No Arabic abstract
Topological properties of crystals and quasicrystals is a subject of recent and growing interest. This Letter reports an experiment where, for certain quasicrystals, these properties can be directly retrieved from diffraction. We directly observe, using an interferometric approach, all the topological invariants of finite-length Fibonacci chains in their diffraction pattern. We also demonstrate quantitatively the stability of these topological invariants with respect to structural disorder.
In two and three spatial dimensions, the transverse response experienced by a charged particle on a lattice in a uniform magnetic field is proportional to a topological invariant, the first Chern number, characterizing the energy bands of the underlying Hofstadter Hamiltonian. In four dimensions, the transverse response is also quantized, and controlled by the second Chern number. These remarkable features solely arise from the magnetic translational symmetry. Here we show that the symmetries of the two-, three- and four-dimensional Hofstadter Hamiltonians may be encrypted in optical diffraction gratings, such that simple photonic experiments allow one to extract the first and the second Chern numbers of the whole energy spectra. This result is particularly remarkable in three and four dimensions, where complete topological characterizations have not yet been achieved experimentally. Side-by-side to the theoretical analysis, in this work we present the experimental study of optical gratings analogues of the two- and three-dimensional Hofstadter models.
In this paper, we characterize quasicrystalline interacting topological phases of matter i.e., phases protected by some quasicrystalline structure. We show that the elasticity theory of quasicrystals, which accounts for both phonon and phason modes, admits non-trivial quantized topological terms with far richer structure than their crystalline counterparts. We show that these terms correspond to distinct phases of matter and also uncover intrinsically quasicrystalline phases, which have no crystalline analogues. For quasicrystals with internal $mathrm{U}(1)$ symmetry, we discuss a number of interpretations and physical implications of the topological terms, including constraints on the mobility of dislocations in $d=2$ quasicrystals and a quasicrystalline generalization of the Lieb-Schultz-Mattis-Oshikawa-Hastings theorem. We then extend these ideas much further and address the complete classification of quasicrystalline topological phases, including systems with point-group symmetry as well as non-invertible phases. We hence obtain the Quasicrystalline Equivalence Principle, which generalizes the classification of crystalline topological phases to the quasicrystalline setting.
We have implemented a virtual Youngs double slit experiment for hard X-ray photons with micro-fabricated bi-prisms. We observe fringe patterns with a scintillator, and quantify interferograms by detecting X-ray fluorescence from a scanned 30nm Cr metal film. The observed intensities are best modeled with a near-field, Fresnel analysis. The maximum fringe number in the overlap region is proportional to the ratio of real to imaginary parts refractive index of the prism material. The horizontal and vertical transverse coherence lengths at beamline APS 8-ID are measured.
In semiconductor physics, many essential optoelectronic material parameters can be experimentally revealed via optical spectroscopy in sufficiently large magnetic fields. For monolayer transition-metal dichalcogenide semiconductors, this field scale is substantial --tens of teslas or more-- due to heavy carrier masses and huge exciton binding energies. Here we report absorption spectroscopy of monolayer MoS$_2$, MoSe$_2$, MoTe$_2$, and WS$_2$ in very high magnetic fields to 91~T. We follow the diamagnetic shifts and valley Zeeman splittings of not only the excitons $1s$ ground state but also its excited $2s$, $3s$, ..., $ns$ Rydberg states. This provides a direct experimental measure of the effective (reduced) exciton masses and dielectric properties. Exciton binding energies, exciton radii, and free-particle bandgaps are also determined. The measured exciton masses are heavier than theoretically predicted, especially for Mo-based monolayers. These results provide essential and quantitative parameters for the rational design of opto-electronic van der Waals heterostructures incorporating 2D semiconductors.
The knowledge of how the magnetization looks inside a ferromagnet is often hindered by the limitations of the available experimental methods that are sensitive only to the surface regions or limited in spatial resolution. We report the 3D tomographic reconstruction of the magnetization within a ferromagnetic film of 240 nm in thickness using soft X ray microscopy and magnetic dichroism. The film has periodic magnetic domains forming stripes and closure domains found to be shifted from the stripe array by 1/4 of the period. In addition, the bifurcations of the stripes, which act as inversion nuclei of the magnetization, evidence in 3D meron singularities and Bloch points at the interior of the film. This novel method can be easily extended to magnetic stacks in spintronics applications and other singularities in films.