Realizing scalable Quantum-to-the-Home (QTTH) faces a bottleneck: link asymmetry in broadcast continuous-variable quantum access networks (CV-QANs) hinders the selection of a globally optimal modulation variance. We demonstrate a downstream broadcast CV-QAN connecting a Quantum Line Terminal (QLT) to multiple Quantum Network Units (QNUs) over commercial fiber. Operating within a trusted local network domain, we establish a multi-user utility model to select the optimal shared variance, balancing network efficiency and user fairness. Supported by robust digital signal processing, our 1:16 field trial achieves Mbit/s-level asymptotic secure key rates, bridging theoretical protocols with Fiber-to-the-Home reality and guiding future scalable access architectures.

End-to-end entanglement distribution is a key capability of upcoming quantum networks, enabling applications like distributed quantum computing, quantum sensor networks, and secure communications. Hence, its realistic and efficient simulation is crucial for quantum network design and for assessing the ability of a network to run certain applications. This work provides tools to scale-up and improve the realism of entanglement generation simulations in quantum networks. This is achieved by deriving analytical results that directly return the success probability, the output state and corresponding fidelity of a selected entanglement generation protocol, while accounting for a variety of noise sources affecting the protocol. These results are then integrated and streamlined in an upgraded version of SeQUeNCe, one of the most popular quantum network simulators. The resulting simulator features increased scalability by reducing computation time by more than 60%, while allowing for a variety of realistic noise sources, including imperfect mode matching, dark counts, and imperfect memory initialization. The simulator is also benchmarked with real experimental data and is capable of replicating the average entanglement generation time and the final state fidelity of a selected experiment. Altogether, the results can enhance current quantum network simulation capabilities towards large-scale networks, paving the way for the future quantum internet.

The photon blockade (PB) effect is a hallmark non-classical phenomenon in quantum optics and finds important applications for building quantum sources, while the control of PB by the non-Hermitian exceptional points remains largely unexplored. In this work, we theoretically investigate universal photon blockade in a microcavity harboring chiral exceptional points (CEPs) for building multiplexing quantum sources with nonreciprocal photon statistics. The results reveal that the presence of the CEPs leads to a stark contrast in the photon statistics of two whispering-gallery modes with opposite propagating directions. That is, one mode exhibits a strong PB effect while the other displays either sub-Poissonian or super-Poissonian distribution. Our findings thus may pave the way for advanced applications of photon blockade, and provide a theoretical foundation for the selective generation of single-photon and two-photon emission

Complex quantum networks can support a diverse set of long-range entanglement distribution schemes ranging from linear repeater protocols to multipath entanglement purification strategies. As a result, a network's resourcefulness, that is its ability to facilitate quantum communication, depends on the deployed distribution scheme. In this work, we analyse and compare the resourcefulness of quantum networks across a broad range of network topologies, including both regular and random networks, under two distinct entanglement distribution schemes. The first relies on entanglement swapping along a single path connecting a source-target pair, while the second exploits entanglement purification using multiple paths between the same source and target nodes. The resourcefulness of the network is quantified using a recently described metric [1] that averages over the maximum teleportation fidelity between arbitrary source-target pairs in the network. We present algorithms for estimating this metric under constraints of edge-usage and ordering of paths. Our results not only demonstrate the sensitivity of the average maximum teleportation fidelity metric to the choice of entanglement distribution protocol, but also highlight the significant improvements enabled by network purification schemes. In particular, purification-based approaches can substantially enhance average teleportation fidelity, thereby improving the overall teleportation capability of quantum networks.

We analyze how memory in disorder facilitates quantum communication in many-body scar systems. We consider three distinct types of disorder, viz., memoryful, and memoryless uniform and Gaussian, and compare their respective performances in facilitating quantum state transfer. Using the maximum transfer fidelity and fidelity area as figures of merit, we find that memoryful disorder yields a better performance than the memoryless disordered channels. Furthermore, the maximum transfer fidelity exhibits an initial parabolic decay with disorder strength, followed by a linear decrease, for all the disorder models considered. We introduce a degree of scarness, and show that it is higher for memoryful disorder in comparison to memoryless disorders, implying a role of scarness in the quantum state transfer protocol. We further perform a scaling analysis, revealing that memory effect in disorder is not only beneficial for short-distance but also long-distance quantum state transfer. Finally, we show that the state yielding the maximum transfer fidelity has larger inverse participation ratio for memoryful disorder in comparison to the other two disorders, highlighting the role of nonergodicity in enhancing state transfer.

Quantifying coherence is an essential endeavor in both quantum foundations and quantum technologies. In this paper, we study the coherence measures in terms of the diagonal states in the strictly incoherent operations framework. Specifically, we propose a coherence measure in terms of fidelity and provide its analytical expression. The relations between the proposed coherence measure and some other coherence measures are derived. Furthermore, we prove its monotonicity under incoherent operations. As an application, we explore the role of the proposed coherence measure in characterizing the waveness in the multi-path interferometer. As a result, some wave-particle dualities in terms of fidelity are presented. This work not only deepens the interpretation of the diagonal states on characterizing quantum states, but also promotes the quantitative description of the wave-particle behaviors in the multi-path interferometer.

We characterize three-qubit controlled unitary gates of Schmidt rank three, establishing necessary and sufficient conditions for such gates to have Schmidt rank three. We construct explicit examples and analyze their entanglement capabilities, showing that gates with Schmidt rank three can generate output states ranging from fully separable to maximal GHZ-class states. Within this classification, we present a parameterized gate family that produces an output W-class state whose bipartite tangles for subsystems AB and AC are modulated as simple trigonometric functions of a single phase parameter. The examples also include gates implementable with only three CNOT gates, showing that this lower bound is achievable. Decompositions that achieve the minimum possible CNOT count for several other cases are provided as well. Our results bridge Schmidt rank classification, entanglement structure, and resource-efficient circuit synthesis.

We introduce the notion and reveal remarkable properties of quantum complexity resource contained in a mixed multimode Gaussian state and providing universal quantitative characterization of its quantum advantage. The notion is based on convex optimization, multimode photon number statistics, Hafnian Master Theorem, and #P-hard complexity. We consider pulsed OPAs targeting maximal quantum complexity resource and thousands of multipartite-entangled squeezed modes of output light via nonlinear, spatio-temporally nonadiabatic generation inside OPA and optimized extraction out of OPA. We show that such figure of merit is more realistic than Bloch--Messiah supermodes and guides to multimode OPAs opening new paths to important applications in quantum information science such as generation of 3D cluster states for one-way photonic quantum computing and demonstration of quantum advantage.

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) are among the leading approaches for near-term quantum computing, yet their performance can degrade in barren plateau regimes characterized by vanishing gradients. A widely held intuition is that increasing circuit expressivity, often associated with random-state behavior, leads to a loss of trainability. Existing results show that sufficiently random circuits can lead to barren plateaus. Here we show that standard statistical signatures of randomness can emerge well before this regime, without degrading trainability. We demonstrate this behavior in structured variational circuits applied to the one-dimensional cluster-Ising model and a generalized toric code Hamiltonian. To characterize state complexity, we analyze Porter-Thomas statistics, entanglement-spectrum level statistics, and inverse participation ratios. Across both models, increasing circuit depth drives these diagnostics toward random-state-like or random-matrix-like behavior, while variational optimization remains effective, with no evidence of exponential gradient suppression in the regime studied. We interpret this behavior in terms of locality. Spectral correlations develop at relatively shallow depth through locally generated structure, while global state randomization and the associated concentration-of-measure effects are not yet realized. These results show that commonly used statistical diagnostics of complexity do not by themselves determine trainability. Instead, they point to a separation between different aspects of complexity in finite-depth variational circuits.

We implement the Hadamard test with Trotterized time-evolution operators on IBM quantum computers to simultaneously extract ground- and excited-state energies of the transverse field Ising model (TFIM) and transverse longitudinal field Ising model (TLFIM). The Trotterization circuits for the TFIM admit constant-depth circuits (CDCs) for arbitrary time, allowing us to locate a large number of eigen-energies above the background noise for up to six spins. Via circuit synthesis we show that the three-spin TLFIM has constant-depth structure although it does not meet the known CDC criteria. The CDCs enable the extraction of the ground and first-excited state energies of the three-site TLFIM via its dynamics. We also address complications from the noisy background and discrete Fourier transform to enhance the reliability of the extraction process and compare the results from different generations of IBM hardware to highlight the improvement.

A promising avenue for scaling quantum computing is to connect quantum processing units (QPUs) by generating entanglement between them. This requires circuit partitioning: partially rewriting quantum circuits to run on a distributed quantum system using quantum teleportation protocols, while preserving the unitary operation implemented by the circuit. The key metric to minimize when partitioning is the e-bit count, defined as the number of maximally entangled qubit pairs that must be generated between QPUs. We focus on partitioning the quantum Fourier transform (QFT) circuit, which is widely used as a subroutine in quantum algorithms such as quantum phase estimation and arithmetic circuits. Specifically, we present a partitioning scheme based on optimal gate-packing, compare it against prior analytical partitioning schemes for the QFT, and evaluate it against partitions produced by general-purpose circuit partitioning algorithms. We further validate our approach by implementing the partitioned circuit on quantum hardware.

There is growing interest in extensions of the standard model of gate-based quantum computation to include auxiliary degrees of freedom evolving according to a nonlinear Schrödinger equation. By reducing the Boolean satisfiability problem SAT to quantum state discrimination, Abrams and Lloyd argued that the right type of nonlinearity can be used to solve {\sf NP} and \#{\sf P} problems in polynomial time, at least in an idealized noise-free limit. For practical implementation, however, we are restricted to simulated and emergent nonlinearities, such as that appearing in mean field models for ultracold atoms and similar ensembles. A prominent example is the torsion model, which arises in two-component Bose-Einstein condensates and spin models with all-to-all Ising interaction. But torsion-based state discrimination appears to fall short of solving SAT. Here we close this gap by constructing the filtered oracle of the Valiant-Vazirani theorem, providing a randomized polynomial-time reduction from SAT to UNIQUE SAT, a promise problem where there is at most 1 satisfying assignment. In the noise free limit, the UNIQUE SAT problem can be olved in polynomial time using torsion nonlinearity. Quantum Valiant-Vazirani reduction is no faster than the efficient classical version, but a fault-tolerant implementation coupled to a nonlinear quantum coprocessor simulating torsion would enable polynomial time solution to {\sf NP} (but not \#{\sf P}) problems.

As large language models (LLMs) become embedded in quantum simulation workflows (IDE copilots, notebook assistants, agentic pipelines), evaluation must move beyond functional correctness to anticipate and catch structured failures before they propagate through expensive pipelines. We present a layered evaluation framework for materials-informed Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) circuit generation: (i) a gatekeeper screening rubric across seven physical and framework criteria; (ii) a circuit fidelity analysis comparing model outputs against analytical and reference-implementation values for H2/STO-3G/Jordan-Wigner/UCCSD, with ansatz classification and gate-composition breakdown; and (iii) design entropy, a run-to-run behavioral consistency metric. We surface a taxonomy of five distinct LLM failure modes (geometry hallucination, nonexistent API usage, runtime integration failures, constraint violations, and plausible-but-unverifiable output), each with distinct detectability profiles and structural to the task rather than to any one model. A forensic audit of the evaluation platform's own source code further establishes that two apparent model failures originated in the harness through silent fallback-template substitution, demonstrating that evaluation infrastructure belongs inside the same trust boundary as the models it tests. Applied across multiple foundation models on a Materials Project integrated pipeline, the framework shows that gatekeeper-style validation is necessary, not optional, for reliable deployment.

We investigate the response of entanglement to temperature variations in interacting two-qubit thermal states. For a general two-qubit interaction Hamiltonian, we derive exact expressions for the thermal concurrence, its first and second derivatives with respect to inverse temperature, and the thermal quantum Fisher information. We show that the rate of change of thermal entanglement is bounded by the thermal quantum Fisher information. We further derive a bound relating entanglement curvature and thermal quantum Fisher information, and show that temperature uncertainty induces a loss of entanglement bounded by the same quantity that determines thermometric sensitivity. These results establish thermal quantum Fisher information as a fundamental constraint on the response and robustness of entanglement in interacting two-qubit thermal states.

Here we investigate the all-optical control of spectral correlations in spontaneous parametric down-conversion. We show that when photon pairs are projected onto high-order spatial modes, the spatial structure of the pump field defines the phase-matching function of the nonlinear interaction. Thus, by structuring the pump field in both space and spectrum, the biphoton spectral correlations are fully controlled.Considering a standard periodically-poled crystal as the nonlinear medium, we show that the Gouy phase matching method proposed here can generate both spectrally uncorrelated and high-dimensional spectrally entangled photon pairs, similarly to what is achieved with aperiodically-poled crystals. Furthermore, we show that our method can generate a wider class of quantum states if the pump field is a spatiotemporal wavepacket, that is, if its spatial and spectral structures are correlated.

We present GPU algorithms for Ewald summation methods for accelerating N-body Stokes flow problems in periodic domains. Like most N-body codes, Ewald sums use a near-field/far-field decomposition. The near field involves particle-to-particle (P2P) interactions. The far field primarily involves particle-to-grid (P2G) and grid-to-particle (G2P) interactions, as well as Fast Fourier Transforms. For each interaction, we investigate several algorithmic variants. Our implementation uses PyKokkos, a Python interface for the Kokkos C++ parallel programming framework, which supports portability to AMD/NVIDIA GPU and ARM/x86 CPU architectures. Double and single-precision numerical results, alongside analytical performance models, confirm the efficiency of our algorithms on AMD and NVIDIA GPU and on ARM and AMD CPU architectures. The P2P interaction achieves around 73% compute efficiency on NVIDIA H200, 84% on NVIDIA A100, 60% on AMD MI300, 52% on Grace CPU, and 68% on AMD Epyc CPU. A straightforward implementation of the P2G kernel can become a computational bottleneck. We introduce a novel P2G algorithm that achieves up to 16$\times$ speedup compared to a baseline GPU implementation. The overall Ewald sum code processes approximately 8 million particles per second on a H200 GPU, and about a half-million particles per second on a Grace CPU, for nine digits of accuracy. We also perform a multi-GPU weak scaling test on up to 256 million particles (64 GPUs) that shows bounded communication cost for all stages except the all-to-all particle sorting, which can be reduced to neighbor communication in the relevant time-stepping regime.

Tissue motion correction through image registration is essential for ultrasound localization microscopy (ULM). Parametric image registration is commonly formulated as an optimization problem where motion parameters are iteratively updated to maximize image similarity, and used optimization algorithms typically rely on gradient information, the explicit evaluation of which can become computationally demanding. This work investigates Extremum Seeking Control (ESC) as an alternative to explicit derivative evaluation in image registration. By obtaining descent information via integrating perturbed and demodulated image similarity metric across iterations, ESC avoids differentiation of the image similarity metric with respect to motion parameters in each iteration. The classical ESC, whose optimization behavior approximates that of classical gradient descent (GD), is first compared with GD for affine image registration using simulated ground-truth motions derived from a beating ex vivo porcine heart dataset. The results show that ESC achieves registration accuracy and convergence behavior comparable to GD while reducing per-iteration computational cost by approximately 3.5-fold. ESC is subsequently employed in a two-stage motion correction pipeline, where affine registration compensates for global tissue motion and B-spline registration corrects residual local deformation. The proposed method is applied to ULM imaging of a beating ex vivo porcine heart and achieves a spatial resolution of 219 um, substantially below the half-wavelength diffraction limit of 321 um associated with 2.4 MHz diverging-wave imaging. These results demonstrate that ESC provides an effective alternative to explicit derivative evaluation in ULM image registration, enabling accurate motion correction and high-quality super-resolution imaging.

Transitioning quantum magnetometry from laboratory environments to real-world applications has been limited by a persistent trade-off between sensor miniaturization and magnetic sensitivity. While bulky systems can achieve high sensitivity, endoscopic probes commonly suffer from inefficient fluorescence collection and reduced performance. Here we resolve this trade-off and present a miniaturized diamond quantum magnetometer with a 6 mm diameter endoscopic sensor head, achieving a magnetic-field sensitivity of 91 pT/sqrt(Hz) with a 2 kHz measurement bandwidth in a magnetically unshielded environment. The fluorescence collection bottleneck is overcome by separating excitation and collection into different cores of a fused multi-core fiber bundle, coupled to the diamond through a custom high-numerical-aperture micro-objective. A compact FPGA-based backend performs microwave control, lock-in detection and real-time resonance tracking, enabling robust operation during magnetic-field imaging. To demonstrate the practical utility of the miniaturized sensor, we image the magnetic field of a commercial lithium-ion pouch cell during charge and discharge and reconstruct depth-integrated current-density maps of the current flow. These results show that endoscopic diamond magnetometers can combine high sensitivity with a probe geometry suitable for confined, unshielded measurements, opening new avenues in battery technology and beyond.

We investigate the effects of environmental noise on cooperation in a spatial evolutionary game model with variable population size. Building on a one-dimensional lattice model in which vacancies promote cooperation through spatial selection, we add random noise to the environmental quality parameter and consider two distinct types: annealed noise, where the environmental quality fluctu ates independently at each site and each time step, and quenched noise, where each site is assigned a permanently fixed random value. For annealed noise, we develop a mean-field theory by replacing the noise-dependent death probabilities with their distribution averages, and find that increasing the noise intensity shifts both the cooperator-defector phase boundary and the absorbing boundary upward in the parameter space, simultaneously expanding the cooperative regime and the extinc tion region. These predictions are confirmed by numerical simulations. In contrast, quenched noise leaves the phase boundary nearly unchanged across all noise levels, exerting only a weak effect on cooperator frequency. Together, these results demonstrate that temporal fluctuations, rather than static spatial heterogeneity, are the primary driver of noise-induced shifts in the cooperative phase structure.

Atom interferometers are among the most sensitive instruments for precision measurements and tests of fundamental physics. Their performance, however, is ultimately limited by quantum projection noise when uncorrelated atomic ensembles are employed. Cavity-assisted generation of entangled states has proven to be a promising route toward quantum-enhanced interferometry beyond the standard quantum limit. In this work, we present the realization and characterization of a monolithic bow-tie cavity developed to achieve a strong collective atom-light coupling with strontium atoms. Unlike conventional standing-wave Fabry-Pérot resonators, the traveling-wave geometry of the bow-tie cavity provides homogeneous atom-light coupling over the entire atomic ensemble, making it particularly suitable for entanglement-enhanced atom interferometry with freely falling atoms. The monolithic cavity architecture presents several scientifically relevant features such as high mechanical stability, high finesse, robustness against mirror misalignment, optical and atomic access and the option of generating squeezed states through different strategies. The cavity was realized for operation on the strontium $(5s^2) ^1S_0-(5s5p) ^3P_1$ transition at 689 nm and achieves a finesse of $\mathcal{F}=5.7\times 10^4$ while keeping the transmission of a single mirror sufficiently large to allow for efficient atomic information extraction. In this geometry, the cavity supports two foci with waists of 164 $μ$m and 31 $μ$m which gives access to different regimes of atom-cavity coupling. For ensembles containing up to $10^5$ atoms, the cavity is expected to enable metrological gains approaching 24 dB of spin squeezing through cavity-feedback squeezing, and 28 dB through quantum non-demolition measurements, demonstrating its potential as a platform for next-generation quantum-enhanced atom interferometers.

We study the propagation of coupled surface and internal equatorial internal waves. A model of two vertically stratified fluid layers with different constant densities is employed. Taking Coriolis forces into account, we derive explicit solutions to the linearized governing equations which assumes irrotational fluid motion in both layers separately, and further obtain the dispersion relation which determines the phase speeds of propagating surface and internal waves. We prove a result on solutions to the dispersion relations which greatly simplifies our subsequent analysis of the nonlinear dynamical systems which describe the motion of the fluid in the upper layer. Phase portraits for all possible streamlines in both fluid layers are presented, while furthermore a Lagrangian description of the fluid flow is obtained, and the particle trajectories of the fluid particles are determined.

In a standard two-level Ramsey interferometer, the measured phase accumulates linearly during the interrogation time. Here, we introduce three-level Ramsey interferometry that employs a noncyclic geometric phase response to enhance phase sensing, with projected internal-path interference reshaping the mapping from accumulated signal phase to readout phase. Near a geodesic-closure transition, a small accumulated signal phase produces a sharply amplified readout-phase shift. We quantify the accompanying gain--visibility tradeoff and identify a finite operating window in which the amplified response yields a net signal-to-noise-ratio gain under technical-noise-limited conditions. By tuning an initial Ramsey phase offset, this high-slope window can be positioned at a desired operating point and sampled repeatedly with shorter cycles, providing a geometric shortcut to improved projected stability. More broadly, these results establish a multilevel Ramsey route to enhanced phase sensitivity in quantum platforms, where two signal-collecting internal paths interfere to produce a noncyclic geometric response.

We characterize two nested Walsh parity-check filters implemented on Quandela's Belenos cloud photonic processor in a single-photon eight-mode spatial register. The modes are indexed by the vertices of the cube $Q_3$. The filters realize the classical $[8,7,2]$ single-parity-check code, the zero-sum neutral subspace $\mathcal{N}$ and the $[8,4,4]$ extended Hamming code, the parity-checked subspace $\mathcal{S}\subset\mathcal{N}$ with one DC and three face-parity syndrome channels. These are first-quantized path/mode encodings of classical codes: the experiment verifies leakage suppression and syndrome routing, not error correction or protection against photon loss, and all probabilities are conditional on postselected single-photon detections. Across more than 340,000 detections, neutral inputs show residual DC-port leakage of $0.02\%$-$1.1\%$ (mean $0.6\%$), corresponding to $\approx21\times$ suppression relative to the ideal $0.125$ DC-capture baseline and $31.6\times$ relative to the measured non-neutral control. Injected DC contamination gives a monotonic soft error signal, and the three face-parity syndrome channels route to their predicted ports with $94$-$99\%$ selectivity. A sector-preserving unitary core keeps leakage far below non-neutral controls over one to three applications, with differences dominated by calibration and compilation systematics rather than gate-cycle physics. We quantify these limits, including fixed-pattern separator bias, $\pm 0.02$ calibration offsets, and compilation scatter near the $10^{-3}$ leakage level, and report a Hong-Ou-Mandel degradation episode in which suppression vanished and recovered after recalibration.

Interference of time-bin encoded signals over free-space optical channels typically requires stringent mode filtering on receivers due to wavefront distortions from atmospheric turbulence, conventionally addressed with adaptive optics. Passive multimode receivers based on field-widened interferometers present a compelling alternative, enabling direct interference without the overhead of wavefront correction. We demonstrate a field-widened interferometer design that is implemented solely with reflective surfaces and achieves a high interference visibility (greater than 0.97) for spatially multimode beams. The interference of the multimode beams is enabled by two imaging systems that consist of a cavity configuration between a spherical concave mirror and a flat mirror. The configuration enables small form-factors, is inherently achromatic, and is based on standard spherical mirrors which reduces the complexity of the system. The interferometer is applicable for spatially multimode and turbulent optical channels, such as satellite communication, and is designed for quantum systems that use time-bin encoded qubits.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly interact with one another in multi-agent systems, from simulations of human discourse to influence operations and fully LLM-driven social platforms. These interactions give rise to new regimes of opinion propagation that are not yet well understood. We investigate whether classical opinion dynamics models, which have long been used to explain how interactions shape collective beliefs in human societies, can capture the behavior of LLM networks. We find that, while naive averaging-style models fail to track LLMs' opinion dynamics, simple modifications yield substantial gains in modeling fidelity. In particular, bias, an innate opinion toward which agents regress, emerges as a significant driver of LLM opinion dynamics, with its inclusion reducing cumulative estimated mean opinion error by up to 88%. We additionally find that these conclusions generalize across model families, discussion topics, and networks.

We report the design, commissioning, and operation of deuterium-deuterium (DD) and deuterium-tritium (DT) gas delivery systems developed to load a diamond anvil cell (DAC) beam target for muon-catalyzed fusion (muCF). The DAC approach enables DT fuel to be compressed to GPa pressures at more than twice the liquid density and heated from cryogenic temperatures through 500 K, opening access to a substantially expanded parameter range for muCF kinetics and yield measurements. In this approach, DT is cryo-condensed to a liquid in a minichamber and then compressed in the DAC using a helium-driven pneumatic membrane, achieving high pressures in a millimeter-scale DT sample volume. A DD gas delivery system was designed and used to validate the experimental apparatus, measure the gas quantities needed for filling, develop operational experience, and collect kinetics and yield data with DD targets. The DT gas delivery system adds tritium-specific capabilities for inventory minimization, secondary containment, and activity monitoring. The DT system integrates depleted uranium storage beds and a liquid helium cryogenic condenser used for pressure building and cryopumping. High-purity delivery is provided by a rapid-response palladium permeator. The system is housed in a helium-atmosphere glovebox held at negative pressure with continuous cleanup. We present the process and instrumentation design, a failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA), and data from the experiment's in situ Raman spectrometer, which provides direct confirmation of target loading and composition through the optically clear diamond anvils. The 2024 and 2025 DT campaigns achieved repeatable target fills and operation with no measurable tritium releases to the stack, demonstrating safe, high-purity DT loading at novel density-temperature conditions for muCF studies.

We consider an ideal Fermi gas in a container subject to a uniform gravitational field at absolute zero temperature. Under a semiclassical approximation, we examine the density profile of the particles and derive an expression for the chemical potential. A critical value of the chemical potential separates the weak- and strong-gravity regimes, and the kinetic and potential energies of the Fermi gas are determined in both regimes.

Ionization stabilization is a well-known phenomenon in strongly driven Soft-Coulomb atomic models, where the ionization probability decrease as the field amplitude increases. In this work, we investigate how this mechanism is affected by introducing a repulsive Morse barrier into the binding potential, leading to a Morse-Soft-Coulomb (MsC) model. A systematic comparison between the Soft-Coulomb and Morse-Soft-Coulomb systems is performed for different values of the softening parameter. Ionization probabilities, escape-time maps computed on the field-free energy shell and representative trajectories reveal that the stabilization window observed in the Soft-Coulomb model is strongly suppressed in the Morse-Soft-Coulomb system. To elucidate the origin of this behavior, we analyze the corresponding Kramers-Henneberger effective potentials. While the Soft-Coulomb model develops a symmetric double-well structure supporting two equivalent trapping regions, the Morse-Soft-Coulomb potential exhibits a single effective minimum as a consequence of the broken left-right symmetry introduced by the Morse branch. The combined analysis of ionization probabilities, escape dynamics, representative trajectories, and Kramers-Henneberger potentials indicates that the suppression of stabilization is closely associated with the modification of the phase-space transport structures and the reduction of the effective trapping region induced by the Morse

The weakly nonlinear response of a homogeneous magnetised plasma is usually written as a double cyclotron-harmonic expansion. This representation is explicit, but the repeated use of the Jacobi-Anger expansion produces long sums of Bessel functions and nested resonance denominators. In the linear problem we recently obtained an alternative formulation by keeping the Larmor phase unexpanded and by evaluating the characteristic integral in terms of the newly introduced incomplete-Bessel function $G_μ(z,ψ)$. In this article we apply the same idea directly to the first nonlinear Vlasov-Maxwell equation. The nonlinear source contains the linear response of an inner mode. When this linear response is written in incomplete-Bessel form, the outer characteristic integral produces a bivariate orbit-resolvent $G_{μ,ν}^{(r)}(z,ψ;w,χ)$. This function emerges therefore as the natural orbit integral generated by the first nonlinear characteristic problem. We derive the nonlinear distribution function in terms of these bivariate functions, collect the identities needed for the current projection, recover an extension of the classical double-harmonic Liu-Tripathi formula by expansion, and indicate how the nonlinear susceptibility tensor is obtained from bivariate angular contractions.

The biomechanics of pulsed-jet propulsion in aquatic animals, including squids and jellyfish, provide valuable insights into energy-efficient locomotion. In these organisms, flexible funnel deformation enables rapid acceleration and maneuverability while minimizing energy use. Drawing inspiration from these biological systems, this study investigates performance trade-offs between rigid and flexible nozzle geometries in pulsed-jet propulsion systems. A multi-objective Bayesian optimization framework integrated with three-dimensional fluid-structure interaction (FSI) simulations identifies nozzle designs that maximize hydrodynamic impulse and minimize jet energy input. The optimization reveals fundamentally distinct performance characteristics for rigid and flexible nozzles. Rigid nozzles achieve the highest impulse amplification, up to 5 times that of a baseline cylindrical nozzle, but at substantially increased energy expenditure. In contrast, flexible nozzles yield lower peak impulse enhancement of about 2.5 times while achieving significantly greater propulsion efficiency. The maximum normalized impulse-to-energy ratio for flexible nozzles is about 1.8 times higher than that of rigid configurations, indicating more effective conversion of input energy into useful propulsive output. Analysis of the flow physics shows that optimized rigid nozzles enhance performance through geometry-induced internal entrainment, secondary vortex formation, and contraction-driven jet acceleration. This results in stronger vortex circulation and downstream convection. Flexible nozzles use traveling expansion-contraction deformation waves that promote additional entrainment during expansion and accelerate the internally entrained fluid during contraction to improve pressure recovery, reduce pressure-energy expenditure, and mitigate negative pressure impulse contributions.