arXiv preprints from January 1, 2026 through September 7, 2026 — 21:30:56 EST
Orbital magnetism is a purely quantum phenomenon that reflects intrinsic electronic properties of solids, yet its microscopic description in interacting multiband systems remains incomplete. We develop a general quantum many-body framework for orbital magnetic responses based on the Luttinger-Ward functional. Starting from the Dyson...
We present a reanalysis of the water maser system in NGC 4258 to reassess its geometric distance, commonly reported as approximately 7.6 Mpc with percent-level accuracy, a key anchor in extragalactic distance ladder calibrations and recent determinations of the Hubble constant. We introduce a method that relies exclusively on tracking...
The rapid emergence of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in the early Universe poses a challenge to current models of black hole growth. One promising formation pathway is the direct collapse black hole (DCBH) scenario, in which gas in pristine, low-metallicity halos forms supermassive (or quasi-) stars leading to massive black holes...
The discovery by JWST of a substantial population of compact "Little Red Dots" (LRDs) presents a major puzzle: their observed spectra defy standard astrophysical interpretations. Here, we show that LRD spectra are naturally reproduced by emission from an accreting Direct Collapse Black Hole (DCBH). Using radiation-hydrodynamic...
eROSITA substantiated earlier indications that Loop-I is the northern part of an extended bipolar Galactic-bubble structure, but the southern bubble was not established in nonthermal emission and the shock strength was not robustly measured in either bubble. After using eROSITA data to map the bubble edges, we analyzed edge-adjacent...
Transition--metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) uniquely combine topological electronic states realized without external magnetic fields with a strong optical response arising from long--lived excitons. Motivated by this confluence, we investigate an interacting fermion--boson system formed by coupling an exciton to a quasihole of a...
The origin of hot Jupiters is the oldest problem in exoplanet astrophysics. Hot Jupiters formed in situ or via disk migration should be in place just a few Myr after the formation of their host stars. On the other hand, hot Jupiters formed via eccentricity excitation and tidal damping as a result of planet--planet scattering or...
Inspired by string theory and cosmological constant problem, it is plausible that the Universe's vacuum structure is characterized by a landscape of metastable vacua. The existence of dark matter and dark energy further suggests that the dark sector may inhabit its own "dark landscape". If the dark vacuum is metastable, bubbles of...
Josephson junctions made of conventional superconductors display Fraunhofer-like oscillations of the critical current as a function of the threaded magnetic flux. When the superconductors are deposited on the surface of a three-dimensional topological insulator, this pattern is slightly modified due to the presence of chiral Majorana...
One of the largest source of uncertainties in the predictions of stellar models comes from the internal transport mechanisms. In close massive binaries, previous theoretical studies suggest that tides systematically boost chemical mixing. However, observations do not reveal any clear period-nitrogen enrichment trend, challenging these...
Using the modified Villain lattice Hamiltonian formulation of the 1+1d compact boson theory, we construct exactly solvable abelian chiral lattice gauge theories in two spacetime dimensions. As a concrete example, we derive an explicit quadratic lattice Hamiltonian for the "34-50" chiral gauge theory. We further show that $N$ copies of...
A crucial physical quantity in determining the 21-cm signal during cosmic dawn is the inhomogeneous background of Ly$α$ photons originating from the first galaxies. As these photons travel through the intergalactic medium, their scattering cross-section is often approximated as a delta function at resonance due to computational cost....
Discretely self-similar solutions govern critical gravitational collapse and have been known only numerically since Choptuik's pioneering work. We construct, in closed analytic form, an infinite family of such solutions of the Einstein-massless-Klein-Gordon system using the large-D expansion. We characterize their structure and...
Understanding the connection between active galactic nuclei and star-formation (the AGN-SF connection) is one of the longest standing problems in modern astrophysics. In the age of large Integral Field Unit (IFU) surveys, studies of the AGN-SF connection greatly benefit from spatially resolving AGN and SF contributions to study the...
IGR J17091-3624 is a distinctive black hole X-ray binary exhibiting exotic variability, including complex "heartbeat" oscillations in its X-ray light curves, similar to those observed in GRS 1915+105, a system renowned for its structured, rapid X-ray variability but heavily obscured at optical wavelengths. In contrast, IGR J17091-3624...
The paper presents the results of long-term homogeneous spectroscopic studies of the Herbig Ae/Be star HD 141569A obtained in the optical range. We detect spectral variability on timescales of months to years, including changes in the spectrophotometric parameters of the Halpha emission line, as well as other hydrogen absorption...
Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and spectroscopy (STS) with $s$-wave superconducting tips has been widely applied to probe exotic superconductors, but its potential for investigating topological superconductors remains unclear. In junctions between an $s$-wave superconductor and a topological superconductor, the dominant tunneling...
Transcranial ultrasound must overcome the significant challenge of the human skull, limiting both imaging and therapeutic applications. While high-fidelity numerical simulations can compensate for skull-induced distortions, they require precise skull templates (typically derived from Computed Tomography, CT) and spatial alignment to...
High-contrast imaging systems using active control with adaptive optics (AO) are often limited by non-common path (NCP) aberrations that are seen only at the final science image. AO systems employing focal-plane wavefront sensors (FP-WFSs) are able to simultaneously correct NCP aberrations and measure science images, but they...
This work develops a unified, dimensionless framework for comparing geometrically similar reacting porous-flow systems across scale, with emphasis on hydrometallurgical heap leaching, when particle size distribution (PSD) and intraparticle pore structure differ. Under dynamic similarity, the dimensionless liquid residence-time...
Semiconductor-s-type superconductor nanowires host spinful fermions and cannot be reduced to a single spinless Kitaev chain hosting single Majorana zero mode. Instead, such systems can be converted into two coupled p-wave Kitaev-like chains associated with different spin sectors. Using the bond Fermion transformation and exact...
Electronic phases of matter, such as magnetism and superconductivity, are defined and distinguished by their order parameters quantifying the spontaneous symmetry breaking underlying each phase. Simple cases include the uniform magnetisation of ferromagnets and isotropic gap function of conventional superconductors. Unconventional...
Recent research suggests the possibility of the two-dimensional breathing-Kagome magnet Nb$_3$Cl$_8$ hosting a quantum spin liquid state, warranting further study into its magnetic properties. Using ab initio calculations, we show that monolayer Nb$_3$Cl$_8$ has short-range antiferromagnetic correlations among Nb$_3$ trimers with S =...
Mechanical metamaterials can be designed to exhibit unique mechanical properties, including tunable auxetic behavior as well as multi-stability, which arise from the geometry and configuration of the constituent building blocks. Lattice-based metamaterials, in particular, provide lightweight platforms where local instabilities can...
We formulate a deterministic algorithm for preparing a general $U(1)$-eigenstate of a spin-$s$ chain of length $n$. These states consist of linear combinations of computational basis states $|\vec{m}\rangle$ of $n$ qudits, each with $(2s+1)$ levels and $s= 1/2, 1, 3/2, \ldots$, whose ditstrings $\vec{m}$ have a fixed digit sum....