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We present spectroscopic data for four metastable state clear-out transitions between 399 nm and 412 nm for all even long-lived isotopes of Yb$^+$ as well as their hyperfine structure in $^{171}$Yb$^+$. The strong $^2 \rm{D}_{3/2} \rightarrow {}^1[1/2]_{1/2}$ transition at 412 nm represents an attractive alternative for the standard 935 nm repumper used in cooling and trapping experiments, while the transition to the $^3[3/2]_{3/2}$ state at 411 nm clears out the $^2 $F$_{7/2}$ state, for which typically 638 nm or 760 nm are used. These two alternative transitions simplify the experimental setup by removing the need for infrared optics to cool and manipulate Yb$^+$ and may be of particular interest when considering integrated photonics solutions. We also present data for the transitions $^2 $D$_{3/2} \rightarrow {}^3[1/2]_{3/2}$ at 399 nm, and $^2 $D$_{3/2} \rightarrow {}^1[5/2]_{5/2}$ at 410 nm including decay branching ratios of the excited states., Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures

We simulate a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate in the strongly dipolar regime, observing the existence of self-bound droplets, as well as their splitting into multiple droplets by confinement-induced frustration. Our quantum Monte Carlo approach goes beyond the limits of the established effective mean-field theories for dipolar quantum gases, revealing small droplets produced by strong dipolar interactions outside known stable regimes. The simulations include realistic molecular interactions and therefore have direct relevance for current and future experiments., Comment: 6 + 1 pages text + Supplementary Material (appendix). 3 figures + 1 table

This paper presents a routine to align an optical tweezer on a single trapped ion and use the ion as a probe to characterize the tweezer. We find a smallest tweezer waist of $2.3(2)\,\mu$m, which is in agreement with the theoretical minimal attainable waist of $2.5(2)\,\mu$m in our setup. We characterize the spatial dependence of the tweezer Rabi frequency which is suppressed by a factor of 19(3) in the immediate surrounding of the ion. We investigate the effects of optical forces and coherent population trapping on the ion. Finally, we show that the challenges posed by these forces can be overcome, and that the number of tweezers can be easily scaled up to reach several ions by using a spatial light modulator.

Probabilistic models in physics often require from the evaluation of normalized Boltzmann factors, which in turn implies the computation of the partition function Z. Getting the exact value of Z, though, becomes a forbiddingly expensive task as the system size increases. This problem is also present in probabilistic learning models such as the Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM), where the situation is even worse as the exact learning rules implies the computation of Z at each iteration. A possible way to tackle this problem is to use the Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) algorithm, which provides a tool to stochastically estimate the partition function of the system. So far, the standard application of the AIS algorithm starts from the uniform probability distribution and uses a large number of Monte Carlo steps to obtain reliable estimations of Z following an annealing process. In this work we show that both the quality of the estimation and the cost of the computation can be significantly improved by using a properly selected mean-field starting probability distribution. We perform a systematic analysis of AIS in both small- and large-sized problems, and compare the results to exact values in problems where these are known. As a result of our systematic analysis, we propose two successful strategies that work well in all the problems analyzed. We conclude that these are good starting points to estimate the partition function with AIS with a relatively low computational cost., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2007.11926

The analysis of glioblastoma (GB) cell locomotion and its modeling inspired by Levy random walks is presented herein. We study such walks occurring on a two-dimensional plane where the walk is similar to the motion of a bird flying with a constant velocity, but with random changes of direction in time. The intelligence of the bird is signaled by the instantaneous changes of flying direction, which become invisible in the time series obtained by projecting the 2D walk either on the x axis or the y axis. We establish that the projected 1D time series share the statistical complexity of time series frequently used to monitor physiological processes, shedding light on the role of crucial events (CE-s) in pathophysiology. Such CE-s are signified by abrupt changes of flying direction which are invisible in the 1D physiological time series. We establish a connection between the complex scaling index \delta generated by the CE-s through \mu_{R} = 2 - \delta , where \mu_{R} is the inverse power law index of the probability density function of the time interval between consecutive failures of the process of interest. We argue that the identification of empirical indices along with their theoretical relations afford important measures to control cancer., Comment: 30 pages, 44 references, 13 figures

We present a quantum Monte Carlo based density functional to describe droplet formation and supersolidity in dipolar systems. The usual Lee-Huang-Yang term, accounting for quantum correlations in the conventional extended Gross-Pitaievskii equation (eGPE), has been substituted by the correlation energy evaluated with Quantum Monte Carlo. We demonstrate the ability of the new functional to reproduce existing experimental data for the minimum critical number of atoms $N_\mathrm{c}$ required for droplet formation. $N_\mathrm{c}$ is a challenging quantity for theoretical predictions, and the eGPE provides only a qualitative description of it, mainly when it is applied to Dysprosium. We also use the new approach to characterize the BEC-supersolid transition. The quantum Monte Carlo based functional can be easily implemented in any existing eGPE code, improving the description of dipolar systems without increasing the computational cost., Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures

We report quantum Monte Carlo results of harmonically confined quantum Bose dipoles within a range of interactions covering the evolution from a gas phase to the formation of an array of droplets. Scaling the experimental setup to a computationally accessible domain we characterize that evolution in qualitative agreement with experiments. Our microscopic approach generates ground-state results free from approximations, albeit with some controlled statistical noise. The simultaneous estimation of the static structure factor and the one-body density matrix allows for a better knowledge of the quantum coherence between droplets. Our results show a narrow window of interaction strengths where diagonal and off-diagonal long-range order can coexist. This domain, which is the key signal of a supersolid state, is reduced with respect to the one predicted by the extended Gross-Pitaevskii equation. Differences are probably due to an increase of attraction in our model, observed previously in the calculation of critical atom numbers for single dipolar drops., Comment: 7 pages

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in Natural Language Processing (NLP), especially in domains where labeled data is scarce or expensive, such as clinical domain. However, to unlock the clinical knowledge hidden in these LLMs, we need to design effective prompts that can guide them to perform specific clinical NLP tasks without any task-specific training data. This is known as in-context learning, which is an art and science that requires understanding the strengths and weaknesses of different LLMs and prompt engineering approaches. In this paper, we present a comprehensive and systematic experimental study on prompt engineering for five clinical NLP tasks: Clinical Sense Disambiguation, Biomedical Evidence Extraction, Coreference Resolution, Medication Status Extraction, and Medication Attribute Extraction. We assessed the prompts proposed in recent literature, including simple prefix, simple cloze, chain of thought, and anticipatory prompts, and introduced two new types of prompts, namely heuristic prompting and ensemble prompting. We evaluated the performance of these prompts on three state-of-the-art LLMs: GPT-3.5, BARD, and LLAMA2. We also contrasted zero-shot prompting with few-shot prompting, and provide novel insights and guidelines for prompt engineering for LLMs in clinical NLP. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first works on the empirical evaluation of different prompt engineering approaches for clinical NLP in this era of generative AI, and we hope that it will inspire and inform future research in this area.

We study the quasiparticle properties of a dipolar impurity immersed in a two-dimensional dipolar bath. We use the ab-initio Diffusion Monte Carlo technique to determine the polaron energy, effective mass and quasiparticle residue. We find that both the polaron energy and quasiparticle residue follow a universal behaviour with respect to the polarization angle when properly scaled in terms of the scattering length. This trend is maintained over a wide range of values of the gas parameter, even in the highly correlated regime. Instead, the effective mass shows growing anisotropy as the tilting angle is increased, which is induced, mainly, by the anisotropy of the impurity-boson dipole-dipole interaction. Surprisingly, the effective mass is larger in the direction of minimum inter-particle repulsion. Finally, we use our Monte Carlo results to check the accuracy of perturbative approaches and determine their range of validity in terms of the gas parameter., Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures

Future fusion nuclear reactors will produce sustainable energy form the fusion of deuterium and tritium. In order to do so, the reactors will need to produce their own tritium through the neutron bombardment of lithium. Such reaction will produce tritium and helium inside the breeding blanket of the reactor. Helium can trigger nucleation mechanisms due to its very low solubility inside liquid metals. Consequently, the knowledge and understanding of the microscopic processes of helium nucleation is crucial to improve the efficiency, sustainability and safety of the fusion energy production. The formation of helium bubbles inside the liquid metal used as breeding material may be a serious issue that has yet to be fully understood. We provide further insight on the behavior of lithium and helium mixtures at experimentally corresponding operating conditions (800~K and pressures between 1 and 100 bar) using a suitable microscopic model able to describe the helium and lithium atomic interactions, in excellent agreement with available experimental data. The simulations predict the formation of helium bubbles with radii around 10 Angstroem at ambient pressure and with surface tension values between 0.6-1.0 N/m, with a dependency of the concentration of helium. We also report cohesive energies of helium as well as a quantitative estimation of the Hildebrand and Kumar cohesion parameters., Comment: 32 pages, 10 figures

We consider the implementation of quantum logic gates in trapped ions using tightly focused optical tweezers. Strong polarization gradients near the tweezer focus lead to qubit-state dependent forces on the ion. We show that these may be used to implement quantum logic gates on pairs of ion qubits in a crystal. The qubit-state dependent forces generated by this effect live on the plane perpendicular to the direction of propagation of the laser beams opening new ways of coupling to motional modes of an ion crystal. The proposed gate does not require ground state cooling of the ions and does not rely on the Lamb-Dicke approximation, although the waist of the tightly focused beam needs to be comparable with its wavelength in order to achieve the needed field curvature. Furthermore, the gate can be performed on both ground state and magnetic field insensitive clock state qubits without the need for counter-propagating laser fields. This simplifies the setup and eliminates errors due to phase instabilities between the gate laser beams. Finally, we show that imperfections in the gate execution, in particular pointing errors $<30$ nm in the tweezers reduce the gate fidelity from $\mathcal F\gtrsim 0.99998$ to $\gtrsim 0.999$.

Virtual Reality (VR) interfaces are increasingly used as remote visualization media in telerobotics. Remote environments captured through RGB-D cameras and visualized using VR interfaces can enhance operators' situational awareness and sense of presence. However, this approach has strict requirements for the speed, throughput, and quality of the visualized 3D data.Further, telerobotics requires operators to focus on their tasks fully, requiring high perceptual and cognitive skills. This paper shows a work-in-progress framework to address these challenges by taking the human visual system (HVS) as an inspiration. Human eyes use attentional mechanisms to select and draw user engagement to a specific place from the dynamic environment. Inspired by this, the framework implements functionalities to draw users's engagement to a specific place while simultaneously reducing latency and bandwidth requirements.

We investigate the phases of a Bose-Einstein condensate of dipolar atoms restricted to move in a two-dimensional plane. The dipole moments are all aligned in a direction tilted with respect to the plane normal. As a result of the attractive and repulsive components of the dipole-dipole interaction, the dipolar gas has a self-bound phase, which is stabilized by quantum fluctuations. Furthermore, tilting the dipoles tunes the anisotropy of the dipole-dipole interaction, which can trigger a spatial density modulation. In this work we study these two aspects and investigate the conditions for the formation of a self-bound and striped phase, which has been realized in experiments with dipolar droplets. We use a variational method based on the hypernetted-chain Euler-Lagrange optimization of a Jastrow-Feenberg ansatz for the many-body wave function to study the ground state properties. This method takes into account quantum fluctuations in a non-perturbative way and thus can be used also for strongly correlated systems., Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures

Background: At the beginning of 2020, a high number of COVID-19 cases affected Italy in a short period, causing a difficult supply of medical equipment. To deal with the problem, many healthcare operators readapted different masks to medical devices, but no experiment was conducted to evaluate their performance. The aims of our study were: to assess the performances of three masks and a CPAP helmet in their original configuration and after modifications, in the maintenance of mean pressure and half-amplitude variations using different PEEP valves and to analyse the impact of antibacterial (AB) or antibacterial-viral (ABV) pre-valve PEEP filters on the effective PEEP delivered to the patients. Four pressure ports were installed on each mask (three on helmet), mean values and half amplitudes of pressure were recorded. Tests were performed with any, AB, ABV filter before the PEEP valve. CPAP helmet was the most efficient interface producing more stable mean pressure and less prominent half-amplitude variations but the non-medical masks, especially after the modifications, maintained a stable mean pressure value with only a moderate increase of half-amplitude. The use of AB and ABV filters, produced respectively an increase of 2,23% and 16.5% in mean pressure, compared to no filter condition. CPAP helmet is the most reliable interface in terms of detected performance, but readapted masks can assure almost a similar performance. The use of ABV filters before the PEEP valve significantly increases the detected mean pressure while the AB filters have almost a neutral effect., Comment: This paper, even if paginated folowing ACTA IMEKO standards, has still never been submitted to that journal

We present the case study developed in the context of the 4SECURail project and the approach used for its formal modeling and analysis. Starting from a simple SysML/UML behavioral model of the system requirements, three formal models have been developed using three different frameworks, namely UMC, ProB, and CADP/LNT. The paper shows how the different ways to represent and analyze the system from the three different points of view allow us to take advantage of the resulting diversity., Comment: In Proceedings MARS 2022, arXiv:2203.09299

We study the dynamics of a one-dimensional Bose gas at unit filling in both shallow and deep optical lattices and obtain the dynamic structure factor ${S(k,\omega)}$ by monitoring the linear response to a weak probe pulse. We introduce a new procedure, based on the time-dependent variational Monte Carlo method (tVMC), which allows to evolve the system in real time, using as a variational model a Jastrow-Feenberg wave function that includes pair correlations. Comparison with exact diagonalization results of ${S(k,\omega)}$ obtained on a lattice in the Bose-Hubbard limit shows good agreement of the dispersion relation for sufficiently deep optical lattices, while for shallow lattices we observe the influence of higher Bloch bands. We also investigate non-linear response to strong pulses. From the power spectrum of the density fluctuations we obtain the excitation spectrum, albeit broadened, by higher harmonic generation after a strong pulse with a single low wave number. As a remarkable feature of our simulations we furthermore demonstrate that the full excitation spectrum can be retrieved from the power spectrum of the density fluctuations due to the stochastic noise inherent in any Monte Carlo method, without applying an actual perturbation., Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures

The energy of ultra-dilute quantum many-body systems is known to exhibit a universal dependence on the gas parameter $x=n a_0^d$, with $n$ the density, $d$ the dimensionality of the space ($d=1,2,3$) and $a_0$ the $s$-wave scattering length. The universal regime typically extends up to $x\approx 0.001$, while at larger values specific details of the interaction start to be relevant and different model potentials lead to different results. Dipolar systems are peculiar in this regard since the anisotropy of the interaction makes $a_0$ depend on the polarization angle $\alpha$, so different combinations of $n$ and $\alpha$ can lead to the same value of the gas parameter $x$. In this work we analyze the scaling properties of dipolar bosons in two dimensions as a function of the density and polarization dependent scattering length up to very large values of the gas parameter $x$. Using Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods we study the energy and the main structural and coherence properties of the ground state of a gas of dipolar bosons by varying the density and scattering length for fixed gas parameter. We find that the dipolar interaction shows relevant scaling laws up to unusually large values of $x$ that hold almost to the boundaries in the phase diagram where a transition to a stripe phase takes place.

A study of initial-state gluon radiation (ISR) in hadron collisions is presented using Drell-Yan (DY) events produced in proton-antiproton collisions by the Tevatron collider at a center-of-mass energy of 1.96 TeV. This paper adopts a novel approach which uses the mean value of the Z/$\gamma^*$ transverse momentum $$ in DY events as a powerful observable to characterize the effect of ISR. In a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 9.4 fb$^{-1}$ collected with the CDF Run II detector, $$ is measured as a function of the Z/$\gamma^*$ invariant mass. It is found that these two observables have a dependence, $ = -8 + 2.2 \ln m_{DY}^2$ [GeV/c], where $m_{DY}$ is the value of the Z/$\gamma^*$ mass measured in units of GeV/$c^2$. This linear dependence is observed for the first time in this analysis. It may be exploited to model the effect of ISR and constrain its impact in other processes., Comment: 14 pages, 14 figures

Fusion energy stands out as a promising alternative for a future decarbonised energy system. To be sustainable, future fusion nuclear reactors will have to produce their own tritium. In the so-called breeding blanket of a reactor, the neutron bombardment of lithium will produce the desired tritium, but also helium, which can trigger nucleation mechanisms owing to the very low solubility of helium in liquid metals. An understanding of the underlying microscopic processes is important for improving the efficiency, sustainability and reliability of the fusion energy conversion process. A spontaneous creation of helium drops or bubbles in the liquid metal used as breeding material in some designs may be a serious issue for the performance of the breeding blankets. This phenomenon has yet to be fully studied and understood. This work aims to provide some insight on the behavior of lithium and helium mixtures at experimentally corresponding operating conditions (843 K and pressures between 0.1 and 7 GPa). We report a microscopic study of the thermodynamic, structural and dynamical properties of lithium-helium mixtures, as a first step to the simulation of the environment in a nuclear fusion power plant. We introduce a microscopic model devised to describe the formation of helium drops in the thermodynamic range considered. A transition from a miscible homogeneous mixture to a phase-separated one, in which helium drops are nucleated, is observed as the pressure is increased above 0.175 GPa. The diffusion coefficient of lithium (2 {\AA} 2 /ps) is in excellent agreement with reference experimental data, whereas the diffusion coefficient of helium is in the range of 1 {\AA} 2 /ps and tends to decrease as pressure increases. The radii of helium drops have been found to be between 1 and 2 {\AA}.

At the Fermilab Tevatron proton-antiproton ($p\bar{p}$) collider, high-mass electron-neutrino ($e\nu$) pairs are produced predominantly in the process $p \bar{p} \rightarrow W(\rightarrow e\nu) + X$. The asymmetry of the electron and positron yield as a function of their pseudorapidity constrain the slope of the ratio of the $u$- to $d$-quark parton distributions versus the fraction of the proton momentum carried by the quarks. This paper reports on the measurement of the electron-charge asymmetry using the full data set recorded by the Collider Detector at Fermilab in 2001--2011 and corresponding to 9.1~fb$^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity. The measurement significantly improves the precision of the Tevatron constraints on the parton-distribution functions of the proton. Numerical tables of the measurement are provided., Comment: 27 pages, 25 figures. To be published in PRD

We propose a new scalable architecture for trapped ion quantum computing that combines optical tweezers delivering qubit state-dependent local potentials with oscillating electric fields. Since the electric field allows for long-range qubit-qubit interactions mediated by the center-of-mass motion of the ion crystal alone, it is inherently scalable to large ion crystals. Furthermore, our proposed scheme does not rely on either ground state cooling or the Lamb-Dicke approximation. We study the effects of imperfect cooling of the ion crystal, as well as the role of unwanted qubit-motion entanglement, and discuss the prospects of implementing the state-dependent tweezers in the laboratory., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures

We reveal a novel regime of photon-pair generation driven by the interplay of multiple bound states in the continuum resonances in nonlinear metasurfaces. This non-degenerate photon-pair generation is derived from the hyperbolic topology of the transverse phase-matching and can enable orders-of-magnitude enhancement of the photon rate and spectral brightness, as compared to the degenerate regime. We show that the entanglement of the photon-pairs can be tuned by varying the pump polarization, which can underpin future advances and applications of ultra-compact quantum light sources., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures

We propose a new method for generating programmable interactions in one- and two-dimensional trapped-ion quantum simulators. Here we consider the use of optical tweezers to engineer the sound-wave spectrum of trapped ion crystals. We show that this approach allows us to tune the interactions and connectivity of the ion qubits beyond the power-law interactions accessible in current setups. We demonstrate the experimental feasibility of our proposal using realistic tweezer settings and experimentally relevant trap parameters to generate the optimal tweezer patterns to create target spin-spin interaction patterns in both one- and two-dimensional crystals. Our approach will advance quantum simulation in trapped-ion platforms as it allows them to realize a broader family of quantum spin Hamiltonians.

Formal methods and supporting tools have a long record of success in the development of safety-critical systems. However, no single tool has emerged as the dominant solution for system design. Each tool differs from the others in terms of the modeling language used, its verification capabilities and other complementary features, and each development context has peculiar needs that require different tools. This is particularly problematic for the railway industry, in which formal methods are highly recommended by the norms, but no actual guidance is provided for the selection of tools. To guide companies in the selection of the most appropriate formal tools to adopt in their contexts, a clear assessment of the features of the currently available tools is required. To address this goal, this paper considers a set of 13 formal tools that have been used for railway system design, and it presents a systematic evaluation of such tools and a preliminary usability analysis of a subset of 7 tools, involving railway practitioners. The results are discussed considering the most desired aspects by industry and earlier related studies. While the focus is on the railway domain, the overall methodology can be applied to similar contexts. Our study thus contributes with a systematic evaluation of formal tools and it shows that despite the poor graphical interfaces, usability and maturity of the tools are not major problems, as claimed by contributions from the literature. Instead, support for process integration is the most relevant obstacle for the adoption of most of the tools.

Conditional multi-qubit gates are a key component for elaborate quantum algorithms. In a recent work, Rasmussen et al. (Phys. Rev. A 101, 022308) proposed an efficient single-step method for a prototypical multi-qubit gate, a Toffoli gate, based on a combination of Ising interactions between control qubits and an appropriate driving field on a target qubit. Trapped ions are a natural platform to implement this method, since Ising interactions mediated by phonons have been demonstrated in increasingly large ion crystals. However, the simultaneous application of these interactions and the driving field required for the gate results in undesired entanglement between the qubits and the motion of the ions, reducing the gate fidelity. In this work, we propose a solution based on adiabatic switching of these phonon mediated Ising interactions. We study the effects of imperfect ground state cooling, and use spin-echo techniques to undo unwanted phase accumulation in the achievable fidelities. For gates coupling to all axial modes of a linear crystal, we calculate high fidelities ($>$ 99%) $N$-qubit rotations with $N=$ 3-7 ions cooled to their ground state of motion and a gate time below 1~ms. The high fidelities obtained also for large crystals could make the gate competitive with gate-decomposed, multi-step variants of the $N$-qubit Toffoli gate, at the expense of requiring ground state cooling of the ion crystal., Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures including appendices

Probabilistic models based on Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) imply the evaluation of normalized Boltzmann factors, which in turn require from the evaluation of the partition function Z. The exact evaluation of Z, though, becomes a forbiddingly expensive task as the system size increases. This even worsens when one considers most usual learning algorithms for RBMs, where the exact evaluation of the gradient of the log-likelihood of the empirical distribution of the data includes the computation of Z at each iteration. The Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) method provides a tool to stochastically estimate the partition function of the system. So far, the standard use of the AIS algorithm in the Machine Learning context has been done using a large number of Monte Carlo steps. In this work we show that this may not be required if a proper starting probability distribution is employed as the initialization of the AIS algorithm. We analyze the performance of AIS in both small- and large-sized problems, and show that in both cases a good estimation of Z can be obtained with little computational cost.

We analyze the role played by quantum fluctuations on a Raman Spin-Orbit Coupled system in the stripe phase. We show that beyond mean-field effects stabilize the collapse predicted by mean-field theory and induce the emergence of two phases: a gas and a liquid, which also show spatial periodicity along a privileged direction. We show that the energetically favored phase is determined by the Raman coupling and the spin-dependent scattering lengths. We obtain the ground-state solution of the finite system by solving the extended Gross-Pitaevskii equation and find self-bound, droplet-like solutions that feature internal structure through a striped pattern. We estimate the critical number for binding associated to these droplets and show that their value is experimentally accessible. We report an approximate energy functional in order to ease the evaluation of the Lee-Huang-Yang correction in practical terms., Comment: 10 pages, 6 Figures

This is a Reply to the Comment from F. Cinti and M. Boninsegni on our recent work on the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) phase transition in a two-dimensional dipolar system [R.Bomb\'in, F. Mazzanti and J. Boronat, Physical Review A 100, 063614 (2019)]. The main criticism about our work, expressed in that Comment, is that we did not explicitly report the two spatial contributions to the total superfluid fraction. Here, we analyze our results for a point of the phase diagram corresponding to the stripe phase, close to the gas to stripe transition line, and for a temperature below the BKT critical temperature. The scaling with the system size of the contribution to the superfluid fraction, coming from the direction in which spatial order appears, shows that it remains finite in the thermodynamic limit, as we already stated in our original work. This allow us to state that the stripe phase is superfluid at low temperatures. Furthermore, we offer some comments that help to understand where the differences between the results of Cinti and Boninsegni and ours comes from.

Bidirectional nanoantennas are of key relevance for advanced functionalities to be implemented at the nanoscale, and in particular for color routing in an ultracompact flat-optics configuration. Here we demonstrate a novel approach avoiding complex collective geometries and/or restrictive morphological parameters, based on cross-polarized detuned plasmonic nanoantennas in a uniaxial (quasi-1D) bimetallic configuration. The nanofabrication of such a flat-optics system is controlled over a large-area (cm^2) by a novel self-organized technique exploiting ion-induced nanoscale wrinkling instability on glass templates to engineer tilted bimetallic nanostrip dimers. These nanoantennas feature broadband color routing with superior light scattering directivity figures, which are well described by numerical simulations and turn out to be competitive with the response of lithographic nanoantennas. These results demonstrate that our large-area self-organized metasurfaces can be implemented in real world applications of flat optics color routing from telecom photonics to optical nanosensing., Comment: 25+8 pages, 5+4 figures

We describe and characterize an experimental apparatus that has been used to study interactions between ultracold lithium atoms and ytterbium ions. The preparation of ultracold clouds of Li atoms is described as well as their subsequent transport and overlap with Yb$^+$ ions trapped in a Paul trap. We show how the kinetic energy of the ion after interacting with the atoms can be obtained by laser spectroscopy. From analyzing the dynamics of the ion in the absence of atoms, we conclude that background heating, due to electric field noise, limits attainable buffer gas cooling temperatures. We suspect that this effect can be mitigated by noise reduction and by increasing the density of the Li gas, in order to improve its cooling power. Imperfections in the Paul trap lead to so-called excess micromotion, which poses another limitation to the buffer gas cooling. We describe in detail how we measure and subsequently minimize excess micromotion in our setup. We measure the effect of excess micromotion on attainable ion temperatures after buffer gas cooling and compare this to molecular dynamics simulations which describe the observed data very well., Comment: 11 pages and 11 figures

A Bose gas under the effect of Raman Spin-Orbit Coupling (SOC) is analyzed using the Discrete Spin T-moves Diffusion Monte Carlo method. By computing the energy as well as the static structure factor and the superfluid fraction of the system, the emergence of an energetically favorable supersolid stripe state is observed, which is in agreement with recent observations. A significant enhancement of the stability of the stripe phase with respect to the mean-field prediction is observed when the strength of the inter-atomic correlations is increased. We also quantify and characterize the degree of superfluidity of the stripes and show that this quantity is mostly determined by the ratio between the Raman coupling and the square of the momentum difference between the pair of SOC inducing laser beams., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures

A two-dimensional quantum system of dipoles, with a polarization angle not perpendicular to the plane, shows a transition from a gas to a stripe phase. We have studied the thermal properties of these two phases using the path integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) method. By simulating the thermal density matrix, PIMC provides exact results for magnitudes of interest such as the superfluid fraction and the one-body density matrix. As it is well known, in two dimensions the superfluid-to-normal phase transition follows the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) scenario. Our results show that both the anisotropic gas and the stripe phases follow the BKT scaling laws. At fixed density and increasing the tilting angle, the transition temperature decreases in going from the gas to the stripe phase. Superfluidity in the perpendicular direction to the stripes is rather small close to the critical temperature but it becomes larger at lower temperatures, mainly close to the transition to the gas. Our results are in qualitative agreement with the supersolidity observed recently in a quasi-one-dimensional array of dipolar droplets.

Great advances in precision quantum measurement have been achieved with trapped ions and atomic gases at the lowest possible temperatures. These successes have inspired ideas to merge the two systems. In this way one can study the unique properties of ionic impurities inside a quantum fluid or explore buffer gas cooling of the trapped ion quantum computer. Remarkably, in spite of its importance, experiments with atom-ion mixtures remained firmly confined to the classical collision regime. We report a collision energy of 1.15(0.23) times the $s$-wave energy (or 9.9(2.0)~$\mu$K) for a trapped ytterbium ion in an ultracold lithium gas. We observed a deviation from classical Langevin theory by studying the spin-exchange dynamics, indicating quantum behavior in the atom-ion collisions. Our results open up numerous opportunities, such as the exploration of atom-ion Feshbach resonances, in analogy to neutral systems., Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures including appendices