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Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty-first century, challenging the prevailing view that anthropogenic forcing causes climate warming. Various mechanisms have been proposed for this hiatus in global warming, but their relative importance has not been quantified, hampering observational estimates of climate sensitivity. Here we show that accounting for recent cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific reconciles climate simulations and observations. We present a novel method of uncovering mechanisms for global temperature change by prescribing, in addition to radiative forcing, the observed history of sea surface temperature over the central to eastern tropical Pacific in a climate model. Although the surface temperature prescription is limited to only 8.2% of the global surface, our model reproduces the annual-mean global temperature remarkably well with correlation coefficient r = 0.97 for 1970-2012 (which includes the current hiatus and a period of accelerated global warming). Moreover, our simulation captures major seasonal and regional characteristics of the hiatus, including the intensified Walker circulation, the winter cooling in northwestern North America and the prolonged drought in the southern USA. Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to a La-Niña-like decadal cooling. Although similar decadal hiatus events may occur in the future, the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas increase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On cooling through the transition temperature Tc of a conventional superconductor, an energy gap develops as the normal-state charge carriers form Cooper pairs; these pairs form a phase-coherent condensate that exhibits the well-known signatures of superconductivity: zero resistivity and the expulsion of magnetic flux (the Meissner effect). However, in many unconventional superconductors, the formation of the energy gap is not coincident with the formation of the phase-coherent superfluid. Instead, at temperatures above the critical temperature a range of unusual properties, collectively known as ‘pseudogap phenomena’, are observed. Here we argue that a key pseudogap phenomenon—fluctuating superconductivity occurring substantially above the transition temperature—could be induced by the proximity of a Mott-insulating state. The Mott-insulating state in the κ-(BEDT-TTF)2X organic molecular metals can be tuned, without doping, through superconductivity into a normal metallic state as a function of the parameter t/U, where t is the tight-binding transfer integral characterizing the metallic bandwidth and U is the on-site Coulomb repulsion. By exploiting a particularly sensitive probe of superconducting fluctuations, the vortex-Nernst effect, we find that a fluctuating regime develops as t/U decreases and the role of Coulomb correlations increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The counter-intuitive properties of quantum mechanics have the potential to revolutionize information processing by enabling the development of efficient algorithms with no known classical counterparts. Harnessing this power requires the development of a set of building blocks, one of which is a method to initialize the set of quantum bits (qubits) to a known state. Additionally, fresh ancillary qubits must be available during the course of computation to achieve fault tolerance. In any physical system used to implement quantum computation, one must therefore be able to selectively and dynamically remove entropy from the part of the system that is to be mapped to qubits. One such method is an ‘open-system’ cooling protocol in which a subset of qubits can be brought into contact with an external system of large heat capacity. Theoretical efforts have led to an implementation-independent cooling procedure, namely heat-bath algorithmic cooling. These efforts have culminated with the proposal of an optimal algorithm, the partner-pairing algorithm, which was used to compute the physical limits of heat-bath algorithmic cooling. Here we report the experimental realization of multi-step cooling of a quantum system via heat-bath algorithmic cooling. The experiment was carried out using nuclear magnetic resonance of a solid-state ensemble three-qubit system. We demonstrate the repeated repolarization of a particular qubit to an effective spin-bath temperature, and alternating logical operations within the three-qubit subspace to ultimately cool a second qubit below this temperature. Demonstration of the control necessary for these operations represents an important step forward in the manipulation of solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance qubits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most materials expand upon heating. Although rare, some materials expand on cooling, and are said to exhibit negative thermal expansion (NTE); but the property is exhibited in only one crystallographic direction. Such materials include silicon and germanium at very low temperature (<100?K) and, at room temperature, glasses in the titania-silica family, Kevlar, carbon fibres, anisotropic Invar Fe-Ni alloys, ZrW2O3 (ref. 4) and certain molecular networks. NTE materials can be combined with materials demonstrating a positive thermal expansion coefficient to fabricate composites exhibiting an overall zero thermal expansion (ZTE). ZTE materials are useful because they do not undergo thermal shock on rapid heating or cooling. The need for such composites could be avoided if ZTE materials were available in a pure form. Here we show that an electrically conductive intermetallic compound, YbGaGe, can exhibit nearly ZTE-that is, negligible volume change between 100 and 400?K. We suggest that this response is due to a temperature-induced valence transition in the Yb atoms. ZTE materials are desirable to prevent or reduce resulting strain or internal stresses in systems subject to large temperature fluctuations, such as in space applications and thermomechanical actuators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study on the quantum Zeno effect which states that if a quantum system is measured often enough, it will never be able to change its state and will not evolve at all. The authors of the research first considered disturbances to the thermal equilibrium of a system of two energy surrounded by an infinite reservoir of heat. They proved that the entropy and the temperature of both systems and its surrounding heat bath can be decreased or increase by modifying how frequently the system is probed. They concluded according to the principle that it should be possible to control both the production of entropy and the cooling or heating of the system by modifying how it is probe.