Department of Physics

Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad&nbsp;(IIT Palakkad or IIT PKD) is a public autonomous&nbsp;engineering&nbsp;and&nbsp;research&nbsp;institute located in&nbsp;Palakkad,&nbsp;Kerala. It was&nbsp;one of the five new&nbsp;IITs&nbsp;proposed in the&nbsp;2014 Union budget of India. The campus was inaugurated on 3 August 2015. The institute has 94 faculty, 978 students, and 63 non-teaching staffs.

IT Palakkad currently offers four-year Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) and two years MS programmes in 8 different engineering disciplines including&nbsp;Computer Science, Electrical, Mechanical, Civil among others.

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IIT Palakkad

BaSn2 has been shown to form as layers of buckled stanene intercalated by barium ions. However, despite an apparently straightforward synthesis and significant interest in stanene as a topological material, BaSn2 has been left largely unexplored, and has only recently been recognized as a potential topological insulator. Belonging to neither the lead nor bismuth chalcogenide families, it would represent a unique manifestation of the topological insulating phase. Here we present a detailed investigation of BaSn2, using both ab initio and experimental methods. First-principles calculations demonstrate that this overlooked material is indeed a strong, wide-gap topological insulator with a bulk band gap of 200 meV. We characterize the surface state dependence on termination chemistry, providing guidance for experimental efforts to measure and manipulate its topological properties. Additionally, through ab initio modeling and synthesis experiments, we explore the stability and accessibility of this phase, revealing a complicated phase diagram that indicates a challenging path to obtaining single crystals. © 2017 American Physical Society.

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Physical Review B

BaSn2: A wide-gap strong topological insulator

We present Se77-NMR measurements on single-crystalline FeSe under pressures up to 2 GPa. Based on the observation of the splitting and broadening of the NMR spectrum due to structural twin domains, we discovered that static, local nematic ordering exists well above the bulk nematic ordering temperature, Ts. The static, local nematic order and the low-energy stripe-type antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations, as revealed by NMR spin-lattice relaxation rate measurements, are both insensitive to pressure application. These NMR results provide clear evidence for the microscopic cooperation between magnetism and local nematicity in FeSe. © 2017 American Physical Society.

NMR evidence for static local nematicity and its cooperative interplay with low-energy magnetic fluctuations in FeSe under pressure

We report the growth, structure and characterization of BaZnGa, identifying it as the sole known ternary compound in the Ba–Zn–Ga system. Single crystals of BaZnGa can be grown out of excess Ba–Zn and adopt a tI36 structure type. There are three unique Ba sites and three M = Zn/Ga sites. Using DFT calculations we can argue that whereas one of these three M sites is probably solely occupied by Ga, the other two M sites, most likely, have mixed Zn/Ga occupancy. Temperature-dependent resistivity and magnetization measurements suggest that BaZnGa is a poor metal with no electronic or magnetic phase transitions between 1.8 and 300 K. © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Philosophical Magazine

Growth and characterization of BaZnGa

APS March Meeting Abstracts 2017, X48.

Systematic investigation of structural, transport, magnetic and thermodynamic properties of new hexagonal compound GdPtPb

Multiparty quantum states are useful for a variety of quantum information and computation protocols. We define a multiparty entanglement measure based on local measurements on a multiparty quantum state and an entanglement measure averaged on the postmeasurement ensemble. Using the generalized geometric measure as the measure of multipartite entanglement for the ensemble, we demonstrate, in the case of several well-known classes of multipartite pure states, that the localized multipartite entanglement can exceed the entanglement present in the original state. We also show that measurement over multiple parties may be beneficial in enhancing localizable multipartite entanglement. We point out that localizable generalized geometric measure faithfully signals quantum critical phenomena in well-known quantum spin models even when considerable finite-size effect is present in the system. © 2017 American Physical Society.

Physical Review A

Multipartite entanglement accumulation in quantum states: Localizable generalized geometric measure

A stochastic version of the Barkai-Leibler model of chemotaxis receptors in Escherichia coli is studied here with the goal of elucidating the effects of intrinsic network noise in their conformational dynamics. The model was originally proposed to explain the robust and near-perfect adaptation of E. coli observed across a wide range of spatially uniform attractant/repellent (ligand) concentrations. In the model, a receptor is either active or inactive and can stochastically switch between the two states. The enzyme CheR methylates inactive receptors while CheB demethylates active receptors and the probability for a receptor to be active depends on its level of methylation and ligand occupation. In a simple version of the model with two methylation sites per receptor (M = 2), we show rigorously, under a quasi-steady state approximation, that the mean active fraction of receptors is an ultrasensitive function of [CheR]/[CheB] in the limit of saturating receptor concentration. Hence the model shows zeroorder ultrasensitivity (ZOU), similar to the classical two-state model of covalent modification studied by Goldbeter and Koshland (GK). We also find that in the limits of extremely small and extremely large ligand concentrations, the system reduces to two different two-state GK modules. A quantitative measure of the spontaneous fluctuations in activity is provided by the variance s2 a in the active fraction, which is estimated mathematically under linear noise approximation (LNA). It is found that s2 a peaks near the ZOU transition. The variance is a nonmonotonic, but weak function of ligand concentration and a decreasing function of receptor concentration. Gillespie simulations are also performed in models with M = 2, 3 and 4. For M = 2, simulations show excellent agreement with analytical results obtained under LNA. Numerical results for M = 3 and M = 4 are qualitatively similar to our mathematical results in M = 2; while all the models show ZOU in mean activity, the variance is found to be smaller for larger M. The magnitude of receptor noise deduced from available experimental data is consistent with our predictions. A simple analysis of the downstream signaling pathway shows that this noise is large enough to affect the motility of the organism, and may have a beneficial effect on it. The response of mean receptor activity to small time-dependent changes in the external ligand concentration is computed within linear response theory, and found to have a bilobe form, in agreement with earlier experimental observations. © 2017 Roy, Gopalakrishnan. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

PLoS ONE

Ultrasensitivity and fluctuations in the Barkai-Leibler model of chemotaxis receptors in Escherichia coli

We report a complete suppression of the coffee-ring effect resulting in the formation of loosely packed two-dimensional particle monolayers by controlled evaporation of sessile drops containing soft microgel particles. These particulate deposits show gradual order-to-disorder transitions that are not abrupt like deposits of hard colloids. The areal coverage of the monolayer deposits can also be precisely controlled by tuning the particle concentration. The preferential adsorption of soft-microgel particles to the water-vapor interface, and their radial flow along the interface towards the drop edge facilitates the creation of the novel monolayer deposits. © 2017 The Royal Society of Chemistry.

Nanoscale

Loosely packed monolayer coffee stains in dried drops of soft colloids

We discuss a 1+1 dimensional generalization of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model. The model contains N Majorana fermions at each lattice site with a nearest-neighbour hopping term. The SYK random interaction is restricted to low momentum fermions of definite chirality within each lattice site. This gives rise to an ordinary 1+1 field theory above some energy scale and a low energy SYK-like behavior. We exhibit a class of low-pass filters which give rise to a rich variety of hyperscaling behaviour in the IR. We also discuss another set of generalizations which describes probing an SYK system with an external fermion, together with the new scaling behavior they exhibit in the IR. © 2017, The Author(s).

Journal of High Energy Physics

Higher dimensional generalizations of the SYK model

We study large N tensor models on the lattice without disorder. We introduce techniques which can be applied to a wide class of models, and illustrate it by studying some specific rank-3 tensor models. In particular, we study Klebanov-Tarnopolsky model on lattice, Gurau-Witten model (by treating it as a tensor model on four sites) and also a new model which interpolates between these two models. In each model, we evaluate various four point functions at large N and strong coupling, and discuss their spectrum and long time behaviors. We find similarities as well as differences from SYK model. We also generalize our analysis to rank-D tensor models where we obtain analogous results as D = 3 case for the four point functions which we computed. For D > 5, we are able to compute the next-to-subleading 1N corrections for a specific four point function. © 2017, The Author(s).

SYK-like tensor models on the lattice

Paramagnetic impurities in a quantum spin liquid give rise to Kondo effects with highly unusual properties. We have studied the effect of locally coupling a paramagnetic impurity with the spin-12 honeycomb Kitaev model in its gapless spin-liquid phase. The (impurity) scaling equations are found to be insensitive to the sign of the coupling. The weak and strong coupling fixed points are stable, with the latter corresponding to a noninteracting vacancy and an interacting, spin-1 defect for the antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic cases, respectively. The ground state in the strong coupling limit in both cases has a nontrivial topology associated with a finite Z2 flux at the impurity site. For the antiferromagnetic case, this result has been obtained straightforwardly owing to the integrability of the Kitaev model with a vacancy. The strong-coupling limit of the ferromagnetic case is, however, nonintegrable, and we address this problem through exact-diagonalization calculations with finite Kitaev fragments. Our exact diagonalization calculations indicate that the weak-to-strong coupling transition and the topological phase transition occur rather close to each other and are possibly coincident. We also find an intriguing similarity between the magnetic response of the defect and the impurity susceptibility in the two-channel Kondo problem. © 2016 American Physical Society.