Selective excitation of homogeneous spectral lines

It is possible, for homogeneously broadened lines, to excite selectively the response signals, which are orders of magnitude narrower than the original lines. The new type of echo, which allows detecting such signals, and the formalism, useful for understanding the phenomenon, as well as the experimental examples from NMR spectroscopy are presented.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figure

Hot Electron Effects in the 2D Superconductor-Insulator Transition

The parallel magnetic field tuned two-dimensional superconductor-insulator transition has been investigated in ultrathin films of amorphous Bi. The resistance is found to be independent of temperature on both sides of the transition below approximately 120 mK. Several observations suggest that this regime is not intrinsically "metallic" but results from the failure of the films' electrons to cool. The onset of this temperature-independent regime can be moved to higher temperatures by either increasing the measuring current or the level of electromagnetic noise. Temperature scaling is successful above 120 mK. Electric field scaling can be mapped onto temperature scaling by relating the electric fields to elevated electron temperatures. These results cast doubt on the existence of an intrinsic metallic regime and on the independent determination of the correlation length and dynamical critical exponents obtained by combining the results of electric field and temperature scaling.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Electrostatic Tuning of the Superconductor-Insulator Transition in Two Dimensions

Superconductivity has been induced in insulating ultra-thin films of amorphous bismuth using the electric field effect. The screening of electron-electron interaction was found to increase with electron concentration in a manner correlated with the tendency towards superconductivity. This does not preclude an increase in the density of states being important in the development of superconductivity. The superconductor-insulator transition appears to belong to the universality class of the three dimensional XY model.Comment: Four pages, three figures. Revised slightly to reflect referees' comment

Supporting Pluralism by Artificial Intelligence: Conceptualizing Epistemic Disagreements as Digital Artifacts

A crucial concept in philosophy and social sciences, epistemic disagreement, has not yet been adequately reflected in the Web. In this paper, we call for development of intelligent tools dealing with epistemic disagreements on the Web to support pluralism. As a first step, we present Polyphony, an ontology for representing and annotating epistemic disagreements

Radiative polarization of electrons in a strong laser wave

We reanalyze the problem of radiative polarization of electrons brought into collision with a circularly polarized strong plane wave. We present an independent analytical verification of formulae for the cross section given by D.\,Yu. Ivanov et al [Eur.\ Phys.\ J. C \textbf{36}, 127 (2004)]. By choosing the exact electron's helicity as the spin quantum number we show that the self-polarization effect exists only for the moderately relativistic electrons with energy $\gamma = E/mc^2 \lesssim 10$ and only for a non-head-on collision geometry. In these conditions polarization degree may achieve the values up to 65%, but the effective polarization time is found to be larger than 1\,s even for a high power optical or infrared laser with intensity parameter $\xi = |{\bf E}| m c^2/E_c \hbar \omega \sim 0.1$ ($E_c = m^2 c^3/e \hbar$). This makes such a polarization practically unrealizable. We also compare these results with the ones of some papers where the high degree of polarization was predicted for ultrarelativistic case. We argue that this apparent contradiction arises due to the different choice of the spin quantum numbers. In particular, the quantum numbers which provide the high polarization degree represent neither helicity nor transverse polarization, that makes the use of them inconvenient in practice.Comment: minor changes compared to v3; to appear in PR

Engineering Time-Reversal Invariant Topological Insulators With Ultra-Cold Atoms

Topological insulators are a broad class of unconventional materials that are insulating in the interior but conduct along the edges. This edge transport is topologically protected and dissipationless. Until recently, all existing topological insulators, known as quantum Hall states, violated time-reversal symmetry. However, the discovery of the quantum spin Hall effect demonstrated the existence of novel topological states not rooted in time-reversal violations. Here, we lay out an experiment to realize time-reversal topological insulators in ultra-cold atomic gases subjected to synthetic gauge fields in the near-field of an atom-chip. In particular, we introduce a feasible scheme to engineer sharp boundaries where the "edge states" are localized. Besides, this multi-band system has a large parameter space exhibiting a variety of quantum phase transitions between topological and normal insulating phases. Due to their unprecedented controllability, cold-atom systems are ideally suited to realize topological states of matter and drive the development of topological quantum computing.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure

Magnetoresistance of composite fermions at \nu=1/2

We have studied temperature dependence of both diagonal and Hall resistivity in the vicinity of $\nu=1/2$. Magnetoresistance was found to be positive and almost independent of temperature: temperature enters resistivity as a logarithmic correction. At the same time, no measurable corrections to the Hall resistivity has been found. Neither of these results can be explained within the mean-field theory of composite fermions by an analogy with conventional low-field interaction theory. There is an indication that interactions of composite fermions with fluctuations of the gauge field may reconcile the theory and experiment.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure