Kavli Affiliate: Archana Raja| Summary:When Coulomb interactions dominate kinetic energy, dilute two-dimensional carriers form a Wigner solid. Both its melting and disorder-driven localization can drive density-tuned metal-insulator transitions, but their relative roles and interplay have been debated for decades. Atomically thin semiconductors offer a new test because transport and scanning tunneling microscopy can probe the […]
Kavli Affiliate: Giordano Scappucci | Summary:Semiconductor-superconductor hybrid systems form the basis for a broad range of quantum phenomena, such as Andreev bound states, topological superconductivity, and hybrid quantum Hall states. The performance of these hybrid systems can strongly benefit from the exceptional electronic properties of heterostructures with deeply buried quantum wells. However, establishing high-quality superconducting […]
Kavli Affiliate: Andrew Vanderburg | Summary:Transiting Warm Jupiters orbiting bright stars are scarcely known, but a substantial number of these planets have been uncovered by the TESS mission. In this work we report the discovery and confirmation of a transiting Warm Jupiter orbiting the bright ($V$ = 8.70) subgiant star HD 715 (TOI-6893). HD 715 […]
Kavli Affiliate: Masahiro Kawasaki | Summary:The origin of supermassive black holes, especially those already present at high redshift, remains an open problem. We propose that their seeds are primordial black holes formed from rare overdense regions of conventional thermal DM. A spectator scalar with two degenerate vacua gives the DM different masses, and hence different […]
Kavli Affiliate: Menno Veldhorst | Summary:Fault-tolerant quantum computation requires increasing the qubit count while maintaining high performance and connectivity. Semiconductor qubits have demonstrated high-fidelity operation, but growing the system size at sufficient connectivity remains challenging, such that scaling mainly occurred in one spatial direction to preserve access for control lines in the other. Here, we […]
Kavli Affiliate: Wei Gao| Summary:Dexterous manipulation poses a challenging high-dimensional optimization problem, as useful behaviors require coordinated motion across many hand joints. In reinforcement learning (RL) and sampling-based trajectory optimization, exploration commonly relies on independent robot joint perturbations, making coordinated behaviors difficult to discover. Prior work reduces this search space for grasp learning using low-dimensional […]