Shock-breakout emission is light that arises when a shockwave, generated by the core-collapse explosion of a massive star, passes through its outer envelope. Hitherto, the earliest detection of such a signal was at several hours after the explosion1, although a few others had been reported. The temporal evolution of early light curves should provide insights into the shock propagation, including explosion asymmetry and environment in the vicinity, but this has been hampered by the lack of multiwavelength observations. Here we report the instant multiband observations of a type II supernova (SN 2023ixf) in the galaxy M101, beginning at about 1.4?h after the explosion. The exploding star was a red supergiant with a radius of about 440 solar radii. The light curves evolved rapidly, on timescales of 1?2?h, and appeared unusually fainter and redder than predicted by the models9,10,11 within the first few hours, which we attribute to an optically thick dust shell before it was disrupted by the shockwave. We infer that the breakout and perhaps the distribution of the surrounding dust were not spherically symmetric.
The complex circumstellar environment of supernova 2023ixf
超新星2023ixf復雜的星周環境
▲ 作者:E. A. Zimmerman, I. Irani, P. Chen, A. Gal-Yam, S. Schulze, D. A. Perley, J. Sollerman, A. V. Filippenko, T. Shenar, O. Yaron, S. Shahaf, R. J. Bruch, E. O. Ofek, A. De Cia, T. G. Brink, Y. Yang, S. S. Vasylyev, S. Ben Ami, M. Aubert, A. Badash, J. S. Bloom, P. J. Brown, K. De, G. Dimitriadis, K. Zhang
The early evolution of a supernova (SN) can reveal information about the environment and the progenitor star. When a star explodes in vacuum, the first photons to escape from its surface appear as a brief, hours-long shock-breakout flare, followed by a cooling phase of emission. However, for stars exploding within a distribution of dense, optically thick circumstellar material (CSM), the first photons escape from the material beyond the stellar edge and the duration of the initial flare can extend to several days, during which the escaping emission indicates photospheric heating. Early serendipitous observations that lacked ultraviolet (UV) data were unable to determine whether the early emission is heating or cooling and hence the nature of the early explosion event. Here we report UV spectra of the nearby SN?2023ixf in the galaxy Messier?101 (M101). Using the UV data as well as a comprehensive set of further multiwavelength observations, we temporally resolve the emergence of the explosion shock from a thick medium heated by the SN emission. We derive a reliable bolometric light curve that indicates that the shock breaks out from a dense layer with a radius substantially larger than typical supergiants.
Optomechanical realization of the bosonic Kitaev chain
玻色子基塔耶夫鏈的光力學實現
▲ 作者:Jesse J. Slim, Clara C. Wanjura, Matteo Brunelli, Javier del Pino, Andreas Nunnenkamp & Ewold Verhagen
The fermionic Kitaev chain is a canonical model featuring topological Majorana zero modes. We report the experimental realization of its bosonic analogue in a nano-optomechanical network, in which the parametric interactions induce beam-splitter coupling and two-mode squeezing among the nanomechanical modes, analogous to hopping and p-wave pairing in the fermionic case, respectively. This specific structure gives rise to a set of extraordinary phenomena in the bosonic dynamics and transport. We observe quadrature-dependent chiral amplification, exponential scaling of the gain with system size and strong sensitivity to boundary conditions. All these are linked to the unique non-Hermitian topological nature of the bosonic Kitaev chain. We probe the topological phase transition and uncover a rich dynamical phase diagram by controlling interaction phases and amplitudes. Finally, we present an experimental demonstration of an exponentially enhanced response to a small perturbation. These results represent the demonstration of a new synthetic phase of matter whose bosonic dynamics do not have fermionic parallels, and we have established a powerful system for studying non-Hermitian topology and its applications for signal manipulation and sensing.
High-fidelity spin qubit operation and algorithmic initialization above 1 K
1k以上高保真自旋量子位運算和算法初始化
▲ 作者:Jonathan Y. Huang, Rocky Y. Su, Wee Han Lim, MengKe Feng, Barnaby van Straaten, Brandon Severin, Will Gilbert, Nard Dumoulin Stuyck, Tuomo Tanttu, Santiago Serrano, Jesus D. Cifuentes, Ingvild Hansen, Amanda E. Seedhouse, Ensar Vahapoglu, Ross C. C. Leon, Nikolay V. Abrosimov, Hans-Joachim Pohl, Michael L. W. Thewalt, Fay E. Hudson, Christopher C. Escott, Natalia Ares, Stephen D. Bartlett, Andrea Morello, Andre Saraiva, Chih Hwan Yang
The encoding of qubits in semiconductor spin carriers has been recognized as a promising approach to a commercial quantum computer that can be lithographically produced and integrated at scale. However, the operation of the large number of qubits required for advantageous quantum applications will produce a thermal load exceeding the available cooling power of cryostats at millikelvin temperatures. As the scale-up accelerates, it becomes imperative to establish fault-tolerant operation above 1?K, at which the cooling power is orders of magnitude higher. Here we tune up and operate spin qubits in silicon above 1?K, with fidelities in the range required for fault-tolerant operations at these temperatures. We design an algorithmic initialization protocol to prepare a pure two-qubit state even when the thermal energy is substantially above the qubit energies and incorporate radiofrequency readout to achieve fidelities up to 99.34% for both readout and initialization. We also demonstrate single-qubit Clifford gate fidelities up to 99.85% and a two-qubit gate fidelity of 98.92%. These advances overcome the fundamental limitation that the thermal energy must be well below the qubit energies for the high-fidelity operation to be possible, surmounting a main obstacle in the pathway to scalable and fault-tolerant quantum computation.
氣候學Climatology
Five million years of Antarctic Circumpolar Current strength variability
500萬年的南極環極流強度變化
▲ 作者:Frank Lamy, Gisela Winckler, Helge W. Arz, Jesse R. Farmer, Julia Gottschalk, Lester Lembke-Jene, Jennifer L. Middleton, Michèlle van der Does, Ralf Tiedemann, Carlos Alvarez Zarikian, Chandranath Basak, Anieke Brombacher, Levin Dumm, Oliver M. Esper, Lisa C. Herbert, Shinya Iwasaki, Gaston Kreps, Vera J. Lawson, Li Lo, Elisa Malinverno, Alfredo Martinez-Garcia, Elisabeth Michel, Simone Moretti, Christopher M. Moy, Xiangyu Zhao
The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) represents the world’s largest ocean-current system and affects global ocean circulation, climate and Antarctic ice-sheet stability. Today, ACC dynamics are controlled by atmospheric forcing, oceanic density gradients and eddy activity. Whereas palaeoceanographic reconstructions exhibit regional heterogeneity in ACC position and strength over Pleistocene glacial–interglacial cycles, the long-term evolution of the ACC is poorly known. Here we document changes in ACC strength from sediment cores in the Pacific Southern Ocean. We find no linear long-term trend in ACC flow since 5.3?million years ago (Ma), in contrast to global cooling9 and increasing global ice volume. Instead, we observe a reversal on a million-year timescale, from increasing ACC strength during Pliocene global cooling to a subsequent decrease with further Early Pleistocene cooling. This shift in the ACC regime coincided with a Southern Ocean reconfiguration that altered the sensitivity of the ACC to atmospheric and oceanic forcings. We find ACC strength changes to be closely linked to 400,000-year eccentricity cycles, probably originating from modulation of precessional changes in the South Pacific jet stream linked to tropical Pacific temperature variability. A persistent link between weaker ACC flow, equatorward-shifted opal deposition and reduced atmospheric CO2 during glacial periods first emerged during the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT). The strongest ACC flow occurred during warmer-than-present intervals of the Plio-Pleistocene, providing evidence of potentially increasing ACC flow with future climate warming.
Global supply chains amplify economic costs of future extreme heat risk
Evidence shows a continuing increase in the frequency and severity of global heatwaves, raising concerns about the future impacts of climate change and the associated socioeconomic costs. Here we develop a disaster footprint analytical framework by integrating climate, epidemiological and hybrid input–output and computable general equilibrium global trade models to estimate the midcentury socioeconomic impacts of heat stress. We consider health costs related to heat exposure, the value of heat-induced labour productivity loss and indirect losses due to economic disruptions cascading through supply chains. Here we show that the global annual incremental gross domestic product loss increases exponentially from 0.03?±?0.01 (SSP?245)–0.05?±?0.03 (SSP?585) percentage points during 2030–2040 to 0.05?±?0.01–0.15?±?0.04 percentage points during 2050–2060. By 2060, the expected global economic losses reach a total of 0.6–4.6% with losses attributed to health loss (37–45%), labour productivity loss (18–37%) and indirect loss (12–43%) under different shared socioeconomic pathways. Small- and medium-sized developing countries suffer disproportionately from higher health loss in South-Central Africa (2.1 to 4.0 times above global average) and labour productivity loss in West Africa and Southeast Asia (2.0–3.3 times above global average). The supply-chain disruption effects are much more widespread with strong hit to those manufacturing-heavy countries such as China and the USA, leading to soaring economic losses of 2.7?±?0.7% and 1.8?±?0.5%, respectively.