PERSPECTIVE
Reversible to irreversible (R-IR) transitions have been found in a wide variety of both soft and hard matter periodically driven collectively interacting systems that, after a certain number of driving cycles, organize into either a reversible state where the particle trajectories repeat during every or every few cycles or into a chaotic motion state. An overview of R-IR transitions including recent advances in the field is followed by a discussion of how the general framework of R-IR transitions could be applied to a much broader class of nonequilibrium systems in which periodic driving occurs, including not only soft and hard condensed matter systems, but also astrophysics, biological systems, and social systems.
C. Reichhardt et al.
Phys. Rev. Research 5, 021001 (2023)
LETTER
Using pulse shape spectroscopy, we demonstrate long-lived electronic coherences in molecules, and we are able to disentangle the electronic and nuclear degrees of freedom by performing momentum resolved covariance measurements of the fragment ions as we vary the phase between pump and probe pulses. These results pave the way for measuring coupled electron-nuclear dynamics in molecules and understanding the role that electronic coherences play in fundamental photophysical and photochemical processes.
Gönenç Moğol et al.
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022047 (2024)
LETTER
The behavior of lobes, geometrical structures in Hamiltonian systems, is studied to design robust trajectories of spacecraft in the Earth-Moon system. This control framework connects start and goal orbits via a few chaotic orbits within appropriately selected lobes, which results in finding a short-time transfer in spacecraft dynamics.
Naoki Hiraiwa, Mai Bando, Isaia Nisoli, and Yuzuru Sato
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022046 (2024)
LETTER
The mechanics of spherical epithelial sheets like cysts or intestinal organoids can be described by a three-dimensional vertex model. The vertex model is coarse grained to an elastic continuum theory of bent thin sheets. A morphological instability at topological defects is found in the vertex model and quantitatively explained through buckling within the continuum theory.
Oliver M. Drozdowski and Ulrich S. Schwarz
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022045 (2024)
LETTER
Microswimmers are driven by a nonequilibrium chemical cycle. Using a thermodynamically consistent model with full hydrodynamics, it is shown that external forces affect their motion not only by passively dragging them but also by influencing their active swimming through the same mechanochemical coupling that allows them to swim, suggesting a strategy for the experimental inference of the chemical forces that drive them.
Michalis Chatzittofi, Jaime Agudo-Canalejo, and Ramin Golestanian
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022044 (2024)
EDITORS' SUGGESTION
A method for predicting annual rain distributions, based on combining monthly rain histograms from historical data, is introduced and applied to several locations in Israel. It is then argued (using tests of the method in a simple toy model) that the method gives reliable predictions not only for typical events but also for rare ones.
Yosef Ashkenazy and Naftali R. Smith
Phys. Rev. Research 6, 023187 (2024)
LETTER
A study reveals that division time distributions in proliferating cells vary in shape across experiments, unlike the universally consistent cell size distributions. This variation is influenced by the robustness of the corresponding shape factors in model parameter space.
Kuheli Biswas and Naama Brenner
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022043 (2024)
LETTER
One-dimensional -wave superconductors can reside in a topological phase and are predicted to host non-Abelian states at their ends. It is shown that attractive interactions mediated by magnons can induce intrinsic triplet superconductivity in an electronic chain in proximity to a spin spiral, and combined with the effects from coupling to the static spin spiral the magnon-mediated interaction stabilizes a topological superconducting phase.
Florinda Viñas Boström and Emil Viñas Boström
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022042 (2024)
EDITORS' SUGGESTION
Cooling by electromagnetically induced transparency is experimentally demonstrated with an optically trapped single neutral atom. The Fano resonance feature is resolved in the fluorescence excitation spectra and the temperature profiles.
Chang Hoong Chow, Boon Long Ng, Vindhiya Prakash, and Christian Kurtsiefer
Phys. Rev. Research 6, 023154 (2024)
LETTER
Integrated linear optical networks encoded in frequency bins are realized in a dispersion-engineered nonlinear optical waveguide. The network is scalable and will serve as basis for quantum information technologies thanks to high fidelities, free reconfigurability, and full connectivity.
Syamsundar De et al.
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022040 (2024)
LETTER
For quantum state preparation, a nonunitary operator that decays unwanted states contained in an initial state is probabilistically realized on a quantum computer. Combining quantum amplitude amplification with multistep probabilistic algorithms is proposed, leading to quadratic speedup and quantum advantages in quantum state preparation.
Hirofumi Nishi, Taichi Kosugi, Yusuke Nishiya, and Yu-ichiro Matsushita
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022041 (2024)
LETTER
In semimagic nuclei, a broken pair of nucleons generate a characteristic regular pattern in energy and transition rates for protons and neutrons residing in the same orbital of the open shell. Lifetime measurement in Rh nucleus shows a deviation from this pattern in the orbital of the open proton shell.
B. Das et al.
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022038 (2024)
EDITORS' SUGGESTION
A robot swarm is used to simulate single-lane traffic, identifying three different states: free flow, intermittent, and totally congested. The stability and repeatability of these agents, which become a suitable model of programmable active-matter systems, is showcased.
Laciel Alonso-Llanes, Angel Garcimartín, and Iker Zuriguel
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022037 (2024)
LETTER
The claim that no quantum work measurement satisfies standard physical principles has raised compatibility concerns between quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and the classical limit. A revised framework is presented for addressing the classical limit, and it is shown that work defined as a quantum observable aligns quantum work statistics with thermodynamic principles.
Thales A. B. Pinto Silva and David Gelbwaser-Klimovsky
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022036 (2024)
LETTER
Higher-order Casimir-Polder interactions between highly excited Rydberg atoms and macroscopic surfaces are studied, providing calculations of a term that evolves with the inverse fifth power of the atom-surface distance. The effects of this higher-order term in Casimir-Polder thin-cell spectroscopy are also investigated.
B. Dutta et al.
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022035 (2024)
EDITORS' SUGGESTION
How to quick charge a quantum battery by using superposition of trajectories is shown. The proposed charging protocols have been verified on IBMQ and IonQ quantum processors.
Po-Rong Lai et al.
Phys. Rev. Research 6, 023136 (2024)
LETTER
Zooplankton reduce their vulnerability to predation by evading high-strain areas. A robust strategy for how such microswimmers can navigate by sensing hydromechanical signals to steer clear of high-strain regions in turbulent environments has been identified.
N. Mousavi et al.
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022034 (2024)
LETTER
At thermal equilibrium, generalized susceptibilities encoding the static physical response of Hermitian many-electron systems are shown to possess inherent non-Hermitian matrix symmetries, leading to the generic occurrence of exceptional points. In strongly correlated electron systems, such exceptional points are found to necessarily promote electronic charge instabilities that occur in the proximity of a Mott transition to a topologically robust phenomenon.
M. Reitner et al.
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022031 (2024)
LETTER
Understanding collisional thermalization among ultracold molecules is essential to achieving quantum degenerate gases with evaporative cooling. A theoretical technique for efficiently handling thermalization calculations with nonuniversal dipolar scattering is demonstrated, providing a widely applicable tool for exploring optimal evaporation protocols.
Reuben R. W. Wang and John L. Bohn
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022033 (2024)
LETTER
For strongly compressible shock-dominated turbulence, a heuristic theoretical framework, which shows that the statistics of pair dispersion of Lagrangian tracer particles is different from its counterpart for incompressible-fluid turbulence, is developed. The trapping of Lagrangian particles in shocks is responsible for this difference, as is shown by extensive direct numerical simulations of the randomly forced two-dimensional Burgers equation, which models shock-dominated turbulence.
Sadhitro De, Dhrubaditya Mitra, and Rahul Pandit
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022032 (2024)
LETTER
The physics of superfluidity of spin-1 Bose gas shares many similarities with that of multicomponent superconductivity, and it has been suspected that a strongly ferromagnetic Bose gas (such as Li) may realize the elusive high-order symmetry-breaking state proposed in superconductors. It is theoretically shown that the dilute Bose gas doesn’t exhibit such states, but the strong ferromagnetism does drive a joint first-order superfluid transition, contrary to a second-order one in the mean-field prediction.
Pye Ton How and Sungkit Yip
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022030 (2024)
LETTER
Subterahertz transmittance of two-dimensional systems reveals the complexity of optical Shubnikov–de Haas oscillations featuring “universal” nodes at overtones of the cyclotron resonance as well as “tunable” nodes at positions sensitive to all parameters of the structure.
M. L. Savchenko et al.
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022027 (2024)
LETTER
A prototypical two-state gene-expression model is investigated, where the activation process has a fat-tailed (nonexponential) waiting time distribution, resulting in nonstationary dynamics and emerging nonergodicity.
Ohad Vilk, Ralf Metzler, and Michael Assaf
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022026 (2024)
LETTER
The complexity of human languages is explored through the lens of fractal geometry and large language models, uncovering a multifractal structure. A universal correlation dimension of approximately 6.5 is identified in literary texts written in four languages, a phenomenon that appears to stem from the presence of long memory in these texts.
Xin Du and Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022028 (2024)
LETTER
In the helical twisted trilayer graphene with equal twist angles, a hexagonal mosaic pattern spanning the moiré-of-moiré length scale and featuring alternating 1 Chern numbers in each block is revealed.
Daniele Guerci, Yuncheng Mao, and Christophe Mora
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022025 (2024)
LETTER
How do mitochondria align at almost regular intervals in nerve axons? The mechanism is deciphered as the mitochondria employing the noise depending on the ATP, similar to the thermodynamic force.
Masashi K. Kajita, Yoshiyuki Konishi, and Tetsuhiro S. Hatakeyama
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022024 (2024)
LETTER
The full quantum geometric tensor (QGT) is experimentally obtained for a plasmonic lattice. The quantum metric and the Berry curvature, related to the real and imaginary parts of the QGT, respectively, are found to be nonzero along the diagonals of the Brillouin zone, even for a trivial square lattice. While the quantum metric emerges from the interplay of polarization and the mode structure, the origin of the Berry curvature is purely non-Hermitian due to the system losses.
Javier Cuerda et al.
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022020 (2024)
LETTER
The first-principles calculation of a quasiparticle band structure on actual quantum computers is demonstrated. This is achieved by hybrid quantum-classical algorithms in conjunction with qubit-reduction and error-mitigation techniques.
Takahiro Ohgoe et al.
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022022 (2024)
LETTER
Not all quantum chaos scrambles quantum information: While the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model does, typical chaotic spin chains do not.
Yoshifumi Nakata and Masaki Tezuka
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022021 (2024)
LETTER
The supercurrent noise in the equilibrium state induced by thermal fluctuations of the phase-coherent Andreev bound states in a mesoscopic superconductor-normal ring is directly observed and the fluctuation-dissipation relation in such a system is experimentally confirmed.
Ziwei Dou et al.
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022023 (2024)
LETTER
The phenomenon of epidemic criticality in temporal networks is remarkably complex due to the competition between the network correlation effect (the persistence of links in the network) and the dynamic correlation effect (the tendency of infected nodes to group together).
Chao-Ran Cai, Yuan-Yuan Nie, and Petter Holme
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022017 (2024)
LETTER
The onset of athermal jamming is argued to be a critical phenomenon describable by a mean-field theory in physical dimensions. By elucidating the scaling behavior of jammed systems subjected to active forces and thermal fluctuations in the vicinity of the jamming onset, it’s shown that the physics of active jamming remains mean-field-like in contrast with active systems in which anomalous scaling behavior is the norm.
Shalabh K. Anand, Chiu Fan Lee, and Thibault Bertrand
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022018 (2024)
LETTER
A direct construction for the projected entangled pair states representation of states that admit descriptions in terms of exponentially localized Wannier functions is proposed. The construction involves first obtaining a tree tensor network construction for subregions, then stacking the tree tensor networks, and finally compressing local tensors successively.
Yuman He, Kangle Li, Yanbai Zhang, and Hoi Chun Po
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022016 (2024)
LETTER
In a size-disperse granular shear flow, particles too small to be trapped in the absence of shear percolate more slowly with increasing shear rate because of their increased velocity fluctuations, while small particles large enough to be trapped at zero shear are mobilized with increasing shear rate but eventually reach a maximum percolation speed and then slow down because of velocity fluctuations
Song Gao (高颂), Julio M. Ottino, Richard M. Lueptow, and Paul B. Umbanhowar
Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022015 (2024)