Ostriches, spiders’ webs and Antichrist: Hypocrisy in writings of Pope Gregory the Great and Archbishop Wulfstan II of York

This article examines the use of the concepts of hypocrisy and the hypocrite in the writings of Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) and Archbishop Wulfstan of York (1002–23). Although separated by many centuries, these two treatments are connected through Wulfstan’s debt to Gregory’s ideas on the evil of hypocrisy, and particularly in his depiction of Antichrist as the chief of all hypocrites. Both use the idea of hypocrisy to critique their contemporary situation: for Gregory, the pride of the Patriarch John IV of Constantinople in adopting the title ‘Ecumenical Patriarch’; and for Wulfstan, the court politics in the turbulent final years of the reign of Æthelred the Unready

Multiple low-temperature skyrmionic states in a bulk chiral magnet

Magnetic skyrmions are topologically protected nanoscale spin textures with particle-like properties. In bulk cubic helimagnets, they appear under applied magnetic fields and condense spontaneously into a lattice in a narrow region of the phase diagram just below the magnetic ordering temperature, the so-called A-phase. Theory, however, predicts skyrmions to be locally stable in a wide range of magnetic fields and temperatures. Our neutron diffraction measurements reveal the formation of skyrmion states in large areas of the magnetic phase diagram, from the lowest temperatures up to the A-phase. We show that nascent and disappearing spiral states near critical lines catalyze topological charge changing processes, leading to the formation and destruction of skyrmionic states at low temperatures, which are thermodynamically stable or metastable depending on the orientation and strength of the magnetic field. Skyrmions are surprisingly resilient to high magnetic fields: the memory of skyrmion lattice states persists in the field polarized state, even when the skyrmion lattice signal has disappeared. These findings highlight the paramount role of magnetic anisotropies in stabilizing skyrmionic states and open up new routes for manipulating these quasi-particles towards energy-efficient spintronics applications

Author Correction: Scalable and robust SARS-CoV-2 testing in an academic center.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper