Happy Canada Day!

By Thomas Farrell on July 1, 2016

Today is Canada Day! To celebrate, I’ve put together a collection of some of the best research we’ve recently published from Canadian institutions, which I hope you will find interesting. Of course, all scientific research is collaborative, so many of these papers are the result of international collaboration and are not solely produced by teams in Canada, but they certainly make a nice list.

I also talked to Professor Ed Grant of the University of British Columbia. Professor Grant is a member of the Editorial Board of JPhysB, and he had this to say about Canada’s contribution to the field of atomic, molecular and optical physics:

“Over the last 50 years, Canadian scientists have led key advances in atomic, molecular and optical physics. This is perhaps most prominently signified by the 1971 award of the Nobel Prize in Physics to Gerhard Herzberg for his work mainly at the National Research Council in Ottawa on the electronic structure and geometry of molecules. Around this time Herzberg working NRC with Christian Jungen laid the foundation of molecular multichannel quantum defect theory (MQDT). Soon thereafter at the University of British Columbia, Jungen and Anthony Merer established a framework within which to understand the rotational structure of molecules in electronic states strongly coupled to degenerate bending vibrations. The Steacie Institute at NRC has seen many other AMO Physics firsts. In 2001 NRC researchers, led by Paul Corkum, produced and measured the first attosecond pulses. Ultrafast measurements there by Albert Stolow have clocked the breaking of chemical bonds. David Villeneuve and coworkers have used attosecond recollisions to record tomograms of molecular orbitals. Meanwhile, in work at Dalhousie, Axel Becke took key steps that established the utility of Density Functional Theory (DFT) for describing the structure of molecules. Today, AMO Physics researchers across Canada conduct leading investigations focusing on quantum optics and quantum information, the physics of ultracold systems such as atomic and molecular Bose-Einstein condensates and Fermi gases, trapped ions, ultracold plasmas, as well as applications extending to molecular biophysics and quantum materials.”

JPhysA: Mathematical and Theoretical

Stability theorem of depolarizing channels for the minimal output quantum Rényi entropies, Eunok Bae et al
Quantum conical designs, Matthew A Graydon and D M Appleby
Summoning information in spacetime, or where and when can a qubit be?, Patrick Hayden and Alex May

The spatial profile of an XUV beam, in the presence of spatial-chirp in the driving field, as a function of the CEP of the driving laser pulse, from Chunmei Zhang et al 2015 J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 48 061001 , Image Ⓒ IOP Publishing, All Rights Reserved.

JPhysB: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics

Attosecond lighthouse driven by sub-two-cycle, 1.8 μm laser pulses, Chunmei Zhang et al
Coherent control of D2/H2 dissociative ionization by a mid-infrared two-color laser field, Vincent Wanie et al
Interference asymmetry of molecular frame photoelectron angular distributions in bichromatic UV ionization processes, Kai-Jun Yuan and André D Bandrauk
Large numbers of cold positronium atoms created in laser-selected Rydberg states using resonant charge exchange, R McConnell et al

JPCM: Condensed Matter

Photograph of the molecular junctions fabricated using a SIM-card pin-out (with a conventional SIM card shown for comparison) to simplify testing and integration into analog circuits, from Adam Johan Bergren et al 2016 J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 28 094011, Image Ⓒ IOP Publishing, All Rights Reserved.

Musical molecules: the molecular junction as an active component in audio distortion, Adam Johan Bergren et al
Differences between the insulating limit quasiparticles of one-band and three-band cuprate models, H Ebrahimnejad et al (incidently, you can check out a great write up of this work by coauthor Mona Berciu on this very blog)
Spin-wave instabilities of ferromagnetic nanowire stripes under parallel pumping, Zahra Haghshenasfard and Michael G Cottam

JPhysD: Applied Physics

JPhysG: Nuclear and Particle Physics

The emergence of deformation and rotational states in the many nucleon quantum theory of nuclei, D J Rowe

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

Front image and Image 1: Canadian Flag, created by user ElasticComputeFarm, from https://pixabay.com/en/canadian-flag-canada-maple-country-1229484/ reused under Creative Commons CC0

Image 2: The spatial profile of an XUV beam, in the presence of spatial-chirp in the driving field, as a function of the CEP of the driving laser pulse, from Chunmei Zhang et al 2015 J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 48 061001 , Image Ⓒ IOP Publishing, Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.

Image 3: Photograph of the molecular junctions fabricated using a SIM-card pin-out (with a conventional SIM card shown for comparison) to simplify testing and integration into analog circuits, from Adam Johan Bergren et al 2016 J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 28 094011, Image Ⓒ IOP Publishing, Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.