1,934 research outputs found
Wavefunction tomography of topological dimer chains with long-range couplings
The ability to tailor with a high accuracy the inter-site connectivity in a
lattice is a crucial tool for realizing novel topological phases of matter.
Here, we report the experimental realization of photonic dimer chains with
long-range hopping terms of arbitrary strength and phase, providing a rich
generalization of the celebrated Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model. Our experiment is
based on a synthetic dimension scheme involving the frequency modes of an
optical fiber loop platform. This setup provides direct access to both the band
dispersion and the geometry of the Bloch wavefunctions throughout the entire
Brillouin zone allowing us to extract the winding number for any possible
configuration. Finally, we highlight a topological phase transition solely
driven by a time-reversal-breaking synthetic gauge field associated with the
phase of the long-range hopping, providing a route for engineering topological
bands in photonic lattices belonging to the AIII symmetry class
Complete quantum control of exciton qubits bound to isoelectronic centres
In recent years, impressive demonstrations related to quantum information processing have been realized. The scalability of quantum interactions between arbitrary qubits within an array remains however a significant hurdle to the practical realization of a quantum computer. Among the proposed ideas to achieve fully scalable quantum processing, the use of photons is appealing because they can mediate long-range quantum interactions and could serve as buses to build quantum networks. Quantum dots or nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond can be coupled to light, but the former system lacks optical homogeneity while the latter suffers from a low dipole moment, rendering their large-scale interconnection challenging. Here, through the complete quantum control of exciton qubits, we demonstrate that nitrogen isoelectronic centres in GaAs combine both the uniformity and predictability of atomic defects and the dipole moment of semiconductor quantum dots. This establishes isoelectronic centres as a promising platform for quantum information processing
Measuring topological invariants in polaritonic graphene
Topological materials rely on engineering global properties of their bulk
energy bands called topological invariants. These invariants, usually defined
over the entire Brillouin zone, are related to the existence of protected edge
states. However, for an important class of Hamiltonians corresponding to 2D
lattices with time-reversal and chiral symmetry (e.g. graphene), the existence
of edge states is linked to invariants that are not defined over the full 2D
Brillouin zone, but on reduced 1D sub-spaces. Here, we demonstrate a novel
scheme based on a combined real- and momentum-space measurement to directly
access these 1D topological invariants in lattices of semiconductor
microcavities confining exciton-polaritons. We extract these invariants in
arrays emulating the physics of regular and critically compressed graphene
sucht that Dirac cones have merged. Our scheme provides a direct evidence of
the bulk-edge correspondence in these systems, and opens the door to the
exploration of more complex topological effects, for example involving disorder
and interactions.Comment: Suppl. Mat. added; improved data/error analysi
Robustness and Fragility in Immunosenescence
We construct a model to study tradeoffs associated with aging in the adaptive immune system, focusing on cumulative effects of replacing naive cells with memory cells. Binding affinities are characterized by a stochastic shape space model. System loss arising from an individual infection is associated with disease severity, as measured by the total antigen population over the course of an infection. We monitor evolution of cell populations on the shape space over a string of infections, and find that the distribution of losses becomes increasingly heavy-tailed with time. Initially this lowers the average loss: the memory cell population becomes tuned to the history of past exposures, reducing the loss of the system when subjected to a second, similar infection. This is accompanied by a corresponding increase in vulnerability to novel infections, which ultimately causes the expected loss to increase due to overspecialization, leading to increasing fragility with age (i.e., immunosenescence). In our model, immunosenescence is not the result of a performance degradation of some specific lymphocyte, but rather a natural consequence of the built-in mechanisms for system adaptation. This “robust, yet fragile” behavior is a key signature of Highly Optimized Tolerance
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