We generate experimentally different types of two-dimensional Bloch waves of a square photonic lattice by employing the phase imprinting technique.We probe the local dispersion of the Bloch modes in the photonic lattice by analyzing the linear diffraction of beams associated with the high-symmetry points of the Brillouin zone, and also distinguish the regimes of normal, anomalous, and anisotrop...

A rotating Bose-Einstein condensate is shown to exhibit a Bloch band structure even in the absence of a periodic potential. Vortices enter the condensate via Bragg reflection if the frequency of a rotating drive is adiabatically increased or decreased, or if the interaction is adiabatically changed at a constant rotating drive. A localized state analogous to a gap soliton in a periodic system i...

Relaxation of electronic spins in metals is significantly enhanced whenever a Fermi surface crosses Brillouin zone boundaries, special symmetry points, or lines of accidental degeneracy. A realistic calculation shows that if aluminum had one valence electron, its spin relaxation would be slower by nearly two orders of magnitude. This not only solves a longstanding experimental puzzle, but also ...

The magnetic excitations of the square-lattice spin-1/2 antiferromagnet and high- T(c) parent compound La2CuO4 are determined using high-resolution inelastic neutron scattering. Sharp spin waves with absolute intensities in agreement with theory including quantum corrections are found throughout the Brillouin zone. The observed dispersion relation shows evidence for substantial interactions bey...

A recently developed density-functional method based on localized densities is applied to calculate electronic, structural, and vibrational properties of 20 alkali halides with elements lithium through cesium and fluorine through iodine. Properties calculated include dissociation energy, lattice parameter, dielectric constant, elastic moduli, and phonon frequencies for the high-symmetry points ...

We demonstrate resonant guiding in a chalcogenide glass photonic crystal membrane. We observe strong resonances in the optical transmission spectra at normal incidence, associated with Fano coupling between free space and guided modes. We obtain good agreement with modeling results based on three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain simulations, and identify the guided modes near the centr...

A quasi-Newton Method is used to simultaneously relax the internal coordinates and lattice parameters of crystals under pressure. The symmetry of the crystal structure is preserved during the relaxation. From the inverse of the Hessian matrix, elastic properties and some optical phonon frequencies at the Brillouin zone center can be estimated. The e ciency of the method is demonstrated for sili...

Phosphorene is a two-dimensional nanomaterial with a direct band-gap at the Brillouin zone center. In this paper, we present a recently derived effective-mass theory of the band structure in the presence of strain and electric field, based upon group theory. Band parameters for this theory are computed using a first-principles theory based upon the generalized-gradient approximation to the dens...

We present an algorithm for the construction of the branching functions in the vacuum sector for affine Lie algebras based on the string hypothesis solution to a system of Bethe equations for generalized RSOS models. We also mention how the ground state structure and features of the excitation spectra like the Brillouin zone schemes of these models (and those in the same universality classes) c...

We show that a new resonant magnetic excitation at incommensurate momenta, observed recently by inelastic neutron scattering experiments on YBa2Cu3O6.85 and YBa2Cu3O6.6, is a spin exciton. Its location in the Brillouin zone and its frequency are determined by the momentum dependence of the particle-hole continuum. We identify several features that distinguish this novel mode from the previous r...