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Physical Review Letters

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May 9, 2008 Topological defect in a spinor BEC. The white and black tubes indicate the creation of a knot with topological charge equal to 1. A component of the order parameter is represented on the torus with color-coded phase information.
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May 12, 2008 Edited by Martin Blume
Letters from the Past — A PRL Retrospective: This week's Milestone Letters were originally published in 1974. Milestone Letters: Discovery of the J/ψ Milestone Letters >
April 29, 2008 We recently stated here that peer review is a source of great strength for APS journals, but did not discuss why. What are the elements of a helpful report? Who benefits from such a report, and how?
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March 10, 2008 The American Physical Society announces a highly selective award program to recognize scientists who have been exceptionally helpful in assessing manuscripts for publication in the APS journals. The program will annually recognize 130 of the 42,000 currently active referees, but in this inaugural year a larger group of 534 referees has been selected for the “Outstanding Referee” designation.
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February 22, 2008 Starting with the 1975 discovery of the tau lepton, I look back on the last three decades of change in the substance and style of experimental and theoretical research in elementary particle physics. I recount the major accomplishments of those decades and predict a bright future for particle physics in the next two decades. Turning to three problems, I lament the change in theoretical style and taste, I discuss the growth in the complexity, size, and cost of particle physics experiments, and I conclude with a pessimistic comment on the size of particle physics collaborations.
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May 8, 2008
Researchers propose a new and less challenging way to "squeeze" light, strongly reducing quantum fluctuations to make a beam with unwavering intensity.
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More Focus Articles
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The timeline features events related to the Physical Review and PRL, as well as seminal developments in physics after 1893. We also list a few important papers published by the journals. Each week, papers published in PRL will be highlighted separately as Milestone Letters.
Complete Timeline >
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To promote reading across fields, the editors of Physical Review Letters offer "Suggestions" each week of papers that they hope will lead readers to explore other areas of physics. Please see our Announcement PRL 98, 010001 (2007).
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D. C. Marinica, A. G. Borisov, and S. V. Shabanov
With examples of two parallel dielectric gratings and two arrays of thin parallel dielectric cylinders, it is shown that the interaction between trapped electromagnetic modes can lead to scattering resonances with practically zero width. Such resonances are the bound states in the radiation continuu...
[Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 183902
] Published Thu May 8, 2008
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Roberto Cerbino and Veronique Trappe
We demonstrate the use of an ordinary white-light microscope for the study of the q-dependent dynamics of colloidal dispersions. Time series of digital video images are acquired in bright field with a fast camera, and image differences are Fourier analyzed as a function of the time delay between the...
[Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 188102
] Published Mon May 5, 2008
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Johannes Berg
In order to express specific genes at the right time, the transcription of genes is regulated by the presence and absence of transcription factor molecules. With transcription factor concentrations undergoing constant changes, gene transcription takes place out of equilibrium. In this Letter we disc...
[Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 188101
] Published Mon May 5, 2008
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A. R. Rocha, M. Rossi, A. Fazzio, and Antonio J. da Silva
Using a combination of density functional theory and recursive Green‘s functions techniques, we present a full description of a large scale sensor, accounting for disorder and different coverages. Here, we use this method to demonstrate the functionality of nitrogen-rich carbon nanotubes as ammoni...
[Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 176803
] Published Tue Apr 29, 2008
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Mikko Möttönen, Juha J. Vartiainen, and Jukka P. Pekola
We present the first measurements of the Berry phase in a superconducting Cooper pair pump. A fixed amount of Berry phase is accumulated to the quantum-mechanical ground state in each adiabatic pumping cycle, which is determined by measuring the charge passing through the device. The dynamic and geo...
[Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 177201
] Published Mon Apr 28, 2008
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Eric Grelet
We report a study of colloidal suspensions of highly monodisperse semiflexible chiral rodlike viruses, denoted fd, in the range of high concentrations. Small angle x-ray scattering experiments reveal the existence of two hexagonal phases: the first one is crystalline and the second one is hexatic co...
[Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 168301
] Published Thu Apr 24, 2008
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T. Kumagai, M. Kaizu, S. Hatta, H. Okuyama, T. Aruga, I. Hamada, and Y. Morikawa
The dynamics of water dimers was investigated at the single-molecule level by using a scanning tunneling microscope. The two molecules in a water dimer, bound on a Cu(110) surface at 6 K, were observed to exchange their roles as hydrogen-bond donor and acceptor via hydrogen-bond rearrangement. The ...
[Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 166101
] Published Thu Apr 24, 2008
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Maher Harb, Ralph Ernstorfer, Christoph T. Hebeisen, Germán Sciaini, Weina Peng, Thibault Dartigalongue, Mark A. Eriksson, Max G. Lagally, Sergei G. Kruglik, and R. J. Miller
The excitation of a high density of carriers in semiconductors can induce an order-to-disorder phase transition due to changes in the potential-energy landscape of the lattice. We report the first direct resolution of the structural details of this phenomenon in freestanding films of polycrystalline...
[Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 155504
] Published Fri Apr 18, 2008
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Y. Nakajima, T. Nakagawa, T. Tamegai, and H. Harima
We report low-temperature specific-heat studies on the single-crystalline ternary-iron silicide superconductor Lu2Fe3Si5 with Tc=6.1 K down to ∼Tc/20. We confirm a reduced normalized jump in specific heat at Tc, and find that the specific heat divided by temperature C/T shows a sudden drop at...
[Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 157001
] Published Tue Apr 15, 2008
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Yoshikazu Tanaka, Tomoyuki Takeuchi, Stephen W. Lovesey, Kevin S. Knight, Ashish Chainani, Yasutaka Takata, Masaki Oura, Yasunori Senba, Haruhiko Ohashi, and Shik Shin
Enantiomers, or stereoisomers, have crystal structures that are mirror images of each other and are thus handed, like our right and left hands. The physical properties of enantiomers are identical except for optical activity, which rotates linearly polarized light by equal amounts but in opposite di...
[Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 145502
] Published Tue Apr 8, 2008
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General Physics: Statistical and Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Information, etc.
Ariel Bendersky, Fernando Pastawski, and Juan Pablo Paz
We present a new method for quantum process tomography enabling the efficient estimation, with fixed precision, of any of the parameters characterizing a quantum channel. The estimation strategy depends upon the set of matrix elements one selects to estimate. Furthermore, we describe a way to effici...
[Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 190403
] Published Tue May 13, 2008
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Nuclear Physics
H. van Hees, M. Mannarelli, V. Greco, and R. Rapp
We evaluate heavy-quark (HQ) transport properties in a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) within a Brueckner many-body scheme employing interaction potentials extracted from thermal lattice QCD. The in-medium T matrices for elastic charm- and bottom-quark scattering off light quarks in the QGP are dominated b...
[Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 192301
] Published Tue May 13, 2008
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M. Kotulla et al. CBELSA/TAPS Collaboration
Information on hadron properties in the nuclear medium has been derived from the photoproduction of ω mesons on the nuclei C, Ca, Nb, and Pb using the Crystal Barrel/TAPS detector at the ELSA tagged photon facility in Bonn. The dependence of the ω-meson cross section on the nuclear mass number has...
[Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 192302
] Published Tue May 13, 2008
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Nonlinear Dynamics, Fluid Dynamics, Classical Optics, etc.
T. Still, W. Cheng, M. Retsch, R. Sainidou, J. Wang, U. Jonas, N. Stefanou, and G. Fytas
We report on the observation of two hypersonic phononic gaps of different nature in three-dimensional colloidal films of nanospheres using Brillouin light scattering. One is a Bragg gap occurring at the edge of the first Brillouin zone along a high-symmetry crystal direction. The other is a hybridiz...
[Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 194301
] Published Tue May 13, 2008
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Condensed Matter: Structure, etc.
A. D. Fefferman, R. O. Pohl, A. T. Zehnder, and J. M. Parpia
We have made reliable measurements of the sound velocity δv/v0 and internal friction Q-1 in vitreous silica at 1.03, 3.74, and 14.0 kHz between 1 mK and 0.5 K. In contrast with earlier studies that did not span as wide a temperature and frequency range, our measurements of Q-1 reveal a crossover...
[Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 195501
] Published Tue May 13, 2008
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B. D. Todd, J. S. Hansen, and Peter J. Daivis
It has been suggested that for fluids in which the rate of strain varies appreciably over length scales of the order of the intermolecular interaction range, the viscosity must be treated as a nonlocal property of the fluid. The shear stress can then be postulated to be a convolution of this nonloca...
[Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 195901
] Published Tue May 13, 2008
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Emanuela Zaccarelli, Stefan Andreev, Francesco Sciortino, and David R. Reichman
Vitrification in colloidal systems typically occurs at high densities driven by sharply varying, short-ranged interactions. The possibility of glassy behavior arising from smoothly varying, long-ranged particle interactions has received relatively little attention. Here we investigate the behavior o...
[Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 195701
] Published Mon May 12, 2008
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A. A. Stekolnikov, F. Bechstedt, M. Wisniewski, J. Schäfer, and R. Claessen
Combining total-energy calculations, electronic-structure studies, and scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), we demonstrate that the observed one-dimensional nanowires are composed of Pt-induced Ge structures instead of Pt chains. Pt-Ge bonds are favored versus Pt-Pt ones. The novel tetramer-dimer-ch...
[Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 196101
] Published Mon May 12, 2008
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Condensed Matter: Electronic Properties, etc.
Hakima Abou-Rachid, Anguang Hu, Vladimir Timoshevskii, Yanfeng Song, and Louis-Simon Lussier
We present a theoretical study of a new hybrid material, nanostructured polymeric nitrogen, where a polymeric nitrogen chain is encapsulated in a carbon nanotube. The electronic and structural properties of the new system are studied by means of ab initio electronic structure and molecular dynamics...
[Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 196401
] Published Tue May 13, 2008
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S. V. Borisenko, A. A. Kordyuk, A. N. Yaresko, V. B. Zabolotnyy, D. S. Inosov, R. Schuster, B. Büchner, R. Weber, R. Follath, L. Patthey, and H. Berger
Using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy we demonstrate that a normal-state pseudogap exists above TN-IC in one of the most studied two-dimensional charge-density wave (CDW) dichalcogenides 2H-TaSe2. The initial formation of the incommensurate CDW is confirmed as being driven by a conventiona...
[Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 196402
] Published Tue May 13, 2008
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Papers recently accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters (view more).
General Physics: Statistical and Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Information, etc.
Generation of high fidelity four photon cluster state and quantum domain demonstration of one way quantum computing
Yuuki Tokunaga, Shin Kuwashiro, Takashi Yamamoto, Masato Koashi and Nobuyuki Imoto
We experimentally demonstrate a simple scheme for generating a four-photon entangled cluster state with fidelity over 0.860 ± 0.015. We show that the fidelity is high enough to guarantee that the produced state is distinguished from GHZ, W, and Dicke types of genuine four-qubit entanglement. We also demonstrate basic operations of one-way quantum computing using the produced state and show that the output state fidelities surpass classical bounds, which indicates that the entanglement in the produced state essentially contributes to the quantum operation.
Accepted Tue May 13, 2008
Optimum spin squeezing in Bose Einstein condensates with particle losses
Li Yun, Y. Castin and A. Sinatra
The problem of spin squeezing with a bimodal condensate in presence of particle losses is solved analytically by the Monte Carlo wavefunction method. We find the largest obtainable spin squeezing as a function of the one-body loss rate, the two-body and three-body rate constants, and the s-wave scattering length.
Accepted Tue May 13, 2008
Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
Distant dipolar fields in laser polarized gases on macroscopic scales
PaulP Zanker, Jorg Schmiedeskamp, Hans W. Spiess and Rodolfo H. Acosta
Distant dipolar fields among nuclear spins on macroscopic scales in the gas phase are reported for the first time. Their observation via interatomic multiple quantum coherences requires high nuclear spin polarization corresponding to spin temperatures of a few mK, which is generated in laser polarized 3He, and proper control of the gas diffusion through a heavier buffer gas. This combination of physics at low and ambient temperatures opens up new ways of studying the relative translational diffusion of atoms and of gas diffusion in structures with a large range of length scales.
Accepted Tue May 13, 2008
Resonances in electron impact electron detachment of C_{2}^{-}
Gabriela Halmova and Jonathan Tennyson
Molecular R-matrix with pseudostate calculations are reported for the electron impact ionisation cross section of the carbon dimer anion. A 1Sg+ resonance is found near the detachment threshold and two further resonances, of 3Pg and 1Pg symmetry, are found near 10 eV close to the structures observed experimentally. These unusual shape resonances are a result of the competition between the repulsive Coulomb interaction and the large, attractive polarizability of C2-. Use of the Born approximation to allow for higher partial waves gives a total cross section close to that observed experimentally.
Accepted Mon May 12, 2008
Nonlinear Dynamics, Fluid Dynamics, Classical Optics, etc.
Exact linear hydrodynamics from the Boltzmann equation
I. V. Karlin, M. Colangeli and M. Kroger
Exact (to all orders in Knudsen number) equations of linear hydrodynamics are derived from the Boltzmann kinetic equation with the Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook collision integral. The exact hydrodynamic equations are cast in a form which allows us to immediately prove their hyperbolicity, stability, and existence of an H-theorem.
Accepted Tue May 13, 2008
Elimination of vortex streets in bluff body flows
S. Dong, G. S. Triantafyllou and G. E. Karniadakis
We present an effective technique for suppressing the vortex-induced vibrations of bluff bodies by eliminating the von Karman street formed in their wake. Specifically, we find that small amounts of combined windward suction/leeward blowing around the body modify the wake instability and lead to suppression of the fluctuating lift force. Three-dimensional simulations and stability analysis are employed to quantify our findings for the flow past fixed and flexibly-mounted circular cylinders.
Accepted Mon May 12, 2008
Plasma and Beam Physics
Exact relativistic kinetic theory of an electron beam--plasma system: Hierarchy of the competing modes in the system parameter space
A. Bret, L. Gremillet, D. Benisti and E. Lefebvre
Besides being one of the most fundamental basic issues of plasma physics, the stability analysis of an electron beam-plasma system is of critical relevance in many areas of physics. Surprisingly, decades of extensive investigation had not yet resulted in a realistic unified picture of the multidimensional unstable spectrum within a fully relativistic and kinetic framework. All attempts made so far in this direction were indeed restricted to simplistic distribution functions and/or did not aim at a complete mapping of the beam-plasma parameter space. The present paper comprehensively tackles this problem by implementing an exact linear model. We show that three kinds of modes compete in the linear phase, which can be classified according to the direction of their wavenumber with respect to the beam. We then determine their respective domain of preponderance in a three-dimensional parameter space. All these results are supported by multidimensional particle-in-cell simulations.
Accepted Mon May 12, 2008
Breakdown limits on gigavolt per-meter electron beam-driven wakefields in dielectric structures
M. C. Thompson, H. Badakov, A. M. Cook, J. B. Rosenzweig, R. Tikhoplav, G. Travish, I. Blumenfeld, M. J. Hogan, R. Ischebeck, N. Kirby, R. Siemann, D. Walz, P. Muggli, A. Scott and R. B. Yoder
First measurements of the breakdown threshold in a dielectric subjected to GV/m wakefields produced by short (30-330 fs), 28.5 GeV electron bunches have been made. Fused silica tubes of 100 mm inner diameter were exposed to a range of bunch lengths, allowing surface dielectric fields up to 27 GV/m to be generated. The onset of breakdown, detected through light emission from the tube ends, is observed to occur when the peak electric field at the dielectric surface reaches 13.8 ± 0.7 GV/m. The correlation of structure damage to beam-induced breakdown is established using an array of post-exposure inspection techniques.
Accepted Mon May 12, 2008
Self feeding turbulent magnetic reconnection on macroscopic scales
Giovanni Lapenta
Within a MHD approach we find magnetic reconnection to progress in two entirely different ways. The first is well-known: the laminar Sweet-Parker process. But a second, completely different and chaotic reconnection process is possible. This regime has properties of immediate practical relevance: i) it is much faster, developing on scales of the order of the Alfvén time, and ii) the areas of reconnection become distributed chaotically over a macroscopic region. The onset of the faster process is the formation of closed circulation patterns where the jets going out of the reconnection regions turn around and forces their way back in, carrying along copious amounts of magnetic flux.
Accepted Fri May 9, 2008
Condensed Matter: Structure, etc.
Evolution towards equilibrium of open and closed nanocrystalline systems: Si Ge islands on Si(001)
Marina S. Leite, A. Malachias, S. W. Kycia, T. I. Kamins, R.Stanley Williams and G. Medeiros Ribeiro
An open (closed) system, in which matter is (not) exchanged through surface diffusion was realized via growth kinetics. Epitaxially grown Si-Ge:Si (001) islands were annealed in different environments affecting the diffusivity of Si adatoms selectively. The evolution of the driving forces for intermixing while approaching the equilibrium was inferred from Synchrotron X-ray measurements of composition and strain. For the open system, intermixing due to the Si inflow from the wetting layer (reservoir) caused a decrease in the Ge content, leading to a lowering of the elastic energy and an increase in the mixing entropy. In contrast, for the closed system, whilst keeping the average Ge composition constant, atom rearrangement within the islands led to an increase in both elastic and entropic contributions. The Gibbs free energy decreased in both cases, despite the different evolution paths for the composition profiles.
Accepted Tue May 13, 2008
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In Oct 2007, 90% of new papers received by Physical Review Letters were sent to referees within 14 days; in Oct 2004, 65% were sent out within 14 days.
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