Coherent pumping of a Mott insulator: Fermi golden rule versus Rabi oscillations

Cold atoms provide a unique arena to study many-body systems far from equilibrium. Furthermore, novel phases in cold atom systems are conveniently investigated by dynamical probes pushing the system out of equilibrium. Here, we discuss the pumping of doubly-occupied sites in a fermionic Mott insulator by a periodic modulation of the hopping amplitude. We show that deep in the insulating phase the many-body system can be mapped onto an effective two-level system which performs coherent Rabi oscillations due to the driving. Coupling the two-level system to the remaining degrees of freedom renders the Rabi oscillations damped. We compare this scheme to an alternative description where the particles are incoherently pumped into a broad continuum.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Which long-baseline neutrino experiments are preferable?

We discuss the physics of superbeam upgrades, where we focus on T2KK, a NuMI beam line based experiment NOvA*, and a wide band beam (WBB) experiment independent of the NuMI beam line. For T2KK, we find that the Japan-Korea baseline helps resolve parameter degeneracies, but the improvement due to correlated systematics between the two detectors (using identical detectors) is only moderate. For an upgrade of NOvA with a liquid argon detector, we demonstrate that the Ash River site is preferred compared to alternatives, such as at the second oscillation maximum, and is the optimal site within the U.S. For a WBB experiment, we find that high proton energies and long decay tunnels are preferable. We compare water Cherenkov and liquid argon technologies, and find the break-even point in detector cost at about 4:1. In order to compare the physics potential of the different experimental configurations, we use the concept of exposure to normalize the performance. We find that experiments with WBBs are the best experimental concept. NOvA* could be competitive with sufficient luminosity. If $\sin^2 2\theta_{13}$ > 0.01, a WBB experiment can perform better than a neutrino factory.Comment: 31 pages, 13 figures, 5 tables. Version to appear in PR

Probing the Electrostatics of Integer Quantum Hall Edges with Momentum-Resolved Tunnel Spectroscopy

We present measurements of momentum-resolved magneto-tunneling from a perpendicular two-dimensional (2D) contact into integer quantum Hall (QH) edges at a sharp edge potential created by cleaved edge overgrowth. Resonances in the tunnel conductance correspond to coincidences of electronic states of the QH edge and the 2D contact in energy-momentum space. With this dispersion relation reflecting the potential distribution at the edge we can directly measure the band bending at our cleaved edge under the influence of an external voltage bias. At finite bias we observe significant deviations from the flat-band condition in agreement with self-consistent calculations of the edge potential

Detecting solar axions using Earth's magnetic field

We show that solar axion conversion to photons in the Earth's magnetosphere can produce an x-ray flux, with average energy \sim 4 keV, which is measurable on the dark side of the Earth. The smallness of the Earth's magnetic field is compensated by a large magnetized volume. For axion masses < 10^{-4} eV, a low-Earth-orbit x-ray detector with an effective area of 10^4 cm^2, pointed at the solar core, can probe the photon-axion coupling down to 10^{-11} GeV^{-1}, in one year. Thus, the sensitivity of this new approach will be an order of magnitude beyond current laboratory limits.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure, typos corrected, references adde

A gobal fit to the anomalous magnetic moment, Higgs limit and b->s gamma in the constrained MSSM

New data on the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon together with the b->s gamma decay rate and Higgs limits are considered within the supergravity inspired constrained minimal supersymmetric model. We perform a global statistical chi2 analysis of these data and show that the allowed region of parameter space is bounded from below by the Higgs limit, which depends on the trilinear coupling and from above by the anomalous magnetic moment.Comment: 3 pages, To appear in Proc. of SUSY01, Dubna (Russia

Generation and detection of spin-orbit coupled neutron beams

Spin-orbit coupling of light has come to the fore in nano-optics and plasmonics, and is a key ingredient of topological photonics and chiral quantum optics. We demonstrate a basic tool for incorporating analogous effects into neutron optics: the generation and detection of neutron beams with coupled spin and orbital angular momentum. $^3$He neutron spin-filters are used in conjunction with specifically oriented triangular coils to prepare neutron beams with lattices of spin-orbit correlations, as demonstrated by their spin-dependant intensity profiles. These correlations can be tailored to particular applications, such as neutron studies of topological materials

A Census Of Highly Symmetric Combinatorial Designs

As a consequence of the classification of the finite simple groups, it has been possible in recent years to characterize Steiner t-designs, that is t-(v,k,1) designs, mainly for t = 2, admitting groups of automorphisms with sufficiently strong symmetry properties. However, despite the finite simple group classification, for Steiner t-designs with t > 2 most of these characterizations have remained longstanding challenging problems. Especially, the determination of all flag-transitive Steiner t-designs with 2 < t < 7 is of particular interest and has been open for about 40 years (cf. [11, p. 147] and [12, p. 273], but presumably dating back to 1965). The present paper continues the author's work [20, 21, 22] of classifying all flag-transitive Steiner 3-designs and 4-designs. We give a complete classification of all flag-transitive Steiner 5-designs and prove furthermore that there are no non-trivial flag-transitive Steiner 6-designs. Both results rely on the classification of the finite 3-homogeneous permutation groups. Moreover, we survey some of the most general results on highly symmetric Steiner t-designs.Comment: 26 pages; to appear in: "Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics