Entropy Production in Open Systems: The Predominant Role of Intraenvironment Correlations

in PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS (2019)

Mono-to-multilayer transition in growing bacterial colonies

in Physical Review Letters (2019), 123(17-25),

The transition from monolayers to multilayered structures in bacterial colonies is a fundamental step in biofilm development. Observed across different morphotypes and species, this transition is ... [more ▼]

The transition from monolayers to multilayered structures in bacterial colonies is a fundamental step in biofilm development. Observed across different morphotypes and species, this transition is triggered within freely growing bacterial microcolonies comprising a few hundred cells. Using a combination of numerical simulations and analytical modeling, here we demonstrate that this transition originates from the competition between growth-induced in-plane active stresses and vertical restoring forces, due to the cell-substrate interactions. Using a simple chainlike colony of laterally confined cells, we show that the transition sets when individual cells become unstable to rotations; thus it is localized and mechanically deterministic. Asynchronous cell division renders the process stochastic, so that all the critical parameters that control the onset of the transition are continuously distributed random variables. Here we demonstrate that the occurrence of the first division in the colony can be approximated as a Poisson process in the limit of large cell numbers. This allows us to approximately calculate the probability distribution function of the position and time associated with the first extrusion. The rate of such a Poisson process can be identified as the order parameter of the transition, thus highlighting its mixed deterministic-stochastic nature. [less ▲]

Electric-Field Control of Magnetization, Jahn-Teller Distortion, and Orbital Ordering in Ferroelectric Ferromagnets

in PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS (2019), 122(24),

Deterministic Limit of Intracellular Calcium Spikes

in Physical Review Letters (2019), 122(8), 088101

In nonexcitable cells, global Ca2+ spikes emerge from the collective dynamics of clusters of Ca2+ channels that are coupled by diffusion. Current modeling approaches have opposed stochastic descriptions ... [more ▼]

In nonexcitable cells, global Ca2+ spikes emerge from the collective dynamics of clusters of Ca2+ channels that are coupled by diffusion. Current modeling approaches have opposed stochastic descriptions of these systems to purely deterministic models, while both paradoxically appear compatible with experimental data. Combining fully stochastic simulations and mean-field analyses, we demonstrate that these two approaches can be reconciled. Our fully stochastic model generates spike sequences that can be seen as noise-perturbed oscillations of deterministic origin, while displaying statistical properties in agreement with experimental data. These underlying deterministic oscillations arise from a phenomenological spike nucleation mechanism. [less ▲]

Photoinduced Phase Transitions in Ferroelectrics

in PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS (2019), 123(8), 087601-6

Ferroic materials naturally exhibit a rich number of functionalities, which often arise from thermally, chemically, or mechanically induced symmetry breakings or phase transitions. Based on density ... [more ▼]

Ferroic materials naturally exhibit a rich number of functionalities, which often arise from thermally, chemically, or mechanically induced symmetry breakings or phase transitions. Based on density functional calculations, we demonstrate here that light can drive phase transitions as well in ferroelectric materials such as the perovskite oxides lead titanate and barium titanate. Phonon analysis and total energy calculations reveal that the polarization tends to vanish under illumination, to favor the emergence of nonpolar phases, potentially antiferroelectric, and exhibiting a tilt of the oxygen octahedra. Strategies to tailor photoinduced phases based on phonon instabilities in the electronic ground state are also discussed. [less ▲]

Exciton-Phonon Coupling in the Ultraviolet Absorption and Emission Spectra of Bulk Hexagonal Boron Nitride

in PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS (2019), 122(18), 187401-6

We present an ab initio method to calculate phonon-assisted absorption and emission spectra in the presence of strong excitonic effects. We apply the method to bulk hexagonal BN, which has an indirect ... [more ▼]

We present an ab initio method to calculate phonon-assisted absorption and emission spectra in the presence of strong excitonic effects. We apply the method to bulk hexagonal BN, which has an indirect band gap and is known for its strong luminescence in the UV range. We first analyze the excitons at the wave vector (q) over bar of the indirect gap. The coupling of these excitons with the various phonon modes at (q) over bar is expressed in terms of a product of the mean square displacement of the atoms and the second derivative of the optical response function with respect to atomic displacement along the phonon eigenvectors. The derivatives are calculated numerically with a finite difference scheme in a supercell commensurate with (q) over bar. We use detailed balance arguments to obtain the intensity ratio between emission and absorption processes. Our results explain recent luminescence experiments and reveal the exciton-phonon coupling channels responsible for the emission lines. [less ▲]

Information Thermodynamics of Turing Patterns

in Physical Review Letters (2018)

e set up a rigorous thermodynamic description of reaction-diffusion systems driven out of equilibrium by time-dependent space-distributed chemostats. Building on the assumption of local equilibrium ... [more ▼]

e set up a rigorous thermodynamic description of reaction-diffusion systems driven out of equilibrium by time-dependent space-distributed chemostats. Building on the assumption of local equilibrium, nonequilibrium thermodynamic potentials are constructed exploiting the symmetries of the chemical network topology. It is shown that the canonical (resp. semigrand canonical) nonequilibrium free energy works as a Lyapunov function in the relaxation to equilibrium of a closed (resp. open) system and its variation provides the minimum amount of work needed to manipulate the species concentrations. The theory is used to study analytically the Turing pattern formation in a prototypical reaction-diffusion system, the one-dimensional Brusselator model, and to classify it as a genuine thermodynamic nonequilibrium phase transition. [less ▲]

Response functions as quantifiers of non-Markovianity

in Physical Review Letters (2018)

Quantum non-Markovianity is crucially related to the study of dynamical maps, which are usually derived for initially factorized system-bath states. We here demonstrate that linear response theory also ... [more ▼]

Quantum non-Markovianity is crucially related to the study of dynamical maps, which are usually derived for initially factorized system-bath states. We here demonstrate that linear response theory also provides a way to derive dynamical maps, but for initially correlated (and in general entangled) states. Importantly, these maps are always time-translational invariant and allow for a much simpler quantification of non-Markovianity compared to previous approaches. We apply our theory to the Caldeira-Leggett model, for which our quantifier is valid beyond linear response and can be expressed analytically. We find that a classical Brownian particle coupled to an Ohmic bath can already exhibit non-Markovian behaviour, a phenomenon related to the initial state preparation procedure. Furthermore, for a peaked spectral density we demonstrate that there is no monotonic relation between our quantifier and the system-bath coupling strength, the sharpness of the peak or the resonance frequency in the bath. [less ▲]

Impact of many-body effects on Landau levels in graphene

in Physical Review Letters (2018), 120(18), 187701

We present magneto-Raman spectroscopy measurements on suspended graphene to investigate the charge carrier density-dependent electron-electron interaction in the presence of Landau levels. Utilizing gate ... [more ▼]

We present magneto-Raman spectroscopy measurements on suspended graphene to investigate the charge carrier density-dependent electron-electron interaction in the presence of Landau levels. Utilizing gate-tunable magnetophonon resonances, we extract the charge carrier density dependence of the Landau level transition energies and the associated effective Fermi velocity vF. In contrast to the logarithmic divergence of vF at zero magnetic field, we find a piecewise linear scaling of vF as a function of the charge carrier density, due to a magnetic-field-induced suppression of the long-range Coulomb interaction. We quantitatively confirm our experimental findings by performing tight-binding calculations on the level of the Hartree-Fock approximation, which also allow us to estimate an excitonic binding energy of ≈6  meV contained in the experimentally extracted Landau level transitions energies. [less ▲]

Sadhukhan and Tkatchenko Reply

in Physical Review Letters (2018), 120