Publications

Through a combination of experimental measurements and theoretical modeling, we describe a strongly orbital-polarized insulating ground state in an (LaTiO3)2/(LaCoO3)2 oxide heterostructure. X-ray absorption spectra and ab initio calculations show that an electron is transferred from the titanate to the cobaltate layers. The charge transfer, accompanied by a large octahedral distortion, induces a substantial orbital polarization in the cobaltate layer of a size unattainable via epitaxial strain alone. The asymmetry between in-plane and out-of-plane orbital occupancies in the high-spin cobaltate layer is predicted by theory and observed through x-ray linear dichroism experiments. Manipulating orbital configurations using interfacial coupling within heterostructures promises exciting ground-state engineering for realizing new emergent electronic phases in metal oxide superlattices.

In simple fluids, such as water, invariance under parity and time-reversal symmetry imposes that the rotation of constituent ‘atoms’ is determined by the flow and that viscous stresses damp motion. Activation of the rotational degrees of freedom of a fluid by spinning its atomic building blocks breaks these constraints and has thus been the subject of fundamental theoretical interest across classical and quantum fluids. However, the creation of a model liquid that isolates chiral hydrodynamic phenomena has remained experimentally elusive. Here, we report the creation of a cohesive two-dimensional chiral liquid consisting of millions of spinning colloidal magnets and study its flows. We find that dissipative viscous ‘edge-pumping’ is a key and general mechanism of chiral hydrodynamics, driving unidirectional surface waves and instabilities, with no counterpart in conventional fluids. Spectral measurements of the chiral surface dynamics suggest the presence of Hall viscosity, an experimentally elusive property of chiral fluids. Precise measurements and comparison with theory demonstrate excellent agreement with a minimal chiral hydrodynamic model, paving the way for the exploration of chiral hydrodynamics in experiment.

We present results on the mass, spin, and redshift distributions with phenomenological population models using the ten binary black hole mergers detected in the first and second observing runs completed by Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo. We constrain properties of the binary black hole (BBH) mass spectrum using models with a range of parameterizations of the BBH mass and spin distributions. We find that the mass distribution of the more massive black hole in such binaries is well approximated by models with no more than 1% of black holes more massive than 45M⊙, and a power law index of α=1.3+1.4−1.7 (90% credibility). We also show that BBHs are unlikely to be composed of black holes with large spins aligned to the orbital angular momentum. Modelling the evolution of the BBH merger rate with redshift, we show that it is at or increasing with redshift with 93% probability. Marginalizing over uncertainties in the BBH population, we find robust estimates of the BBH merger rate density of R=53.2+55.8−28.2 Gpc−3 yr−1 (90% credibility). As the BBH catalog grows in future observing runs, we expect that uncertainties in the population model parameters will shrink, potentially providing insights into the formation of black holes via supernovae, binary interactions of massive stars, stellar cluster dynamics, and the formation history of black holes across cosmic time.

The study of symmetry-protected topological states in presence of electron correlations has recently aroused great interest as rich and exotic phenomena can emerge. Here, we report a concrete example by employing large-scale unbiased quantum Monte Carlo study of the Kane-Mele model with cluster charge interactions. The ground-state phase diagram for the model at half filling is established. Our simulation identifies the coexistence of a symmetry-protected topological order with a symmetry-breaking Kekulé valence bond order and shows that the spontaneous symmetry-breaking is accompanied by an interaction-driven topological phase transition (TPT). This TPT features appearance of zeros of single-particle Green's function and gap closing in spin channel rather than single-particle excitation spectrum, and thus has no mean-field correspondence.

We present a first-principles approach to electronic many-body systems strongly coupled to cavity modes in terms of matter–photon one-body reduced density matrices. The theory is fundamentally nonperturbative and thus captures not only the effects of correlated electronic systems but accounts also for strong interactions between matter and photon degrees of freedom. We do so by introducing a higher-dimensional auxiliary system that maps the coupled fermion-boson system to a dressed fermionic problem. This reformulation allows us to overcome many fundamental challenges of density-matrix theory in the context of coupled fermion-boson systems and we can employ conventional reduced density-matrix functional theory developed for purely fermionic systems. We provide results for one-dimensional model systems in real space and show that simple density-matrix approximations are accurate from the weak to the deep-strong coupling regime. This justifies the application of our method to systems that are too complex for exact calculations and we present first results, which show that the influence of the photon field depends sensitively on the details of the electronic structure.

Beyond the scope of thermal conduction, Joseph Fourier's treatise on the Analytical Theory of Heat (1822) profoundly altered our understanding of acoustic waves. It posits that any function of unit period can be decomposed into a sum of sinusoids, whose respective contributions represent some essential property of the underlying periodic phenomenon. In acoustics, such a decomposition reveals the resonant modes of a freely vibrating string. The introduction of Fourier series thus opened new research avenues on the modeling of musical timbre—a topic that was to become of crucial importance in the 1960s with the advent of computer-generated sounds. This article proposes to revisit the scientific legacy of Joseph Fourier through the lens of computer music research. We first discuss how the Fourier series marked a paradigm shift in our understanding of acoustics, supplanting the theory of consonance of harmonics in the Pythagorean monochord. Then, we highlight the utility of Fourier's paradigm via three practical problems in analysis–synthesis: the imitation of musical instruments, frequency transposition, and the generation of audio textures. Interestingly, each of these problems involves a different perspective on time–frequency duality, and stimulates a multidisciplinary interplay between research and creation that is still ongoing.

Employing the quantum Liouville equation with phenomenological dissipation, we investigate the transport properties of massless and massive Dirac fermion systems that mimics graphene and topological insulators, respectively. The massless Dirac fermion system does not show an intrinsic Hall effect, but it shows a Hall current under the presence of circularly-polarized laser fields as a nature of a optically-driven nonequilibrium state. Based on the microscopic analysis, we find that the light-induced Hall effect mainly originates from the imbalance of photocarrier distribution in momentum space although the emergent Floquet–Berry curvature also has a non-zero contribution. We further compute the Hall transport property of the massive Dirac fermion system with an intrinsic Hall effect in order to investigate the interplay of the intrinsic topological contribution and the extrinsic light-induced population contribution. As a result, we find that the contribution from the photocarrier population imbalance becomes significant in the strong field regime and it overcomes the intrinsic contribution. This finding clearly demonstrates that intrinsic transport properties of materials can be overwritten by external driving and may open a way to ultrafast optical-control of transport properties of materials.

The stochastic gravitational-wave background is a superposition of sources that are either too weak or too numerous to detect individually. In this study we present the results from a cross-correlation analysis on data from Advanced LIGO's second observing run (O2), which we combine with the results of the first observing run (O1). We do not find evidence for a stochastic background, so we place upper limits on the normalized energy density in gravitational waves at the 95% credible level of ΩGW<6.0×10−8 for a frequency-independent (flat) background and ΩGW<4.8×10−8 at 25 Hz for a background of compact binary coalescences. The upper limit improves over the O1 result by a factor of 2.8. Additionally, we place upper limits on the energy density in an isotropic background of scalar- and vector-polarized gravitational waves, and we discuss the implication of these results for models of compact binaries and cosmic string backgrounds. Finally, we present a conservative estimate of the correlated broadband noise due to the magnetic Schumann resonances in O2, based on magnetometer measurements at both the LIGO Hanford and LIGO Livingston observatories. We find that correlated noise is well below the O2 sensitivity.

Cytoskeletal networks are foundational examples of active matter and central to self-organized structures in the cell. In vivo, these networks are active and densely crosslinked. Relating their large-scale dynamics to the properties of their constituents remains an unsolved problem. Here, we study an in vitro active gel made from aligned microtubules and XCTK2 kinesin motors. Using photobleaching, we demonstrate that the gel’s aligned microtubules, driven by motors, continually slide past each other at a speed independent of the local microtubule polarity and motor concentration. This phenomenon is also observed, and remains unexplained, in spindles. We derive a general framework for coarse graining microtubule gels crosslinked by molecular motors from microscopic considerations. Using microtubule–microtubule coupling through a force–velocity relationship for kinesin, this theory naturally explains the experimental results: motors generate an active strain rate in regions of changing polarity, which allows microtubules of opposite polarities to slide past each other without stressing the material.