On-chip inductor design plays a critical role in the advancement of radio-frequency integrated circuits (RFICs). Inductors typically occupy a substantial portion of the chip area as their performance metrics, namely, inductance density and Quality factor ($Q$-factor), are fundamentally tied to the available footprint, thereby limiting miniaturization. To better understand and quantify these limitations, we employ rigorous electromagnetic analysis together with convex optimization techniques to derive a fundamental bound on the maximum achievable $Q$-factor of electrically-small planar inductors as a function of the available design area. The analysis yields analytical expressions for the bound and, via modal analysis techniques, identifies and interprets operational regimes and scaling trends with respect to design area and material conductivity. The analysis accounts for both ohmic and radiation losses, with the latter becoming significant as the inductor size increases. A broad set of state-of-the-art inductor designs from the literature is evaluated against the established $Q$-factor upper bound, identifying designs that approach the theoretical limit as well as those with potential for further improvement. The study is extended to include the effect of kinetic inductance, which offers a promising avenue toward next-generation inductors with higher inductance densities and $Q$-factors. By establishing this benchmark, this work aims to guide and inspire the design of more efficient and compact planar inductors for high-performance RF systems.

The nonlinear response coefficient, $χ_{4,22}$, is a crucial observable for probing the dynamical properties of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). While traditionally understood as a signature of medium response, recent studies suggest that $χ_{4,22}$ also encapsulates critical information regarding the intrinsic initial-state configuration of the colliding nuclei. In this study, we utilize A Multi-Phase Transport (AMPT) model to investigate the microscopic origin and stage-by-stage development of $χ_{4,22}$ in $^{238}$U+$^{238}$U and $^{197}$Au+$^{197}$Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}} = 200$ GeV. By tracking the flow observables through the partonic cascade, quark coalescence, and hadronic rescattering phases, we map the translation of initial geometric eccentricities into final-state momentum anisotropies. Our results demonstrate that the absolute magnitude of $χ_{4,22}$ increases continuously during the collective expansion, confirming its nature as a dynamically generated medium response. However, the comparative ratio of this coefficient between the U+U and Au+Au systems is stable across all evolutionary stages within statistical uncertainties. This indicates that the ratio approximately cancels complex evolutionary dynamics to isolate intrinsic geometric correlations present at the initial state. These findings provide compelling theoretical support and crucial insights for recent experimental efforts aiming to extract high-order nuclear structure, such as hexadecapole deformation, using nonlinear flow observables.

The development of operational scenarios without large Type-I ELMs is of utmost importance for the stable operation and longevity of future tokamaks. The EUROfusion tokamak exploitation program has therefore made the understanding of ELM-free regimes a major topic of exploration across all its contributing devices (ASDEX Upgrade, JET, MAST-Upgrade, TCV, and WEST). An integrated program to investigate a range of Type-I ELM-free regimes has been developed covering the enhanced D-alpha (EDA), magnetic perturbations (MP), negative triangularity (NT), quasi-continuous exhaust (QCE), quiescent H-mode (QH), the baseline small ELMs (SE), I-mode, and X-point radiator (XPR) regimes. This contribution focuses on the development and understanding of the NT and QCE regimes on ASDEX Upgrade, JET, and TCV. The importance of transport via ballooning modes in both regimes is highlighted, as well as the progress in developing access models based on ideal-MHD. In the case of the QCE, this can also be expressed as a minimum separatrix density, which corresponds well to experimentally measured separatrix densities. Particular focus is paid to the performance of the QCE in terms of the achieved pedestal top values, which, when appropriately normalised, do not differ significantly from ELMy H-mode plasmas. This, combined with the predicted minimum separatrix density for the 15 MA ITER baseline plasma, highlight the relevance of the QCE as a potential operational scenario for both ITER and future reactors.

Electron shuttling is emerging as a key mechanism for enabling long-range coupling in scalable spin-qubit architectures. Bringing shuttling waveform generation into the cryostat can improve scalability, but imposes strict area and power constraints on the control electronics. Concurrently, shuttling in Si/SiGe is further limited by a spatially varying valley splitting that induces spin--valley mixing and degrades coherence. Here, we make three contributions that address these limitations jointly: (i) an end-to-end co-simulation framework that combines disorder-informed valley maps with transistor-level cryogenic circuit simulations including electronic noise; (ii) a fully integrated cryogenic shuttling-signal generator tailored to velocity modulation, enabling period-wise waveform shaping through discrete circuit settings stored in on-chip memory; and (iii) a noise-aware optimization procedure that tunes only these implementable circuit controls, using one of four discrete resistor settings per period, to generate high-fidelity shuttling sequences. Across simulated valley and noise realizations in our co-simulation framework, the optimized velocity-modulation waveforms improve transport performance, achieving an average shuttling fidelity of $99.99 \pm 0.007\%$ at $v_{\mathrm{avg}} = 20~\mathrm{m\,s^{-1}}$ over a distance of $10~μ\mathrm{m}$, while maintaining active analog power consumption in the tens of $μ\mathrm{W}$ during shuttling. This validates on-chip storage and replay of optimized control settings as a practical strategy to mitigate valley disorder in scalable shuttling architectures.

Mrk421 displayed its highest flux state ever observed in February of 2010 with very high TeV fluxes and interesting cross-band correlations and a spectral energy distribution (SED) evolution not entirely consistent with the standard single zone leptonic synchrotron self-Compton model. The source was already in a high state in January 2010 and displayed strong variability in the days preceding the highest state. We study the temporal evolution of the spectra in January to extract information about the particle dynamics and the physical properties of the emission region. We build up on the temporal variability and correlations studied in the previous work (MAGIC collaboration - Abe et al. 2025) and attempt to improve the SED model fits with a physics oriented approach. The multi-wavelength data was processed and the SEDs were fit using JetSeT. The SED evolution and cross band correlations were modelled using leptonic log-parabola with a low energy power-law branch (LPPL) and pile-up distributions that are predicted in a stochastic acceleration scenario. A simplified temporal evolution model was developed and fit to the SEDs and the resulting trends and phenomenology were characterised in context of theoretical literature. An expanding emission region model was also tested. We find the spectral variability to be well in agreement with stochastic acceleration. Our analysis suggests that the standard LPPL distribution develops a Maxwellian pile-up component at the transition from acceleration to cooling dominated phase on 3 nights in the dataset, as also hinted by the very-high energy and X-ray light curves. The resulting phenomenology of our sequential snapshot evolution SED model agrees well with theoretical and numerical simulation studies on temporal evolution using the diffusion equation approach.

We show that the inverse Faraday effect can be used to engineer dipole--exchange spin-wave spectra in ferrimagnetic bismuth iron garnet (BIG) Mie spheres. Internal optical Mie resonances generate spatially structured effective magnetic fields whose symmetry is inherited from the optical near field and which act as controllable perturbations of the magnon Hamiltonian. For circularly polarized light incident collinearly with the equilibrium magnetization, the optical perturbation preserves axial symmetry while breaking mirror parity, thereby enabling hybridization of magnon modes with opposite parity within the same $\widehat{J}_z$ sector. Using coupled-mode theory, we derive the corresponding avoided-crossing spectrum and analytical expressions for the induced level splittings, which scale linearly with pump intensity. Numerical calculations for BIG spheres confirm the predicted hybridization and show that the splitting is maximized near optical Mie resonances, where field enhancement and magneto-optical response are strongest. We further discuss the roles of damping, linewidth, and heating, and show that the predicted MHz--hundreds-of-MHz splittings should be observable under realistic conditions. These results identify BIG Mie resonators as a promising platform for symmetry-selective optical control of spin-wave spectra.

Mid-infrared spectra from the Medium Resolution Spectrometer on the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed the molecular chemistry of carbon stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud with better resolution and sensitivity than previously possible. Our sample spans a range of dust-production rates and includes three relatively dust-free semiregular variables and six dustier Mira variables. All were observed 15-20 yr earlier with the Infrared Spectrograph on the Spitzer Space Telescope at lower spectral resolution. The new spectra show that the C3 molecule is responsible for a strong absorption band centered at 5.2 um. CS is clearly present in some of the sample, especially the stars with less dust. HCN also appears to be present. Some of the spectra have changed significantly between the Spitzer epoch and the MRS observations in 2023 and 2024, and in most cases these changes can be attributed to the stellar pulsation cycle. One exception is the disappearance of a dust emission feature at ~18 um in one of the Miras. The new spectra reveal a dip centered at ~10 um, which could arise either from an unknown carrier or from variable molecular emission to the red and blue. The presence of this spectral structure on the short-wavelength side of the SiC dust emission feature at ~11.3 um along with the broad C2H2 band centered at 14 um raise the possibility that some previously reported detections of weak SiC dust emission in other carbon stars may not be real.

Conical intersections are central to the description of photophysics and photochemistry. Nevertheless, in non-adiabatic molecular dynamics simulations, they are fundamentally challenging for single-reference electronic structure methods. Density functional theory (DFT) and its time-dependent extension (TDDFT) represent the most widely used theoretical approaches in physics, chemistry, and biology. However, the treatment of ground and excited states as separate problems leads to breakdowns in the topological structure of potential energy surfaces near conical intersections. In this work, we solve this long-standing issue by presenting Convex DFT (CVX-DFT), a framework that, by explicitly enforcing convexity of the variational problem within an appropriately defined subspace, guarantees a unique and continuous electronic solution across regions of degeneracies. We demonstrate that CVX-DFT yields smooth and physically meaningful intersection seams by comparison with reference methods, such as multireference wave function methods. In this way, we establish the method as a robust and computationally efficient DFT approach for treating electronically degenerate regions. These developments represent a critical step toward reliable non-adiabatic simulations beyond the limitations of conventional TDDFT.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) weather models are improving rapidly, and their forecasts are already competitive with long-established traditional Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP). To build confidence in this new methodology, it is critical that we understand how these predictions are generated. This is a huge challenge as these AI weather models remain largely black boxes. In other areas of Machine Learning (ML), mechanistic interpretability has emerged as a framework for understanding ML predictions by analysing the building blocks responsible for them. Here we present an open-source, highly adaptable tool which incorporates concepts from mechanistic interpretability. The tool organises internal latent representations from the model processor and allows for initial analyses, including cosine similarity and Principal Component Analysis (PCA), enabling the user to identify directions in latent space potentially associated with meteorological features. Applying our tool to the graph neural network GraphCast, we present preliminary case studies for mid-latitude synoptic-scale waves and specific humidity. These demonstrate the tool's ability to identify linear combinations of latent channels that appear to correspond to interpretable features.

We consider the problem on the existence of two dimensional superintegrable systems in the presence of a magnetic field in the two dimensional Euclidean space. We assume the existence of two integrals of motion, besides the Hamiltonian, that are quadratic polynomials in the momenta. This problem was already studied in the cases where one integral is of Cartesian or polar type [J. Bérubé, and P. Winternitz, J. Math. Phys., 45(5): 1959-1973, 2004]. We continue the investigation by assuming that one of the integrals is of parabolic type and the second integral is of elliptic or (''non-standard'') parabolic type, confirming so far that, on the Euclidean plane, the only two dimensional superintegrable system with quadratic integrals is the one with constant magnetic field and constant electrostatic potential.

We report on imaging the optical near-fields in resonant periodic photonic structures with nanometer resolution using ultrafast 4D scanning transmission electron microscopy (U4DSTEM). In particular, U4DSTEM is applied to visualize the transverse component of the Lorentz force of a synchronous near-field mode excited by an infrared femtosecond pulse in a periodic silicon nanostructure designed for photonic acceleration of electrons. Our results show that in addition to the accelerating/decelerating force acting on the electrons in the longitudinal direction along the electron propagation, the structures can be efficiently used for transverse electron streaking at optical frequencies when excited by light with polarization perpendicular to the electron trajectory. The measured spatial profile of the excited near-field mode intensity is consistent with the numerical simulations performed using finite-difference time domain technique.

We introduce surrogate functionals: machine-learned energy functionals for orbital-free density functional theory (OF-DFT) which are defined not by universal fidelity to a physical reference, but merely by the requirement that density optimization with a fixed procedure yields the true ground-state density. Helpfully, training surrogate functionals requires only ground-state densities, no energies or gradients away from the ground state. We here propose a gradient-descent-improvement loss that guarantees exponential convergence of the density to the ground state, and combine it with an adaptive sampling scheme that concentrates learning around the optimization trajectories actually visited during inference. On the QM9 and QMugs benchmarks, surrogate functionals achieve density errors competitive with or improving upon the state of the art for fully supervised machine-learned OF-DFT, while eliminating the need for the $O(N^3)$ orthononormalization step required by prior work, yielding improved runtime scaling for larger systems.

Semi-visible jets (SVJs) provide a characteristic collider signature of strongly interacting dark sectors, in which the key model parameter $r_{\mathrm{inv}}$ controls the fraction of dark hadrons decaying to dark matter candidates. In this work, a regression model is developed to reconstruct $r_{\mathrm{inv}}$ in SVJ events produced in association with an energetic photon. The model uses information from high-level physics objects only, and the training procedure is optimized to ensure applicability. The performance is found to be robust against varying signal parameters and $r_{\mathrm{inv}}$ can be reconstructed at a much higher precision, compared to previously developed analytical method. It offers a new approach to conduct SVJ searches that can potentially unify both $s$-channel and $t$-channel productions, enhancing the sensitivities.

We study how strategic interaction can arise from controlled quantum dynamics rather than being imposed as an external mathematical structure. We introduce a class of interaction-defined quantum games in which players are represented by distinguishable quantum walkers, strategies correspond to local coin operations, and payoffs are defined as expectation values of physical observables. Using interacting discrete-time quantum walks as a concrete platform, we demonstrate numerically that competitive, cooperative, and asymmetric games admit stable stationary strategy profiles when the walkers are coupled, while no non-trivial equilibria exist in the absence of interaction. To clarify the game-theoretic structure, we derive an analytic perturbative decomposition of the payoff function in the weak-interaction regime, showing explicitly that strategic coupling originates from interaction-induced interference terms in the joint probability distribution. For a collision-based phase interaction, the payoff becomes non-separable at first order in the interaction strength and generically admits stationary points satisfying the Nash conditions. Our results provide a physically explicit realization of strategic interdependence in quantum transport processes and establish interacting quantum walks as a minimal platform for studying game-theoretic behavior emerging from unitary dynamics.

We discuss some mathematical aspects of the Mori-Zwanzig projection operator formalism. The core of the Mori-Zwanzig formalism is the generalised Langevin equation, which is typically derived from the Dyson-Duhamel identity. We derive the projection operator formalism for Mori's projection by means of semigroup theory, and we illustrate where rigorous methods fail for the case of Zwanzig's projection. For bounded perturbations of the time-evolution operator (e.g. for Mori's projection), the Dyson-Duhamel identity coincides with the variation of constants formula. For unbounded perturbations (e.g. for Zwanzigs's projection), the Dyson-Duhamel identity should be considered an equation for the orthogonal dynamics, for which the existence of unique solutions has yet to be established. Then we recall that all properties of Mori's generalised Langevin equation follow directly from the well-posedness of Volterra equations, irrespective of the projection operator formalism. Further, we discuss the use of Mori's generalised Langevin equation as a coarse-grained model. Finally, we illustrate that the memory term is a coupling term that is not necessarily related to memory. To this end, we introduce projections onto subspaces of 'fast' and 'slow' variables that are associated with the spectral decomposition of skew-adjoint operators. For these projections, the memory term vanishes.

Fano resonances are sharp asymmetrical spectral peaks which are now ubiquitous in nanophotonics. The high sensitivity of these resonances to system parameter has been exploited to improve light matter interaction and in applications such as sensing, filters and on-chip processing. The ability to dynamically change the Fano slope and spectral phase would enable optimization of the device parameters post fabrication for various applications. Here we demonstrate such a control over the Fano resonance in a one-dimensional photonics crystal cavity integrated on a silicon waveguide -grating platform. In our device, Fano resonance arises due to interference between cavity mode and an oscillatory background due to grating coupler. The dynamics tuning of Fano asymmetric parameter is achieved using thermos-optic effect in silicon. We experimentally tune the Fano parameter from ~-3.2 to +1.7 achieving a highest extinction ratio of 21.6 dB and spectral slope of 108dB/nm. All the above is achieved in an ultra-compact design with simple fabrication and with multiple cavities or feedback elements. The steep slope offers distinct advantage over conventional cavity for sensing and modulation applications and the tunability enables dynamic control over gain, dynamic range, bandwidth and noise coupling.

We investigate the feasibility of the macrospin approximation to account for the actual shape of soft magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) with realistic geometries. Specifically focusing on magnetite, we use the superellipsoidal parametrisation to account for a variety of shapes, with a continuous interpolation from spherical to cubic morphologies, as well as different elongations. Our procedure consists of the direct comparison between angular-dependent hysteresis loops obtained by full micromagnetic simulations, with those produced by an extended Stoner-Wohlfarth (SW) model that incorporates both the intrinsic cubic magnetocrystalline anisotropy, and an effective uniaxial contribution arising from the particle elongation. The limits of validity of the macrospin description are approximately 10-60 nm for axial ratios r>1.5, and 20-60 nm for 1.0<r<1.5. These results establish a direct connection between nanoparticle morphology and effective macrospin parameters, demonstrating the suitability of the generalized SW model for describing the magnetic response of realistically shaped MNPs.

We present recent results from the FASTSUM collaboration, using anisotropic lattice QCD to study spectral properties of heavy quarkonia and open heavy flavour systems at high temperature. For heavy quarkonium, our results using a number of different methods suggest a small but significant and robust negative mass shift as well as an increasing thermal width. We present the first lattice results for masses and spectral functions of B mesons at high temperature, and preliminary results for a high-precision calculation of the static quark potential.

The nature of the recently observed $K(1690)$ state, reported by the COMPASS Collaboration as a candidate for a strange crypto-exotic meson with $J^P=0^-$, remains unclear. In this work, we investigate whether it can be described by local meson-meson currents within the framework of QCD sum rules. We construct a set of local meson-meson-type interpolating currents with $J^P=0^-$, covering the representative Dirac structures $0^- \otimes 0^+$, $0^+ \otimes 0^-$, $1^- \otimes 1^+$, $1^+ \otimes 1^-$, as well as tensor configurations. For all these currents, we perform a systematic operator product expansion up to dimension-eight condensates and carry out a detailed analysis of Borel stability, continuum threshold dependence, and pole contributions. We find that the extracted masses are consistently located around $2~\mathrm{GeV}$ or higher, significantly above the experimental mass of the $K(1690)$. This behavior is highly stable against variations of QCD parameters and the choice of interpolating currents, and is observed universally across all the considered configurations. The absence of any low-lying pole compatible with the COMPASS signal therefore disfavors interpreting the $K(1690)$ as a state predominantly coupled to these local meson-meson currents within the QCD sum rule framework. Our results thus make a compact multiquark configuration a more plausible explanation for this state.

Accurate state-of-health (SOH) estimation for lithium-ion batteries remains a challenging problem due to complex electrochemical degradation mechanisms and long-range temporal dependencies. In this work, we propose a quantum-enhanced recurrent framework, termed QLSTM, in which variational quantum circuits are directly embedded into the gating mechanisms of long short-term memory networks. By replacing classical affine transformations with parameterized unitary operations, the proposed model introduces structured nonlinear transformations into the recurrent state-transition process. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark battery datasets demonstrate that QLSTM consistently outperforms classical sequence models in both predictive accuracy and robustness, achieving significant reductions in mean absolute error (MAE), with improvements on the order of 20% compared with classical LSTM baselines. Ablation studies further confirm that these improvements arise primarily from quantum-enhanced gating rather than input-level transformations. Additional analyses on qubit scaling and noise robustness reveal that model performance is governed by a balance between expressive capacity and trainability. These results provide empirical evidence that embedding quantum computational primitives within recurrent architectures offers a structurally grounded approach to improving sequence modeling capability. The proposed framework establishes a new design paradigm for integrating quantum operators into temporal learning models, with potential applications in complex dynamical system prediction tasks.

Soft composite solids, comprising discrete inclusions embedded within a compliant matrix, are emerging candidates for engineering synthetic tissues and soft robotic materials. Current strategies for controlling their nonlinear mechanics, such as strain-stiffening, have primarily relied on the nonlinear elasticity of polymer matrices. Although direct contacts between inclusions may enhance stiffening responses at high densities, the role of the non-equilibrium and history-dependent nature of disordered contact networks in composite mechanics remains unexplored. In this work, by applying a mechanical training protocol near a shear-jamming phase boundary, we demonstrate that the structural memory encoded in contact networks drives a crossover from granular-like to biopolymer-like strain stiffening. Simulations of a coarse-grained composite model reveal that this biopolymer-like mechanical response emerges from enhanced non-affine reconfigurations of nearly-jammed contact networks. Without relying on matrix nonlinearity, we establish a design strategy that leverages non-equilibrium memory effects intrinsic to granular systems to achieve highly programmable strain-stiffening in soft composites.

We introduce a quantum analogue of a classical synchronizing automaton. In classical case the state of a system evolves according to a set of rules forming an alphabet, and sequences of these rules, called words, govern its evolution. Certain special words, known as synchronizing words, drive the automaton into a predetermined state regardless of its initial configuration. Although such an apparently irreversible process seems incompatible with the unitarity of quantum mechanics, we present a resetting protocol based on quantum synchronizing words by incorporating auxiliary qubits whose states encode the rules of the automaton's alphabet. These qubits interact with the quantum automaton, whose state is encoded in a qudit, via a global unitary operation. When the qubit register is initially prepared in a state corresponding to a synchronizing word, the automaton evolves into a predetermined pure state independent of its initial state, while the qubit register is transformed into a complex, often entangled, state that encodes information about the automaton's original configuration. The resulting entanglement depends on both the rule set and the automaton's initial state, and we show how specific entangled states can be generated within this framework.

Thermal runaway in lithium-ion batteries is governed by the poorly-understood initiation phase, where localised heating introduces instability. Here we identify the three key components that trigger thermal runaway, decreases in local conductivity, heat capacity changes, and intercalation heating, which significantly increase temperature gradients that accelerate battery degradation. Using a multiscale framework that links atomistic phonon calculations with grain-resolved thermal modelling, we identify large thermal gradients across grain boundaries arising from external heating events and intercalation-dependent thermal properties of Li$_x$ZrS$_2$. The observed changes in thermal conductivity are due to charge redistribution and bond-strength modulation of the host, in contrast to the existing theory of lithium rattler mechanics. Internal heating events driven by intercalation gives rise to local thermal gradients, finite-speed thermal wave interference, and internal thermal fluctuations that generate mechanical strain and sub-grain thermal breakdown. These results show that the trigger for thermal runaway is controlled by internal grain architecture and composition, as well as the external environment. Our findings establish materials and electrode design rules for suppressing hotspot formation and improving battery safety during fast charging.

We study an Ising model with long-range interactions undergoing a time-periodic kicking. For different initial states we observe persistent period doubling. When there is period doubling we find that the initial state has relevant overlap with Floquet states showing time-translation symmetry breaking, organized in doublets displaying $π$-spectral pairing (as highlighted by the $π$-spectral gap) and long-range order (as shown by the eigenvalues of the magnetization in the doublet). We observe period doubling for initial states with domain walls and tilted spins, and for the latter ones a finite-size scaling of the relevant $π$-shifted gap and magnetization eigenvalues suggests period-doubling oscillations persisting for larger system sizes and lasting a time exponential in the system size. We find that just a minority of Floquet states displays time-translation symmetry breaking while the rest is thermal, a weak-ergodicity breaking situation typical of systems with quantum scars. Although the time-translation symmetry breaking eigenstates are the minority, their number is exponential in the system size and this motivates the period doubling observed for many different initial states.

Large families of confining holographic QFTs, described by Einstein-Dilaton gravity, are considered on constant-curvature manifolds in the presence of a $θ$-angle. The space of ground states of such theories is explored as a function of the UV parameters, namely the dimensionless curvature and the $θ$ angle. The free energy is computed, and the phase structure is determined. For constant negative curvature manifolds, we find solutions dual to single QFTs as well as solutions describing interfaces. The single QFTs exhibit an infinite family of saddle points, with the leading one dominating the gravitational path integral and no phase transitions present. For constant positive curvature manifolds, like de Sitter, the ($θ$-angle, curvature) phase diagram exhibits both first and second order phase transitions, as a function of the class of theories considered. We also show that when $θ=0$, a holographic Vafa-Witten-like theorem can be proven.

We present a comprehensive study of the relationship between star formation rate (SFR) and stellar mass (M_*) from z = 0.1 to z = 4 using a mass-complete sample of approximately 290,000 galaxies from the COSMOS2020 catalog. We find that the SFR-M_* relation exhibits a pronounced high-mass decline that becomes increasingly evident at lower redshifts. Examining environmental and morphological dependencies, we find strikingly different patterns. For all galaxies, we find galaxies in high-density environments exhibit suppressed star formation rates at z < 1 especially at high-mass end, while for star-forming galaxies no apparent environmental effect is found at all redshifts. In contrast, galaxy morphology exerts strong influence on the SFR-M_* relation at z < 2, in a sense that early-type galaxies exhibit systematically lower star formation rates at fixed mass compared to spirals and irregulars, with this trend persisting even within the star-forming population. These results suggest that internal structural properties (bulge components in particular) continuously regulate star formation efficiency independently of whether galaxies are classified as active or quiescent, whereas external environmental processes primarily serve as rapid quenching mechanisms that increase the fraction of quiescent galaxies at low redshifts. We attribute the observed high-mass decline of the SFR-M_* relation to COSMOS2020's superior capability for detecting massive star-forming galaxies undergoing "morphological quenching" processes.

Releasing shell-shaped Bose-Einstein condensates from their confinement produces a spherically symmetric density distribution characterized by concentric ripples surrounding a central peak. Here we investigate how a vortex-antivortex dipole affects this dynamics, finding that increasing dipole separation progressively breaks the spherical symmetry and, correspondingly, the interplay of vortex physics and curvature produces a non-monotonic behavior of the cloud aspect ratio. These features can be used for preparing and detecting vortex dipoles in shell-shaped superfluids, as well as for analyzing their signatures in other thin superfluids with more general curved geometries.

The thermosensitive behavior of microgel particles suspended in solvents, i.e. their temperature-dependent swelling properties, has triggered ongoing interest in industry and academia over the past forty years. The most-studied polymer is poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) - PNIPAM -, where the volume phase transition temperature is well known to depend on the detailed molecular architecture of the monomers. In this article, we focus on publications mostly of the past five years in chemical synthesis, aiming at shifting or controlling the volume phase transition temperature (VPTT) of such polymers by copolymerization of a main monomer - often from the PNIPAM family - with either monomers of different hydrophobicity, or with ones bearing ionizable groups. In some cases, hydrophobicity may be modulated by light as external switching parameter, whereas ionic strength or pH may act on the thermosensitivity of the microgels containing charged groups. Due to either differences in reactivity, or specific synthesis routes, particular microgel morphologies, such as molecular gradient, core-shell, interpenetrated, or patchy (multi-lobular) structures may be generated. They may give rise to spatial modulations of thermosensitivity within particles and are highlighted in this review. Our short overview shows that multiple external control of VPTT and morphology is commonly achieved nowadays.

We develop a general theory of high-harmonic generation (HHG) in solid-state systems, based on a weak-correlation expansion of photonic and matter degrees of freedom. Unlike standard HHG theories, which treat light-matter dynamics through the Schrodinger equation, our approach employs density-matrix evolution, naturally capturing the mixed-state character of both the field and the matter - a critical aspect for describing complex solid-state band structures. We show explicitly that the properties of the emitted fields are governed by the quantum statistics and quantum geometry of the underlying solid. Taking the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model in a one-sided optical cavity as a paradigmatic example and considering the dual regime, we demonstrate that in the topological phase a system exhibits a stronger HHG response and stronger quantum-light signatures than in the trivial phase. Furthermore, we show that cavity-matter interaction gives rise to squeezed high-harmonic quantum light, whose properties are directly imprinted by the current-current fluctuations in the material system. Crucially, the observed squeezing does not rely on a separate quartic Kerr mechanism. In the mesoscopic regime, the genuine quantum Kerr term is higher order in light-matter coupling strength and negligible, while the relevant non-classical effect is governed by current-current fluctuations encoded in the complex susceptibility of the material. This work establishes a direct link between band topology and photon statistics, opening new avenues for topology-sensitive quantum light generation and photon statistics based spectroscopy of solid-state systems.

In this work, we investigate the projected sensitivity of the Beam-Dump eXperiment at the International Linear Collider (ILC-BDX) to inelastic fermionic dark matter coupled to the Standard Model photon through an off-diagonal magnetic dipole operator. We compute the production rate of dark matter states in the bremsstrahlung like process $e^- N \to e^- N γ^* (\to χ_{1} \barχ_0)$, induced by the scattering of high-energy electrons on target nuclei. The resulting boosted dark matter fluxes are then propagated to the detector, where the signal events arise from scattering off detector electrons. The projected exclusion limits are derived using the expected numbers of electrons on target (this implies a typical rate of $4.0~\times~10^{21}/\mbox{year}$) corresponding to 1 year and 10 years of data taking. To characterize the impact of inelasticity, we consider two benchmark relative mass splittings, $Δ=0.05$ and $Δ=0.001$, motivated by thermal dark matter scenarios. Our results show that ILC-BDX can probe inelastic magnetic-dipole dark matter over a phenomenologically relevant region of parameter space.