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Birefringence, an inherent characteristic of optically anisotropic materials, is widely utilized in various imaging applications ranging from material characterizations to clinical diagnosis. Polarized light microscopy enables high-resolution, high-contrast imaging of optically anisotropic specimens, but it is associated with mechanical rotations of polarizer/analyzer and relatively complex optical designs. Here, we present a novel form of polarization-sensitive microscopy capable of birefringence imaging of transparent objects without an optical lens and any moving parts. Our method exploits an optical mask-modulated polarization image sensor and single-input-state LED illumination design to obtain complex and birefringence images of the object via ptychographic phase retrieval. Using a camera with a pixel resolution of 3.45 um, the method achieves birefringence imaging with a half-pitch resolution of 2.46 um over a 59.74 mm^2 field-of-view, which corresponds to a space-bandwidth product of 9.9 megapixels. We demonstrate the high-resolution, large-area birefringence imaging capability of our method by presenting the birefringence images of various anisotropic objects, including a birefringent resolution target, liquid crystal polymer depolarizer, monosodium urate crystal, and excised mouse eye and heart tissues., Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures, author names corrected

The minimum time required for a quantum system to evolve to a distinguishable state is set by the quantum speed limit, and consequently influences the change of quantum correlations and other physical properties. Here we study the time required to maximally entangle two principal systems interacting either directly or via a mediating ancillary system, under the same energy constraints. The direct interactions are proved to provide the fastest way to entangle the principal systems, but it turns out that there exist mediated dynamics that are just as fast. We show that this can only happen if the mediator is initially correlated with the principal systems. These correlations can be fully classical and can remain classical during the entangling process. The final message is that correlations save energy: one has to supply extra energy if maximal entanglement across the principal systems is to be obtained as fast as with an initially correlated mediator., Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures

We investigate interacting disordered zigzag nanoribbons at low doping, using the Hubbard model to treat electron interactions within the density matrix renormalization group and Hartree-Fock method. Extra electrons that are inserted into an interacting disordered zigzag nanoribbon divide into anyons. Furthermore, the fractional charges form a new disordered anyon phase with a highly distorted edge spin density wave, containing numerous localized magnetic moments residing on the zigzag edges, thereby displaying spin-charge separation and a strong non-local correlation between the opposite zigzag edges. We make the following new predictions, which can be experimentally tested: (1) In the low doping case and weak disorder regime, the soft gap in the tunneling density of states is replaced by a sharp peak at the midgap energy with two accompanying peaks. The $e^-/2$ fractional charges that reside on the boundary of the zigzag edges are responsible for these peaks. (2) We find that the midgap peak disappears as the doping concentration increases. The presence of $e-/2$ fractional charges will be strongly supported by the detection of these peaks. Doped zigzag ribbons may also exhibit unusual transport, magnetic, and inter-edge tunneling properties., Comment: 16 pages, 1~11 pages are main paper and 12~16 pages are supplementary material. 8 figures(for main article), 4 figures (for supplementary material)

The effective work-function of metal electrode is one of the major factors to determine the threshold voltage of metal/oxide/semiconductor junction. In this work, we demonstrate experimentally that the effective work-function of Aluminum (Al) electrode in Al/SiO$_2$/n-Si junction increases significantly by $\sim$1.04 eV with the graphene interlayer inserted at Al/SiO$_2$ interface. We also provide the device-physical analysis of solving Poisson equation when the flat-band voltage is applied to the junction, supporting that the wide tuning of Al effective work-function originates from the electrical dipole layer formed by the overlap of electron orbitals between Al and graphene layer. Our work suggests the feasibility of constructing the dual-metal gate CMOS circuitry just by using Al electrodes with area-specific underlying graphene interlayer., Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures

We propose a simple and generic construction of the variational tensor network operators to study the quantum spin systems by the synergy of ideas from the imaginary-time evolution and variational optimization of trial wave functions. By applying these operators to simple initial states, accurate variational ground state wave functions with extremely few parameters can be obtained. Furthermore, the framework can be applied to study spontaneously symmetry breaking, symmetry protected topological, and intrinsic topologically ordered phases, and we show that symmetries of the local tensors associated with these phases can emerge directly after the optimization without any gauge fixing. This provides a universal way to identify quantum phase transitions without prior knowledge of the system., Comment: 16 pages, 12 figures

Identifying the three-dimensional (3D) crystal-plane and strain-field distributions of nanocrystals is essential for optical, catalytic, and electronic applications. Here, we developed a methodology for visualizing the 3D information of chiral gold nanoparticles with concave gap structures by Bragg coherent X-ray diffraction imaging. The distribution of the high-Miller-index planes constituting the concave chiral gap was precisely determined. The highly strained region adjacent to the chiral gaps was resolved, which was correlated to the 432-symmetric morphology of the nanoparticles and its corresponding plasmonic properties were numerically predicted from the atomically defined structures. This approach can serve as a general characterization platform for visualizing the 3D crystallographic and strain distributions of nanoparticles, especially for applications where structural complexity and local heterogeneity are major determinants, as exemplified in plasmonics., Comment: Sungwook Choi and Sang Won Im contributed equally to this work. Corresponding author. Email: nkitae@snu.ac.kr, hkim@sogang.ac.kr

We propose a hybrid framework opPINN: physics-informed neural network (PINN) with operator learning for approximating the solution to the Fokker-Planck-Landau (FPL) equation. The opPINN framework is divided into two steps: Step 1 and Step 2. After the operator surrogate models are trained during Step 1, PINN can effectively approximate the solution to the FPL equation during Step 2 by using the pre-trained surrogate models. The operator surrogate models greatly reduce the computational cost and boost PINN by approximating the complex Landau collision integral in the FPL equation. The operator surrogate models can also be combined with the traditional numerical schemes. It provides a high efficiency in computational time when the number of velocity modes becomes larger. Using the opPINN framework, we provide the neural network solutions for the FPL equation under the various types of initial conditions, and interaction models in two and three dimensions. Furthermore, based on the theoretical properties of the FPL equation, we show that the approximated neural network solution converges to the a priori classical solution of the FPL equation as the pre-defined loss function is reduced., Comment: 28 pages, 12 figures

Two-mode squeezed vacuum states are a crucial component of quantum technologies. In the microwave domain, they can be produced by Josephson ring modulator which acts as a three-wave mixing non-degenerate parametric amplifier. Here, we solve the master equation of three bosonic modes describing the Josephson ring modulator with a novel numerical method to compute squeezing of output fields and gain at low signal power. We show that the third-order interaction from the three-wave mixing process intrinsically limits squeezing and reduces gain. Since our results are related to other general cavity-based three-wave mixing processes, these imply that any non-degenerate parametric amplifier will have an intrinsic squeezing limit in the output fields., Comment: 6+6 pages, 4 figures

We study the simplest quantum lattice spin model for the two-dimensional (2D) cubic ferromagnet by means of mean-field analysis and tensor network calculation. While both methods give rise to similar results in detecting related phases, the 2D infinite projected entangled-pair state (iPEPS) calculation provides more accurate values of transition points. Near the phase boundary, moreover, our iPEPS results indicate that it is more difficult to pin down the orientation of magnetic easy axes, and we interpret it as the easy-axis softening. This phenomenon implies an emergence of continuous $U(1)$ symmetry, which is indicated by the low-energy effective model and has been analytically shown by the field theory. Our model and study provide a concrete example for utilizing iPEPS near the critical region, showing that the emergent phenomenon living on the critical points can already be captured by iPEPS with a rather small bond dimension., Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, 1 Table

We investigate the non-equilibrium states of an interacting multi-component quantum system when only an extensive subsystem is quantum-quenched or driven from the ground state. As a concrete example, we consider a system where two XXZ spin chains are coupled to a transverse field Ising (TFI) chain, and only the transverse field in the TFI chain is quantum-quenched or periodically driven in time, starting from an initially ordered state. This system is studied using density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) simulations and various entanglement entropy diagnostics. In the case of quantum quenching, when the transverse field is suddenly switched on to become the largest energy scale, the resulting internal dynamics leads to a pre-thermal steady state with persistent oscillating magnetization (`self-driving') and emergent conservation laws. Upon applying the time-dependent drive to the TFI chain (`external driving'), sufficiently fast drive gives rise to a pre-thermal steady state with finite magnetization, whereas a slow drive generates a high-temperature disordered state. We briefly discuss the experimental implementation of our protocol in organic materials with quantum-tunneling hydrogen atoms., Comment: 6+4 pages, 3+4 figures

Learning the mapping between two function spaces has garnered considerable research attention. However, learning the solution operator of partial differential equations (PDEs) remains a challenge in scientific computing. Fourier neural operator (FNO) was recently proposed to learn solution operators, and it achieved an excellent performance. In this study, we propose a novel \textit{pseudo-differential integral operator} (PDIO) to analyze and generalize the Fourier integral operator in FNO. PDIO is inspired by a pseudo-differential operator, which is a generalized differential operator characterized by a certain symbol. We parameterize this symbol using a neural network and demonstrate that the neural network-based symbol is contained in a smooth symbol class. Subsequently, we verify that the PDIO is a bounded linear operator, and thus is continuous in the Sobolev space. We combine the PDIO with the neural operator to develop a \textit{pseudo-differential neural operator} (PDNO) and learn the nonlinear solution operator of PDEs. We experimentally validate the effectiveness of the proposed model by utilizing Darcy flow and the Navier-Stokes equation. The obtained results indicate that the proposed PDNO outperforms the existing neural operator approaches in most experiments., Comment: 23 pages, 13 figures