Condensed Matter

Amorphous solids such as glass are ubiquitous in our daily life and have found broad applications ranging from window glass and solar cells to telecommunications and transformer cores. However, due to the lack of long-range order, the three-dimensional (3D) atomic structure of amorphous solids have thus far defied any direct experimental determination without model fitting. Here, using a multi-component metallic glass as a proof-of-principle, we advance atomic electron tomography to determine the 3D atomic positions in an amorphous solid for the first time. We quantitatively characterize the short-range order (SRO) and medium-range order (MRO) of the 3D atomic arrangement. We find that although the 3D atomic packing of the SRO is geometrically disordered, some SRO connect with each other to form crystal-like networks and give rise to MRO. We identify four crystal-like MRO networks - face-centred cubic, hexagonal close-packed, body-centered cubic and simple cubic - coexisting in the sample, which show translational but no orientational order. These observations confirm that the 3D atomic structure in some parts of the sample is consistent with the efficient cluster packing model. Looking forward, we anticipate this experiment will open the door to determining the 3D atomic coordinates of various amorphous solids, whose impact on non-crystalline solids may be comparable to the first 3D crystal structure solved by x-ray crystallography over a century ago.

We demonstrate that the Einstein relation for the diffusion of a particle in the random energy landscape with the Gaussian density of states is an exclusive 1D property and does not hold in higher dimensions. We also consider the analytical properties of the particle velocity and diffusivity for the limit of weak driving force and establish connection between these properties and dimensionality and spatial correlation of the random energy landscape.

We investigate diffusion of excitation in one- and two-dimensional lattices with random on-site energies and deterministic long-range couplings (hopping) inversely proportional to the distance. Three regimes of diffusion are observed in strongly disordered systems: ballistic motion at short time, standard diffusion for intermediate times, and a stationary phase (saturation) at long times. We propose an analytical solution valid in the strong-coupling regime which explains the observed dynamics and relates the ballistic velocity, diffusion coefficient, and asymptotic diffusion range to the system size and disorder strength via simple formulas. We show also that in the long-time asymptotic limit of diffusion from a single site the occupations form a heavy-tailed power-law distribution.

Dislocation networks and their evolution are known to control the mechanical properties of metal samples. However, the lack of computationally efficient and statistically rigorous descriptors for such defect systems has hindered the development and adoption of rational protocols for the optimal design of these material systems. This study presents a framework for the rigorous statistical quantification and low dimensional representation of dislocation networks using the formalism of 2-point spatial correlations (also called 2-point statistics) along with Principle Component Analysis (PCA). The usefulness of this basic framework for comparing and observing dislocation networks is exemplified and discussed with suitable examples.

We provide a theoretical analysis by means of the nonperturbative functional renormalization group (NP-FRG) of the corrections to scaling in the critical behavior of the random-field Ising model (RFIM) near the dimension d DR ≈5.1 that separates a region where the renormalized theory at the fixed point is supersymmetric and critical scaling satisfies the d→d−2 dimensional reduction property ( d> d DR ) from a region where both supersymmetry and dimensional reduction break down at criticality ( d< d DR ). We show that the NP-FRG results are in very good agreement with recent large-scale lattice simulations of the RFIM in d=5 and we detail the consequences for the leading correction-to-scaling exponent of the peculiar boundary-layer mechanism by which the dimensional-reduction fixed point disappears and the dimensional-reduction-broken fixed point emerges in d DR .

Building on large-scale quantum Monte Carlo simulations, we investigate the zero-temperature phase diagram of hard-core bosons in a random potential on site-centered Cayley trees with branching number K=2 . In order to follow how the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is affected by the disorder, we focus on both the zero-momentum density, probing the quantum coherence, and the one-body density matrix (1BDM) whose largest eigenvalue monitors the off-diagonal long-range order. We further study its associated eigenstate which brings useful information about the real-space properties of this leading eigenmode. Upon increasing randomness, we find that the system undergoes a quantum phase transition at finite disorder strength between a long-range ordered BEC state, fully ergodic at large scale, and a new disordered Bose glass regime showing conventional localization for the coherence fraction while the 1BDM displays a non-trivial algebraic vanishing BEC density together with a non-ergodic occupation in real-space. These peculiar properties can be analytically captured by a simple phenomenological description on the Cayley tree which provides a physical picture of the Bose glass regime.

Finding hidden layers in complex networks is an important and a non-trivial problem in modern science. We explore the framework of quantum graphs to determine whether concealed parts of a multi-layer system exist and if so then what is their extent, i.e., how many unknown layers there are. Assuming that all information available is the time evolution of a wave propagation on a single layer of a network it is indeed possible to uncover that which is hidden by merely observing the dynamics. We present evidence on both synthetic and real-world networks that the frequency spectrum of the wave dynamics can express distinct features in the form of additional frequency peaks. These peaks exhibit dependence on the number of layers taking part in the propagation and thus allowing for the extraction of said number. We show that in fact, with sufficient observation time, one can fully reconstruct the row-normalised adjacency matrix spectrum. We compare our propositions to a machine learning approach using a modified, for the purposes of multi-layer systems, wave packet signature method.

Domain switching pathways in ferroelectric materials visualized by dynamic Piezoresponse Force Microscopy (PFM) are explored via variational autoencoder (VAE), which simplifies the elements of the observed domain structure, crucially allowing for rotational invariance, thereby reducing the variability of local polarization distributions to a small number of latent variables. For small sampling window sizes the latent space is degenerate, and variability is observed only in the direction of a single latent variable that can be identified with the presence of domain wall. For larger window sizes, the latent space is 2D, and the disentangled latent variables can be generally interpreted as the degree of switching and complexity of domain structure. Applied to multiple consecutive PFM images acquired while monitoring domain switching, the polarization switching mechanism can thus be visualized in the latent space, providing insight into domain evolution mechanisms and their correlation with the microstructure.

We investigate the effect of disorder on the Landau levels (LLs) in tilted three dimensional Weyl semimetals (WSMs) when a magnetic field is present. Based on the minimum lattice model and by using the exact diagonalization and Kubo's formula, we numerically calculate the Hall conductivity and the density of states (DOS), from which several striking signatures are found to distinguish type-I WSMs from type-II WSMs: the first is the response of the Hall conductivity to the Fermi energy around the band center in clean limit, the second is the performance of the Hall conductivity to disorder, where in type-I WSMs, the robustness of the low-energy LLs is broken successively from the higher LLs to the lower ones and can be understood with the sink down picture, and the third is the behavior of the DOS at zero energy to disorder. The implications of our results are discussed.

We study the localization properties of the two-dimensional Lieb lattice and its extensions in the presence of disorder using transfer matrix method and finite-size scaling. We find that all states in the Lieb lattice and its extensions are localized for W≥1 . Clear differences in the localization properties between disordered flat band and disordered dispersive bands are identified. Our results complement previous experimental studies of clean photonic Lieb lattices and provide information about their stability with respect to disorder.