Publications

The Immersed Boundary (IB) method has been widely used to solve fluid-structure interaction problems, including those where the structure interacts with polymeric fluids. In this paper, we examine the convergence of one such scheme for a well known two-dimensional benchmark flow for the Oldroyd-B constitutive model, and we show that the traditional IB-based scheme fails to adequately capture the polymeric stress near to embedded boundaries. We analyze the reason for such failure, and we argue that this feature is not specific to the case study chosen, but a general feature of such methods due to lack of convergence in velocity gradients near interfaces. In order to remedy this problem, we build a different scheme for the Oldroyd-B system using the Immersed Boundary Smooth Extension (IBSE) scheme, which provides convergent viscous stresses near boundaries. We show that this modified scheme produces convergent polymeric stresses through the whole domain, including on embedded boundaries, and produces solutions in good agreement with known benchmarks.

At crystalline interfaces where a valence-mismatch exists, electronic, and structural interactions may occur to relieve the polar mismatch, leading to the stabilization of non-bulk-like phases. We show that spontaneous reconstructions at polar La0.7Sr0.3MnO3 interfaces are correlated with suppressed ferromagnetism for film thicknesses on the order of a unit cell. We investigate the structural and magnetic properties of valence-matched La0.7Sr0.3CrO3/La0.7Sr0.3MnO3 interfaces using a combination of high-resolution electron microscopy, first principles theory, synchrotron X-ray scattering and magnetic spectroscopy and temperature-dependent magnetometry. A combination of an antiferromagnetic coupling between the La0.7Sr0.3CrO3 and La0.7Sr0.3MnO3 layers and a suppression of interfacial polar distortions are found to result in robust long-range ferromagnetic ordering for ultrathin La0.7Sr0.3MnO3. These results underscore the critical importance of interfacial structural and magnetic interactions in the design of devices based on two-dimensional oxide magnetic systems.

Chiral superconductors are a class of unconventional superconductors that host topologically protected chiral Majorana fermions at interfaces and domain walls quasiparticles that could serve as a platform for topological quantum computing. Here we show that, in analogy to a qubit, the out-of-equilibrium superconducting state in such materials can be described by a Bloch vector and predict that they can be controlled on ultrafast timescales. The all-optical control mechanism is universal, permitting arbitrary rotations of the order parameter, and can induce a dynamical change of handedness of the condensate. It relies on transient breaking of crystal symmetries via choice of pulse polarization to enable arbitrary rotations of the Bloch vector. The mechanism extends to ultrafast timescales and the engineered state persists after the pump is switched off. We predict that these phenomena should appear in graphene or magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene, as well as Sr2RuO4. Furthermore, we show that chiral superconductivity can be detected in time-resolved pump–probe measurements. This paves the way towards a robust mechanism for ultrafast control and measurement of chirally ordered phases and Majorana modes.

Chiral superconductors are a class of unconventional superconductors that host topologically protected chiral Majorana fermions at interfaces and domain walls, quasiparticles that could serve as a platform for topological quantum computing. Here we show that, in analogy to a qubit, the out-of-equilibrium superconducting state in such materials can be described by a Bloch vector and predict that they can be controlled on ultrafast timescales. The all-optical control mechanism is universal, permitting arbitrary rotations of the order parameter, and can induce a dynamical change of handedness of the condensate. It relies on transient breaking of crystal symmetries via choice of pulse polarization to enable arbitrary rotations of the Bloch vector. The mechanism extends to ultrafast timescales and the engineered state persists after the pump is switched off. We predict that these phenomena should appear in graphene or magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene, as well as Sr2RuO4. Furthermore, we show that chiral superconductivity can be detected in time-resolved pump–probe measurements. This paves the way towards a robust mechanism for ultrafast control and measurement of chirally ordered phases and Majorana modes.

We study the growth of entanglement entropy and bond dimension with time in density matrix renormalization group simulations of the periodically driven single-impurity Anderson model. The growth of entanglement entropy is found to be related to the ordering of the bath orbitals and to the relation of the driving period
T to the convergence radius of the Floquet-Magnus expansion. Ordering the bath orbitals by their Floquet quasienergy is found to reduce the exponential growth rate of the computation time at intermediate driving periods, suggesting new ways to optimize matrix product state calculations of driven systems.

Orbital properties of stars, computed from their six-dimensional phase space measurements and an assumed Galactic potential, are used to understand the structure and evolution of the Galaxy. Stellar actions, computed from orbits, have the attractive quality of being invariant under certain assumptions and are therefore used as quantitative labels of a star's orbit. We report a subtle but important systematic error that is induced in the actions as a consequence of local midplane variations expected for the Milky Way. This error is difficult to model because it is non-Gaussian and bimodal, with neither mode peaking on the null value. An offset in the vertical position of the Galactic midplane of ∼15pc for a thin disk-like orbit or ∼120pc for a thick disk-like orbit induces a 25% systematic error in the vertical action Jz. In FIRE simulations of Milky Way-mass galaxies, these variations are on the order of ∼100pc at the solar circle. From observations of the mean vertical velocity variation of ∼5--10kms−1 with radius, we estimate that the Milky Way midplane variations are ∼60--170pc, consistent with three-dimensional dust maps. Action calculations and orbit integrations, which assume the global and local midplanes are identical, are likely to include this induced error, depending on the volume considered. Variation in the local standard of rest or distance to the Galactic center causes similar issues. The variation of the midplane must be taken into account when performing dynamical analysis across the large regions of the disk accessible to Gaia and future missions.

We present a 0.16% precise and 0.27% accurate determination of R0, the distance to the Galactic Center. Our measurement uses the star S2 on its 16-year orbit around the massive black hole Sgr A* that we followed astrometrically and spectroscopically for 27 years. Since 2017, we added near-infrared interferometry with the VLTI beam combiner GRAVITY, yielding a direct measurement of the separation vector between S2 and Sgr A* with an accuracy as good as 20 micro-arcsec in the best cases. S2 passed the pericenter of its highly eccentric orbit in May 2018, and we followed the passage with dense sampling throughout the year. Together with our spectroscopy, in the best cases with an error of 7 km/s, this yields a geometric distance estimate: R0 = 8178 +- 13(stat.) +- 22(sys.) pc. This work updates our previous publication in which we reported the first detection of the gravitational redshift in the S2 data. The redshift term is now detected with a significance level of 20 sigma with f_redshift = 1.04 +- 0.05.

We describe an algorithm to reduce the cost of auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) calculations for the electronic structure problem. The technique uses a nested low-rank factorization of the electron repulsion integral (ERI). While the cost of conventional AFQMC calculations in Gaussian bases scales as $\mathcal{O}(N^4)$ where $N$ is the size of the basis, we show that ground-state energies can be computed through tensor decomposition with reduced memory requirements and sub-quartic scaling. The algorithm is applied to hydrogen chains and square grids, water clusters, and hexagonal BN. In all cases we observe significant memory savings and, for larger systems, reduced, sub-quartic simulation time.

We present the results of a search for long-duration gravitational-wave transients in the data from the Advanced LIGO second observation run; we search for gravitational-wave transients of 2 -- 500~s duration in the 24−2048\,Hz frequency band with minimal assumptions about signal properties such as waveform morphologies, polarization, sky location or time of occurrence. Targeted signal models include fallback accretion onto neutron stars, broadband chirps from innermost stable circular orbit waves around rotating black holes, eccentric inspiral-merger-ringdown compact binary coalescence waveforms, and other models. The second observation run totals about \otwoduration~days of coincident data between November 2016 and August 2017. We find no significant events within the parameter space that we searched, apart from the already-reported binary neutron star merger GW170817. We thus report sensitivity limits on the root-sum-square strain amplitude hrss at 50% efficiency. These sensitivity estimates are an improvement relative to the first observing run and also done with an enlarged set of gravitational-wave transient waveforms. Overall, the best search sensitivity is h50%rss=2.7×10−22~Hz−1/2 for a millisecond magnetar model. For eccentric compact binary coalescence signals, the search sensitivity reaches h50%rss=9.6×10−22~Hz−1/2.

We have recently developed a post-processing framework to estimate the abundance of atomic and molecular hydrogen (HI and H2, respectively) in galaxies in large-volume cosmological simulations. Here we compare the HI and H2 content of IllustrisTNG galaxies to observations. We mostly restrict this comparison to z≈0 and consider six observational metrics: the overall abundance of HI and H2, their mass functions, gas fractions as a function of stellar mass, the correlation between H2 and star formation rate, the spatial distribution of gas, and the correlation between gas content and morphology. We find generally good agreement between simulations and observations, particularly for the gas fractions and the HI mass-size relation. The H2 mass correlates with star formation rate as expected, revealing an almost constant depletion time that evolves up to z = 2 as observed. However, we also discover a number of tensions with varying degrees of significance, including an overestimate of the total neutral gas abundance at z = 0 by about a factor of two and a possible excess of satellites with no or very little neutral gas. These conclusions are robust to the modelling of the HI/H2 transition. In terms of their neutral gas properties, the IllustrisTNG simulations represent an enormous improvement over the original Illustris run. All data used in this paper are publicly available as part of the IllustrisTNG data release.