Two-dimensional materials can be strongly influenced by their surroundings. A dielectric environment screens and reduces the Coulomb interaction between electrons in the two-dimensional material. Since in Mott materials the Coulomb interaction is responsible for the insulating state, manipulating the dielectric screening provides direct control over Mottness. Our many-body calculations reveal the spectroscopic fingerprints of such Coulomb engineering: we demonstrate eV-scale changes to the position of the Hubbard bands and show a Coulomb engineered insulator-to-metal transition. Based on our proof-of-principle calculations, we discuss the (feasible) conditions under which our scenario of Coulomb engineering of Mott materials can be realized experimentally.
Machine learning, satellites or local sensors are key factors for a sustainable and resource-saving optimisation of agriculture and proved its values for the management of agricultural land. Up to now, the main focus was on the enlargement of data which were evaluated by means of supervised learning methods. Nevertheless, the need for labels is also a limiting and time-consuming factor, while in contrast, ongoing technological development is already providing an ever-increasing amount of unlabeled data. Self-supervised learning (SSL) could overcome this limitation and incorporate existing unlabeled data. Therefore, a crop type data set was utilized to conduct experiments with SSL and compare it to supervised methods. A unique feature of our data set from 2016 to 2018 was a divergent climatological condition in 2018 that reduced yields and affected the spectral fingerprint of the plants. Our experiments focused on predicting 2018 using SLL without or a few labels to clarify whether new labels should be collected for an unknown year. Despite these challenging conditions, the results showed that SSL contributed to higher accuracies. We believe that the results will encourage further improvements in the field of precision farming, why the SSL framework and data will be published (Marszalek, 2021).
The global trends of urbanization and increased personal mobility force us to rethink the way we live and use urban space. The Traffic4cast competition series tackles this problem in a data-driven way, advancing the latest methods in machine learning for modeling complex spatial systems over time. In this edition, our dynamic road graph data combine information from road maps, 10^12 probe data points, and stationary vehicle detectors in three cities over the span of two years. While stationary vehicle detectors are the most accurate way to capture traffic volume, they are only available in few locations. Traffic4cast 2022 explores models that have the ability to generalize loosely related temporal vertex data on just a few nodes to predict dynamic future traffic states on the edges of the entire road graph. In the core challenge, participants are invited to predict the likelihoods of three congestion classes derived from the speed levels in the GPS data for the entire road graph in three cities 15 min into the future. We only provide vehicle count data from spatially sparse stationary vehicle detectors in these three cities as model input for this task. The data are aggregated in 15 min time bins for one hour prior to the prediction time. For the extended challenge, participants are tasked to predict the average travel times on super-segments 15 min into the future - super-segments are longer sequences of road segments in the graph. The competition results provide an important advance in the prediction of complex city-wide traffic states just from publicly available sparse vehicle data and without the need for large amounts of real-time floating vehicle data.
We identify the precise hallmarks of the local magnetic moment formation and its Kondo screening in the frequency structure of the generalized charge susceptibility. The sharpness of our identification even pinpoints an alternative criterion to determine the Kondo temperature of strongly correlated systems on the two-particle level, which only requires calculations at the lowest Matsubara frequency. We showcase its strength by applying it to the single impurity and the periodic Anderson model as well as to the Hubbard model. Our results represent a significant progress for the general understanding of quantum field theory at the two-particle level and allow for tracing the limits of the physics captured by perturbative approaches for correlated systems.
We clarify the origin of the strikingly different spectroscopic properties of the chemically similar compounds NaOsO_{3} and LiOsO_{3}. Our first-principle, many-body analysis demonstrates that the highly sensitive physics of these two materials is controlled by their proximity to an adjacent Hund's-Mott insulating phase. Although 5d oxides are mildly correlated, we show that the cooperative action of intraorbital repulsion and Hund's exchange becomes the dominant physical mechanism in these materials if their t_{2g} shell is half filled. Small material specific details hence result in an extremely sharp change of the electronic mobility, explaining the surprisingly different properties of the paramagnetic high-temperature phases of the two compounds.
We investigate the divergences appearing in the two-particle-irreducible vertex functions of many-fermion systems with attractive on-site interactions. By means of dynamical mean-field theory calculations, we determine the location of singularity lines in the phase diagram of the attractive Hubbard model at half-filling, where the local Bethe-Salpeter equations are noninvertible. We find that divergences appear both in the magnetic and in the density scattering channels. The former affect a sector of suppressed fluctuations and comply with the mapping of the physical susceptibilities of the repulsive case. At the same time, the appearance of singularities in the density channel of the attractive model demonstrates that vertex divergences can also plague the dominant scattering sectors associated with enhanced local susceptibilities. This constitutes a counterexample to previously proposed interpretations. Eventually, by exploiting the underlying physical symmetries and a spectral representation of the susceptibilities, we clarify the relation between vertex divergences and the local response of the system in different channels.
We study the characteristic timescales of the fluctuating local moments in Hund's metal systems for different degrees of correlation. By analyzing the dynamical spin susceptibility in the real-time domain, we determine the timescales controlling oscillation and damping of on-site fluctuations-a crucial factor for the detection of local moments with different experimental probes. We apply this procedure to different families of iron pnictides or chalcogenides, explaining the material trend in the discrepancies reported between experimental and theoretical estimates of their magnetic moments.
While the breakdown of the perturbation expansion for the many-electron problem has several formal consequences, here we unveil its physical effect: flipping the sign of the effective electronic interaction in specific scattering channels. By decomposing local and uniform susceptibilities of the Hubbard model via their spectral representations, we prove how entering the nonperturbative regime causes an enhancement of the charge response, ultimately responsible for the phase-separation instabilities close to the Mott metal-insulator transition. Our analysis opens a new route for understanding phase transitions in the nonperturbative regime and clarifies why attractive effects emerging from a strong repulsion can induce phase separations but not s-wave pairing or charge-density wave instabilities.
The temperature dependence of the relaxation dynamics in the bilayer thin film heterostructure composed of multiferroic BiFeO_3 (BFO) and superconducting YBa_2Cu_3O_7 (YBCO) grown on a (001) SrTiO_3 substrate is studied by a time-resolved pump-probe technique, and compared with that of pure YBCO thin film grown under the same growth conditions. The superconductivity of YBCO is found to be retained in the heterostructure. We observe a speeding up of the YBCO recombination dynamics in the superconducting state of the heterostructure, and attribute it to the presence of weak ferromagnetism at the BFO/YBCO interface as observed in magnetization data. An extension of the Rothwarf-Taylor model is used to fit the ultrafast dynamics of BFO/YBCO, that models an increased quasiparticle occupation of the ferromagnetic interfacial layer in the superconducting state of YBCO.
The impact of disorder on the superconducting (SC) pairing mechanism is the centre of much debate. Some evidence suggests a loss of phase coherence of pairs while others point towards the formation of a competing phase. In our work we show that the two perspectives may be different sides of the same coin. Using an extension of the perturbative renormalization group approach we compare the impact of different disorder-induced interactions on a SC ground state. We find that in the strongly disordered regime an interaction between paired fermions and their respective disordered environment replaces conventional Cooper pairing. For these unconventional Cooper pairs the phase coherence condition, required for the formation of a SC condensate, is not satisfied.
Using ultrafast optical techniques, we detect two types of bosons strongly coupled to electrons in the family of Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ (Bi-2212) from the underdoped to overdoped regimes. The different doping dependences of the electron–boson coupling strengths enable us to identify them as phonons and spin fluctuations: electron–phonon coupling (λe−ph) peaks at optimal doping, while electron–spin fluctuation coupling (λe−sf) decreases monotonically with doping. This observation is consistent with two facts: (i) superconductivity is in close proximity with antiferromagnetism at low dopings and (ii) a pronounced lattice renormalization effect at larger dopings.
Temperature-dependent terahertz conductivity of tin oxide (SnO2) nanowire films was measured from 10 to 300 K using terahertz time-domain spectroscopy. The optical parameters, including the complex refractive index, optical conductivity and dielectric function, were obtained using a simple effective medium theory. The complex conductivity was fitted with the Drude-Smith model and the plasmon model. The results show that the carrier density (N) and plasmon resonance frequency (omega(0)) increase while the scattering time decreases with increasing temperature. The reduced carrier mobility compared with bulk SnO2 indicates the presence of carrier localization or trapping in these nanowires.
We present THz conductivity of LaAlO3 (LAO) as a function of temperature and annealing, using terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS). We observed that, after annealing, spectral weight redistribution occurs, such that the real conductivity σ1(ω) changed from a featureless and almost frequency-independent spectrum, into one where peaks occur near the phonon frequencies. These phonon frequencies increase with increasing temperature. We attribute the appearance of these absorption peaks to the diffusion and relocation of oxygen vacancies. The dielectric functions of annealed LAO are well fitted with the Drude-Lorentz model.
Magnetic polarons have been proposed to play important roles in doped wide band gap oxides that exhibit weak room temperature ferromagnetism. Here, we report the experimental evidence supporting polaronic magnetism and transport in Ag-doped ZnO. Temperature dependent resistivity data suggest the conduction mechanism of Mott and Efros variable range hopping. The observed weak ferromagnetism and its temperature dependence are explained using the percolation-based model of partially ordered bound magnetic polarons.
In this work we study the influence of an electric field on stripes and compare our results with experimental findings from scanning tunneling microscope measurements. By introducing a negative-bias electric field into a time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau equation with stable stripe solutions, we show that hole(electron)-like stripes widen (narrow) compared to the field free case. When a magnetic field is introduced instead, stripe formation is found to be suppressed.