Graphene under the influence of Aharonov-Bohm flux and constant magnetic field

Investigation of real two-dimensional systems with Dirac-like electronic behavior under the influence of magnetic field is challenging and leads to many interesting physical results. In this paper we study 2D graphene model with a particular form of magnetic field as a superposition of a homogeneous field and an Aharonov-Bohm vortex. For this configuration, electronic wave functions and energy spectrum were obtained and it was shown that the magnetic Aharonov-Bohm vortex plays the role of a charge impurity. As a demonstration of vacuum properties of the system, vacuum current, as well as an electric current, is calculated and their representation for particular limiting cases of magnetic field is obtained

Laser-induced topological transitions in phosphorene with inversion symmetry

Recent ab initio calculations and experiments reported insulating-semimetallic phase transitions in multilayer phosphorene under a perpendicular dc field, pressure or doping, as a possible route to realize topological phases. In this work, we show that even a monolayer phosphorene may undergo Lifshitz transitions toward semimetallic and topological insulating phases, provided it is rapidly driven by in-plane time-periodic laser fields. Based on a four-orbital tight-binding description, we give an inversion-symmetry-based prescription in order to apprehend the topology of the photon-renormalized band structure, up to the second order in the high-frequency limit. Apart from the initial band insulating behavior, two additional phases are thus identified. A semimetallic phase with massless Dirac electrons may be induced by linear polarized fields, whereas elliptic polarized fields are likely to drive the material into an anomalous quantum Hall phase.Comment: Includes Supplemental Materia

Dynamical and Reversible Control of Topological Spin Textures

Recent observations of topological spin textures brought spintronics one step closer to new magnetic memories. Nevertheless, the existence of Skyrmions, as well as their stabilization, require very specific intrinsic magnetic properties which are usually fixed in magnets. Here we address the possibility to dynamically control their intrinsic magnetic interactions by varying the strength of a high-frequency laser field. It is shown that drastic changes can be induced in the antiferromagnetic exchange interactions and the latter can even be reversed to become ferromagnetic, provided the direct exchange is already non-negligible in equilibrium as predicted, for example, in Si doped with C, Sn, or Pb adatoms. In the presence of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions, this enables us to tune features of ferromagnetic Skyrmions such as their radius, making them easier to stabilize. Alternatively, such topological spin textures can occur in frustrated triangular lattices. Then, we demonstrate that a high-frequency laser field can induce dynamical frustration in antiferromagnets, where the degree of frustration can subsequently be tuned suitably to drive the material toward a Skyrmionic phase

Long-term planning versus short-term planning in the asymptotical location problem

Given the probability measure $\nu$ over the given region $\Omega\subset \R^n$, we consider the optimal location of a set $\Sigma$ composed by $n$ points \Om in order to minimize the average distance \Sigma\mapsto \int_\Om \dist(x,\Sigma) d\nu (the classical optimal facility location problem). The paper compares two strategies to find optimal configurations: the long-term one which consists in placing all $n$ points at once in an optimal position, and the short-term one which consists in placing the points one by one adding at each step at most one point and preserving the configuration built at previous steps. We show that the respective optimization problems exhibit qualitatively different asymptotic behavior as $n\to\infty$, although the optimization costs in both cases have the same asymptotic orders of vanishing.Comment: for more pictures and some movies as well, see http://www.sissa.it/~brancoli

Excitonic Instability and Pseudogap Formation in Nodal Line Semimetal ZrSiS

Electron correlation effects are studied in ZrSiS using a combination of first-principles and model approaches. We show that basic electronic properties of ZrSiS can be described within a two-dimensional lattice model of two nested square lattices. High degree of electron-hole symmetry characteristic for ZrSiS is one of the key features of this model. Having determined model parameters from first-principles calculations, we then explicitly take electron-electron interactions into account and show that at moderately low temperatures ZrSiS exhibits excitonic instability, leading to the formation of a pseudogap in the electronic spectrum. The results can be understood in terms of Coulomb-interaction-assisted pairing of electrons and holes reminiscent to that of an excitonic insulator. Our finding allows us to provide a physical interpretation to the unusual mass enhancement of charge carriers in ZrSiS recently observed experimentally.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures. Final versio

Magnetic ionization-thermal instability

Linear analysis of the stability of diffuse clouds in the cold neutral medium with uniform magnetic field is performed. We consider that gas in equilibrium state is heated by cosmic rays, X-rays and electronic photoeffect on the surface of dust grains, and it is cooled by the collisional excitation of fine levels of the CII. Ionization by cosmic rays and radiative recombinations is taken into account. A dispersion equation is solved analytically in the limiting cases of small and large wave numbers, as well as numerically in the general case. In particular cases the dispersion equation describes thermal instability of Field (1965) and ionization-coupled acoustic instability of Flannery and Press (1979). We pay our attention to magnetosonic waves arising in presence of magnetic field, in thermally stable region, $35 \leq T \leq 95$ K and density n\lessapprox 10^3\,\mbox{cm}^{-3}. We have shown that these modes can be unstable in the isobarically stable medium. The instability mechanism is similar to the mechanism of ionization-coupled acoustic instability. We determine maximum growth rates and critical wavelengths of the instability of magnetosonic waves depending on gas temperature, magnetic field strength and the direction of wave vector with respect to the magnetic field lines. The minimum growth time of the unstable slow magnetosonic waves in diffuse clouds is of $4-60$ Myr, minimum and the most unstable wavelengths lie in ranges $0.05-0.5$ and $0.5-5$ pc, respectively. We discuss the application of considered instability to the formation of small-scale structures and the generation of MHD turbulence in the cold neutral medium.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in MNRA