These properties make such solutions a promising setting for exploring the mechanisms behind extreme cosmic sources of gamma rays.We perform full-magnetohydrodynamics simulations on various initially helical configurations and show that they reconfigure into a state where the magnetic field lines span nested toroidal surfaces. This relaxed configuration is not a Taylor state, as is often assumed for relaxing plasma, but a state where the Lorentz force is balanced by the hydrostatic pressure, which is lowest on the central ring of the nested tori. Furthermore, the structure is characterized by a spatially slowly varying rotational transform, which leads to the formation of a few magnetic islands at rational surfaces. We then obtain analytic expressions that approximate the global structure of the quasistable linked and knotted plasma configurations that emerge, using maps from S^3 to S^2 of which the Hopf fibration is a special case. The knotted plasma configurations have a highly localized magnetic energy density and retain their structure on time scales much longer than the Alfvénic time scale.We report on reproducible shock acceleration from irradiation of a λ=10  μm CO_2 laser on optically shaped H_2 and He gas targets. A low energy laser prepulse (I≲10^14  W cm^-2) is used to drive a blast wave inside the gas target, creating a steepened, variable density gradient. This is followed, after 25 ns, by a high intensity laser pulse (I>10^16  W cm^-2) that produces an electrostatic collisionless shock. Upstream ions are accelerated for a narrow range of prepulse energies. For long density gradients (≳40  μm), broadband beams of He^+ and H^+ are routinely produced, while for shorter gradients (≲20  μm), quasimonoenergetic acceleration of protons is observed. These measurements indicate that the properties of the accelerating shock and the resultant ion energy distribution, in particular the production of narrow energy spread beams, is highly dependent on the plasma density profile. These findings are corroborated by 2D particle-in-cell simulations.A new method to determine the spin tune is described and tested. In an ideal planar magnetic ring, the spin tune-defined as the number of spin precessions per turn-is given by ν(s)=γG (γ is the Lorentz factor, G the gyromagnetic anomaly). At 970  MeV/c, the deuteron spins coherently precess at a frequency of ≈120  kHz in the Cooler Synchrotron COSY. check details The spin tune is deduced from the up-down asymmetry of deuteron-carbon scattering. In a time interval of 2.6 s, the spin tune was determined with a precision of the order 10^-8, and to 1×10^-10 for a continuous 100 s accelerator cycle. This renders the presented method a new precision tool for accelerator physics; controlling the spin motion of particles to high precision is mandatory, in particular, for the measurement of electric dipole moments of charged particles in a storage ring.We report on a new method for realizing an exceptionally strong inertial confinement of a gas in a liquid A centimetric spherical bubble filled with a reactive gaseous mixture in a liquid is expanded by an exothermic chemical reaction whose products condense in the liquid at the bubble wall. Hence, the cavity formed in this way is essentially empty as it collapses. The temperatures reached at maximum compression, inferred from the cavity radius dynamics and further confirmed by spectroscopic measurements exceed 20 000 K. Because the cavity is typically big, our findings also provide unique space and time resolved sequences of the events accompanying the collapse, notably the development of the inertial instability notoriously known to deter strong compression.Wave scattering provides profound insight into the structure of matter. Typically, the ability to sense microstructure is determined by the ratio of scatterer size to probing wavelength. Here, we address the question of whether macroscopic waves can report back the presence and distribution of microscopic scatterers despite several orders of magnitude difference in scale between wavelength and scatterer size. In our analysis, monosized hard scatterers 5  μm in radius are immersed in lossless gelatin phantoms to investigate the effect of multiple reflections on the propagation of shear waves with millimeter wavelength. Steady-state monochromatic waves are imaged in situ via magnetic resonance imaging, enabling quantification of the phase velocity at a voxel size big enough to contain thousands of individual scatterers, but small enough to resolve the wavelength. We show in theory, experiments, and simulations that the resulting coherent superposition of multiple reflections gives rise to power-law dispersion at the macroscopic scale if the scatterer distribution exhibits apparent fractality over an effective length scale that is comparable to the probing wavelength. Since apparent fractality is naturally present in any random medium, microstructure can thereby leave its fingerprint on the macroscopically quantifiable power-law exponent. Our results are generic to wave phenomena and carry great potential for sensing microstructure that exhibits intrinsic fractality, such as, for instance, vasculature.Rogue waves are observed as light propagates in the extreme nonlinear regime that occurs when a photorefractive ferroelectric crystal is undergoing a structural phase transition. The transmitted spatial light distribution contains bright localized spots of anomalously large intensity that follow a signature long-tail statistics that disappears as the nonlinearity is weakened. The isolated wave events form as out-of-equilibrium response and disorder enhance the Kerr-saturated nonlinearity at the critical point. Self-similarity associable to the individual observed filaments and numerical simulations of the generalized nonlinear Schrödinger equation suggests that dynamics of soliton fusions and scale invariance can microscopically play an important role in the observed rogue intensities and statistics.We show how to use two-mode squeezed light to exponentially enhance cavity-based dispersive qubit measurement. Our scheme enables true Heisenberg-limited scaling of the measurement, and crucially, it is not restricted to small dispersive couplings or unrealistically long measurement times. It involves coupling a qubit dispersively to two cavities and making use of a symmetry in the dynamics of joint cavity quadratures (a so-called quantum-mechanics-free subsystem). link2 We discuss the basic scaling of the scheme and its robustness against imperfections, as well as a realistic implementation in circuit quantum electrodynamics.We demonstrate an all-fiber cavity quantum electrodynamics system with a trapped single atom in the strong coupling regime. We use a nanofiber Fabry-Perot cavity, that is, an optical nanofiber sandwiched by two fiber-Bragg-grating mirrors. Measurements of the cavity transmission spectrum with a single atom in a state-insensitive nanofiber trap clearly reveal the vacuum Rabi splitting.All-optical addressing and coherent control of single solid-state based quantum bits is a key tool for fast and precise control of ground-state spin qubits. So far, all-optical addressing of qubits was demonstrated only in a very few systems, such as color centers and quantum dots. Here, we perform high-resolution spectroscopic of native and implanted single rare earth ions in solid, namely, a cerium ion in yttrium aluminum garnet (YAG) crystal. We find narrow and spectrally stable optical transitions between the spin sublevels of the ground and excited optical states. Utilizing these transitions we demonstrate the generation of a coherent dark state in electron spin sublevels of a single Ce^3+ ion in YAG by coherent population trapping.We demonstrate |W⟩ state encoding of multiatom ensemble qubits. Using optically trapped Rb atoms, the T_2 coherence time is 2.6(3) ms for N[over ¯]=7.6 atoms and scales approximately inversely with the number of atoms. Strong Rydberg blockade between two ensemble qubits is demonstrated with a fidelity of 0.89(1), and with a fidelity of ∼1.0 when postselected on a control ensemble excitation. These results are a significant step towards deterministic entanglement of atomic ensembles.The charge transfer (ionization) of hydrogen Rydberg atoms (n=25-34) incident on a Cu(100) surface is investigated. Unlike fully metallic surfaces, where the Rydberg electron energy is degenerate with the conduction band of the metal, the Cu(100) surface has a projected band gap at these energies, and only discrete image states are available through which charge transfer can take place. Resonant enhancement of charge transfer is observed for Rydberg states whose energy matches one of the image states, and the integrated surface ionization signals (signal versus applied field) show clear periodicity as a function of n as the energies come in and out of resonance with the image states. The surface ionization dynamics show a velocity dependence; decreased velocity of the incident H atom leads to a greater mean distance of ionization and a lower field required to extract the ion. The surface ionization profiles for „on resonance“ n values show a changing shape as the velocity is changed, reflecting the finite field range over which resonance occurs.We present a mechanism of global reaction coordinate switching, namely, a phenomenon in which the reaction coordinate dynamically switches to another coordinate as the total energy of the system increases. link3 The mechanism is based on global changes in the underlying phase space geometry caused by a switching of dominant unstable modes from the original reactive mode to another nonreactive mode in systems with more than 2 degrees of freedom. We demonstrate an experimental observability to detect a reaction coordinate switching in an ionization reaction of a hydrogen atom in crossed electric and magnetic fields. For this reaction, the reaction coordinate is a coordinate along which electrons escape and its switching changes the escaping direction from the direction of the electric field to that of the magnetic field and, thus, the switching can be detected experimentally by measuring the angle-resolved momentum distribution of escaping electrons.We investigate the transport of excitations through a chain of atoms with nonlocal dissipation introduced through coupling to additional short-lived states. The system is described by an effective spin-1/2 model where the ratio of the exchange interaction strength to the reservoir coupling strength determines the type of transport, including coherent exciton motion, incoherent hopping, and a regime in which an emergent length scale leads to a preferred hopping distance far beyond nearest neighbors. For multiple impurities, the dissipation gives rise to strong nearest-neighbor correlations and entanglement. These results highlight the importance of nontrivial dissipation, correlations, and many-body effects in recent experiments on the dipole-mediated transport of Rydberg excitations.We propose an orbital exchange-correlation functional for applying time-dependent density functional theory to many-electron systems coupled to cavity photons. The time nonlocal equation for the electron-photon optimized effective potential (OEP) is derived. In the static limit our OEP energy functional reduces to the Lamb shift of the ground state energy. We test the new approximation in the Rabi model. It is shown that the OEP (i) reproduces quantitatively the exact ground-state energy from the weak to the deep strong coupling regime and (ii) accurately captures the dynamics entering the ultrastrong coupling regime. The present formalism opens the path to a first-principles description of correlated electron-photon systems, bridging the gap between electronic structure methods and quantum optics for real material applications.