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1. Atomic-scale electronic structure of the cuprate pair density wave state coexisting with superconductivity

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2002429117  

   Choubey, Peayush; Joo, Sang Hyun; Fujita, K.; Du, Zengyi; Edkins, S. D.; Hamidian, M. H.; Eisaki, H.; Uchida, S.; Mackenzie, A. P.; Lee, Jinho; et al (June 2020, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   null (Ed.)

   The defining characteristic of hole-doped cuprates is d -wave high temperature superconductivity. However, intense theoretical interest is now focused on whether a pair density wave state (PDW) could coexist with cuprate superconductivity [D. F. Agterberg et al., Annu. Rev. Condens. Matter Phys. 11, 231 (2020)]. Here, we use a strong-coupling mean-field theory of cuprates, to model the atomic-scale electronic structure of an eight-unit-cell periodic, d -symmetry form factor, pair density wave (PDW) state coexisting with d -wave superconductivity (DSC). From this PDW + DSC model, the atomically resolved density of Bogoliubov quasiparticle states N r , E is predicted at the terminal BiO surface of Bi 2 Sr 2 CaCu 2 O 8 and compared with high-precision electronic visualization experiments using spectroscopic imaging scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). The PDW + DSC model predictions include the intraunit-cell structure and periodic modulations of N r , E , the modulations of the coherence peak energy Δ p r , and the characteristics of Bogoliubov quasiparticle interference in scattering-wavevector space q - space . Consistency between all these predictions and the corresponding experiments indicates that lightly hole-doped Bi 2 Sr 2 CaCu 2 O 8 does contain a PDW + DSC state. Moreover, in the model the PDW + DSC state becomes unstable to a pure DSC state at a critical hole density p *, with empirically equivalent phenomena occurring in the experiments. All these results are consistent with a picture in which the cuprate translational symmetry-breaking state is a PDW, the observed charge modulations are its consequence, the antinodal pseudogap is that of the PDW state, and the cuprate critical point at p * ≈ 19% occurs due to disappearance of this PDW. 

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2. Magnetic field–induced pair density wave state in the cuprate vortex halo

   https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aat1773  

   Edkins, S. D.; Kostin, A.; Fujita, K.; Mackenzie, A. P.; Eisaki, H.; Uchida, S.; Sachdev, Subir; Lawler, Michael J.; Kim, E.-A.; Séamus Davis, J. C.; et al (June 2019, Science)

   High magnetic fields suppress cuprate superconductivity to reveal an unusual density wave (DW) state coexisting with unexplained quantum oscillations. Although routinely labeled a charge density wave (CDW), this DW state could actually be an electron-pair density wave (PDW). To search for evidence of a field-induced PDW, we visualized modulations in the density of electronic states N ( r ) within the halo surrounding Bi 2 Sr 2 CaCu 2 O 8 vortex cores. We detected numerous phenomena predicted for a field-induced PDW, including two sets of particle-hole symmetric N ( r ) modulations with wave vectors Q P and 2 Q P , with the latter decaying twice as rapidly from the core as the former. These data imply that the primary field-induced state in underdoped superconducting cuprates is a PDW, with approximately eight CuO 2 unit-cell periodicity and coexisting with its secondary CDWs. 

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3. Evidence for a vestigial nematic state in the cuprate pseudogap phase

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821454116  

   Mukhopadhyay, Sourin; Sharma, Rahul; Kim, Chung Koo; Edkins, Stephen D.; Hamidian, Mohammad H.; Eisaki, Hiroshi; Uchida, Shin-ichi; Kim, Eun-Ah; Lawler, Michael J.; Mackenzie, Andrew P.; et al (July 2019, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   The CuO 2 antiferromagnetic insulator is transformed by hole-doping into an exotic quantum fluid usually referred to as the pseudogap (PG) phase. Its defining characteristic is a strong suppression of the electronic density-of-states D ( E ) for energies | E | < Δ * , where Δ * is the PG energy. Unanticipated broken-symmetry phases have been detected by a wide variety of techniques in the PG regime, most significantly a finite- Q density-wave (DW) state and a Q = 0 nematic (NE) state. Sublattice-phase-resolved imaging of electronic structure allows the doping and energy dependence of these distinct broken-symmetry states to be visualized simultaneously. Using this approach, we show that even though their reported ordering temperatures T DW and T NE are unrelated to each other, both the DW and NE states always exhibit their maximum spectral intensity at the same energy, and using independent measurements that this is the PG energy Δ * . Moreover, no new energy-gap opening coincides with the appearance of the DW state (which should theoretically open an energy gap on the Fermi surface), while the observed PG opening coincides with the appearance of the NE state (which should theoretically be incapable of opening a Fermi-surface gap). We demonstrate how this perplexing phenomenology of thermal transitions and energy-gap opening at the breaking of two highly distinct symmetries may be understood as the natural consequence of a vestigial nematic state within the pseudogap phase of Bi 2 Sr 2 CaCu 2 O 8 . 

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4. Physical limits to sensing material properties

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18995-4  

   Beroz, Farzan; Zhou, Di; Mao, Xiaoming; Lubensky, David K. (December 2020, Nature Communications)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract All materials respond heterogeneously at small scales, which limits what a sensor can learn. Although previous studies have characterized measurement noise arising from thermal fluctuations, the limits imposed by structural heterogeneity have remained unclear. In this paper, we find that the least fractional uncertainty with which a sensor can determine a material constant λ 0 of an elastic medium is approximately $$\delta {\lambda }_{0}/{\lambda }_{0} \sim ({\Delta }_{\lambda }^{1/2}/{\lambda }_{0}){(d/a)}^{D/2}{(\xi /a)}^{D/2}$$ δ λ 0 / λ 0 ~ ( Δ λ 1 / 2 / λ 0 ) ( d / a ) D / 2 ( ξ / a ) D / 2 for a  ≫  d  ≫  ξ , $${\lambda }_{0}\gg {\Delta }_{\lambda }^{1/2}$$ λ 0 ≫ Δ λ 1 / 2 , and D  > 1, where a is the size of the sensor, d is its spatial resolution, ξ is the correlation length of fluctuations in λ 0 , Δ λ is the local variability of λ 0 , and D is the dimension of the medium. Our results reveal how one can construct devices capable of sensing near these limits, e.g. for medical diagnostics. We use our theoretical framework to estimate the limits of mechanosensing in a biopolymer network, a sensory process involved in cellular behavior, medical diagnostics, and material fabrication. 

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5. Curvature and sharp growth rates of log-quasimodes on compact manifolds

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s00222-025-01315-2  

   Huang, Xiaoqi; Sogge, Christopher D (March 2025, Inventiones mathematicae)

   Abstract We obtain new optimal estimates for the$$L^{2}(M)\to L^{q}(M)$$ $L^2\left(M\right)\to L^q\left(M\right)$,$$q\in (2,q_{c}]$$ $q\in (2,q_c]$,$$q_{c}=2(n+1)/(n-1)$$ $q_c=2(n+1)/(n-1)$, operator norms of spectral projection operators associated with spectral windows$$[\lambda ,\lambda +\delta (\lambda )]$$ $[\lambda ,\lambda +\delta (\lambda \left)\right]$, with$$\delta (\lambda )=O((\log \lambda )^{-1})$$ $\delta \left(\lambda \right)=O\left({(log\lambda )}^{-1}\right)$on compact Riemannian manifolds$$(M,g)$$ $(M,g)$of dimension$$n\ge 2$$ $n\ge 2$all of whose sectional curvatures are nonpositive or negative. We show that these two different types of estimates are saturated on flat manifolds or manifolds all of whose sectional curvatures are negative. This allows us to classify compact space forms in terms of the size of$$L^{q}$$ $L^q$-norms of quasimodes for each Lebesgue exponent$$q\in (2,q_{c}]$$ $q\in (2,q_c]$, even though it is impossible to distinguish between ones of negative or zero curvature sectional curvature for any$$q>q_{c}$$ $q>q_c$. 

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