Generalized harmonic formulation in spherical symmetry

In this pedagogically structured article, we describe a generalized harmonic formulation of the Einstein equations in spherical symmetry which is regular at the origin. The generalized harmonic approach has attracted significant attention in numerical relativity over the past few years, especially as applied to the problem of binary inspiral and merger. A key issue when using the technique is the choice of the gauge source functions, and recent work has provided several prescriptions for gauge drivers designed to evolve these functions in a controlled way. We numerically investigate the parameter spaces of some of these drivers in the context of fully non-linear collapse of a real, massless scalar field, and determine nearly optimal parameter settings for specific situations. Surprisingly, we find that many of the drivers that perform well in 3+1 calculations that use Cartesian coordinates, are considerably less effective in spherical symmetry, where some of them are, in fact, unstable.Comment: 47 pages, 15 figures. v2: Minor corrections, including 2 added references; journal version

Photon-number-resolved measurement of an exciton-polariton condensate

We measure the full photon-number distribution emitted from a Bose condensate of microcavity exciton polaritons confined in a micropillar cavity. The statistics are acquired by means of a photon-number-resolving transition edge sensor. We directly observe that the photon-number distribution evolves with the nonresonant optical excitation power from geometric to quasi-Poissonian statistics, which is canonical for a transition from a thermal to a coherent state. Moreover, the photon-number distribution allows one to evaluate the higher-order photon correlations, shedding further light on the coherence formation and phase transition of the polariton condensate. The experimental data are analyzed in terms of thermal-coherent states, which gives direct access to the thermal and coherent fraction from the measured distributions. These results pave the way for a full understanding of the contribution of interactions in light-matter condensates in the coherence buildup at threshold.Ministry of Science and Education of the Russian Federation (Grant No. RFMEFI61617X0085

Observation of non-Hermitian degeneracies in a chaotic exciton-polariton billiard

This research was supported by the Australian Research Council, the ImPACT Program of the Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (Cabinet Office, Government of Japan), the RIKEN iTHES Project, the MURI Center for Dynamic Magneto-Optics, a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (type A), and the State of Bavaria.Exciton-polaritons are hybrid light-matter quasiparticles formed by strongly interacting photons and excitons (electron-hole pairs) in semiconductor microcavities. They have emerged as a robust solid-state platform for next-generation optoelectronic applications as well as for fundamental studies of quantum many-body physics. Importantly, exciton-polaritons are a profoundly open (that is, non-Hermitian) quantum system, which requires constant pumping of energy and continuously decays, releasing coherent radiation. Thus, the exciton-polaritons always exist in a balanced potential landscape of gain and loss. However, the inherent non-Hermitian nature of this potential has so far been largely ignored in exciton-polariton physics. Here we demonstrate that non-Hermiticity dramatically modifies the structure of modes and spectral degeneracies in exciton-polariton systems, and, therefore, will affect their quantum transport, localization and dynamical properties. Using a spatially structured optical pump, we create a chaotic exciton-polariton billiard-a two-dimensional area enclosed by a curved potential barrier. Eigenmodes of this billiard exhibit multiple non-Hermitian spectral degeneracies, known as exceptional points. Such points can cause remarkable wave phenomena, such as unidirectional transport, anomalous lasing/absorption and chiral modes. By varying parameters of the billiard, we observe crossing and anti-crossing of energy levels and reveal the non-trivial topological modal structure exclusive to non-Hermitian systems. We also observe mode switching and a topological Berry phase for a parameter loop encircling the exceptional point. Our findings pave the way to studies of non-Hermitian quantum dynamics of exciton-polaritons, which may uncover novel operating principles for polariton-based devices.PostprintPeer reviewe

Measurements of Higgs boson production and couplings in diboson final states with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

Measurements are presented of production properties and couplings of the recently discovered Higgs boson using the decays into boson pairs, H →γ γ, H → Z Z∗ →4l and H →W W∗ →lνlν. The results are based on the complete pp collision data sample recorded by the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider at centre-of-mass energies of √s = 7 TeV and √s = 8 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of about 25 fb−1. Evidence for Higgs boson production through vector-boson fusion is reported. Results of combined fits probing Higgs boson couplings to fermions and bosons, as well as anomalous contributions to loop-induced production and decay modes, are presented. All measurements are consistent with expectations for the Standard Model Higgs boson

Standalone vertex finding in the ATLAS muon spectrometer

A dedicated reconstruction algorithm to find decay vertices in the ATLAS muon spectrometer is presented. The algorithm searches the region just upstream of or inside the muon spectrometer volume for multi-particle vertices that originate from the decay of particles with long decay paths. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated using both a sample of simulated Higgs boson events, in which the Higgs boson decays to long-lived neutral particles that in turn decay to bbar b final states, and pp collision data at √s = 7 TeV collected with the ATLAS detector at the LHC during 2011