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

Open charm tomography of cold nuclear matter

We study the relative contribution of partonic sub-processes to D meson production and D meson-triggered inclusive di-hadrons to lowest order in perturbative QCD. While gluon fusion dominates the creation of large angle DD-bar pairs, charm on light parton scattering determines the yield of single inclusive D mesons. The distinctly different non-perturbative fragmentation of c quarks into D mesons versus the fragmentation of quarks and gluons into light hadrons results in a strong transverse momentum dependence of anticharm content of the away-side charm-triggered jet. In p+A reactions, we calculate and resum the coherent nuclear-enhanced power corrections from the final state partonic scattering in the medium. We find that single and double inclusive open charm production can be suppressed as much as the yield of neutral pions from dynamical high-twist shadowing. Effects of energy loss in p+A collisions are also investigated phenomenologically and may lead to significantly weaker transverse momentum dependence of the nuclear attenuation.Comment: 24 pages, 21 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

Space-Time Symmetries: P and CP Violation

We begin with a few remarks on an explicit construction of a Bargmann-Wightman-Wigner-type quantum field theory [Phys. Lett. B {\bf 316}, 102 (1993)] in which bosons and associated antibosons have opposite relative intrinsic parities. We then construct $(1,0)\oplus(0,1)$ Majorana ($CP$ self conjugate) and Majorana-like ($C\Gamma^5$ self conjugate, $\Gamma^5=$ chirality operator) fields. We point out that this new structure in the space time symmetries may be relevant to $P$ and $CP$ violation.Comment: Talk presened by D. V. Ahluwalia at the III International Wigner Symposium, Christ Church, Oxford, September 1993

Neutrino clustering and the Z-burst model

The possibility that the observed Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays are generated by high energy neutrinos creating "Z-bursts" in resonant interactions with the background neutrinos has been proposed, but there are difficulties in generating enough events with reasonable incident neutrino fluxes. We point out that this difficulty is overcome if the background neutrinos have coalesced into "neutrino clouds" --- a possibility previously suggested by some of us in another context. The limitations that this mechanism for the generation of UHECRs places on the high energy neutrino flux, on the masses of the background neutrinos and the characteristics of the neutrino clouds are spelled out.Comment: 13 pages and 3 figures. Contributed to the XX International Symposium on Lepton and Photon Interactions at High Energies, Rome, July 2001, and to the International Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics, Budapest, July 2001. Preprint numbers added, misprints correcte

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

Synthetic gauge fields in synthetic dimensions

We describe a simple technique for generating a cold-atom lattice pierced by a uniform magnetic field. Our method is to extend a one-dimensional optical lattice into the "dimension" provided by the internal atomic degrees of freedom, yielding a synthetic 2D lattice. Suitable laser-coupling between these internal states leads to a uniform magnetic flux within the 2D lattice. We show that this setup reproduces the main features of magnetic lattice systems, such as the fractal Hofstadter butterfly spectrum and the chiral edge states of the associated Chern insulating phases.Comment: 5+4 pages, 5+3 figures, two-column revtex; v2: discussion of role of interactions added, Fig. 1 reshaped, minor changes, references adde