Academic literature on the topic 'Squeezed phonons'

Changes in the physical properties such as the ground state properties, charge density wave ordering, binding energy and energy bandwidth of polaron and quantum fluctuation, and minimum uncertainty relation of phonons and nonadiabatically coupled electron–phonon systems with spin-1/2 have been investigated by our new state ansatz which can account for correlation among the phononic displacement, squeezing and polaron effects using variational method in one-dimensional Holstein model. The investigation here shows that the squeezing–antisqueezing effect (correlated) results in a decrease of the ground state energy, an increase of the binding energy of polarons, the reduction of the uncertainty and quantum fluctuation of the phonons, a decrease of polaron narrowing of electron bandwidth, an increase of tunneling effect of the polarons and an increase of CDW ordering and phonon staggered ordering when compared with the uncorrelated case. Therefore, this shows that the ground state determined by the new state ansatz is the most stable. The new ansatz which include the squeezing–antisqueezing (correlated) effect is very relevant for the coupled electron–phonon systems, especially in strongly coupled and highly squeezed cases.

AbstractRecent advances in pulsed x-ray sources have opened up new opportunities to study the dynamics of matter directly in the time domain with picosecond to femtosecond resolution. In this article, we present recent results from a variety of ultrafast sources on time-resolved x-ray scattering from elementary excitations in periodic solids. A few representative examples are given on folded acoustic phonons, coherent optical phonons, squeezed phonons, and polaritons excited by femtosecond lasers. Next-generation light sources, such as the x-ray-free electron laser, will lead to improvements in coherence, flux, and pulse duration. These experiments demonstrate potential opportunities for studying matter far from equilibrium on the fastest time scales and shortest distances that will be available in the coming years.

2013/2014
Femtosecond pump and probe techniques are standard experimental methodologies used for studying ultrafast dynamics in solids, in particular phonon oscillations in target materials. So far, only semiclassical methods have been employed in order to theoretically interpret the experimental data. In contrast, a fully quantum treatment will be presented here taking into account the quantum features of the generation mechanism of excited phonons by pump laser pulses, and of the process of accessing their behaviour by probe laser pulses. A single effective Hamiltonian will be used to model the interaction between photons and phonons both for the pumping and probing processes. In addition, as they interact with their environment, mainly electrons in the target, the excited phonons cannot be considered an isolated system. Their dynamics is then that typical of open quantum systems and generated by a master equation of Lindblad form, that takes into account the dissipative and noisy effects due to the environment.In this formalism, phonon oscillations can be analysed through suitable probe photon observables. Specifically, unlike in the existing literature, we will not focus only upon the scattered probe pulse intensity, namely on the probe photon number, but also on the number variance. Through the latter some quantum features of the phonon state can be accessed; in particular, specific signals of the presence of squeezed phonons can thus be identified.
Le tecniche di "pump and probe" impulsato sono metodologie sperimentali standard usate nello studio delle dinamiche ultraveloci nei solidi, in particolare delle oscillazioni di fononi. Usualmente l'interpretazione teorica dei dati sperimentali si basa su approssimazioni semiclassiche. Una descrizione completamente quantistica e` invece sviluppata nella presente trattazione: e` basata sull'introduzione di un'unica hamiltoniana di interazione tra fotoni e fononi, capace di descrivere in modo effettivo sia il processo di eccitazione che di rivelazione dei fononi. In generale, tali fononi non possono essere considerati come isolati, ma costituiscono un sistema quantistico aperto, cioe` in interazione debole con l'ambiente esterno, formato principalmente da elettroni e dagli altri costituenti del materiale in studio. La loro dinamica deve percio` venir descritta tramite una equazione master, che tenga conto di effetti di rumore e dissipazione. In questo formalismo, le proprieta` dei fononi eccitati dagli impulsi laser di "pump" possono essere analizzate attraverso lo studio di opportune osservabili caratterizzanti i fotoni di "probe". Piu` specificatamente, si e` analizzato il comportamento non solo dell'intensita` media della luce di "probe" riflessa, cioe` del numero medio di fotoni, ma anche della relativa varianza. In questo modo, si possono evidenziare alcune caratteristiche quantistiche dei fononi: in particolare, sono stati individuati segnali specifici della presenza di fononi "squeezed"
XXVII Ciclo
1986

L'étude de la dynamique hors équilibre des systèmes fortement corrélés, à l'aide de laser femtoseconde, a révélé une variété de phénomènes sans analogue en physique d'équilibre. Dans cette thèse, nous étudions théoriquement la dynamique hors équilibre des degrés de liberté du réseau et leur signature en spectroscopie pompe-sonde. Nous développons une description microscopique des phonons cohérents displacive excité par le laser. La théorie capture la rétroaction de l'excitation des phonons sur le fluide électronique, qui manque dans la formulation phénoménologique actuelle. Nous montrons que cette rétroaction conduit à une oscillation avec une fréquence qui dépend du temps aux temps courts, même si le mouvement des phonons est harmonique. Pour les temps longs, cette rétroaction apparaît comme une phase résiduelle dans le signal oscillatoire. Nous appliquons la théorie au BaFe2As2, nous expliquons l'origine de la phase du signal oscillatoire rapporté dans des expériences récentes, et nous prédisons que le système oscille avec une fréquence décalé vers le rouge pour les grandes fluences. Notre théorie ouvre également la possibilité d'extraire des informations d'équilibre à partir la dynamique des phonons cohérents. Un autre phénomène intéressant qui a été observé en spectroscopie pompe-sonde est l'oscillation des fluctuations du réseau au double de la fréquence d’un phonon du système étudié. Ces oscillations sont interprétées comme une signature d'états de phonons squeezé macroscopique. Dans ce travail, nous identifions d'autres mécanismes d'oscillations à une fréquence double autre que le squeezing. Nous montrons qu'un quench de la température du bain thermique induite par la pompe, à laquelle le phonon est couplé, ou l'excitation d'un phonon cohérent pour lequel l'anharmonicité cubique est permise par symétrie peut également produire de telles oscillations en spectroscopie sans que le phonon soit dans un état squeezé. Nous concluons que, contrairement à ce qui est communément admis, les oscillations à double fréquence phononique en spectroscopie de bruit ne sont pas nécessairement une signature des phonons squeezés. Nous soulignons ce qui peut être un critère fiable pour identifier un phonon squeezé en utilisant la spectroscopie pompe-sonde
The study of the out of equilibrium dynamics of strongly correlated systems, using ultrafast pulses, uncovered a plethora of phenomena with no analog in equilibrium physics. In this thesis, we theoretically investigate the out of equilibrium dynamics of the lattice degrees of freedom and their signature in pump-probe spectroscopy. We develop a Hamiltonian-based microscopic description of laser pump induced displacive coherent phonons. The theory captures the feedback of the phonon excitation upon the electronic fluid, which is missing in the state-of-the-art phenomenological formulation. We show that this feedback leads to chirping at short timescales, even if the phonon motion is harmonic. At long times, this feedback appears as a finite phase in the oscillatory signal. We apply the theory to BaFe2As2, explain the origin of the phase in the oscillatory signal reported in recent experiments, and we predict that the system will exhibit redshifted chirping at larger fluence. Our theory also opens the possibility to extract equilibrium information from coherent phonon dynamics. Another interesting phenomenon that have been reported in pump-probe spectroscopy is the oscillation of the lattice fluctuations at double phonon frequency. These oscillations are invariably interpreted as a signature of macroscopic squeezed phonon states. In this work, we identify other mechanisms of double phonon frequency oscillations that do not involve squeezing. We show that a pump induced temperature quench of the bath, to which the phonon is coupled to, or exciting a coherent phonon for which cubic anharmonicity is allowed by symmetry can also produce such oscillations in noise spectroscopy without squeezing the phonon state. We conclude that, in contrast with what is commonly believed, double phonon frequency oscillations in noise spectroscopy are not necessarily a signature of macroscopic phonon squeezing. We point out what can be a reliable criterion to identify a squeezed phonon using pump-probe spectroscopy

In this work, we theoretically and numerically investigate nonclassical phonon states created in the collective vibration of a Raman medium by the generation of a dual-pumped Raman optical frequency comb in an optical cavity. This frequency comb is generated by cascaded Raman scattering driven by two phase-locked pump lasers that are separated in frequency by three times the Raman phonon frequency. We characterize the variety of conditioned phonon states that are created when the number of photons in all optical frequency modes except the pump modes are measured. Almost all of these conditioned phonon states are extremely well approximated as three-phonon-squeezed states or Schrödinger-cat states, depending on the outcomes of the photon number measurements. We show how the combinations of first-, second-, and third-order Raman scattering that correspond to each set of measured photon numbers determine the fidelity of the conditioned phonon state with model three-phonon-squeezed states and Schrödinger-cat states. All of the conditioned phonon states demonstrate preferential growth of the phonon mode along three directions in phase space. That is, there are three preferred phase values that the phonon state takes on as a result of Raman scattering. We show that the combination of Raman processes that produces a given set of measured photon numbers always produces phonons in multiples of three. In the quantum number-state representation, these multiples of three are responsible for the threefold phase-space symmetry seen in the conditioned phonon states. With a semiclassical model, we show how this three-phase preference can also be understood in light of phase correlations that are known to spontaneously arise in single-pumped Raman frequency combs. Additionally, our semiclassical model predicts that the optical modes also grow preferentially along three phases, suggesting that the dual-pumped Raman optical frequency comb is partially phase-stabilized.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

As an alternative to homodyne detection, a particle scattering technique is described by which squeezing can be detected. The particle scattering off of the squeezed boson field need not be a photon and the boson field need not be the electromagnetic field. This detection method may thus be particularly useful for systems for which high-efficiency quantum counters such as photodetectors are not available (squeezed phonons, for example). The detection method takes advantage of a coherence that can be established between a scattering process which involves the emission of a boson into the squeezed boson field and that which involves the absorption of a boson from the squeezed boson field. Such a coherence is established by first preparing the particle in a superposition of two energy eigenstates whose energies differ by 2ħω2, where ω q is the oscillation frequency of the mode of the boson field which has been squeezed. When the coherence between the two scattering processes gives rise to destructive interference, the scattering rate can be greatly inhibited below that when the boson field is in its vacuum state. Squeezing thus can manifest itself as a reduction in a scattering rate.

We give a quantum theoretical analysis of squeezed light generation via nondegenerate four-wave mixing in an optical fiber. The medium is modeled by an ensemble of anharmonic oscillators and loss is included. We include the coupling to acoustic phonons which gives rise to guided acoustic wave Brillouin scattering (GAWBS). The GAWBS introduces random noise which destroys the squeezing at room temperatures. By cooling the fiber to temperatures ~2 K the GAWBS is substantially reduced and the observation of squeezing becomes possible. A comparison is made with the recent experimental results of Levenson et al.1, 2 A scheme to suppress the GAWBS at room temperatures using a two-frequency pump and difference detection is analyzed and the conditions in which good squeezing results are determined.

For a random atomic beam interacting with an optomechanical cavity, the synchronization of phonon and photon trapping states is proved. With the system connected to a squeezed phonon reservoir, the phonon blockade effect is realizable.

We experimentally realized the first topological parametric phonon lasers based on nonlinear nanoelectromechanical Dirac-vortex cavities with strong squeezed interaction, which represent an important advance in nonlinear topological physics.