Modern Physics Letters B

Using an ultrafast laser pulse to manipulate the spin degree of freedom has broad technological appeal. It allows one to control the spin dynamics on a femtosecond time scale. The discipline, commonly called femtomagnetism, started with the pioneering experiment by Beaurepaire and coworkers in 1996, who showed subpicosecond demagnetization occurs in magnetic Ni thin films. This finding has motivated extensive research worldwide. All-optical helicity-dependent spin switching (AO-HDS) represents a new frontier in femtomagnetism, where a single ultrafast laser pulse can permanently switch spin without any assistance from a magnetic field. This review summarizes some of the crucial aspects of this new discipline: key experimental findings, leading mechanisms, controversial issues, and possible future directions. The emphasis is on our latest investigation. We first develop the all-optical spin switching (AOS) rule that determines how the switchability depends on the light helicity. This rule allows one to understand microscopically how the spin is reversed and why the circularly polarized light appears more powerful than the linearly polarized light. Then we invoke our latest spin-orbit coupled harmonic oscillator model to simulate single spin reversal. We consider both continuous wave (cw) excitation and pulsed laser excitation. The results are in a good agreement with the experimental result (a MatLab code is available upon request from the author). We then extend the code to include the exchange interaction among different spin sites. We show where the “inverse-Faraday field” comes from and how the laser affects the spin reversal nonlinearly. Our hope is that this review will motivate new experimental and theoretical investigations and discussions.

Single-crystalline Fe₃O₄ hollow nanostructures (nanoring and nanotube) have been successfully synthesized by a hydrothermal method along with a heat treatment process. The temperature dependences of the magnetization of the hollow nanostructures were measured under a high vacuum ($<9.5\times 10^{-6}$ Torr) from 300K to 900K. The Curie temperatures of the nanoring and nanotube samples were found to decrease with decreasing the mean wall thickness. The Curie temperatures of the hollow magnetite nanostructures follow a finite-size scaling relation with the scaling exponent $\nu =1.04\pm 0.03$. By comparison with those of the zero-dimensional Fe₃O₄ particles and two-dimensional Fe₃O₄ films, we show that the scaling relation for our hollow nanostructures is in better agreement with the quasi-two-dimensional finite-size scaling law.

With the help of the time-dependent local-density approximation (TDLDA) coupled non-adiabatically to molecular dynamics (MD), we studied both the static properties and irradiation dynamics of water trimer subject to the short and intense femtosecond laser field. It is shown that the optimized geometry and the optical absorption strength of the water trimer accord well with results in literature. Three typical possible irradiated scenarios of water trimer which are “normal oscillation”, “dissociation and formation” and “pure OH dissociation” are exhibited by investigating the ionization and the level depletion related to electrons as well as the OH bonds, proton-transfer, the intermolecular distance and the kinetic energy connected with ions. In three scenarios, the behaviors of water trimer can be attributed to the sequential combination of responses of the electrons emission, the proton-transfer, OH vibration and rotation, OH dissociation and hydroxyl formation, respectively. The relevant time scales of the first proton-transfer and OH dissociation are identified as 13 fs and 10–20 fs, respectively. The study of kinetic energies of ions show that the kinetic energies of the remaining ions are all below 4.5 eV and outgoing hydrogen ions carry a kinetic energy about 5–12 eV. Furthermore, it is found that in the tunneling ionization situations the depletion is fairly shared between the various levels except the most deep occupied electronic level while in the multiphotonic ionization case the electron loss comes from all single-electron levels and the HOMO level contributes the most.

Effects of scale-free avalanche walks on anomalous diffusions have been studied by introducing simple non-Markovian walk models. The scale-free avalanche walk is realized as a walker goes to one direction consistently in a time interval, the distribution of which follows a power-law. And it is applied to the memory models, in which the entire history of a walk process is memorized or the memory for the latest step is enhanced with time. The power-law avalanche walk with memory effects strengthens the persistence between steps and thus makes the Hurst exponent be larger than the cases without avalanche walks, while does not affect the anti-persistent nature.

According to $p{K}_a$ measurements, it has been predicted that proton transfer would not occur in the radical cation of adenine–thymine (A:T). However, recent theoretical calculations indicate that proton transfer takes place in the base pair in water below the room temperature. We have performed simulations of proton transfer in the cation of B-DNA stack composed of 10 A:T base pairs in water from 20 K to 300 K. Proton transfer occurs below the room temperature, meanwhile it could also be observed at the room temperature under the external electric field. Another case that interests us is that proton transfer bounces back after $\sim$300 fs from the appearance of proton transfer at low temperatures.

Based on a matrix Lie algebra consisting of $4\times 4$ block matrices, new tri-integrable coupling of the Kaup–Newell soliton hierarchy is constructed. Then, the bi-Hamiltonian structure which leads to Liouville integrability of this coupling is furnished by the variational identity.

Network traffic is believed to have a significant impact on network performance and is the result of the application operation on networks. Majority of current network performance analysis are based on the premise that the traffic transmission is through the shortest path, which is too simple to reflect a real traffic process. The real traffic process is related to the network application process characteristics, involving the realistic user behavior. In this paper, first, an application can be divided into the following three categories according to realistic application process characteristics: random application, customized application and routine application. Then, numerical simulations are carried out to analyze the effect of different applications on the network performance. The main results show that (i) network efficiency for the BA scale-free network is less than the ER random network when similar single application is loaded on the network; (ii) customized application has the greatest effect on the network efficiency when mixed multiple applications are loaded on BA network.

The Born–Mayer–Huggins potential which has been found the best suitable potential to study the YBa₂Cu₃O${}_{7-\delta }$ type high temperature superconductors is revisited in a new framework. A deeper insight in it reveals that the Born–Mayer parameters for different interactions in high temperature superconductor are not simple quantities but several thermodynamic and spatial functions enter the problem. Based on the new theory, the expressions for pressure, bulk modulus and Born–Mayer parameters have been derived and it is established that these quantities depend upon Gruneisen parameter which is the measure of the strength of anharmonic effects in high temperature superconductors. This theory has been applied to a specific model YBa₂Cu₃O${}_{7-\delta }$ crystal for the purpose of numerical estimates to justify the new results.

We propose a metal–insulator–metal (MIM) structure which consists of a $\pi$-shaped resonator and a surface plasmon polariton (SPP) waveguide. The finite element method (FEM) is employed in the simulation. The results show that this structure forms an optical pressure sensor. The transmission spectra have a redshift with increasing pressure, and the relation between the wavelength shift and the pressure is linear. The nanoscale pressure sensor shows a high sensitivity and may have potential applications in biological and biomedical engineering.

We observe the polarization squeezing in the mixture of a two mode squeezed vacuum and a simple coherent light through a linear polarization beam splitter. Squeezed vacuum not being squeezed in polarization, generates polarization squeezed light when superposed with coherent light. All the three Stokes parameters of the light produced on the output port of polarization beam splitter are found to be squeezed and squeezing factor also depends upon the parameters of coherent light.

Lithium selenoindate (LiInSe₂) crystals with high optical quality are successfully grown by small-angle inclined horizontal temperature gradient condensation. In order to evaluate the various characteristics, the powder X-ray diffraction (XRD) spectrum, optical damage resistance ability and Vickers hardness in lithium selenoindate crystals were studied. The growth crystals have orthorhombic nature, a = 6.184 Å, b = 7.092 Å and c = 8.207 Å. The damage thresholds of LiInSe₂ crystal with the front face and back face were 224 mW/cm² and 165 mW/cm². Also the Vickers hardness number of LiInSe₂ crystal was found to be 342.4 kg/mm².

A tunable multi-wavelength narrow-linewidth thulium-doped fiber laser employing two-stage cascaded Sagnac loop mirrors is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The designed fiber laser is composed of a pump source, wavelength division multiplex, circulator, thulium-doped fiber, polarization controllers (PCs), couplers and polarization-maintaining fibers (PMFs). Two cascaded Sagnac loops are used as the cavity reflector and filter, and the proposed filter is fabricated using two sections of PMFs with 2-m and 1-m lengths, respectively. In the experiment, the laser threshold is 110 mW, and laser can emit single, double, triple, quadruple and quintuple wavelengths in the spectral range of 1873–1901 nm through the simultaneous adjustment of the two PCs. The power fluctuations and 3-dB linewidth are less than 2.1 dB and 0.2 nm, respectively, over 10 min at room temperature, and the side-mode suppression ratio is greater than 20 dB. The proposed laser will be useful in various fields, such as spectral analysis, fiber sensing and optical communication.

A series of experiments pointed out that compact states of DNA condensed by multivalent cation prefer higher temperature. The condensed DNA takes elongated coil or compact globule states and the population of the compact globule states increases with an increase in temperature. At the same time, a recent experimental work carried out in buffer solution without multivalent cation points out that DNA persistence length strongly depends on the temperature. DNA persistence length is a key parameter for quantitative interpretation of the conformational properties of DNA and related to the bending rigidity of DNA. It is necessary to revolve the effects of temperature dependence of persistence length on DNA condensation, and a model including the temperature dependence of persistence length and strong correlation of multivalent cation on DNA is provided. The autocorrelation function of the tangent vectors is found as an effective way to detect the temperature dependence of toroid conformations. With an increase in temperature, the first periodic oscillation in the autocorrelation function shifts left and the number of segments containing the first periodic oscillation decreases gradually. According to the experiments mentioned above, the long-axis length is defined to estimate the temperature dependence of condensation process further. At the temperatures defined in experiments mentioned above, the relation between long-axis length and temperature matches the experimental results.

The femtosecond pulse propagation and free carriers’ evolution in the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) waveguides have been numerically investigated considering the carrier’s lifetime and the pulse width of the input pulse at 1.5 $\mu$m regime. Numerical results show that the free carriers’ density profile becomes gentle between the leading edge and trailing edge of the pulse in time domain due to the decreasing of the pulse intensity caused by the nonlinear absorption, which becomes more remarkable when the pulse width expands. It can be found that lifetime ranging from 5 ns to 100 ns does not affect the free carriers’ evolution clearly in femtosecond regime. In addition, the refractive index modulation can be appeared in the process of pulse propagation and free carriers evolution with lower peak power of 200 W. This research can supply some contribution to the insight of free carriers evolution in SOI waveguides.

The impact that the heterogeneities of links’ weights have on epidemic diffusion in weighted networks has received much attention. Investigating how heterogeneous edge weights affect epidemic spread is helpful for disease control. In this paper, we study a Reed–Frost epidemic model in weighted evolving networks. Our results indicate that a higher heterogeneity of edge weights leads to higher epidemic prevalence and epidemic incidence at earlier stage of epidemic diffusion in weighted evolving networks. In addition, weighted evolving scale-free networks come with a higher epidemic prevalence and epidemic incidence than unweighted scale-free networks.