxy formation models require further refinement.
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All authors Eray Genc, Angus H. Wright, Hendrik Hildebrandt, Dian P. Triani, Dominik J. Bomans, Benjamin Stölzner, Marika Asgari, Henk Hoekstra, Benjamin Joachimi, Shahab Joudaki, Konrad Kuijken, Lauro Moscardini, Mario Radovich, Robert Reischke, Ziang Yan
Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems
Global synchronization of topological signals with time-delayed interactions
Wilfried Segnou, Thierry Njougouo, Diego Garlaschelli et al. (+1 more)
Topological signals are dynamical variables supported on higher-order structures such as simplicial or
cell complexes. In this work, we investigate the impact of time-delayed interactions on the emergence of global synchronization of topological oscillators, with application to the Stuart-Landau system. We first examine the case where signals are supported on simplexes, or
cells, of a given dimension and coupled through the Hodge-Laplace
matrix. We derive the Master Stability Function and we prove that for suitable discrete delay values, the stability of the synchronous solution becomes analytically tractable and can be solved by using the Lambert W-function. This analysis yields explicit spectral conditions for Global Topological Synchronization to emerge and shows that admissible delays may either promote or suppress synchronization. We then study delayed interactions between signals supported on simplexes, or
cells, of different dimensions coupled by the Dirac operator. Under analogous admissible time delays the variational problem, still related to the Master Stability Function, can again be simplified, however in this case we prove that Global Topological Dirac Synchronization cannot emerge. Numerical simulations on simplicial and
cell complexes corroborate and complement these findings.
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All authors Wilfried Segnou, Thierry Njougouo, Diego Garlaschelli, Timoteo Carletti
Strongly Correlated Electrons
Quantum-Geometric Amplification of Nonperturbative Interaction Scales
Stefano Bilamour, René Meyer, Johanna Erdmenger et al. (+1 more)
Weak interactions at a two-dimensional quadratic band touching (QBT) can generate an exponentially small
symmetry-breaking gap, $m\sim e^{-A/V_1}$, that cannot be captured by every finite order of perturbation theory. We show that the singular
quantum geometry of the gapped QBT converts this beyond-all-orders scale into an algebraically enhanced response. The
quantum metric develops a momentum-space hot spot whose Brillouin-zone integral diverges logarithmically, and therefore grows algebraically when the gap is dynamically generated by interactions. Through the inverse-frequency Souza–Wilkens–Martin optical sum rule, the same amplification appears in the negative-first longitudinal optical moment, even though the ordinary optical conductivity remains $O(e^2/\hbar)$ and its absorption threshold is exponentially small. We establish these results analytically for a massive QBT and verify them microscopically in an interacting kagome
lattice model known to develop a spontaneous
quantum anomalous
Hall mass at its QBT from loop currents order. Our results identify
quantum geometry as an asymptotic amplifier of nonperturbative interaction scales.
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All authors Stefano Bilamour, René Meyer, Johanna Erdmenger, Domenico Di Sante
Chemical Physics
Curvature-Aware Flow Matching for Molecular Structure Generation
Samir Darouich, Juliane Geisler, Jacob W. Toney et al. (+4 more)
Generative models produce three-dimensional molecular structures with high
geometric accuracy, yet they are trained on distributions of atomic coordinates without explicit access to the underlying physics. The potential energy surface (PES) describes how the energy changes around a molecular geometry, and the RMSD between a generated structure and its reference captures this local landscape only indirectly. Supervising the PES during training could close this gap, but conformers and transition states (TSs) are stationary points at which the forces vanish, so first-order quantities carry little information about them. What remains is the local
curvature, encoded in the Hessian of the PES.
Quantum-chemical Hessians are too expensive to be available at the scale required for training, but recently proposed machine-learned predictors make
curvature inexpensive enough to supervise directly. We introduce CurvFM, a flow matching (FM) formulation whose training objective constrains the
curvature at the generated structure. A frozen Hessian prediction model is evaluated at the generated endpoint and at the reference structure, which removes the need for
quantum-chemical Hessians and keeps the residual cheap enough to impose at every training step. Across TS and conformer generation, CurvFM substantially improves physical fidelity at unchanged global structural accuracy, reducing the median deviation in maximum force by 63% on GEOM-QM9 and raising the fraction of valid TSs by up to 10% across three reaction
datasets.
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All authors Samir Darouich, Juliane Geisler, Jacob W. Toney, Tanja Bien, Johannes Kästner, Heather J. Kulik, Mathias Niepert
Atomic Physics
Breit interaction in elastic scattering of vortex electron on Hydrogen atomic target
Pengcheng Zhao
The interaction of electron
vortex beams with atoms is fundamental to their applications, yet existing studies on elastic scattering have considered only the Coulomb interaction. The role of the Breit interaction, which represents the leading relativistic correction to the Coulomb potential between two electrons, has not been systematically examined. We study the elastic scattering of a \(300\) keV
vortex electron by a hydrogen atomic target, with emphasis on the role of the Breit interaction. Comparisons are made between the pure Coulomb contribution and the sum of the Coulomb and Breit contributions. Our results show that the Breit interaction dominates the scattering process in certain kinematic regions when the total angular momentum (TAM) of the
vortex electron is sufficiently large, which breaks with the conventional notion that the Breit interaction has little contribution to electron scattering for low-\(Z\) atoms. This phenomenon arises primarily because a
vortex electron with large angular momentum possesses a substantial
magnetic moment, and the Breit interaction precisely describes the interaction between
magnetic moments. We further compare single-atom, mesoscopic, and macroscopic target cases, and show that the target size significantly influences the observability of the Breit-induced effects, with a smaller target size being favorable for observing this phenomenon.
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Strongly Correlated Electrons
Enhanced sliding in the coexisting Charge Density Wave phase of strained TbTe3
Antoine Gallo Frantz, Aleksander Sinchenko, Luc Ortega et al. (+5 more)
In the last years, the application of mechanical tensile stress has been shown to trigger unconventional phases in
quantum materials. Recently, an orientational transition of the charge density wave (CDW) of TbTe3 was reported under the application of moderate uniaxial tensile stress, associated to the in-plane a/c
lattice anisotropy. This leads to the disappearance of the pristine c-oriented CDW (CDWc) and to the appearance of the orthogonal a-oriented one (CDWa). A coexistence phase with a superposition of CDWa and CDWc appears when a=c. Here, we probe the sliding dynamics of both CDWc and CDWa as a function of applied tensile stress, i.e. in the pure CDWc, pure CDWa and coexistence phases, by measuring current-voltage characteristics and associated differential resistances. If the pristine CDWc has been known to display non-linear dynamics and thus sliding for several years, we show here that the strain-induced CDWa phase also displays the same characteristics, proving its incommensurate nature. Moreover, we show that sliding also takes place both for CDWc and CDWa, with reduced threshold currents, in the coexistence phase, which questions the microstructure of these coexisting orthogonal CDWs in real space. Finally, the linearity of the threshold fields is kept for all deformation states, with finite threshold fields at Tc, which is discussed in terms of commensurability and pinning potentials. This work opens new questions for the theoretical description of sliding CDWs in quasi-2D systems.
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All authors Antoine Gallo Frantz, Aleksander Sinchenko, Luc Ortega, Abdellali Hadj Azzem, Jose Emilio Lorenzo, Pierre Monceau, David Le Bolloch, Vincent Jacques
High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
Unexpected Gamma-ray Outburst from the CSS Radio Galaxy 3C 216
Stefano Ciprini and Federica Giacchino
While compact steep-spectrum (CSS)
radio galaxies, genuine young/intermittent-jet or frustrated-jet
radio galaxies trapped in gas-rich environments, are rarely detected in GeV gamma-ray energy bands, 3C 216 is an interesting exception. In 2023, the Large Area
Telescope (LAT) on board the
Fermi Gamma-ray Space
Telescope detected an unexpected, rapid, and powerful GeV gamma-ray outburst from this CSS
radio galaxy, which was followed up by UV and X-ray observations from the Neil Gehrels Swift Space Observatory. During the outburst its spectral energy distribution is dominated by synchrotron and synchrotron self-Compton radiation, produced in the relativistic jet, suggesting a young
quasar classification.
Radio-band features, such as superluminal motion and a flat-spectrum core component, confirm that 3C 216 harbors a distinct blazar-like core, bent and viewed under a small angle to the line of sight. This is the unique large and energetic event from the source observed in 17 years of
Fermi-LAT continuous all-sky and time-domain monitoring.
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Quantum Physics
Microsecond-Programmable Synthetic Quantum Matter: Circumventing the Adiabatic Bottleneck for Heisenberg-Limited Metrology
Soi-Chan Lei
Generating macroscopic
quantum entanglement is central to
quantum metrology. While traversing a
quantum critical point yields Heisenberg-limited precision, adiabatic schemes are restricted by slow dynamics and decoherence. Here, we propose a non-adiabatic Floquet protocol in a single-cavity Bose-Einstein condensate to circumvent these limitations. By applying rapid rotations and phase jumps, we dynamically synthesize effective Two-Axis Twisting (TAT) interactions from native longitudinal couplings. To evaluate this beyond mean-field limits, we develop an exact finite-state automaton
Matrix Product Operator (MPO) encoding that strictly bounds the virtual dimension to $\mathcal{O}(1)$, enabling exact DMRG and TDVP simulations for large systems. Tracking non-
equilibrium Floquet TAT dynamics and environmental decoherence for $N=10^3$ ensembles, we demonstrate that the quench rapidly generates Heisenberg-limited
spin squeezing ($\xi_R^2 \sim 1/N$). The microsecond timescale of this protocol decouples the generation process from typical millisecond decoherence, with phenomenological models revealing an optimal extraction time near $t \approx 3.26~\mu s$. This work establishes a feasible route for realizing Heisenberg-limited metrology in current cavity-QED platforms.
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Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
Probing hydrodynamics in graphene and quark matter via Seebeck coefficient
Subhalaxmi Nayak, Jayanta Dey and Sabyasachi Ghosh
We investigate the Seebeck coefficient as a probe of collective transport behavior in
graphene and
quark-
gluon plasma using a kinetic-theory approach in the hydrodynamic regime. The Seebeck coefficient is obtained by solving the Boltzmann transport equation in the relaxation-time approximation. At high-charge-carrier density, corresponding to the
Fermi-
liquid domain, our result approaches the behavior expected from the conventional Mott relation. In contrast, significant deviations from the Mott relation are observed in the low-carrier-density regime, corresponding to the Dirac fluid domain. These facts are in good agreement with experimental Seebeck coefficient data for
graphene. This behavior indicates the emergence of collective hydrodynamic transport in
graphene. The enthalpy per particle plays a key role for the Seebeck coefficient in the Dirac fluid regime. We extend our formalism to the ultra-relativistic
quark-
gluon plasma. A similar deviation from the Mott relation is observed, supporting a similar fluid response in the Seebeck coefficient across two markedly different strongly correlated
quantum systems -
graphene and
quark matter.
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Materials Science
Magneto-optical Kerr spectroscopy of exciton Rydberg states in a magnetic van der Waals heterostructure
Astha Khandelwal, Benran Zhang, Madhusmita Jena et al. (+8 more)
Excitonic states in two-dimensional
semiconductors are sensitive to time-reversal
symmetry breaking, yet how interfacial exchange acts on higher-lying
exciton Rydberg states remains largely unexplored. Here we show that wavelength-resolved magneto-optical Kerr spectroscopy of a proximity-coupled MoSe$_2$/Fe$_3$GaTe$_2$ van der Waals
heterostructure resolves
magnetic symmetry breaking across the A- and B-
exciton manifolds. Combining reflection, photoluminescence, and photoluminescence excitation spectroscopy with first-principles many-body calculations including screening by the metallic Fe$_3$GaTe$_2$ layer, we assign the strongly enhanced Kerr resonances to the ground and 2s states of both
manifolds. Reversing the
magnetic field inverts the polarity of every resonance. A field-odd/field-even decomposition confirms a
magnetic origin. The opposite Kerr polarities of the A- and B-
exciton manifolds can be explained by proximity-induced exchange coupling to the opposite valence-band
spins of the two
exciton series. Our results establish resonant Kerr spectroscopy as a sensitive probe of magnetically induced
symmetry breaking across the excitonic
manifold.
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All authors Astha Khandelwal, Benran Zhang, Madhusmita Jena, Zhenchao Wen, Kenji Watanabe, Takashi Taniguchi, Saroj P. Dash, Zhenglu Li, Ryo Kitaura, Bhagwati Prasad, Daichi Kozawa
Mathematical Physics
Classical BV Pushforward
Xin Geng, Andrey Losev and Vyacheslav Lysov
We define the classical BV pushforward and establish its two main properties. First, we prove that it maps solutions of the classical master equation (CME) on the total space to solutions of the CME on the smaller space. Second, we prove that, for isolated critical points, it maps BV canonically equivalent solutions to BV canonically equivalent solutions. We illustrate the construction with examples and discuss its applications.
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Quantum Physics
Near-Optimal Bounds on the Density of Low-Energy States of $k$-Local Hamiltonians and Faster Quantum Algorithms
Sevag Gharibian, François Le Gall, Ranitha Mataraarachchi et al. (+1 more)
Low-energy estimation and state preparation for general $k$-local
Hamiltonians are fundamental challenges in
quantum complexity theory. Buhrman et al.~ [BGLGST, PRL 2025] recently broke the natural Grover bound $O^\ast(2^{n/2})$ for both problems, with the improvement depending on the relative accuracy $\varepsilon$ and the locality $k$. In this work, we present faster exponential
quantum algorithms for these problems, where the binary
entropy function governs the runtime exponent. For sufficiently small $\varepsilon/k$, our
algorithms improve the exponent by a factor of $\log(k/\varepsilon)$ over [BGLGST, PRL 2025]. Our main technical result is an
entropy-governed lower bound on the dimension of the
Hamiltonian's low-energy subspace, obtained by depolarizing its ground state. For fixed $k$, this bound is optimal up to constant factors in the exponent. The same framework yields tighter bounds for Heisenberg, $XY$, and Ising models on arbitrary interaction graphs.
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All authors Sevag Gharibian, François Le Gall, Ranitha Mataraarachchi, Suguru Tamaki
Geophysics
A Review of Deep-learning-based Seismic Data Denoising and Its Promising Paradigm Shift to Foundation Models
Xintong Dong, Zhengyi Yuan, Changxin Wei et al. (+3 more)
Denoising is a long-standing and widely-concerned topic in seismic data processing, for it can significantly increase the signal-to-noise ratio of seismic data. Numerous deep learning (DL) methods have shown promising denoising performance, but most of them are task-specific and focus on a certain type of seismic background noise. The real condition that seismic
datasets are often contaminated by various types of noises motivates us to explore a well-generalized and versatile DL model for seismic data denoising. Recently, in the fields of computer
vision and natural
language processing, foundation models (FMs) pre-trained on vast
datasets demonstrate outstanding adaptability and generality across diverse downstream tasks. This paradigm offers a promising path to address the challenges faced by task-specific DL denoising models, such as poor generalization, retraining from scratch for different noise, and the lack of labeled data. We first provide a brief review of traditional seismic denoising methods, followed by a comprehensive review of existing DL-based denoising methods categorized by noise type. Furthermore, we conduct a case study on a dedicated seismic denoising foundation model termed SeisDeFM. This is the first study in geophysical research to develop and validate a seismic denoising foundation model on pre-stack gathers with diverse noise conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with task-specific DL baselines, SeisDeFM achieves superior denoising performance and cross-noise generalization by the advantages of sufficient pre-training and appropriate downstream adaptation, and it effectively preserves weak reflection events while suppressing complex noise in pre-stack seismic data.
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All authors Xintong Dong, Zhengyi Yuan, Changxin Wei, Wenshuo Yu, Shiqi Dong, Jun Lin
High Energy Physics (Theory)
Cylinder Defect Casimir Energy and Weyl Anomalies
Yang Zhou
We distinguish two Casimir observables associated with a conformal surface defect. A circular cylinder embedded in flat space has a logarithmic contribution to its Casimir energy, $-d_1\log(R/\epsilon)/(24R)$, fixed by the displacement anomaly. A great cylinder obtained by radial quantization of the ambient theory instead has Casimir energy $-b/(12R)$ in the conformal defect
vacuum with a fixed local anomaly convention. Free-field and
holographic calculations provide checks of the proposed relations in both
embeddings.
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Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Resolved Structure and Orbital Motion of a Localized 1 au-scale Dust Accumulation in the Protoplanetary Disk around TW Hya
Takashi Tsukagoshi, Takayuki Muto, Hideko Nomura et al. (+6 more)
We present the results of high-resolution ($\sim1$~au) Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations of the TW~Hya protoplanetary disk in the Band 6
dust continuum, as well as the \ce{^13CO} and \ce{C^18O} J=2–1 emission lines. The primary focus of this study is to investigate the kinematics, internal morphology, and local gas environment of the prominent
dust blob at a radius of 52~au. By comparing our 2021 data with archival observations from 2017, we detect the proper motion of the blob. The measured azimuthal velocity of 3.3$\pm$0.9~km~s$^{-1}$ is fully consistent with local Keplerian rotation. Combined with the lack of significant radial migration over the four-year baseline, this confirms that the structure is robustly co-moving with the disk system. Crucially, our high-resolution continuum map resolves the blob into a distinct double-peaked morphology separated by $\sim$1.7~au azimuthally. We robustly validate this double-peaked substructure by reproducing it in the independent 2017
dataset using a sparse-modeling image reconstruction technique. We discuss potential physical origins for this double-peaked morphology, including an inclined circumplanetary disk with an inner
dust cavity, the roots of
planet-induced spiral arms, or alternative hydrodynamic scenarios that do not involve an actively accreting
planet such as the U-turn trajectory of secondary
dust or a short-lived hydrodynamic gas
vortex. We detect no compact gas emission counterparts associated with the continuum blob. Since these CO lines likely trace optically thick upper atmospheric layers, the absence of localized vertical gas perturbations suggests that if an embedded
planet is responsible for the
dust structure, its mass must be exceptionally low.
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All authors Takashi Tsukagoshi, Takayuki Muto, Hideko Nomura, Ryohei Kawabe, Satoshi Okuzumi, Shigeru Ida, Jun Hashimoto, Taichi Uyama, Motohide Tamura