407 entries
4 items
Trumpet takes today: three days since it was last assigned, the longest gap of the three, and it wants a short session. Last time was Syncopation, so today goes back to the First Studies in Arban, whose job is tone and evenness, paired with a melody from the Art of Phrasing. The aim is notes that are the same size and shape from one to the next, in the middle register.
Brown's own tune, a brisk bebop line. Listen to how every note in a fast run has the same weight and the same clean edge, so that tonguing never interrupts the sound. That is the evenness the First Studies are meant to build, at a tempo well above today's.
Using Pantheon+ in flat ΛCDM, the authors compare the intercept of the local distance ladder against the value implied by the cosmological model. Applying peculiar-velocity corrections moves the forward-fit H0 from 74.30 (+1.18/−1.20) to 71.37 (+1.23/−1.18) km/s/Mpc, and the intercept discrepancy falls from 6.8σ to 3.9σ in the forward direction and from 7.3σ to 4.3σ in the backward direction. A residual tension of roughly 4σ remains in both.
src H. Dong, M. Biesiada, Z. Cao, S.-J. Wang, "A cosmological intercept tension in local distance ladders", arXiv:2610.31181 (astro-ph.CO, Oct 2026)
The authors give an admit-free, end-to-end machine-checked finite-key security proof for BB84 in the Rocq proof assistant, 87 pages including a 71-page appendix. In formalising the standard paper argument they identify side conditions it leaves unstated and, in one place, a proof branch that was missing. The claim is about the proof, not the protocol: BB84 is not shown to be insecure.
src R. Deng, Z. Ji, J. Zhang, L. Zhou, "FVQKD: A Formal Verification of Quantum Key Distribution Security in Rocq", arXiv:2610.30645 (quant-ph, Oct 2026)
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Piano takes today: four days since it was last assigned, the longest gap of the three, and it is the one instrument that rewards a long block while trumpet and alto rest. The family moves from line building to progressions, with minor_ii_v_i https://brona90.github.io/twelve-keys/minor_ii_v_i.html in F# minor, a key that does not read easily. About 50 minutes.
Blue Bossa is built on minor ii-V-i changes, the same motion as today's exercise. Listen to how the line leans into each dominant and relaxes onto the minor tonic, then try to shape your C#7 to F#m the same way.
Neural tensor network and neural backflow variational states, run on GPUs on lattices up to 1024 sites, find at 1/8 hole doping a near-degeneracy of three states in the 2D Hubbard model, both with and without next-nearest-neighbour hopping: a uniform d-wave superconductor, a superconducting stripe state and a non-superconducting stripe state. They are separated by only about a milli-t. The authors conclude the model does not favour one dominant order in the cuprate-relevant regime; stripes and superconductivity compete strongly.
src A. Chen, J. Gray, S.-J. Du, G. K.-L. Chan, "Extreme competition between stripes and superconductivity in the hole-doped Hubbard model", arXiv:2610.30321 (cond-mat.supr-con, cross-list, Oct 2026)
Neutron capture on chlorine in seawater releases an ~8.6 MeV gamma cascade, against 2.2 MeV for capture on hydrogen, on a shorter timescale. That gives inverse beta decay on electron antineutrinos a delayed-coincidence tag in sparse-instrumented water Cherenkov arrays such as TRIDENT. A detector simulation with measured site water properties projects the 5σ discovery reach for core-collapse supernovae growing from roughly 50 kpc to over 100 kpc. A salted-water test at the China Jinping Underground Laboratory saw correlated neutron-capture signals under suppressed muon background.
src R. Cao, I. Morton-Blake, D. Xu et al., "Natural Chlorine Enhances Antineutrino Detection in the Deep Ocean", arXiv:2610.30754v1 (hep-ex, 22 Oct 2026)
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Alto takes today: four days since it was last assigned, the longest gap of the three, and trumpet was worked yesterday so the chops get a rest. With no method book chosen yet, this is a plain fundamentals session built on a steady tone and one scale pattern in D major, about 30 minutes. Pick a method book soon (Ferling, Voxman, Klosé or Rubank Advanced) so alto work stops being generic.
This is the alto sound to carry into today's long tones: warm, full, and even from the bottom of the horn to the top. Listen to his solo for how the tone stays round when he moves by step and by third, and for how he shapes a phrase with a peak and a settle. That is the same thing the D major musical target asks for, played by a master.
Using 980 fb⁻¹ of Belle and 570 fb⁻¹ of Belle II data, the collaborations observe the singly Cabibbo-suppressed decay Λc⁺→ΛK⁺η for the first time, at more than 10σ. Normalised to the Cabibbo-favoured Λc⁺→Λπ⁺π⁰, the ratio is (8.73 ± 0.35 ± 0.43)×10⁻³, giving an absolute B = (6.20 ± 0.25 ± 0.31 ± 0.30)×10⁻⁴ (the third error is the normalisation mode). Λc⁺→ΛK⁺π⁰ is remeasured at a ratio of (1.82 ± 0.07 ± 0.07)%, B = (1.29 ± 0.05 ± 0.05 ± 0.06)×10⁻³, a significant precision gain over the previous value. The ΛK⁺η rate is reported as significantly larger than SU(3) flavour-symmetry predictions.
src Belle and Belle II Collaborations, "Measurements of the branching fractions of Λc⁺→ΛK⁺π⁰ and Λc⁺→ΛK⁺η decays at Belle and Belle II", arXiv:2610.31377v1 (hep-ex, 22 Oct 2026)
A global reanalysis combining coherent elastic neutrino–nucleus scattering (CEνNS) with neutrino–electron scattering data gives a neutrino-only determination of the low-energy weak mixing angle, sin²θ_W = 0.233 (+0.007, −0.006), a fractional uncertainty near 3%. The authors compare it with the cesium atomic-parity-violation value, check the mutual consistency of the individual neutrino datasets, and present it as an independent Standard Model test at low momentum transfer.
src Atzori Corona, Cadeddu, Cargioli, Dordei, Ferro, Giunti, Pavarani, Sestu, "A consistent neutrino determination of the low-energy weak mixing angle", arXiv:2610.31254v1 (hep-ph, 22 Oct 2026)
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Trumpet takes today: four days since it was last assigned, the longest gap of the three, and it wants a short session rather than a long one. The last trumpet work was Scales & intervals, so today moves to the Syncopation section of Arban to work on time feel, paired with a melody from the Art of Phrasing for the musical target. Keep it to about 30 minutes in the middle register.
Brown plays fast, syncopated bebop lines with an even, round tone and no strain in the sound. Listen to where his phrases begin on off-beats and still resolve squarely on the beat, and to how the tone stays full as the tempo rises. That is the same off-beat accuracy today's Syncopation work is aiming at, played by someone who made it sound easy.
A global reanalysis of existing data extracts the weak-magnetism form factor of the free neutron as g_M = 4.47(87), against the conserved-vector-current (CVC) prediction of 4.71, and excludes g_M = 0 at 5.1σ. The β asymmetry alone cannot separate g_M from the axial-to-vector ratio λ; adding the neutron lifetime and the superallowed 0⁺→0⁺ 𝓕t value breaks the degeneracy. The significance stays within 5.0–6.1σ across variations of the neutron dataset, despite its known internal tensions.
src Camarasa-Domene, González-Alonso, Novoa-Brunet, "First observation of weak magnetism in neutron decay", arXiv:2610.26792v1 (hep-ph, 19 Oct 2026)
Using eight years of IceCube through-going muon-neutrino data, the authors measure the νμ charged-current neutrino-nucleon cross section from 150 GeV to 40 TeV with uncertainties below 20% throughout, against roughly 20–40% for earlier collider, atmospheric and astrophysical measurements. The result agrees with Standard Model predictions. For the first time above 1 TeV there are mild hints that ν and ν̄ cross sections can be separated.
src Hajjar, Bustamante, Palomares-Ruiz, "Measurement of the neutrino cross section across the TeV scale using IceCube data", arXiv:2610.24068v1 (16 Oct 2026)
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Piano takes today: three days since it was last assigned, the longest gap of the three, and it is the instrument that tolerates a single long block. The work is enclosures in A, from the twelve-keys library (enclosures https://brona90.github.io/twelve-keys/enclosures.html), moving from last time's modal material to line building. The aim is to approach chord tones from above and below until the approach notes sound like part of a line.
Powell is the model for the bebop right hand. Listen to how his lines turn around chord tones and how the approach notes lean into the beat rather than away from it. That is the sound the enclosure patterns are trying to build.
BESIII reports the first observation of the radiative charm decay D⁰ → γω at 6.0σ, using 20.3 fb⁻¹ of e⁺e⁻ data at √s = 3.773 GeV (the ψ(3770), where D⁰D̄⁰ pairs are produced). The measured branching fraction is B(D⁰ → γω) = (2.12 ± 0.40 (stat) ± 0.25 (syst)) × 10⁻⁵. Signal selection uses a deep-learning classifier built on the Particle Transformer architecture.
src BESIII Collaboration, "First Observation of the Radiative Decay D⁰ → γω", arXiv:2610.21982v1 (hep-ex, 15 Oct 2026)
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The FCC Media Bureau's March 30, 2026 Public Notice reminded broadcasters that the "lowest unit charge" (LUC) rate for political ads covers two things beyond a candidate's own committee: authorised committees engaged in joint fundraising with a legally qualified federal candidate, and ads that are coordinated expenditures between a party and a candidate. Four Democratic candidates challenged it. On August 25 a divided Fourth Circuit panel (2-1) set the notice aside, reading Section 315 to limit LUC to candidates and treating joint fundraising committees with non-candidate members as ineligible. On September 4, the day the LUC window for the November election opened, the Supreme Court, in an unsigned per curiam order over Justice Jackson's dissent, stayed that judgment, saying the Fourth Circuit likely lacked jurisdiction because the candidates' application for review was still pending before the full Commission. Secondary sources say that reasoning splits with every other circuit to consider the question.
src Supreme Court docket 26A274 (NRCC v. Brown, stay of Sept. 4, 2026) and 26A476 (FCC v. Brown, administrative stay of Oct. 8, 2026), as summarised by Wiley and TheDesk.net (Oct. 12). The orders themselves could not be read: the PDFs were not text-extractable here.
Typst 0.15.1 (2026-07-17) updates the bundled New Computer Modern fonts to
8.1.1. The changelog says this fixes the regular weight of the math font, which
still used old calligraphic letterforms that were meant to live in stylistic
set 6. The same patch fixes two math regressions: alignment points inside
lr (matched delimiters) and vertically misaligned op elements. I have not
compared specimens myself; the changelog gives the cause, not a picture.
src Typst changelog, 0.15.1 (2026-07-17)
Set a titlepage for a short set of notes: title, author, date, one-line
abstract containing \mathcal{L} (Typst: $cal(L)$). Do it once with the
titlepage environment and once with Typst's page and align, in under an
hour, from a document you already compile.
src Typst reference, page and align; LaTeX =titlepage= environment
Alto takes today: three days since it was last assigned, the longest gap of the three, and trumpet was assigned yesterday. With no method book chosen yet, this is another fundamentals session. The target is a sound that stays the same size across the break, with wider leaps than last time: G major in fourths, where the jump between registers is exposed.
An alto player from the Parker line, tribute in the title. Listen for how the tone stays full and unforced when the lines leap between registers, and how the top of a phrase is as warm as the bottom. That consistency across wide intervals is what the fourths are for.
The ΛCDM combination of Planck, CMB lensing and DESI DR2 BAO gives Σmν < 0.056 eV (95% CL), which sits 2-3σ below the 0.10 eV inverted-ordering floor. The authors show how much of that depends on the dark-energy model. Marginalizing over (w0, wa), and over flexible binned and cubic w(a) histories, still gives a bound of Σmν < 0.152 eV. A second route uses primary CMB (marginalized over acoustic-peak smoothing) plus reconstructed CMB lensing and no late-time expansion information; it gives Σmν < 0.41 eV today. Forecasts: Simons Observatory lensing brings that route to 0.31 eV, with a cosmic-variance floor of 0.28 eV; adding SO lensing and Spec-S5 BAO to route one gives σ(Σmν) ≈ 0.043 eV. For comparison the direct KATRIN limit is mνe < 0.45 eV (90% CL), implying Σmν ≲ 1.3 eV.
src Qu, Ge, Wang, Schaan, Wu, Friedland, Sherwin, "Measuring Cosmic Neutrino Masses Independently of Dark Energy", arXiv:2607.24742v1 (preprint, 27 Jul 2026)
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Trumpet takes today: three days since it was last assigned, the longest gap of the three, and the last trumpet session was short. The target is interval accuracy, the neglected half of Arban's Scales & intervals section, played slurred in the middle register with no tonguing-speed work. The Art of Phrasing melody is No. 32, the continuation of the sequence.
A ballad played on a muted horn, where the interval work is on display: every leap lands softly and in tune, and the upper note arrives without a push. Listen for how little vibrato he uses and how each phrase is shaped toward one note before tapering. That plain, placed line is the model for the Art of Phrasing melody today.
On a 156-qubit monolithic heavy-hex device (median two-qubit fidelity about 99.7%) the authors run a dynamic compass code on a 7×7 patch with ZZ/XX distance 7. With BeliefMatching on ACES-extracted noise, exclusion of two defective qubits and leakage post-selection (cutoff 0.9 leak probability), the logical error per round is 4.11% (ZZ) and 2.56% (XX), which is 32.3% and 35.2% below the baseline; without post-selection it is 4.4% and 2.9%. A 5×5 stability experiment over 30 rounds falls from a failure probability of 0.346 to 0.21 with defect exclusion, ACES and soft information (up to 56% reduction with leakage post-selection), and keeps improving to 30 rounds only with defect exclusion (otherwise it plateaus near 12). Lattice-surgery Bell states between 3×3 and 4×3 patches have 58.6-78.4% fidelity unfiltered, and 95.8-97.8% only after logical-gap or belief-propagation-convergence post-selection that keeps 4.55% (3×3) or 9.64% (4×3) of shots. The paper compares against heavy-hex memory at up to about 6% (ZZ) and 12% (XX) per round, and against earlier d=3 surgery at 78% fidelity (6.3% yield) and 92.5% (0.5% yield). It gives no classical-simulation comparison, and none against a below-threshold result.
src "Error-Corrected Memory and Logic on a Heavy-Hex Superconducting-Qubit Processor", arXiv:2610.11658v1 (preprint, 8 Oct 2026; ibm_boston, 156-qubit Heron)
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Piano takes today: three days since it was last assigned, the longest gap of the three, and both horns were assigned in the last two days. After a comping session, this one moves to modal harmony: maiden_voyage https://brona90.github.io/twelve-keys/maiden_voyage.html from the twelve-keys library, in E-flat. The goal is to make slow-moving sus-type harmony sound open and unhurried instead of static, with the voicings changing hands smoothly from one chord to the next.
The composer playing his own tune. Listen to the piano chords underneath the solos: each one is left to ring while the harmony barely moves, so the rhythm section sets a mood instead of pushing. That patience, a voicing placed and then trusted, is what today's slow tempos are for.
ETMC computes the leading-order hadronic-vacuum-polarization contribution to the muon anomalous magnetic moment in isospin-symmetric lattice QCD with N_f = 2+1+1 Wilson-clover twisted-mass quarks at four lattice spacings (a ≃ 0.049–0.079 fm, volumes up to L ≃ 7.7 fm), then extrapolates to the continuum. They get a_μ^HVP = 720.0(6.9)e-10 in the FLAG isospin-symmetric convention and 714.8(7.4)e-10 in the WP25 convention; adding a small isospin-breaking correction of 0.1(3.4)e-10 gives a full a_μ^HVP = 714.9(8.1)e-10, about 1.1% relative uncertainty. The authors state the resulting Standard Model prediction is fully consistent with the latest Fermilab Muon g-2 measurement and that the lattice result strengthens the tension with data-driven dispersive determinations that predate CMD-3.
src Extended Twisted Mass Collaboration (Alexandrou et al.), arXiv:2610.22224 (preprint, cross-listed to hep-ph 16 Oct 2026; figures taken from the arXiv listing text, full paper not read)
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Alto takes today: three days since it was last assigned, the longest gap of the three, and trumpet was assigned yesterday. With no method book chosen yet, this is a fundamentals session and the target is an even, centred sound with clean connections between neighbouring notes. F major is new this week, so it is the key for the scale work.
An alto sound with an urgent edge, played over a fast, dense line. Listen for how Pepper keeps the tone full and centred through the quick runs, and how the notes in the lower register speak as cleanly as the upper ones. That evenness across the range, at speed, is what the long tones and scale in thirds are building.
KATRIN's direct kinematic limit on the effective electron-antineutrino mass is m_β < 0.45 eV at 90% C.L., from 259 days of tritium β-decay data and roughly 36 million electrons near the endpoint, which roughly halves the earlier 0.8 eV ceiling. Cosmology is tighter by an order of magnitude: a conference slide quotes Σm_ν < 0.053 eV from DESI DR2 BAO combined with CMB, against an oscillation-derived minimum of Σm_ν > 0.059 eV (normal ordering), i.e. the quoted cosmological limit sits below the floor oscillations impose. The slide labels this a "3σ tension"; that figure and the exact dataset combination should be checked against the DESI paper before being carried, since DESI's own headline limits are looser than 0.053 eV.
src KATRIN, Science (2025), arXiv:2406.13516 (bound as reported in secondary summaries, paper not re-read this run); Σm_ν < 0.053 eV from a 2026 conference slide citing DESI DR2 BAO + CMB, primary not read
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Trumpet takes today: three days since it was last assigned, the longest gap of the three, and the last session was short, so another short one fits. The target is evenness of tone. Arban's First Studies, the default for tone and evenness, have not come up recently, and they stay in the low and middle register with no tonguing-speed work. The Art of Phrasing melody is No. 31, the continuation of the sequence.
A muted-sounding, close-to-the-microphone trumpet tone playing a slow melody with long gaps between phrases. Listen for how few notes Davis plays, how evenly each one starts and decays, and how the tone stays the same colour from the soft entry to the end of the note. That even, unforced sound is what the long-tone and First Studies work is building.
After widening its nuclear-recoil window from about 55 keV to about 270 keV to probe inelastic dark-matter models, LUX-ZEPLIN reports a single candidate at 248 ± 23 (stat) ± 23 (sys) keV in 2.84 tonne-years (220 live days, March 2023 to April 2024). Secondary reports put the background-only tension at about 2.6σ global (3.4σ local); a theory paper quotes about 3.3σ local for an elastic isovector interaction, so the significance depends on the model and should not be quoted as one number. Jeesun and Majumdar (arXiv:2609.04185, v2 14 Oct) argue the event need not be galactic dark matter: atmospheric neutrinos up-scattering on xenon to a heavier state χ via a pseudoscalar mediator, with a momentum-dependent operator suppressing low-recoil events. Their example point is m_χ ≈ 1.13 GeV, m_φ ≈ 494 MeV, √(y_χ y_u) ≈ 0.33.
src Jeesun & Majumdar, arXiv:2609.04185 (abstract read); LZ numbers via secondary reports, LZ paper not read; not refereed
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Piano takes today: three days since it was last assigned, the longest gap of the three, and it can carry a longer block while the horns rest. The last piano session was blues, so this one moves to comping and time: charleston_comp https://brona90.github.io/twelve-keys/charleston_comp.html from the twelve-keys library, in A-flat, a key that reads less easily than the A that cycling by fourths would give. The goal is a left-hand and right-hand rhythm that stays steady while the voicings change.
A rhythm section playing time behind soloists. Ignore the horns for one pass and follow the piano: short, punctuated chords placed off the beat that leave the bass and drums room, rather than a constant stream. That economy is what the Charleston comp is training: the hit that lands, then the space after it.
Searching 368,071 atmospheric neutrinos between 0.5 and 100 TeV for decoherence-driven damping of flavour oscillations, IceCube finds no evidence for it. Natural Planck-suppressed decoherence is excluded for rates scaling as E^n with 0 ≤ n ≤ 3. The authors state the energy range is an order of magnitude above any previous decoherence search, that limits improve by more than an order of magnitude for n = 2 and n = 3, and that n = 3 is the first Planck-scale exclusion at that scaling. The numerical limits were not read from the abstract page.
src IceCube Collaboration (R. Abbasi et al.), arXiv:2610.14144 (abstract read, full paper not; not yet refereed)
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Alto takes today: three days since it was last assigned, the longest gap of the three. With no method book chosen yet, this is a fundamentals session and the target is an even, centred sound from the bottom of the horn up. B-flat major is new this week, so it is the key for the scale work.
An alto sound that is full from the lowest notes to the top: Adderley's tone is the same size and colour across the break. Listen to how he enters his solo with a relaxed, unforced attack, and how the low register stays round and does not thin out when he leans on it. That evenness across registers is what the long tones and the slurred scale cells are aiming at today.
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DHS has proposed a rule under which a school would pay $70,000 the first time it recommends an F-1 student for any Optional Practical Training (OPT), and $30,000 for each later recommendation of that student. Fees would go to the U.S. Treasury. The proposal lets schools decide whether to pass the cost to students, to all students, or to employers. DHS says in the notice that without the fees the program "may shut down the program entirely." If finalised, the rule would apply prospectively, starting 60 days after the final rule is published. Comments are due November 9, 2026.
src DHS notice of proposed rulemaking, "Optional Practical Training Fees" (Federal Register; as summarised by Ogletree Deakins, Beltway Buzz, Oct. 9, 2026 — the notice itself was not opened, the Federal Register site refused the fetch)
According to SCOTUSblog, the Supreme Court on October 1 agreed to hear a challenge to the administration's policy of detaining noncitizens apprehended inside the United States, as opposed to at the border, without a bond hearing. Argument is expected early next year. SCOTUSblog's report, as retrieved, does not give the docket number, the circuit decision under review, or the exact question presented, so those need the order list.
src Supreme Court order list of Oct. 1, 2026, as reported by SCOTUSblog (Oct. 2); the order list, case name and docket number were not opened
Typst 0.15.0 (2026-06-15) lets a single document carry more than one
bibliography, so a thesis or a collected set of lecture notes can end each
chapter with its own reference list instead of one list at the back. The same
release adds a within selector, a divider element and an experimental
bundle export target that writes several output files from one source. The
release notes describe the feature; check the 0.15 bibliography reference for
the exact syntax before relying on a form remembered from here.
src Typst release notes, 0.15.0 (2026-06-15)
Take any page of your own notes compiled with default settings, or a
\documentclass{article} page with \usepackage[margin0.75in]{geometry}= at
11pt on letter paper. Measure three things on the printed or zoomed page:
characters per line on a full line (count one, then trust it), the
baseline-to-baseline distance divided by the type size, and how many visually
distinct levels the headings, body and captions have.
src Typst reference, paragraph and text; Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, ch. 2 (rhythm and proportion)
Trumpet takes today: three days since it was last assigned, the longest gap of the three, and a short session suits the chops better than a long one. The target is time feel. The last two trumpet days were scales and intervals, so this turns to Arban's Syncopation section, played in the middle register with single tonguing only. The Art of Phrasing melody is No. 30, the continuation of the sequence.
A trumpet melody played with almost no vibrato and a very soft attack, at a tempo slow enough that every note is exposed. Listen to how Baker places the long notes slightly behind the beat and lets the phrase endings fade out rather than cut off. That relaxed placement against the pulse is what the Art of Phrasing pass is aiming at today.
Using (2712.4 ± 14.4) × 10⁶ ψ(3686) events, BESIII reports a threshold enhancement in the π⁰π⁰ invariant-mass spectrum of ψ(3686) → π⁰π⁰J/ψ with significance above 10σ. A Breit-Wigner fit gives mass 274.3 ± 2.1 (stat.) ± 0.6 (syst.) MeV/c² and width 17.1 ± 1.5 (stat.) ± 0.5 (syst.) MeV.
src BESIII, arXiv:2610.13097 (listing abstract read, full paper not; not yet refereed)
For the high-pressure hydride Mg₂IrH₆, the authors compute the Coulomb parameter from first principles and find μ = 0.62, giving a Morel-Anderson pseudopotential μ*_ME ≈ 0.39, against the conventional fixed value of 0.16. They estimate that this lowers the predicted Tc by roughly 40 K.
src Bozier and Pickard, arXiv:2610.12563 (listing abstract read, full paper not; not yet refereed)
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Piano takes today: three days since it was last assigned, the longest gap of
the three, with alto yesterday and trumpet the day before. Sunday leaves room
for a longer single block. The exercise is blues_two_handed_modern from
twelve-keys, in E, a key that sits awkwardly under the hands. It is the blues
family, which has not come up since 09-23, after a run of voicings and
progressions.
A 12-bar blues with a piano that plays its blues in few notes. Listen to the comping behind the horns: short chords placed late in the bar, then silence. Then the piano solo, which stays close to the blues scale and leaves space between phrases. That economy is the sound today's one-chorus phrase is aiming for.
The Short-Baseline Near Detector at Fermilab reports its design and initial performance: a liquid-argon TPC electron lifetime exceeding 30 ms, which the collaboration puts at ten times the design requirement, data-collection efficiency of 98.6%, and a light yield above 10 photoelectrons per MeV. No oscillation or cross-section result is claimed.
src SBND Collaboration, arXiv:2610.11782 (listing abstract read, full paper not)
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Alto takes today: three days since it was last assigned, the longest gap of the three, and trumpet played yesterday. The work is fundamentals, since no alto method is chosen yet. Overtones off low B-flat again, for a centred tone across the register, then the thirds from last time turned around and played descending in E-flat. Short and even.
An alto played softly and evenly, with stepwise lines that stay in tune and never push. Listen for how the sound holds its centre at low volume and how the phrases are shaped by small swells rather than attack. That control at p is what today's long tones and thirds are for.
A joint fit of public atmospheric-neutrino data from Super-Kamiokande (pre-gadolinium), IceCube-DeepCore and KM3NeT/ORCA with six detection units, with shared systematics fully correlated and detector responses modelled per experiment, gives Δm²₃₁ = 2.44 (+0.06/−0.04) ×10⁻³ eV² (2.2% precision), sin²θ₂₃ = 0.52 (+0.03/−0.04) (6.1%) and δ_CP = 1.30 (+0.24/−0.28) π. Normal ordering is preferred over inverted by Δχ² = 11.0; calibrating with pseudoexperiments, inverted ordering is excluded at 99.95% CL (3.3σ).
src M. Jin, C. A. Argüelles, P. Fernández-Menéndez, I. Martínez-Soler, arXiv:2610.12208 (abstract read, full paper not; not yet refereed)
Using 140 fb⁻¹ of 13 TeV pp data, ATLAS selects events with exactly one electron or muon, missing transverse momentum and two b-tagged jets, and separates signal from tt̄, W+jets and t-channel single top with a graph neural network. A likelihood fit to the network output gives an observed (expected) significance of 5.1 (5.2) standard deviations and σ(tb̄ + t̄b) = 10.8 ± 1.5 (stat) ± 1.6 (syst) pb, consistent with the Standard Model. It is the first single-experiment observation of the channel.
src ATLAS Collaboration, arXiv:2610.11465, submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett. (abstract read, full paper not)
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Trumpet takes today: three days since it was last assigned, the longest gap of the three. The work stays in the interval half of Arban's Scales & intervals section and widens from thirds and fourths to fifths and sixths, slurred and in the comfortable register, paired with Art of Phrasing No. 29. Short and clean again.
The theme is made of wide, open intervals played cleanly at speed. Listen for how Miles keeps one tone across the leaps and lets the line breathe between phrases, with nothing forced. That steadiness across intervals is what today's slurs are for.
A superconducting qubit dispersively coupled to a nanomechanical resonator was used for repeated quantum non-demolition measurements of the resonator's phonon number. The mechanical energy relaxation time is T₁ = 2.1 ms, the dispersive shift is 2χ/2π = 328 kHz per phonon, and heralded single-phonon states are prepared with 85% fidelity. Repeated measurement shows discrete quantum jumps between the ground and first excited state of the mechanical mode, the direct energy-quantization signature that position measurements cannot give.
src T. Makihara et al., arXiv:2610.10714; Science 393, 1217 (2026), doi:10.1126/science.aeh7535 (abstract read, full paper not)
A trapped ¹³⁸Ba⁺ ion was entangled with a silicon-vacancy centre in a diamond nanophotonic cavity: a photon from the ion is frequency-converted and re-encoded, reflected off the SiV⁻-cavity system, and a single detection heralds entanglement. Including all conversion losses the reported rate is about 1.03(1) kHz at 87.9(7)% Bell-state fidelity, which the authors state is about four times the fastest photonic ion-ion link.
src L. Hartung et al., arXiv:2610.10705 (abstract read, full paper not; not yet refereed)
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Piano today, three days since it was last assigned and the longest gap of the three. The work is quartal https://brona90.github.io/twelve-keys/quartal.html from the twelve-keys library, in D-flat, a key that reads awkwardly and so gets avoided. A longer single block suits piano: about forty-five minutes, all of it on stacked fourths.
Hancock's voicings here are built from stacked fourths, which is the sound today's exercise drills. Listen to how the open chords are left to ring under the melody instead of being played as blocks, and how little the harmony moves over long stretches. That sustained, unhurried quality is today's musical target.
Super-Kamiokande, using its gadolinium-loaded phase (SK-Gd, since 2020) to tag neutron captures from inverse beta decay, reports the first observation of reactor electron antineutrinos in 411.52 live days. Spectra and monthly rates match the oscillated reactor prediction after accidental, geoneutrino and spallation backgrounds; the no-reactor hypothesis is disfavoured at about 6σ. Reactor-only oscillation parameters are sin²θ₁₂ = 0.500 ± 0.155 and Δm²₂₁ = (9.08 +0.55/−0.54) ×10⁻⁵ eV². These agree with SK's own solar-neutrino values at 1.9σ (the long-standing solar/reactor Δm²₂₁ tension in the same direction), and a combined solar+reactor fit gives sin²θ₁₂ = 0.332 +0.028/−0.026 and Δm²₂₁ = (8.94 +0.46/−0.47) ×10⁻⁵ eV².
src K. Abe et al. (Super-Kamiokande Collab.), arXiv:2610.03143, submitted to PRL (abstract read, full paper not; not yet refereed)
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Alto takes today: three days since it was last assigned, the longest gap of the three, and trumpet was assigned yesterday. With no method book chosen yet, this is a fundamentals session: a steady sound first, then the ascending mirror of the last alto day's descending thirds. Keep it short and the tone in front of everything else.
Paul Desmond's alto is dry, light and even from the bottom of the horn to the top, and the melody sits in just the range of today's long tones. Listen to how each note starts without a bump and how the tone stays the same colour as the line climbs. That steadiness at a low dynamic is what the warmup is reaching for.
A microwave resonator holding a photonic cat state was coupled to a controllable set of nonlinear electronic oscillators acting as the reservoir. As the number of reservoir degrees of freedom was increased, the which-path information that the system-reservoir interaction could still spontaneously erase decreased progressively, so revivable coherence decayed. With enough oscillators, the information the reservoir had acquired could no longer be erased at later times, and the decoherence became irreversible, with no dissipative bath added by hand. The authors also characterised the non-Markovianity of the system. Quantitative values (oscillator number at the crossover, revival amplitudes) are in the paper and not reproduced here.
src R.-H. Zheng et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 150201 (2026), arXiv:2510.15730 (abstract read, full paper not)
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Trumpet takes today: three days since it was last assigned, the longest gap of the three, and the last session was a long one. With the 14 Characteristic Studies finished, the work moves to the interval half of Arban's Scales & intervals section, kept short and in the comfortable register, paired with Art of Phrasing No. 28 as the melody. A brief, clean session is the aim.
Brown's line is full of leaps and scale runs, and every note is placed and even in tone. Listen to how the wide intervals keep the same sound as the stepwise passages, with no change of colour on the jump. That evenness is today's technical target, played by someone who had it.
In two-dimensional turbulence energy conventionally cascades inversely, from small to large scales. Per Quanta's account of the Fang/Si and De Lillo/Boffetta work, an elongated swimmer about 1 cm long (brine shrimp, or a rod) can reverse this locally, and the sign depends on its orientation. The coupling is between the large-scale strain-rate tensor and the small-scale stress the swimmer injects, and their alignment decides the direction. Below about 45° to the axis of maximum stretching energy goes to larger scales, above it to smaller ones. Quanta also reports that steering swimmers to act as transport barriers needs under 1% of the flow's energy. I could not check error bars, Reynolds numbers or the experimental-versus-simulation split, so treat these as secondhand.
src Quanta Magazine, S. Ornes, 2026-10-02 (found the story); primary: L. Fang, X. Si, PNAS Nexus 3(2), pgae056 (2024), doi:10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae056; and a 2025 Science Advances paper with F. De Lillo and G. Boffetta, doi:10.1126/sciadv.adv0956 (neither read)
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In an unsigned order on September 29, the Supreme Court granted the government's application for a stay in DHS v. D.V.D. and set the case for oral argument on December 9. The stay suspends a district-court ruling by Judge Brian Murphy that required DHS to give a noncitizen written notice of a third country, meaning one not named in the removal order, and a meaningful opportunity to contest removal there. Murphy's ruling also required DHS to assess torture claims against a "reasonable" fear standard rather than "more likely than not." Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson would have denied the stay. SCOTUSblog reports they gave no written explanation; ABC News quotes a line from Justice Sotomayor, so check the order text on whether a written dissent exists.
src Supreme Court of the United States, Nos. 26-426 and 26A406, Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D., unsigned order of Sept. 29, 2026 (as reported by SCOTUSblog; the order text itself was not opened)
BLS reports that nonfarm payroll employment rose by 29,000 in September and the unemployment rate was 4.2 percent, with 7.1 million unemployed. BLS describes both as little changed. Consensus forecasts cited by CNBC and others were about 90,000, but a forecast is not BLS data. The release revised July down by 31,000, from +21,000 to -10,000, and August down by 29,000, from +162,000 to +133,000. Average hourly earnings rose 0.1 percent on the month to $37.81 and 3.0 percent over twelve months. The unemployment rate has stayed between 4.1 and 4.3 percent since March. By industry, health care added 17,000 jobs, construction 11,000 and manufacturing 9,000, while financial activities lost 7,000. Household employment rose 406,000 and the participation rate rose 0.2 point to 61.8 percent.
src U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Employment Situation, September 2026 (released Oct. 2, 2026)
Typst 0.15.0 (2026-06-15) improves the layout of under/over constructions such
as underbrace, brings math spacing closer to TeX's, stretches glyphs relative
to the base character instead of a scaled copy, and exports equations in HTML
output as MathML rather than leaving them as images or plain text. The same
release adds variable-font support (axes set automatically from weight and
style, with explicit variation control), lets one PDF target several compatible
standards at once, and moves a footnote's link inside its superscript, which
tidies both tagged PDF and HTML. 0.15.1 (2026-07-17) is a fix release: it
repairs the regular weight of New Computer Modern Math, which still carried the
old calligraphic letterforms, corrects vertical misalignment of op elements,
and fixes alignment points in matched delimiters.
src Typst release notes, 0.15.0 (2026-06-15) and 0.15.1 (2026-07-17)
Take the line from a harmonic-oscillator ground-state energy:
src Typst 0.15.0 release notes (under/over layout); Typst math reference
Piano takes today: three days since it was last assigned, the longest gap of
the three instruments, and alto played yesterday. The exercise is
minor_ii_v_i from twelve-keys, in F♯ minor — G♯ half-diminished, C♯
altered, F♯ minor — chosen because the last piano key was B and F♯ is the
one that reads awkwardly. This is the progressions family, which has not
come up since the voicings and line-building work.
A minor-key tune built on the minor ii–V–i cycle, which is today's exercise at work. Listen to how Kelly's right hand lands on the tonic lightly after each dominant: the resolution is understated, and the swing comes from that lightness rather than from the chords themselves. Notice where the dominant gets its weight, and copy that.
The roughly 20% deficit in νe capture on 71Ga seen in the GALLEX, SAGE and BEST source experiments (51Cr and 37Ar), now above 5σ, is reduced to near agreement by a recalculation of the capture cross section. The authors drop the standard factorization of the leptonic wave functions, which rests on detailed balance, and treat the nucleus, neutrino and electron together, with Gamow-Teller transition densities constrained to reproduce the precisely measured 71Ge half-life. The resulting cross section is about 20% lower than the prior estimate, close to the observed rate. The 20% figure is from the journal's news summary, not the paper's tables.
src M. Cadeddu, N. Cargioli, F. Dordei, L. Ferro, C. Giunti, M. Pitzalis, "A possible solution to the gallium anomaly moving beyond the leptonic wave function factorization", arXiv:2512.20560; Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 131805 (2026), doi:10.1103/5pvf-mcr1
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Alto takes today's slot: three days since the 1st is the longest gap of the three instruments, and trumpet played yesterday, so the two chops-dependent horns do not land back to back. With no method book chosen the assignment stays with fundamentals. Today's fundamental is E♭, one semitone above D. The warmup moves on from plain held tones to the taper, where each note is let go rather than stopped, and the musical target turns the thirds survey around: descending diatonic thirds in E♭ major.
Today's warmup asks for notes that taper without losing pitch or centre. Hodges is the model of it on alto: a slow ballad where nearly every phrase ends by being released rather than cut, the tone still full as the volume falls. Listen to the last second of his long notes and the slides between pitches, and notice that the sound stays focused down to nothing, which is the same control the E♭ tails are after.
LHCb measures R(J/ψ) = B(Bc+ → J/ψ τ+ ντ)/B(Bc+ → J/ψ μ+ νμ) = 0.51 ± 0.12 (stat) ± 0.08 (syst) in 5.4 fb⁻¹ of 13 TeV pp collisions (2016–2018), within 1.8σ of Standard Model predictions that assume lepton flavour universality. The earlier Run 1 measurement was 0.71 ± 0.17 ± 0.18, so the uncertainty has shrunk by roughly a third in total, and the central value has moved down rather than up. Abstract and search summaries only; I did not read the systematics breakdown.
src LHCb Collaboration, "Measurement of the ratio of branching fractions B(Bc+ → J/ψ τ+ ν)/B(Bc+ → J/ψ μ+ ν)", arXiv:2606.10018; Phys. Rev. Lett., doi:10.1103/13fb-1gc2
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Trumpet gets the hour: three days since the 30th is the longest gap of the three, and alto and piano both went more recently. Today is Characteristic Study No. 14, the last of the set, which closes what has run since August. Play it as a finale: decide before the first note where it arrives, and pace the whole study toward that point rather than spending it early. It is paired with Art of Phrasing No. 27 as the place to sing.
src Arban, Complete Conservatory Method — 14 Characteristic Studies
Morgan plays a blues-shaped line over a groove that never lets up, and the solo shows how much a trumpeter can do with a few notes placed behind the beat. Listen for where he sits relative to the pulse: he leans back on the phrase starts and lands exactly on the arrivals. That is the control over pace that today's finale study asks for. Follow one phrase from its start to its peak and notice where he holds back before arriving.
ATLAS reports the first observation of the Bc*+ (c anti-b) meson as a peak, above 8σ, in the mass difference between the Bc+ candidate plus a photon and the Bc+ alone, with Bc+ reconstructed via a muon triplet. The Bc*+ - Bc+ splitting is 64.5 ± 1.4 (stat) +1.0/−1.4 (syst) MeV, within the range of theoretical expectations but slightly off the most recent high-precision calculations. The photon is soft and not observed directly in the splitting measurement beyond that mass-difference peak. Abstract and ATLAS briefing read only.
src ATLAS Collaboration, "Observation of a B_c^(*+) meson with the ATLAS detector", arXiv:2605.16228; PRL (28 Sep 2026)
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Piano gets the hour: three days since the 29th is the longest gap of the three, and trumpet and alto both went more recently. Today is for drop2 voicings, new to this log and the first voicings work since shells on the 14th, played in B, the key that does not read easily. The aim is a chord you can hear as one sound in the left hand and not four notes assembled.
src https://brona90.github.io/twelve-keys/drop_2.html
Evans is a master of voicings that sound like one object. Listen to the left hand under the melody and under the solo: the chords are placed with a pianist's attention to the top note, so the inner voices move by small steps and the line stays smooth. That is the evenness today's assignment asks for. Follow the top note of the chords for one chorus and notice how it makes a melody of its own.
Torralba et al. report PAN-BH*-1, a little red dot (LRD) at z=1.73 found in JWST/NIRCam imaging and confirmed with VLT/X-Shooter, with an extreme Balmer break and a continuum fit by a photosphere at Teff ≈ 4800 K. Its broad Hα emission carries a deep absorption trough spanning -520 to +267 km/s, which they attribute to a thick wind launched from a thick rotating photospheric disk. Rest-frame NUV HST imaging shows extended emission consistent with a host of about 108 solar masses. Most LRDs sit at z > 4; this one is at cosmic noon, where it is far easier to follow up from the ground. I read the abstract only and have not seen the model fits or their uncertainties.
src Torralba et al., "A Black Hole Star at Cosmic Noon: Extreme Balmer break, photospheric continuum, and broad absorption by thick winds in a Little Red Dot at z=1.7", arXiv:2603.28335 (v1 30 Mar 2026, v3 16 Jun 2026)
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Alto takes today's slot: three days since the 28th is the longest gap of the three instruments, and trumpet played yesterday, so the two chops-dependent horns do not land back to back. With no method book chosen the assignment stays with fundamentals. Today's fundamental is D, one semitone above the C♯ of the last session. The warmup returns to plain held tones, no swell, the first shape of the cycle, and the musical target opens a new survey now that the descending broken intervals are finished: ascending diatonic thirds in sequence.
Today's warmup asks for held notes that stay centred in pitch and tone from the first count to the last. Adderley's alto is a good place to hear that as a sound: full, warm and unhurried, even when the line moves quickly. Listen to the ends of his long notes and the tops of his phrases, and notice that the tone does not thin out or go sharp as the line rises, which is the same quality the D major thirds ask for as they climb.
Li and Jiang show that restricting an approximate quantum code to rank-one encoders, where every pure logical input maps to a pure code state, can be strictly suboptimal for entanglement fidelity. Encoders that send pure inputs to mixed states can do better. They prove that the loss from the rank-one restriction is at most quadratic near perfect recovery after joint optimisation of encoder and recovery, and construct an explicit noise family for which every optimal encoder produces mixed code states, so high-rank encoding is needed to approach perfect recovery. This is a theory result with no hardware numbers; I read the abstract only, not the proofs.
src Li and Jiang, "High-Rank Encoding Can Improve Approximate Quantum Error Correction", arXiv:2609.00778 (1 Sep 2026, preprint, not yet refereed)
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Trumpet gets the hour: three days since the 27th is the longest gap of the three, and piano and alto both went in the last two days. The job today is Characteristic Study No. 13, the second-to-last of the set, played as a performance rather than a read-through: decide before the first note what character each section has, and change gears at each seam on purpose. It is paired with Art of Phrasing No. 26 as the place to sing.
src Arban, Complete Conservatory Method — 14 Characteristic Studies
Hubbard's signature tune is a study in holding one groove steady while the trumpet's character changes on top of it: the statement of the head, the solo opening out, the phrases getting longer and looser. Listen for how he makes each stretch sound like a different voice without the pulse ever moving, which is the same thing today's study asks for at the seams. Follow one phrase from its start to its peak and notice where he leans before arriving.
In a 70 nm-wide GaAs quantum well with bilayer-like charge distribution, where inter-layer interactions stabilise an even-denominator ν=1/2 fractional quantum Hall state, charge partitioning at an etch-defined quantum point contact gives shot noise in the weak-backscattering regime that corresponds to quasiparticles of charge e/4. Two independent devices, measured in separate setups, agree. The paper does not distinguish Abelian from non-Abelian topological order; both candidates predict e/4. I did not see the fitted uncertainty on the charge in the material I read, so check the paper for it.
src Alkalay, Heiblum, Banerjee, et al., "Observation of e/4 charge at ν=1/2 in a wide GaAs quantum well", Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 136503 (2026); arXiv:2602.08468
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Piano gets the hour today: three days since the 26th is the longest gap of the three instruments, alto went yesterday and trumpet the day before, so the rotation lands here. It opens line building's slot in lap three with pentatonic_pattern, Coltrane's 1-2-3-5 cell run from each of the first four degrees of the major pentatonic. It is deliberately the opposite of the chromatic enclosures and chord-tone guide_tones already covered: no half steps and no leading tones, so the line floats instead of resolving. The key is D, the one major key this panel has never assigned.
src twelve-keys/src/exercises/pentatonic_pattern/exercise.py
Today's pattern is a piece of the Coltrane and Tyner vocabulary, and "Impressions" is a stretch of modal vamp where it is easy to hear. There is no cadence to resolve and the harmony sits on one mode, so the open, non-leading-tone sound of pentatonic material is doing the work. Listen to how the lines in the solos lift from one degree to the next without pulling toward a tonic, and follow the piano's voicings under them, which is the left-hand role today's assignment asks for.
Gap engineering makes transmon-type qubits resistant to quasiparticle-induced bit flips after ionizing radiation breaks Cooper pairs in the substrate. Kurilovich, Roberts and coauthors at Google Quantum AI find that on a gap-engineered array the phase errors are not suppressed: bursts of correlated phase errors persist tens of times longer than the bit-flip bursts they replace and involve about 1.5 times as many qubits. Radiation events trigger such correlated errors every few tens of seconds, and the authors identify bursts, map their spatial extent and duration, and show that deliberately shifting qubit frequencies changes the detected error rate. Qubit coherence times of tens of microseconds to milliseconds sit against gate times of tens to hundreds of nanoseconds, so a burst spans many error-correction cycles. Error bars were not given in the summary I could read; check the paper before relying on the ratios.
src Kurilovich, Roberts, et al. (Google Quantum AI), "Correlated Phase Error Bursts in a Gap-Engineered Superconducting Qubit Array", Phys. Rev. X 16, 021025 (2026); APS Physics Viewpoint v19, 62
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tikzphysics is a TikZ library purpose-built for classical-mechanics diagrams —
contact surfaces, ramps, blocks, springs, pulleys, pendulums, motion arrows,
mirrors and lenses — and it has moved fast: new to CTAN on 2026-08-13, five
releases since, most recently 1.5.0 on 2026-09-27. The release that actually
changes a document already written against it is 1.2.0 (2026-09-05): a spring
stopped being a node you place and became a path decoration you draw between
two points, written \draw[spring] (A) -- (B);, with leads that can now
collapse to zero length. The same release moved blocks to a 1cm-square default
and pulleys to a 1cm-diameter one rather than requiring an explicit size on
every use, added native to[over pulleyP]= connections and wedge
tangent/normal anchors, and shipped three discovery keys —
show anchors, show keys, physicshelp — that print a diagram's own anchor
names and option keys back onto the page itself, which is how you find out
what to write next without leaving the document to read a manual.
src CTAN update announcements, tikzphysics 1.0.0 (new on CTAN, 2026-08-13) through 1.5.0 (2026-09-27)
Define this in Emacs Lisp — no package beyond stock defmacro, let, while
— and expand it without ever running it:
src GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual, "Defining Macros"; LaTeX3 interface3, the naming convention for internal functions and variables
Missouri's legislature enacted a congressional map in 2022 and a new one in
src Supreme Court of the United States, No. 26A388, People Not Politicians, et al. v. Robert Onder, et al., per curiam order on application for stay (decided Sept. 25, 2026)
On March 3, 2026, the Secretary of War excluded Anthropic's Claude models from the Department's supply chain under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018 (FASCSA), 41 U.S.C. § 4713, after Anthropic declined to drop contractual restrictions barring use of Claude for fully autonomous lethal weapons and domestic mass surveillance. Anthropic petitioned for review on APA, statutory-authority, due-process and First Amendment grounds; the Secretary denied reconsideration June 3, clarifying the determination did not turn on any claim about Anthropic's post-delivery technical control over deployed models. The majority held the Department had ample support for finding that Anthropic's practice of encoding behavioral restrictions into Claude — which has, on at least one occasion, stopped Claude from performing a requested task during an active overseas military operation — qualifies as "manipulating" the product to "deny" its function under FASCSA's definition of a covered supply-chain risk, 41 U.S.C. § 4713(k)(6), regardless of Anthropic's motive; the court rejected the argument that the statute's list of verbs implicitly requires hostile intent. It held due process was satisfied by notice and an opportunity to respond, and that the First Amendment claim failed because the exclusion rested on Anthropic's refusal to accept a contract term, not on its advocacy. Judge Henderson dissented on the statutory question, arguing under canons including series-qualifier and ejusdem generis, and citing Fischer v. United States (2024), that "maliciously" modifies the entire verb series and that the majority's reading turns good-faith contract enforcement into a national-security violation.
src U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Nos. 26-1049 & 26-1162 (consolidated), Anthropic PBC v. United States Department of War and Peter B. Hegseth, decided Sept. 25, 2026 (Katsas, J., joined by Rao, J.; Henderson, J., dissenting)
SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) has run since 1986 to verify immigration and citizenship status for benefits eligibility, and 27 states have also used it since 2005 to check voter rolls. Following a March 2025 executive order, DHS and the Social Security Administration modified SAVE to check against SSA's NUMIDENT records, including Social Security numbers, and to allow bulk rather than only individual lookups. The League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center sued, arguing the changes violated the Social Security Act's confidentiality provision (42 U.S.C. § 405(c)(2)(C)(viii)(I)), the Privacy Act, and the APA. On June 22, the U.S. District Court for D.C. (Judge Sparkle Sooknanan) granted summary judgment to plaintiffs on all three claims and vacated the modified program; a divided D.C. Circuit panel denied a stay on September 4. In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court granted the government's stay application, holding it is likely to succeed on the merits because 8 U.S.C. § 1373's "notwithstanding any other provision of law" clauses require DHS to share and receive citizenship and immigration-status information in a way the Court held supersedes the Social Security Act and Privacy Act restrictions the district court relied on. The Court found standing for at least one plaintiff — a naturalized citizen registered in Louisiana whose SSA record had not updated — but held that risk did not outweigh the government's showing of harm. The order preserves the National Voter Registration Act's 90-day pre-election moratorium on "systematic" list-purging, but allows "individualized" citizenship-verification inquiries to proceed during that window. Justice Jackson's dissent, joined by Sotomayor and Kagan, argued the majority granted emergency relief without full briefing or argument on two never-before-interpreted statutory provisions.
src Supreme Court of the United States, No. 26A308, Department of Homeland Security, et al. v. League of Women Voters, et al., per curiam order on application for stay (decided Sept. 25, 2026), Jackson, J., dissenting, joined by Sotomayor and Kagan, JJ.
Alto takes today's slot: three days since its last session on the 25th is the longest gap of the three instruments right now, and trumpet went yesterday, so the two chops-dependent instruments don't land back to back. With no method book chosen yet, the assignment stays inside the brief's placeholder: long tones, overtones, a scale pattern, nothing invented. Today's fundamental is C♯, the next semitone above the C that crossed the break for the third time on 09-25 — a fourth straight session above it, so the octave-key handling is well past the point of being a new demand. The warmup returns to messa di voce, the shape from 09-16 and not used since, and the musical target closes out the descending interval survey at its widest span, broken sevenths — the mirror of 09-13's ascending broken sevenths and the last interval size a single octave has room for.
Today's musical target closes out the descending interval survey at its widest possible span, a seventh-wide skip with no stepwise runway to soften the landing. "Lonely Woman," Ornette Coleman's own composition with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins, opens on exactly that kind of unresolved, wide leap — a melody built on intervals a conventional tune would smooth over, played with a vocal, keening quality rather than a clean instrumental line. Listen for how the tone stays centered and full-bodied across leaps that would make a thinner sound waver, the same demand today's messa di voce warmup is built to test in miniature: holding the center through a swell rather than losing it under pressure.
Whispering-gallery states are formed when very slow neutrons graze a curved mirror at grazing incidence and are held against it by total reflection, building up an interference pattern in the reflected beam analogous to acoustic whispering-gallery modes in a domed room. Schreiner, Pioquinto, Nesvizhevsky and coauthors built the apparatus and analysis needed to resolve small shifts in that pattern from an external interaction, and demonstrate it on a magnetic field: a relative pattern shift of delta-g/g ~ (6.5 +/- 0.8 [stat] +/- 1.2 [sys]) x 10-4, with sensitivity to spin-dependent differences between neutron scattering lengths of delta-b_n/b_n ~ 10-4. This is a feasibility and first-observation paper rather than a bound on any specific new physics - no limit on a coupling constant is reported here.
src Schreiner, Pioquinto, Baeßler, Nesvizhevsky, Cladé, Crivelli, Cubitt, et al.; arXiv:2609.25982 (2026-09-22)
The depairing current - the current density at which a supercurrent breaks its own Cooper pairs - is the fundamental upper bound on how much current a superconductor can carry, and it has a clean Ginzburg-Landau prediction. In practice it is never reached: ordinary DC transport measurements destroy superconductivity first through vortex motion and self-heating, at a critical current density far below the intrinsic limit. Wang, Cavalleri and coauthors drove current pulses only picoseconds long - too brief for vortices to move or heat to diffuse - through NbN (an s-wave superconductor) and YBa2Cu3O7 (a d-wave superconductor). In NbN at 7 K they see a sharp onset of depairing at Jc* ~ 220 GA/m2, about 2.2 times the conventional DC critical current density of ~100 GA/m2. YBCO at 50 K, whose DC critical current density sits just under 50 GA/m2, shows no comparable sharp threshold under the same picosecond pulses - instead a gradual decline, which the authors attribute to the d-wave gap's momentum-dependent nodes breaking pairs progressively rather than all at once.
src Wang, Chavez-Cervantes, Satapathy, Matsuyama, Meier, Zhang, You, Marijanovic, Curtis, Demler, Cavalleri; arXiv:2603.24711; Nature Physics (2026), doi:10.1038/s41567-026-03469-z
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Eleven studies in, each one has asked for a single kind of control held across a whole page. No. 12 asks for three different ones in a row on the same page: a driving forte in continuous sixteenths, a "dolce" episode that wants a completely different, more spacious feel, and a forte triplet outburst that briefly leaves the four-flat home key before the sixteenths return to close it out. The job today is changing gears cleanly at each seam rather than smoothing the whole page into one character.
src Arban, Complete Conservatory Method — 14 Characteristic Studies
Today's musical target and the study's own "dolce" episode both ask for the same thing: a phrase that sings rather than one that is merely played correctly. Clifford Brown's ballad reading of this standard, with Max Roach, is one of the instrument's standard references for exactly that — wide, confident interval leaps folded into a single unhurried line, with nothing about the width of the leaps disturbing the sense that it's one phrase rather than a series of jumps. Listen for how little the leaps interrupt the line's forward motion, which is the same demand today's "dolce" episode makes of a single page rather than a whole chorus.
Sedrakyan and coauthors ran vanilla (unboosted) random-circuit sampling on a 61-qubit patch of IBM's 120-qubit Nighthawk r2 chip (ibm_phoenix), through the standard cloud stack with no benchmark-specific calibration: median CZ error ~1.9x10-3, median single-qubit (SX) error ~2.5x10-4, median readout error ~8x10-3. At 36 cycles - the depth where tensor-network contraction cost saturates with system size - they measured a cross-entropy fidelity F_XEB = 2.3x10-3, cross-checked against an independent mirror-benchmarking estimator over more than two decades of fidelity decay. Pricing the classical side with a bounded-fidelity rejection-sampling model calibrated against published Sycamore and Zuchongzhi contraction costs (agreement within 0.7 decades), collecting the reported 106-sample ensemble at that fidelity would cost 1.2x1027 machine operations - over a century on the Frontier supercomputer at 20% efficiency - against 19 s of QPU time. The authors then tested "severing" attacks directly: classical spoofing strategies that partition the circuit and sample the severed pieces independently to fake a high cross-entropy score cheaply. The strongest variant they could construct still falls short of the experimental score by a factor of ten, and the margin for balanced cuts exceeds 106.
src Sedrakyan, Zhang, Karapetyan, Baktay, Gharibyan, Tepanyan; arXiv:2609.28657 (2026-09-23)
D'Souza and coauthors grew a 2:1 cocrystal of 6,13-dihydropentacene and pentacene (DHP/Pc, 33.3 mol% pentacene), reaching a volumetric spin-site density of 9.51x1020 cm-3 (3.3x105 ppm) - more than two orders of magnitude above the previous benchmarks for optically addressable spin ensembles, NV-diamond and pentacene-doped p-terphenyl. Packing spins this densely ordinarily destroys the coherence needed to read them out, through dipolar coupling between neighbors and triplet-exciton transport that carries polarization away before measurement. DHP/Pc instead shows microsecond spin coherence together with room-temperature optically detected magnetic resonance and coherent control. Time-resolved measurements attribute the long-lived triplet population mainly to intersystem crossing, with strong non-thermal sublevel polarization, and DFT calculations point to why density does not cost coherence here: the cocrystal's packing geometry weakens electronic coupling between neighboring pentacene molecules, while dihydropentacene's higher triplet energy blocks the trap-to-trap migration that would otherwise scramble polarization.
src D'Souza, Chen, Parashar, et al. (Ajoy group); arXiv:2609.28912 (2026-09-24)
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Piano gets the hour today: three days since its last session on the 23rd is the longest real gap of the three instruments right now, alto went yesterday and trumpet the day before, continuing the alto/piano/trumpet cycle this rotation has held since mid-September. It closes lap three's modes-and-scales slot with half_whole, the eight-note symmetric scale built by alternating half and whole steps — a different construction principle from altered_scale and dorian, the two modes this panel has already covered, and a different technical problem too: the scale repeats every minor third, so learning it on one root hands you three more roots for free. Key is F, the last of the twelve still untouched by this panel, and it lands on exactly the root the exercise wants: F7 is the V of B♭, and the point of the scale is what it does resolving home.
src twelve-keys/src/exercises/half_whole/exercise.py
Today's technical target is entirely about the half-whole diminished sound holding together under tempo, and "Inner Urge" is the tune jazz players reach for first when that sound is the point rather than a passing color — Henderson's own composition, built on shifting dominant harmony that his solo treats with the diminished scale's angular, symmetric lines rather than the more familiar diatonic alternatives. Listen for how little the symmetry reads as a "scale exercise" in his hands — the same eight-note shape practiced here in isolation, played as music rather than as a run.
Most local measurements of the Hubble constant chain several rungs of distance indicator together, so disagreements over any one rung's calibration are hard to isolate. Stiskalek, Desmond and Lavaux instead build a ladder with only two rungs: tip-of-the-red-giant-branch (TRGB) distances to roughly 400 Extragalactic Distance Database hosts, calibrated directly on the geometric anchors of the Large Magellanic Cloud and NGC 4258. They forward-model tip magnitudes and host redshifts - including selection effects and density-dependent galaxy bias - conditioned in turn on each of 80 Manticore-Local reconstructions of the local density and peculiar-velocity field, since most hosts sit close enough (cz below roughly 1000 km/s) that peculiar velocities matter more than calibration. The redshift likelihood and density smoothing each shift H0 by less than 1 km/s/Mpc, and the inferred velocity monopole is 5.4 +/- 3.4 km/s/Mpc, but the field-to-field scatter across the 80 realizations is 5.2 km/s/Mpc - larger than any of those. Weighting the 80 posteriors equally gives H0 = 68.4 +/- 5.9 km/s/Mpc; weighting by Bayesian evidence gives 72.3 +/- 2.6 km/s/Mpc, though that number is set by a single high-evidence realization and is sensitive to how finely the reconstruction posterior was sampled. The paper's own conclusion is that this ladder cannot yet arbitrate the Hubble tension.
src Stiskalek, Desmond, Lavaux; arXiv:2609.29996 (2026-09-24)
Thermogravity theories clip the Einstein equations to a trace-free version, remove the cosmological constant's gravitational coupling, and permit controlled violations of energy conservation that block the usual trick of reinstating Lambda as an integration constant. Lee, Magueijo, van de Bruck and Di Valentino set Lambda = 0 outright and ask whether late-time cosmic acceleration can come solely from that energy non-conservation, with no extra background parameter relative to flat LambdaCDM. Tested against supernova distances, BAO (including DESI) and CMB/BBN calibration, a universal implementation - every species undergoes non-conservation - is strongly disfavored, with DESI BAO alone worsening the fit by Delta-chi2 of about 51 relative to LambdaCDM (a caveat the authors flag themselves: universal non-conservation would also alter the standard observational dictionary, so the comparison isn't fully apples-to-apples). Restricting non-conservation to cold dark matter alone - leaving baryon and photon observables untouched at the background level - gives a self-contained one-parameter extension of LambdaCDM that actually fits the background data slightly better: Delta-chi2 of -4.85 and a maximum Bayesian preference of ln B = 2.77, a weak-to-moderate edge. But once the BAO ruler is calibrated with BBN or CMB information, the reduced effective early-time CDM density raises the sound horizon and pushes H0 lower - widening, not narrowing, the gap with distance-ladder measurements of H0.
src Lee, Magueijo, van de Bruck, Di Valentino; arXiv:2609.29206 (2026-09-24)
S4 0954+65 is a TeV-detected, intermediate-synchrotron-peaked BL Lac blazar at z = 0.3694 that entered an exceptional gamma-ray high state in early 2025. Ouyang et al. combine gamma-ray, X-ray, optical/UV, radio and 43 GHz VLBA observations, using the z-transformed discrete correlation function to cross-correlate bands and VLBA imaging to track the parsec-scale jet. The gamma-ray light curve leads the optical by 3.22 days and the radio by possibly 18.26 days, with no significant gamma-ray/X-ray correlation; both the gamma-ray and X-ray spectra harden as the source brightens, consistent with enhanced particle acceleration during the active state. During the flare, VLBA imaging catches a new superluminal radio knot emerging from the jet core, and its extrapolated ejection time lines up with the gamma-ray peak. Broadband spectral-energy-distribution modeling shows that a leptonic synchrotron self-Compton plus external-Compton model, with the dusty torus supplying seed photons, reproduces the multi-wavelength data with physically plausible parameters; a lepto-hadronic origin remains possible in principle but would require substantially higher jet power than the leptonic fit needs.
src Ouyang, Wu, Xiao, et al.; arXiv:2609.29873 (2026-09-24)
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Alto takes today's slot: three days since its last session on the 22nd is the longest gap of the three instruments right now, and trumpet went yesterday, so the two chops-dependent instruments don't land back to back. With no method book chosen yet, the assignment stays inside the brief's placeholder: long tones, overtones, a scale pattern, nothing invented. Today's fundamental is C, the next semitone above the B that crossed the break for the second time on 09-22 — a third straight session above it, so the octave-key handling is now the established default rather than a new demand. The warmup returns to crescendo attack, closing out the shape it left off with three sessions ago, and the musical target pushes the descending interval survey out to sixths.
Today's musical target asks for a descending sixth with no scalar approach — the lower note of each pair has to be found by ear and landed on directly, not read down to. "Ko-Ko" is built on exactly that kind of commitment: Parker's head over "Cherokee"'s changes, taken at a very fast tempo, moves in wide, decisive leaps rather than the stepwise runs bebop is more often remembered for, and none of them sound tentative or reached-for. Listen for how little the leaps interrupt the time feel — the line keeps moving at full speed through jumps that would make most players pause to reorient, which is the same commitment today's pattern is asking a single octave to hold onto.
Second-order black-hole perturbation theory predicts that a ringdown's quadratic (nonlinear) quasi-normal modes should have amplitudes scaling as the product of their parent linear modes' amplitudes, with a coupling coefficient that depends on the remnant's spin - but that coefficient had never been directly measured from real gravitational-wave data. Yang, Shi and Hu model the GW250114 ringdown with the 220, 221 and 220x220 modes and use Bayesian inference to extract the amplitude-coupling coefficient of the 220x220 mode. The inferred value is consistent with both numerical-relativity fits and second-order perturbation theory, with no comparison showing a deviation exceeding 1.3 sigma - though the data are not yet precise enough to pick between the spin-dependent variants of the prediction.
src Yang, Shi, Hu; arXiv:2609.28953 (2026-09-24)
Single-photon sources for quantum networking and metrology need brightness, indistinguishability and purity simultaneously, and organic dye molecules - which emit transform-limited photons at cryogenic temperature without the growth complexity of a quantum dot - have historically lost on brightness because so little of their emission was ever collected. Luo et al. couple a single dibenzoterrylene molecule to a cryogenic planar metallo-dielectric antenna designed to funnel its emission toward collection optics, reaching a 97% collection efficiency and a detected rate of 100 million photons per second, while the photons themselves show 91.2% indistinguishability on the molecule's Fourier-limited transition and 97.7% single-photon purity under both continuous-wave and pulsed excitation.
src Luo, Hebenstreit, Shkarin, Renger, Utikal, Goetzinger; arXiv:2609.29736 (2026-09-24)
Moire graphene built from Bernal-stacked bilayer and trilayer sheets twisted against each other is a newer platform than the twisted-homobilayer systems that have dominated the field, and the authors state that superconductivity had not previously been seen in it except when a transition-metal-dichalcogenide layer supplies spin-orbit coupling by proximity. Waleffe et al. instead find, across twist angles from 1.05 to 1.50 degrees, Chern insulators at both integer and fractional moire filling for electron doping with Chern numbers reaching |C|3, tunable by twist angle and doping. At theta1.18 degrees, the trivial insulator at band filling nu=-2 is driven by displacement field alone - no TMD, no proximity coupling - into a pocket of incipient superconductivity: a sharp resistive transition with a well-defined critical current, persisting in an in-plane magnetic field to more than four times the weak-coupling Pauli limit, though the resistance does not fall fully to zero.
src Waleffe, Bhattacharyya, Kumar, Maginnis, Okounkova, Faehndrich, Watanabe, Taniguchi, Folk, Yankowitz; arXiv:2609.30202 (2026-09-24)
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Trumpet takes today's slot: three days since its last session on the 21st is the longest real gap of the three instruments right now, with piano having gone yesterday and alto the day before, continuing the alto/piano/trumpet cycle this rotation has held since mid-September. No. 11 follows straight on from No. 10, but it is a different kind of study. No. 10 was built on a repeat — the same two-bar phrase made to mean two different things across a D.C. No. 11 has no repeat at all: one continuous "Allegretto" pass, opening in C major with no key signature and moving through at least half a dozen key-signature changes before it ends plainly, including a swing to four flats at its own Più lento. The job today is reading those changes as they arrive rather than bracing for them.
src Arban, Complete Conservatory Method — 14 Characteristic Studies
Today's technical target is entirely about treating a key change as something to be ready for, not something to react to. "Giant Steps" states that problem in its most literal jazz form: harmony cycling through three key centers roughly every two bars, at a pace most tunes never approach, played by a soloist whose whole reputation on this track rests on making that cycle sound inevitable rather than hard. Listen for how little the time feel wavers at each turn — the harmonic ground moves constantly under the line, but the line never audibly braces for it, which is exactly the seamlessness today's success criterion is asking the etude's key changes to have.
Using 2712.4 +/- 14.3 million psi(3686) events, BESIII performs a model-independent partial wave analysis of the Lambda-antiLambda system produced in psi(3686) radiative decays and finds a resonance near 2.6 GeV/c2 in the 1S0 partial wave, designated eta(2600), with mass 2625 +/- 26 (stat) +/- 6 (syst) MeV/c2 and width 140 +/- 58 (stat) /- 46 (syst) MeV, at a statistical significance of 7.0 sigma. Its mass and width, and its production rate relative to eta_c, are consistent within uncertainty with the previously reported X(2600) seen only in J/psi -> gamma pi pi- eta', supporting the interpretation that eta(2600) and X(2600) are the same state - now confirmed in a second, independent production channel. Separately, and dominating the spectrum near threshold, the analysis also finds a broad structure, eta(Lambda-antiLambda), in the 1S0 and 3P0 partial waves (J^PC = 0^-+ and 0^++), with a model-dependent mass of 2169 +/- 150 MeV/c2 (Breit-Wigner fit) or 1899 +/- 66 MeV/c2 (a threshold-cusp-like lineshape) and width 480 +/- 97 MeV in the Breit-Wigner fit.
src BESIII Collaboration; arXiv:2609.25158 (2026-09-21)
The heavy quark expansion (HQE) predicts that all weakly-decaying single-beauty baryons should have equal lifetimes at leading order, with the small differences between them - between Lambda_b0, Xi_b0, Xi_b- and Omega_b- - probing the size of the corrections beyond that order. The Omega_b- has been the weak link: its lifetime was known only to about 10% (world average 1.64 +/- 0.16 ps), far worse than the sub-1%-precision ratios now measured for the other baryons. Using 6 fb-1 of LHCb Run 2 data in two decay-mode sets (Omega_b- -> Omega_c0 pi- / Xi_b- -> Xi_c0 pi-, and both baryons -> J/psi + charged hyperon), combined with the earlier Run 1 measurement, LHCb now reports r_tau = tau(Omega_b-)/tau(Xi_b-) = 1.109 +/- 0.055 (stat) +/- 0.010 (syst), giving tau(Omega_b-) = 1.751 +/- 0.089 +/- 0.022 ps - roughly a factor of two improvement in precision on the Omega_b- lifetime itself. The result agrees with the HQE prediction r_tau^HQE = 1.054 +/- 0.046 within one standard deviation.
src LHCb Collaboration; arXiv:2609.25370 (2026-09-21)
Little is known about outflows from tidally disrupted stars before the optical light curve peaks, when stream-stream collisions and disk formation are thought to happen. This paper reports the first UV spectrum of any TDE taken before that peak: an HST/STIS spectrum of the nearby (z=0.0137) TDE2025aarm obtained about 20 days before optical maximum, with quasi-simultaneous IR-through-X-ray coverage. The spectrum shows broad near- and far-UV absorption lines blueshifted by ~10,000 km/s - direct evidence of a fast outflow already underway at this early phase - including two UV absorption features not previously identified in a TDE. The FUV-through-IR continuum deviates sharply from a single-temperature blackbody (f_lambda ~ lambda-3.08), which the authors interpret as reprocessing by the outflow itself; correcting for it implies the bolometric luminosity in this TDE is about 9 times higher than a standard blackbody fit to NUV-optical photometry alone would give.
src Hammerstein, Chornock, Somalwar, et al.; arXiv:2609.28460 (2026-09-24)
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Piano gets the hour today: three days since its last session on the 20th is the longest real gap of the three instruments right now, alto went yesterday and trumpet the day before, continuing the alto/piano/trumpet cycle this rotation has held since mid-September. It opens lap three's blues slot with the Evans A-form rootless voicing — a four-note 3-13-b7-9 grip with no root, the same rootless-shape vocabulary 09-14's shells session began, now applied to an actual twelve-bar form for the first time rather than drilled as a shape in isolation. Key is C, the last of the twelve still untouched by this panel, and the one that strips away every black-key landmark the hand has been leaning on through three sessions moving off the flat side.
src twelve-keys/src/exercises/blues_rootless/exercise.py
Today's exercise names its own application tunes, and this is the closest of the three: an F blues built on the same quick-change form printed above the C exercise, I moving to IV already in the second bar rather than staying put for four. Cut 26 November 1945 for Savoy under Parker's own name, with Miles Davis on trumpet, Curley Russell on bass and Max Roach on drums. Listen past the horns to what the harmony is doing under them on that first change — the same two-chord pivot today's technical target is drilling, at the tempo and in the setting the shape was actually built for.
Reconstructing Bs0 mesons in three decay modes (Bs0->Ds-pi+, Bs0->J/psi phi, Bs0->Ds-pi+pi+pi-) and combining each with a pi0, LHCb finds a peaking structure in the Bs0pi0 invariant-mass spectrum at 5698.9 +/- 1.5 (stat) +/- 0.6 (syst) +/- 0.1 MeV/c2, with global significance exceeding 7 sigma and a natural width below 9.8 MeV at 90% CL (11.8 MeV at 95% CL). Both the mass - well under conventional quark-model predictions for the lightest P-wave Bs0 excitation - and the narrowness are what the paper calls unexpected: the state is consistent either with the long-sought chiral partner of the ground-state Bs0 (the "chiral doubling" pattern already seen in the D and Ds systems) or with the first exotic multiquark hadron found in the open single-beauty system, and the paper does not adjudicate between the two.
src LHCb Collaboration; arXiv:2609.25178 (2026-09-21)
Searching 0.401 megaton-years of Super-Kamiokande exposure across its five run periods (SK-I through SK-V, 1996-2020) for the |Delta B|=3 decay O-16(ppp) -> C-13 pi+ pi+ e+ - three bound protons converting simultaneously - the collaboration finds no signal and sets a lower limit on the partial lifetime of 4.2x1032 years, an improvement of six orders of magnitude over the previous experimental constraint. The gain comes chiefly from a convolutional neural network with an attention mechanism classifying Cherenkov-ring event topology, the first time a CNN has been applied to a nucleon-decay search at Super-K.
src Super-Kamiokande Collaboration; arXiv:2609.25681 (2026-09-22)
The Einstein Probe Wide-field X-ray Telescope caught this magnetar early in an outburst on 2026-06-28, and rapid multi-instrument follow-up (XMM-Newton, NuSTAR, SVOM, IXPE) tracked its luminosity falling by roughly half within the first month while confirming the identification via short X-ray bursts. The measured spin period (6 s), dipolar field (2.6x1014 G) and characteristic age (~34 kyr) are unremarkable for a magnetar, but its position - Galactic latitude b=-4.56 deg, about 0.26 kpc below the midplane - is not: reconciling that height with an age this young requires an extreme proper-motion velocity under a simple midplane-birth-and-kick picture. No infrared or radio counterpart was found despite sensitive searches.
src Rea, et al.; arXiv:2609.25990 (2026-09-22); companion IXPE polarimetry: Taverna, et al.; arXiv:2609.25958
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Alto takes today's slot: three days since its last session on the 19th is the longest gap of the three instruments right now, and trumpet went yesterday, so the two chops-dependent instruments don't land back to back. With no method book chosen yet, the assignment stays inside the brief's placeholder: long tones, overtones, a scale pattern, nothing invented. Today's fundamental is B, the next semitone above the B♭ that first crossed the break on 09-19 — still above it, so the octave-key handling that session introduced is being asked for a second time rather than left behind after one try. The warmup closes breath support's third lap with the shape that closed the first two, diminuendo taper, and the musical target pushes the descending interval survey out to fifths.
Today's musical target is broken fifths again, descending this time — the widest skip the descending survey has reached so far. "Straight Up and Down," the closing track on Dolphy's Out to Lunch! and the record's other alto feature besides the title track already used here on 09-13, is built almost entirely on skips wide enough that the tune's own title names the effect: a swaggering, voice-like line that lands nowhere near where a stepwise run would predict, in either direction. That is a more extreme version of exactly what today's pattern asks the ear to do — track where the line actually is after a fifth-wide jump, up or down, rather than where the scale beneath it would suggest.
Ultra-long gamma-ray bursts - a proposed separate population at the extreme tail of the duration distribution, lasting thousands of seconds or more - are hard to reconcile with the minutes-scale engine lifetime expected from the compact Wolf-Rayet stars thought to power ordinary long GRBs. Gompertz et al. report X-ray follow-up of GRB 220706A showing flaring episodes persisting until about 51 days after trigger; at the burst's redshift of z0.8577, that is 27 days in the GRB rest frame, which the paper states is the latest central-engine activity ever observed in a gamma-ray burst, by roughly 21 rest-frame days over the previous record. The authors also identify a likely accompanying supernova which, after accounting for substantial but only indirectly constrained optical extinction (0.9 < A_V <= 3.6 mag), has a peak absolute magnitude M_r <= -20.25 - comparable to SN 2011kl, the energetic supernova that accompanied the previous record-holder, ultra-long GRB 111209A, and consistent with the superluminous-supernova class.
src Gompertz, Habeeb, Pasham, de Ugarte Postigo, Malesani, et al.; arXiv:2609.22426 (2026-09-22)
The rare-earth mononitrides (LnN) are a well-studied family for their magnetic and topological properties, but stoichiometric LaN has been predicted by first-principles calculations to be dynamically unstable, and no bulk member of the family had a confirmed superconducting transition. Benyacko et al. synthesized lanthanum nitride by direct reaction of lanthanum metal with high-pressure nitrogen gas in a laser floating-zone furnace, and used synchrotron X-ray and neutron diffraction to confirm a rocksalt structure with composition LaN0.94 - the nitrogen deficiency being exactly what evades the predicted instability of the 1:1 compound. Electrical transport, heat capacity, and magnetization measurements are mutually consistent in showing a metallic normal state with a bulk superconducting transition at Tc = 5.95 K.
src Benyacko, Yuan, Turner, Reimanis, Ji, Li, Lawrence, Porter, Rondinelli, Wilson; arXiv:2609.23213 (2026-09-22)
Axion-like dark matter with a Chern-Simons coupling to photons induces cosmic birefringence - an oscillating rotation of polarization angle - and highly linearly polarized, hyperactive repeating FRBs are a promising source population for catching it. Liu et al. build a Bayesian search for that oscillation in individual repeating FRBs and then combine several sources into a "polarization array" that exploits the correlation induced by the common Earth-based term, applying a two-component model that accounts for both the source-local and Earth-local dark matter density along the line of sight (calibrated per source with a simulation-based halo profile, and found comparable to the fiducial local density of 0.4 GeV/cm3). Applied to three well-studied hyperactive repeaters, neither the individual-source nor the joint analysis finds compelling evidence for axion-induced oscillations, yielding 95% credible upper limits on the coupling strength of 10-12.6 to 10-7.9 GeV-1 over axion masses of 10-23 to 10-18 eV.
src Liu, Yuwen, Zhang, Liu, Zhao, Feng, Wang, Chen; arXiv:2609.24085 (2026-09-22)
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LaTeX News 44 ships alongside a real pre-release, testable today via
pdflatex-dev: latex-base-dev pre-release 2. Its largest single piece is a
general order key for templates — a way to tell a template "typeset these
named parts, in this order, with these separators" instead of hard-coding the
sequence in the template's own code. Theorem-like environments and
\begin{proof} have already been rewritten onto it: the default order for a
theorem head is order{title,separator-1,number,separator-2,note,punct}=,
and turning "Lemma 3.2 (note)" into "3.2 Lemma (note)" is now a matter of
writing number before title in that list on the template instance,
nothing else in the document touched.
src LaTeX News Issue 44, draft dated 2026-09-15 (target release 2026-11-01); latex-base-dev pre-release 2, CTAN, 2026-09-16
Set the same lemma two ways — "Lemma 3.2 (note)." and "3.2 Lemma (note)." — in LaTeX and in Typst, then flip the order by editing exactly one line.
src thmtools user guide (the =headformat= key); Typst documentation, =state= and =counter=
Late on September 13, Judge Carl Nichols (D.D.C.) granted a preliminary injunction barring USPS from "implementing and enforcing" the mail-ballot rule in full — categorically, not provision by provision. In a 24-page order, Nichols wrote that "no statute grants the Postal Service the power to issue key parts of the Rule," finding the Democratic groups likely to succeed on an ultra vires theory: that USPS lacks statutory authority to condition ballot delivery on state enrollment in its verification portal at all. He separately found that states voluntarily complying with the rule ahead of a final ruling would "create even more confusion and misunderstanding." This is a different theory from Judge Talwani's injunction (D. Mass., covered here September 7 and 15), which rested on the APA's arbitrary-and-capricious standard and the equities of imposing new rules this close to an election — the theory Justice Kavanaugh's September 14 concurrence at the Supreme Court suggested might eventually let USPS prevail on the merits.
src U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, preliminary injunction (Sept. 13, 2026), Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, League of United Latin American Citizens, and NAACP v. USPS
A three-judge panel (Tymkovich writing, joined by Chief Judge Holmes and Judge Moritz) reversed a 2024 district-court ruling that the Army Corps of Engineers acted arbitrarily and capriciously in permitting Denver Water's 131-foot raise of Gross Dam, which would roughly triple Gross Reservoir's capacity. The panel held the Corps' definition of the project's purpose, its method for comparing project alternatives on cost, and its treatment of climate-change projections for future streamflow all "fall easily within that zone of discretion" courts owe an agency — rejecting Save the Colorado's argument that the Corps ignored clear evidence on warming and precipitation trends. The case is remanded with instructions to enter judgment against the environmental groups, vacating the district court's 2025 injunction that had halted construction.
src U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, Nos. 25-1137, 25-1231 & 25-1299, Save the Colorado v. Graham (decided Sept. 15, 2026)
Anderegg was charged with producing, distributing and transferring AI-generated child sexual abuse images (made with Stable Diffusion, depicting no real child) and with private possession of the same material, the last charged under 18 U.S.C. § 1466A(b)(1). This appeal reached only the possession count. Judge Lee, writing for a panel that also included Judges Pryor and Kolar, held that count unconstitutional as applied, affirming the district court: Stanley v. Georgia (1969) protects private in-home possession of even unprotected material from prosecution, and Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (2002) already held that sexually explicit images of fictional minors, produced without using a real child, fall outside the narrower category of speech Ferber and Osborne permit the government to suppress. The panel distinguished those two precedents, which both involved actual child victims, as not controlling here. Lee and Kolar wrote separately that image-generation technology has advanced far past what the Court anticipated in 2002 and said they had "concerns about the lines these cases draw, but we are not free to redraw them ourselves," calling for Supreme Court reconsideration of virtual-CSAM doctrine in light of AI.
src U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, No. 25-1354, United States v. Anderegg (decided Aug. 25, 2026)
At the conclusion of its September 15-16 meeting, the FOMC voted 12-0 to raise the target federal funds rate a quarter point, to 3-3/4 to 4 percent, effective immediately. The statement said economic activity "is expanding at a solid pace," with strong productivity growth and resilient spending, but that "inflation remains elevated," and that the increase would "support a timelier return to the Committee's 2 percent goal." The statement's language on financial conditions was unchanged from prior meetings, describing the Committee's ongoing practice of "maintaining ample reserves in the banking system."
src Federal Reserve, FOMC statement, September 16, 2026
Trumpet takes today's slot: three days since its last session on the 18th is the longest real gap of the three instruments right now, with piano having gone yesterday and alto the day before, continuing the alto/piano/trumpet cycle this rotation has held since mid-September. No. 10 opens with the same page of continuous Allegro sixteenth-note passagework as No. 9, in the same key, but it is built to be played twice: a rall. and a D.C. send it back to the top, and a "Fine" sits only two bars into its Più lento episode. The first time through, that two-bar phrase is a passing contrast on the way to more passagework; the second time, after the D.C., it's where the piece actually ends. Same notes, different job — and shaping that difference on command is today's real target, not just getting through the page clean.
src Arban, Complete Conservatory Method — 14 Characteristic Studies
Today's technical target is checking for sixteenth-note evenness held across three unbroken passes of one page; a Baroque trumpet concerto's opening movement asks a soloist for the same evenness across several unbroken minutes against a steady orchestral pulse, with no rest built in. André's recording of Torelli's D major concerto, with Charles Mackerras and the English Chamber Orchestra, is one of the most-played accounts of exactly that kind of writing. Listen for how little any single note in a run stands out from its neighbors, no matter how far into a phrase it falls — that evenness under length is the harder version of what today's own success criterion is listening for.
Doubly heavy baryons - two charm quarks bound with a single light quark - are a direct test of QCD's static quark-quark potential in a regime lattice calculations can also reach, but only one such state, Xi_cc++, had a confirmed observation before now. LHCb searched for the strange-flavored partner Omega_cc+ (css) in the Omega_c0 pi+ channel, reconstructing the Omega_c0 in its pK-K-pi+ final state, using 6.3 fb-1 of pp collisions at 13.6 TeV collected with the upgraded detector in 2024. A peaking structure at 8.7 sigma global significance is consistent with a weakly decaying particle and identified as Omega_cc+, with mass 3725.9 +/- 1.0 (stat) +/- 0.2 (syst) MeV/c2 plus two further systematics from the assumed lifetime (+/- 0.4 MeV/c2) and the external mass calibration (+/- 0.6 MeV/c2).
src LHCb Collaboration; arXiv:2609.21921 (2026-09-18)
R(D*) and R(D) compare the rate of B-meson decays to a tau lepton against decays to a light lepton (electron or muon); the Standard Model predicts both ratios almost independent of the hadronic form factors that otherwise plague this measurement, so a deviation would point at new physics coupling preferentially to the third generation. Belle II measured both ratios with hadronic tagging - reconstructing the whole recoiling B meson rather than inferring it, which cuts background at the cost of statistics - in 387x106 Upsilon(4S) decays, obtaining R(D*) = 0.242 +/- 0.019 (stat) +/- 0.016 (syst) and R(D) = 0.439 +/- 0.055 (stat) +/- 0.046 (syst). Both are stated as consistent with the Standard Model and with previous measurements, and this is now the most precise hadronic-tag determination of either ratio.
src Belle II Collaboration; arXiv:2609.21947 (2026-09-18)
Pulsar timing arrays probe continuous gravitational waves down to roughly the nanohertz band; below that, toward the picohertz regime where the earliest, widest-separation inspiral of supermassive black hole binaries would show up, neither pulsar timing nor astrometry alone has enough sensitivity. Filipello et al. combine the two for the first time: apparent proper-motion displacements of ~1.5x106 quasars from Gaia's CRF3 catalog, and the orbital-period derivatives of 11 high-precision binary pulsars, in a Bayesian framework that models Galactic-potential uncertainty for the pulsars via Monte Carlo and a vector-spherical-harmonics decomposition (to octupole order) for the quasars to suppress spurious signals. No signal is found (ln B_joint = -0.42 +/- 0.03); the resulting 95% upper limit on strain is h0 <= 6.4e-11 at a reference frequency of 4e-10 Hz, 20-30% tighter than either dataset alone and with full sky coverage, breaking the spatial degeneracies that limit either method in isolation.
src Filipello, Beordo, Akhmetov, Crosta, Lattanzi; arXiv:2609.21606 (2026-09-18)
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Piano gets the whole hour today: three days is the longest real gap of the three instruments right now, alto and trumpet both went in the last two days, and piano is the one that rewards a longer session over a quick one. It opens the comping & time family's third lap with the member the last two sessions haven't touched at all — not another voicing shape, but the pattern underneath every voicing so far: chord on beat 1, then the same chord again on the "and of 2," tied through to the bar's end. Applied to a two-bar ii-V, Am7 to D7, in G major — the plainest key on paper and, after three sessions running on flats, the one with the fewest black keys to find the shapes by feel.
src twelve-keys/src/exercises/charleston_comp/exercise.py
Today's exercise names its own source: the intro credits "Count Basie's rhythm section" of the 1940s with making the Charleston pattern jazz piano's default comp, and this 1939 small-group session is that same rhythm section — Basie, Freddie Green, Walter Page, Jo Jones — cut before the decade the exercise is talking about even started. It's the flip side of "Lester Leaps In," already used here on 09-14: same date, same septet, this time built on Lester Young's other contribution to the session. Listen for how little piano there is and how much the two-attack pattern still carries the whole rhythm section — the same economy today's technical target is drilling in G.
Long gamma-ray bursts are usually attributed to the collapsar channel - a massive star's core collapsing to a black hole, with the accompanying supernova as the signature - but a minority have been seen without one since GRB 060614 in 2006. Yang et al. mined two decades of Swift data for nearby (z <~ 0.35) long GRBs lacking a supernova detection sensitive enough to rule one out, more than doubling the previously known candidate sample through more careful vetting of non-detections. From that enlarged sample they derive the first robust volumetric rate for the population, R = 0.5 +/- 0.2 Gpc-3 yr-1 at luminosities L >~ 1050 erg/s - comparable to the apparent rate of both short GRBs and ordinary supernova-bearing long GRBs. For plausible beaming corrections, that rate lands in the range several compact-binary-merger channels are expected to produce, though the sample's properties are heterogeneous (some in star-forming or dusty hosts, some in quiescent galaxies), which argues against a single progenitor for all of it.
src Yang, Troja, Monsalves, El Kabir, Shahamat Dehsorkh, Waseem; arXiv:2609.20787 (2026-09-18)
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Alto takes today's slot: three days since its last session is the longest gap of the three instruments right now, and trumpet went yesterday, so the two chops-dependent instruments don't land back to back. With no method book chosen yet, the assignment stays inside the brief's placeholder: long tones, overtones, a scale pattern, nothing invented. Today's fundamental is B♭, the next semitone above A and the first fundamental in this climb to sit above the break — every note from low B♭ through A used an open low-register fingering, and this one needs the octave key, so the same overtone drill this survey has run eleven times now asks for a genuinely different fingering and a different voicing feel rather than just a higher pitch.
Shaw built whole lines out of wide, deliberate fourths-leaps rather than the stepwise bebop vocabulary most horn players default to — the same interval today's musical target is asking a single octave to outline, now descending instead of climbing. Listen for how committed each leap sounds, landing on the target note with no audible search, whichever direction the line is moving — that commitment is what turns a broken-interval drill into music rather than an exercise stuck marking scale degrees.
Ahn et al. grew bulk single crystals of the trilayer nickelates (La1-xPrx)4Ni3O8 and (La1-xYx)4Ni3O8, whose parent compound La4Ni3O8 is an insulator with electrons locked into charge/spin stripe order. Substituting smaller lanthanide ions for La breaks up that order and drives the material toward a metallic ground state; superconductivity appears only in a narrow composition window right at that insulator-metal boundary, where metallic and stripe-ordered regions coexist. The superconducting volume fraction is low and non-percolative - consistent with filamentary superconductivity nucleated at the phase boundary rather than a bulk transition - and TEM imaging finds intergrowth defects resembling the known infinite-layer nickelates, which the authors say leaves open the possibility that the superconductivity actually lives in those defect regions rather than the trilayer phase itself. Notably, the Y-series and Pr-series phase diagrams collapse onto each other when plotted against the volume of the fluorite-like spacer layer between trilayers, rather than against dopant identity - identifying that spacer volume as the parameter actually controlling the nickel-oxide electronic structure.
src Ahn, Chen, Zheng, Zhang, Chapai, Li, Thind, Klie, Norman, Welp, Mitchell, Phelan; arXiv:2609.19686 (2026-09-17)
Discrete-modulated continuous-variable QKD (CVQKD) is attractive because it reuses standard telecom hardware, but until now its security proofs against general attacks - the full space of what an eavesdropper could do, not just collective attacks that treat every round identically - only closed in the asymptotic limit of infinitely many rounds, which no real system runs. Bodenstedt et al. report the first experimental DM-CVQKD system, using quadrature-phase-shift-keying modulation, that produces composable secret keys with a full general-attack security proof at a finite block length of order 106 rounds, using a variable-length security framework built on entropy-accumulation techniques and conic optimization, with the whole analysis pipeline running in real time on near-commercial hardware.
src Bodenstedt, Pascual-García, Canta i Pujol, Sales-Moragues, Navarro, Gómez Kabelka, Etcheverry, Ghasemi; arXiv:2609.20596 (2026-09-17)
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Trumpet takes today's slot: three days since its last session is the longest real gap of the three instruments right now (piano went yesterday and alto the day before), continuing the trumpet/alto/piano cycle this rotation has held since mid-August. No. 9, marked plainly Allegro in B-flat major, is a whole page of continuous sixteenth-note passagework broken once by a "Più largo" cantabile episode and resumed by a "Più Allegro" — the exact contrast Arban's own preface to this set asks for: introducing "effective contrasts" into a long, fatiguing piece "without interrupting the execution." The test is not the running notes alone, which No. 1 already asked for, and not the cantabile alone — it is making the join between the two read as a deliberate character change rather than the tempo simply sagging into the slow part and lurching out of it.
src Arban, Complete Conservatory Method — 14 Characteristic Studies
Arban built his own most famous showpiece on the same architecture as today's study: bravura variations on a theme, framing a slower cantabile variation, exactly the run-cantabile-run shape No. 9 packs into one page. Marsalis's recording with Donald Hunsberger and the Eastman Wind Ensemble is a well-known account of it. Listen for how deliberately the cantabile variation announces itself — not a dip in energy but a change of address — and how little ground it needs to cover before the bravura writing takes the floor back.
Continuous displacement measurement is bounded by a Heisenberg trade-off between readout imprecision and measurement back-action, and in LIGO both dominate the noise budget across much of the observation band. The collaboration trapped the differential motion of the interferometer's two 40 kg test masses into a sub-Hz-linewidth optomechanical mode, in a band where radiation-pressure back-action dominates that motion, then engineered the quantum state entering the dark port so that imprecision and back-action become correlated rather than independent. Those correlations partially cancel, reducing the observed motion near resonance by about 47%; a framework separating the imprecision, back-action and correlation terms attributes the suppression to exactly that cancellation rather than to some other noise source shrinking. This is quantum back-action evasion and quantum reservoir engineering demonstrated on a macroscopic, kilogram-scale mechanical system - not a milligram-scale tabletop oscillator.
src Kabagöz, Oelker, et al. (LIGO Scientific Collaboration); arXiv:2609.19317 (2026-09-16)
Sankar.K, Chen, Brennan, Fraser, Maeda and six co-authors analyzed Swift/UVOT and GROND photometry of the hydrogen-poor superluminous supernova SN 2018bsz (z = 0.0267) across ten bands spanning roughly 110 rest-frame days after peak light. After modeling out the smooth decline, a Generalized Lomb-Scargle periodogram finds residual variation in the g, r, i, z and J bands individually at 31.5-31.8 days, and a joint multiband fit gives a rest-frame period of 31.61 +/- 0.03 days across about three visible cycles - quasi-periodic rather than strictly periodic, but robust to the detrending method used, and the authors' comparison-star and lunar-cycle checks argue against an observational systematic producing it. The paper explicitly does not resolve what drives the modulation: Lense-Thirring precession of a compact central engine, interaction with structured circumstellar material, or the orbital motion of a surviving companion star are all left standing as candidates, and the authors state plainly that the present data cannot distinguish between them.
src Sankar.K, Chen, Brennan, Fraser, Maeda, et al.; arXiv:2609.19984 (2026-09-17)
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Piano takes the whole block today: three days is the longest real gap of the three instruments right now, both alto and trumpet went in the last two days, and piano is the one that rewards a longer session rather than a quick one. It opens progressions family's third lap with the family's remaining "form" approach: not one more three-chord cadence substitute — minor_ii_v_i and backdoor both are that, and coltrane_changes already covers the family's chromatic extreme — but the eight-bar I-vi-ii-V cycle that underlies most of the standard bebop repertoire, played twice through in one chorus. Key is E♭ major, the fourth up from last session's B♭ and the first time this rotation has used E♭'s major form rather than its relative minor.
src twelve-keys/src/exercises/rhythm_changes/exercise.py
Sonny Rollins built "Oleo" straight on the I Got Rhythm changes — the same I-vi-ii-V cycle today's technical target is drilling in E♭ — and this 1954 Prestige session, with Horace Silver comping the form under Rollins and Davis, is the recording rhythm_changes's own practice notes point to for singing a head over the cycle. Listen for how little the cycle needs to change to carry a whole chorus of improvising: the same four chords, twice through, under two very different solos.
Using H -> ZZ* -> l+l-l+l- events from 13 and 13.6 TeV LHC proton-proton collisions, ATLAS measured the angular observables that fix the ZZ spin-density-matrix elements C2,1,2,-1 and C2,2,2,-2, finding -0.71 +/- 0.45 and 0.08 +/- 0.44 respectively - both consistent with the Standard Model. The point of the measurement is not those two numbers on their own but a hypothesis test built from the full angular distribution: it rejects the hypothesis that the two Z bosons' spins are in a separable (unentangled) state at 4.7 standard deviations, against an expected sensitivity of 4.9 sigma if the Standard Model's entangled prediction is correct. This is the first entanglement measurement performed on a pair of massive spin-1 particles - previous LHC entanglement work (top-quark pairs) used spin-1/2 fermions, where the entangled state lives in a two-dimensional qubit space; a Z boson's spin is a three-level qutrit, so the entanglement structure being tested here is genuinely different and richer.
src ATLAS Collaboration; arXiv:2603.26463; Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 111804 (2026-09-11)
FRB 20250607A, detected by the CRAFT survey on ASKAP, has two components whose scattering timescale and scintillation bandwidth cannot come from a single thin scattering screen - together they require the dominant screen to sit within roughly 61 kpc of the burst's source, essentially local to it rather than somewhere along the line of sight through the host galaxy or Milky Way. Through that scattering tail, the polarization angle should flatten as the pulse mixes with scattered light; here it does not, a behavior the authors say has not previously been reported in any FRB or pulsar. The two components also show an apparent, visually clear difference in dispersion measure that is nonetheless not statistically significant given current uncertainties - a discrepancy the paper reads as a sign that the uncertainties themselves are too conservative rather than that the difference is illusory. Two further CRAFT-detected bursts, FRB 20190611B and FRB 20210407E, show comparable component-to-component electron-column contrasts, at a level consistent with plasma density variations inside a neutron-star magnetosphere; FRB 20210407E separately shows its own component-dependent polarization-angle structure, and none of the three show generalized Faraday rotation.
src Balzan, Bera, James, Meyers, Deller, Shannon, Wang; arXiv:2609.18086 (2026-09-16); CRAFT survey (ASKAP)
Combining GW170817 with an enlarged sample of neutron stars that now have both mass and radius measured, plus equation-of-state constraints from chiral effective field theory at low density and perturbative QCD at high density, Chen et al. constrain the binary's tidal deformability to kappa2^T = 78 (+17/-11) at 68.3% credibility - a value that favors strong post-merger gravitational-wave radiation, with an estimated post-merger energy release of E_GW,p ~ 0.051 (+0.022/-0.017) solar masses c2. Assuming, as the electromagnetic counterpart modeling suggests, that the merger remnant was a supramassive neutron star, they translate this into the maximum mass of a nonrotating neutron star (M_TOV): 2.09 (+0.11/-0.09) solar masses if the remnant survived 0.1 s before collapsing, rising to 2.18 (+0.10/-0.09) solar masses for a 1 s remnant lifetime. Both values sit close to an independently reconstructed equation-of-state bound of M_TOV = 2.16 (+0.10/-0.07) solar masses, particularly once very massive neutron stars with only indirect mass measurements are excluded from that comparison sample.
src Chen, Gao, Huang, Tang, Fan; arXiv:2609.17936 (2026-09-15)
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Alto takes today's slot: three days since its last session is the longest gap of the three instruments right now, and trumpet went yesterday, so the two chops-dependent instruments don't land back to back. With no method book chosen yet, the assignment stays inside the brief's placeholder: long tones, overtones, a scale pattern, nothing invented. Today's fundamental is low A, continuing the upward semitone climb the survey has held since it passed E♭, and the warmup opens breath support's third circuit with the shape that opened the first two -- messa di voce, swelling out and receding back without losing the center at either end. The scale pattern also turns a corner: with every ascending skip up to a seventh already tried, today starts the same interval over again from the top of the scale down, rather than force a wider skip that a single octave has no room left for.
Written by Duke Ellington as a feature for Hodges, this ballad is a textbook case of a swell shaped and released without the tone thinning at either end -- exactly the control today's warmup asks a much shorter long tone to manage in miniature. Listen for how a phrase can grow from nearly nothing to full and back again without the pitch drifting or the sound going breathy at the quiet edges; that's the same center today's messa di voce is testing, just held across a whole chorus instead of eight counts.
Fan, Shen, Liang, et al. reported evidence in 2024 (arXiv:2407.11737) for a narrow ~43 GeV gamma-ray line in a stacking analysis of Fermi-LAT data toward the Virgo, Fornax and Ophiuchus clusters - the kind of narrow spectral feature no known astrophysical process produces, which is exactly why a line is treated as a dark-matter smoking gun. Profumo reanalyzes the same public data and the excess survives: it holds up under event-type partitions, a test on data withheld from the original selection, and detector-coordinate permutation tests, and realistic hadronic or inverse-Compton backgrounds are too spectrally broad to fake it. Calibrated across a 20-70 GeV search window and five candidate spatial morphologies, the global significance comes out to roughly 2.7 sigma, peaking at 44.5 GeV under a uniform-surface-brightness template. But a spatial-spectral likelihood analysis - cross-checked with an independent annular analysis - finds the excess events extend through much of each cluster's virial region rather than tracing a centrally peaked profile: smooth NFW annihilation and a central point source are both disfavored, while uniform surface brightness or substructure-boosted annihilation fit the spatial data better.
src Stefano Profumo (UC Santa Cruz); arXiv:2609.16425 (2026-09-14)
Searching for a fast radio burst below 300 MHz without a target is expensive: the dispersive delay across the band stretches to tens of seconds instead of milliseconds, which makes a blind search with standard incoherent-dedispersion pipelines computationally prohibitive, and until now the only confirmed sub-300-MHz detection came from a LOFAR campaign pointed deliberately at FRB 20180916B, a source already known to repeat at higher frequencies. Di Pietrantonio, Sokolowski, James and 13 co-authors instead ran a wide-field, imaging-based search - no target list, no prior timing information - over 18,244 deg2-hours of Murchison Widefield Array data from the Southern-sky MWA Rapid Two-metre (SMART) survey, about 441 deg2 of usable sky and roughly 41 hours of quality data after cuts, processing around 4 petabytes. They found FRB 20191203A at 138.9-169.6 MHz (centred 154.9 MHz): signal-to-noise 10.7, fluence 360+-30 Jy ms, peak flux density 3.9+-0.6 Jy, dispersion measure 393 pc/cm3 (277 pc/cm3 after subtracting the Milky Way's contribution), implying a maximum redshift of roughly 0.3. Scaled to a 57 Jy ms fluence threshold, the single detection implies a rate of 54 events per sky per day (95% CI: 1-302) - consistent, within those wide bounds, with the rate already measured above 400 MHz.
src Di Pietrantonio, Sokolowski, James, et al.; arXiv:2609.17275 (2026-09-15)
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On September 14 the Supreme Court denied the government's application to stay Judge Talwani's preliminary injunction (D. Mass., covered here September 7 and 14), which bars USPS from enforcing the envelope-design, portal-registration, data-upload and ballot-refusal provisions of its mail-ballot rule through the November 3 election. The per curiam order held the government unlikely to succeed on the merits and found the equitable factors for emergency relief unmet. Justice Kavanaugh concurred, writing that the final rule has "at least a fair prospect" of falling within USPS's statutory authority under 39 U.S.C. § 401(2), but that applying it to the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act because officials lack time to implement it. Justice Alito, joined by Justice Thomas, dissented, arguing some plaintiffs lack standing and that the government had made the showings a stay requires.
src Supreme Court of the United States, No. 26A305, United States Postal Service v. California (decided 2026-09-14)
On March 30 the FCC's Media Bureau issued a public notice extending the "lowest unit charge" (LUC) political-advertising rate to joint fundraising committees with noncandidate members and to parties engaged in coordinated campaign activity, not just to candidates themselves. Four Democratic candidates sought review at the FCC and, while that application was still pending before the Commission, separately petitioned the Fourth Circuit. On August 25 a divided Fourth Circuit panel held it had jurisdiction despite the pending agency proceeding, set aside the Bureau's notice, denied the party committees' request to stay its own mandate, and let the mandate issue immediately — restricting the LUC to candidates alone. On September 4, the day the LUC window opened for the November midterms, the Supreme Court recalled the Fourth Circuit's mandate and stayed its judgment, holding there was a reasonable probability four Justices would find the jurisdictional question certworthy, a fair prospect of reversal, and irreparable harm from broadcasters already withdrawing the favorable rate. Justice Jackson dissented, writing that a requirement to exhaust administrative review is ordinarily a claims-processing rule rather than a jurisdictional bar absent clear statutory language to the contrary.
src Supreme Court of the United States, No. 26A274, National Republican Congressional Committee v. Brown (stay granted 2026-09-04)
BLS's Producer Price Index report for August, released September 10, put the seasonally adjusted final-demand increase at 0.4% for the month, following a 0.1% rise in July, and 5.4% over the prior 12 months on an unadjusted basis. Final-demand goods rose 1.1% and services rose 0.1%. Core PPI (excluding foods, energy and trade services) rose 0.3% on the month and 4.7% over the year. Energy prices rose 4.2% and accounted for more than three-quarters of the broad-based increase, with diesel fuel up 24.1% and accounting for over a third of the monthly goods gain alone; trade-services margins for fuels and lubricants retailing fell 11.3%, and transportation and warehousing services rose 2.3%.
src Bureau of Labor Statistics, Producer Price Index News Release — August 2026
Trumpet takes today's slot: three days since its last session is the longest real gap of the three instruments right now (piano went yesterday and alto the day before), and that keeps the trumpet/alto/piano cycle this rotation has held since mid-August. No. 8, marked Allegro moderato in F major, asks something none of the last seven studies tested directly: most of the line is slurred, and the accents that punctuate it have to stand out of that slurred backdrop rather than reset the articulation each time they land. Partway through, a written fermata passage opens up into free time before the music snaps back into tempo, forte — a small rehearsal for the larger skill of rubato that returns exactly where it should.
src Arban, Complete Conservatory Method — 14 Characteristic Studies
Bellstedt built this set of variations on "Funiculì funiculà" specifically to showcase a soloist accenting figuration inside continuous fast passagework and then opening into free, cadenza-like time before landing back on the beat — the same pairing today's technical target asks for in miniature. Listen for how little the accents interrupt the line even as they cut through it, and for how the free passages never feel like they have lost the pulse they are about to rejoin.
The leading cosmological bound on the summed neutrino mass, Sigma m_nu < 0.0691 eV at 95% credibility (degenerate ordering; Planck CMB + Planck/ACT lensing + DESI BAO), assumes the standard thermal history correctly predicts the cosmic neutrino background's temperature relative to the CMB's. Figueroa, Sobotka and Erickcek test that assumption two ways: letting massive particles decay into photons and dark radiation after Big Bang nucleosynthesis, and letting the neutrino-to-photon temperature ratio float with no assumed mechanism at all. Photon-only injection tightens the bound slightly, to 0.0652 eV; adding dark radiation relaxes it to 0.0710 eV; the fully model-agnostic case gives 0.0724 eV. Across every scenario the shift stays within 0.004 eV of the standard-history value, and the same pattern holds for the normal and inverted orderings.
src Figueroa, Sobotka, Erickcek; arXiv:2609.15970 (2026-09-14)
Saad et al. ground bulk pyrolytic graphite and annealed the resulting nanoflakes at 670 K in air. TEM shows the annealed flakes carry a high density of wrinkle-type defects at the basal-plane surface; flakes left as-ground, or annealed in vacuum instead of air, show neither the wrinkles nor what follows. In the wrinkled samples, trapped magnetic flux - the field a sample retains after an external field is removed and withdrawn, one signature associated with superconductivity - persists up to 390 K and above, and the correlation between wrinkle density and trapped-flux strength is the paper's evidence that the wrinkled regions are the source. No transition temperature, no resistance-versus-temperature curve, and no bulk Meissner (field-expulsion) measurement appear anywhere in the paper.
src Saad, Nikitin, Tayurskii, Yusupov; arXiv:2609.15712 (2026-09-14)
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fontspec 2.9h fixes \__fontspec_check_script:Nn, the internal test that
answers "is the current run set in script X", which feature defaults such as
small-caps synthesis and language-sensitive substitution read to decide what
to do. The old code named the active font switch by reconstructing it from
\curr@fontshape/\f@size; when that shape doesn't match the font actually in
use — the fix's own test case is \scshape selected on a font with no
small-caps shape, forcing NFSS to fake one — the reconstructed name was wrong
under LuaTeX specifically, because LuaTeX doesn't name font switches the way
XeTeX does. The maintainers' own regression test proves it:
\fontspec_if_script:nTF{hebr}{yes}{no} returns yes under LuaTeX and no
under XeTeX, from the identical source file, with no warning either way. The
fix reads \the\font directly instead of rebuilding its name, which cannot
drift from the font that's actually selected.
src fontspec v2.9h (2026-08-11), latex3/fontspec commit 8b3ad07; CTAN update announcement, 2026-08-12
Set a title block for a two-author paper: a title, then "A. First$1$, B.
Second$2$" on one line, followed by the two affiliations underneath,
numbered to match. In LaTeX, use authblk — \author[1]{A. First},
\author[2]{B. Second}, \affil[1]{...}, \affil[2]{...} — rather than
hand-placed \textsuperscript calls, so the numbering is generated once
rather than typed twice. In Typst, build the same block from two arrays,
authors and affiliations, and generate both the superscripts and the numbered
list from that one shared source with a #for loop, rather than writing the
digits into the author line by hand.
src CTAN package authblk; Typst documentation
On September 10 the Supreme Court, on referral from Circuit Justice Kavanaugh to the full Court, granted a stay application by People Not Politicians and Richard Von Glahn (No. 26A326), staying — "pending the disposition of the appeal" in the Eighth Circuit (No. 26-2797) and any subsequent certiorari petition — a September 8 order of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri (No. 4:26-cv-1424). That order, from Judge Stephen Clark in a suit brought by Rep. Bob Onder, Rick Brattin and two voters, had directed Missouri to use the state's newly drawn 2025 congressional map for the November election, holding that using a different map for the general election than the one used in the August primary violates the Equal Protection Clause. Two days earlier, on September 8, Justice Kavanaugh alone had denied a separate stay application (No. 26A304) by Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, which had sought to let Missouri use the 2025 map over a Missouri Supreme Court ruling (No. SC101805) that a People Not Politicians referendum on the map was legal, sufficient and timely — which, under the state constitution, suspends the map pending the vote and defaults to the state's prior, 2022 map. With both of Hoskins's routes to reinstating the 2025 map now blocked, the 2022 map is what the Secretary of State's office is using to administer the election.
src Supreme Court of the United States (No. 26A326; related No. 26A304)
On September 10 a First Circuit panel (Gelpí, Rikelman and Aframe) denied the government's motion to stay, pending appeal, the preliminary injunction Judge Talwani entered September 4 in League of Women Voters of Massachusetts v. Trump and the consolidated California v. USPS (Nos. 26-2029, 26-2030) — covered here last week when it issued. The injunction bars USPS from enforcing the mail-ballot rule's envelope-design, portal-registration, data-upload and ballot-refusal provisions for elections on or before November 3, 2026. The panel found implementation before then would cause "chaos and widespread disenfranchisement," pointing to record findings that some states could not reprint compliant envelopes in time, that USPS's own state registration portal was not yet operational, and that scanning tens of millions of ballots for the required barcode match was not achievable before the election. The government's separate stay application at the Supreme Court, No. 26A305 (covered here September 7, response filed September 9), remains pending; the panel's order was filed with the Court the same day.
src First Circuit (Nos. 26-2029, 26-2030); Supreme Court No. 26A305 (pending)
BLS's Consumer Price Index report for August, released September 11, put the seasonally adjusted all-items increase at 0.4% for the month and 3.4% over the prior 12 months. Core CPI (excluding food and energy) rose 0.3% on the month — up from 0.2% in July — and 2.4% over the year, down from 2.5% in July. Gasoline rose 3.9% in August and accounted for more than a third of the monthly all-items increase; energy overall was up 2.1% on the month and 16.3% over the year. Shelter rose 0.3%, food 0.1%, with food away from home up 0.3%. Within core, communication, lodging away from home, airline fares, education and used cars and trucks all increased.
src Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index Summary — August 2026
The President signed H.R. 2069 on September 11, along with three narrower bills (H.R. 1276, H.R. 2196 and H.R. 5366). The Stop Secret Spending Act amends the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 to add "other transaction agreements" — contracting instruments, mostly used by the Defense Department and other research agencies, that fall outside the Federal Acquisition Regulation and had not previously counted as reportable federal awards — to the categories of spending covered by USAspending.gov. It sets two real deadlines, both running from September 11: within three years, Treasury must ensure data on these agreements is transmitted to USAspending.gov automatically and shown in a centralized view (new FFATA §4(e)); and within one year, and annually after that, Treasury must post a report listing the total federal award spending not yet on the site and the reason for each category of omission — specifically whether it is national-security-related or classified, a legislative- or judicial-branch award, or a subaward below a primary subaward (new FFATA §2(h)). If Treasury has not met the three-year target by the one-year mark, it must instead publish, by then, a report listing and describing every other transaction agreement entered into that fiscal year; if still short by year two, it must send Congress an implementation plan for reaching full coverage by year three.
src 119th Congress, H.R. 2069, Stop Secret Spending Act of 2025 (Public Law, signed 2026-09-11)
Piano gets today's block alone: it carries the longest gap of the three, and alto went yesterday, so the two chops-dependent instruments don't land back to back either way. It opens voicings family's third lap, and rather than repeat upper_structures' density or quartal's fourths, today strips the voicing down to its floor: the shell, just the 3rd and 7th, the two notes that carry a chord's quality with the root left for a bass player who isn't in the room. Key is B♭ major, the last major key with more than one accidental that this rotation hasn't touched yet.
src twelve-keys/src/exercises/shells/exercise.py
Cut in New York on September 5, 1939, with Lester Young out front and Walter Page holding down the root on bass, this is the small-group setting shells are built for: Basie's piano comping states each chord in the fewest notes that will carry its quality and nothing more, leaving the root entirely to Page and the harmonic color entirely out of the way of Young's lines. Listen for how little piano there actually is behind the solo, and how that absence never reads as absence — the same trust in a bass player's root that today's technical target is asking two notes at a time to place correctly.
Resource-efficient fault-tolerant architectures - qLDPC codes in particular - need non-local connectivity between physical qubits that a single trapped-ion chain or chip cannot provide on its own, which is the case for stitching separate processors together with a photonic link; remote stabilizer measurement between two independent modules is the specific capability that requires, and it had never been demonstrated. Ainley et al. generate heralded entanglement between "network" qubits held in two separate trapped-ion processors - the raw link carries 2.38(17)% error (Table 1) - and use it to read out stabilizers of data qubits sitting in each module without bringing the qubits themselves together. In a distributed two-qubit repetition code, the stabilizer readout returns the correct outcome 96.4(6)% of the time with no error injected, and repeating the error-detection round does not degrade the encoded information further. They then combine these remote syndrome measurements with real-time feedforward to actively correct arbitrary single-qubit Pauli errors injected into one half of a distributed Bell state, prepared at 82.5(15)% fidelity: with correction applied, the fidelity to the target state stays roughly flat as injected depolarizing noise increases, where without correction it declines monotonically.
src Ainley, Agrawal, Araki, et al. (Lucas group, University of Oxford, with Oxford Ionics); arXiv:2609.13065 (2026-09-11)
Primordial black holes (PBHs) in the "asteroid-mass" window, roughly 7.5x1014 to 1021 g, are the one part of PBH-as-dark-matter parameter space that neither microlensing surveys nor gravitational-wave searches can rule out, because holes that light are too small to lens and (if they ever merged) too light to ring LIGO. A PBH that light is still evaporating by Hawking radiation, though, throwing off electrons and positrons that upscatter ambient photons into hard X-rays via inverse Compton scattering. Koechler and De la Torre Luque searched 20 years of accumulated INTEGRAL/IBIS Milky Way observations for exactly that diffuse hard-X-ray glow - the first time this specific signal has been searched for with this instrument - combining spectral and spatial (morphological) information and extending the analysis to extended PBH mass functions and to rotating (Kerr) PBHs. They find no excess and set upper limits on the PBH dark-matter fraction f_PBH across the window; over part of the mass range the new bound improves on the equivalent eROSITA X-ray constraint by up to two orders of magnitude, and above roughly 1016 g it stays tighter than existing CMB and Voyager-1 electron/positron limits, though it does not surpass the strongest existing bounds from the 511 keV line, molecular-cloud ionization, the diffuse cosmic X-ray background, or AMS-02 positrons in the mass ranges where those apply.
src Koechler, De la Torre Luque; arXiv:2609.12044 (2026-09-10)
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Alto takes today's slot — three days since its last session is the longest gap of the three instruments right now, and trumpet went yesterday, so the two chops-dependent instruments don't land back to back. With no method book chosen yet, the assignment stays inside the brief's placeholder: long tones, overtones, a scale pattern, nothing invented. Today's fundamental is low A♭, continuing the upward semitone climb the survey has held since it passed E♭, and both the warmup shape and the musical-target pattern close out their own second circuit — a crescendo attack after last time's taper, and the widest interval skip a single octave has room left for.
Dolphy splits his horns across this record — the title track is one of only two where he plays alto rather than bass clarinet or flute — and its melody is built on exactly the kind of skip today's musical target is chasing: angular leaps that jump past where a stepwise line would go next, so the ear has to track where the phrase actually landed rather than where it seemed to be heading. Listen for how a line that looks disjointed on paper still reads as one idea in his hands — the same claim broken sevenths is asking a single octave to make good on.
Rhombohedral pentalayer graphene on hBN hosts the fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect (FQAHE) at zero magnetic field, but whether the transitions between its various field-tuned phases - Fermi liquid, fractional Chern insulator (FCI), extended quantum anomalous Hall, correlated insulator - follow the same "two-phase" microscopic picture established for ordinary Landau-level quantum Hall transitions has been untested, because that picture was previously only ever probed by sweeping a magnetic field in GaAs two-dimensional electron gases, not by sweeping a displacement field in a Chern band. Having improved device filtering and grounding to cut residual resistance to hundreds of ohms - about 15 times lower than the same device's original 2024 FQAHE discovery run - the authors resolved 11 distinct fractional states and swept the displacement field D through each transition while tracking longitudinal and Hall resistivity (and conductivity). The FL-FCI and FL-EQAH-FCI transitions trace the semicircle relations in the resistivity plane that the two-phase model predicts - the first experimental evidence of that microscopic picture under D-field rather than B-field tuning. The FCI-to-insulator transition, however, only traces a semicircle in conductivity, not resistivity, with the Hall resistivity staying pinned near its quantized FCI value (7h/3e2 at filling 3/7) even as the longitudinal resistivity diverges - the signature of a "fractional quantized anomalous Hall insulator," a zero-field, fractional-filling analog of the quantized Hall insulator known from conventional 2DEGs. Comparing the temperature dependence of resistance in the three most robust FCI states to a thermal-activation model, the authors extract transport gaps reaching about 0.25 meV (~3 K), following the same "V-shape" versus distance from half-filling that composite-fermion theory predicts for ordinary fractional quantum Hall states, and comparable in size to FQH gaps in GaAs devices though smaller than in bilayer graphene at similar density - which the authors attribute to pentalayer graphene's higher self-screening.
src Hadjri, Yue, Han, et al. (Ju and Stern groups, MIT/Weizmann); arXiv:2609.09422 (2026-09-08)
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Trumpet takes today's slot: three days since its last session is the longest gap of the three instruments right now, and piano — which went yesterday — stays off regardless, since it's the one that rewards a longer, less frequent block rather than today's short turnaround. Six sessions into the 14 Characteristic Studies, each one has isolated a demand the others didn't touch — endurance, dynamic contrast, legato across a register break, slur-to-tongue switching, a soft level held without swelling, pulse held steady across changing note density. No. 7, marked Allegro — the fastest of the seven so far — asks something none of those tested: it is staccato throughout rather than a mix of articulations, and the standard trap with it is treating "detached" as "disconnected," so that a technically accurate performance still sounds like a pile of separate notes instead of one fast phrase.
src Arban, Complete Conservatory Method — 14 Characteristic Studies
Arban wrote this theme specifically to be a showcase for staccato technique, and it is the same demand today's technical target makes in miniature, run at full virtuoso length: chorus after chorus of fast detached notes that still have to read as one melody being decorated rather than as a display of separation for its own sake. Marsalis, with the Eastman Wind Ensemble under Donald Hunsberger, keeps every variation singable even at its most rapid-fire — listen for how the line never stops sounding like the theme, no matter how many notes get inserted between its landmarks.
Neutrinoless quadruple beta decay (0nu4beta) is a hypothetical process in which a nucleus converts four neutrons to protons while emitting no neutrinos at all - a more exotic cousin of neutrinoless double beta decay (0nu2beta), and one whose observation without any accompanying 0nu2beta signal has been argued to point specifically to neutrinos being Dirac rather than Majorana particles. The PandaX-4T collaboration searched 148.4 kg.yr of xenon-136 exposure, collected during commissioning and the experiment's first science runs, for 0nu4beta decay and saw no excess over background, setting a lower limit on the half-life of 6.01e24 yr at 90% confidence - the most stringent bound on this process yet reported in any xenon target, and roughly a thousand times tighter than NEMO-3's earlier (1.1-3.2)e21 yr limit on the analogous decay of neodymium-150, though the two isotopes' different phase-space factors mean the numbers are not directly interchangeable.
src PandaX Collaboration; arXiv:2609.10048 (2026-09-09)
Every Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) demonstration to beat classical simulation so far - including the Jiuzhang line's 3,050-photon result last year - has run on room-sized free-space or fiber optical tables, because reaching the needed low loss, high phase precision and high-speed modulation together has demanded bulk components. Fu et al. instead built the whole interferometric network - high-speed electro-optic modulators, on-chip delay lines, and a time-space multiplexed mesh - monolithically on a single thin-film lithium niobate chip, running it at a 4 GHz clock rate to record detection events of up to 11,059 photons within one millisecond, more than three times the photon count of the previous largest (tabletop) GBS experiment. Few-photon calibration fidelities (0.9978 single-photon, 0.9962 two-photon bunching, 0.9911 two-photon non-bunching) and a Bayesian analysis favoring genuine GBS statistics over classical spoofing models validate the sampling; the authors estimate that classically reproducing a 2.5-microsecond sampling run would take a tensor-network simulation on an NVIDIA A100 GPU at least 9.7e6 years.
src Fu, Shen, Hu, et al.; arXiv:2609.11922 (2026-09-10)
Neutral-atom architectures want to combine two species in one array: a divalent atom like ytterbium-171, whose nuclear spin gives a long-lived data qubit, alongside an alkali like rubidium-87, whose bright, fast, species-selective readout makes it a good control and ancilla qubit that can be measured and reset without disturbing the data qubits sitting nearby. The obstacle has been that entangling the two species by the usual route - Rydberg dipole-dipole interaction tuned with a DC Stark field - induces severe Stark mixing in the divalent atom's Rydberg levels. Wang et al. instead find an optically accessible S+S<->P+P Forster resonance between the two species that sits at zero electric field, with a sub-megahertz Forster defect, so the interspecies exchange interaction is strong at ordinary array spacing without any Stark tuning at all. Driving this exchange with a shaped optical pulse, they demonstrate an interspecies controlled-Z gate in 0.36 microseconds with 99.91% intrinsic fidelity, staying above 99.85% under realistic position and laser-amplitude perturbations, and they separately identify an auxiliary van der Waals channel for the same atom pair.
src Wang, Huang, Jing, Yao, Wang, Liu; arXiv:2609.11730 (2026-09-10)
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A Bell-state measurement (BSM) tells you which of the four two-photon entangled states a pair is in, and it is the basic operation behind measurement-based and fusion-based photonic quantum computing and behind entanglement swapping in quantum networks - all of which need to do many BSMs in a row. Built from linear optics alone (beamsplitters and photon counting, no nonlinear interaction), a BSM cannot distinguish all four Bell states and is fundamentally capped at 50% success probability, a hard constant that has bounded photonic key rates and graph-state generation rates ever since. Kumar, Reiß, van Loock and Barz encode each qubit of the pair in a two-photon repetition code - the simplest parity code, built only to catch bit-flip errors - and perform the BSM on the encoded pairs; the redundancy lets them identify and discard exactly the failure patterns that force a bare linear-optical BSM to give up, and they measure a mean success probability of (70.8 +/- 0.4)%, comfortably above the 50% bound. Because fault-tolerant photonic architectures need this same error-correcting encoding anyway for other reasons, the gain costs no extra photons or resources beyond what such a system would already carry.
src Kumar, Reiß, van Loock, Barz; arXiv:2609.10698 (2026-09-11)
Squeezed light - where quantum noise is pushed below the shot-noise limit in one quadrature at the cost of raising it in the other - is what already lets gravitational-wave detectors beat the shot-noise floor at the low, audio-band frequencies (tens of Hz to kHz) where most of their sensitivity lives, but every such source to date has been a large, actively-stabilized tabletop setup: technical noise grows sharply as frequency drops, and holding the local oscillator's phase steady against a fragile vacuum-level quantum signal for long stretches is hard. Zhu et al. generate two-mode squeezed vacuum down to 60 Hz directly on a silica-microcavity photonic chip, solving the phase-stability problem with a coherent-comb trick: a weak electro-optic reference comb, in the orthogonal polarization, co-propagates with the vacuum at the quantum-signal frequencies, giving a stable phase reference without ever touching (and so degrading) the quantum modes themselves. From the resulting covariance-matrix reconstruction, the positive-partial-transposition entanglement criterion gives a minimum symplectic eigenvalue of 0.395, below the 0.5 threshold required to certify genuine two-mode entanglement - the paper reports this eigenvalue rather than a decibel squeezing figure.
src Zhu, Cao, Liu, He, Zhang, Zhang, Du, Wang, Jiang, Su; arXiv:2609.11004 (2026-09-11)
On 2023-02-13 KM3NeT's ARCA detector recorded KM3-230213A, a ~220 PeV neutrino, the highest-energy neutrino ever seen, and where it came from - a genuine astrophysical point source, a diffuse cosmogenic background, or something rarer - is still unsettled (this panel has already passed on several theory papers proposing an origin for it). Here the IceCube Collaboration searches 15 years of its own archival data for neutrinos from that same direction under three timing hypotheses - a steady source, a flare coincident with the KM3NeT detection, and a flare at an unconstrained time anywhere in the archive - and finds no significant excess under any of them. The best hotspot found in the unconstrained-flare search has a pre-trial p-value of 0.0078, but once the look-elsewhere effect across the full time-and-position search is accounted for, its post-trial significance drops to 1 sigma: fully consistent with background alone. Compared against KM3NeT's own estimate of the flux a point source would need to produce the single observed event, IceCube's upper limits for a short-timescale transient lie outside that estimate's 3-sigma range, assuming the same spectrum extends down into IceCube's more sensitive energy band.
src IceCube Collaboration (Abbasi et al.); arXiv:2609.10931 (2026-09-11)
Piano gets today's block alone: alto went yesterday, trumpet the day before, and piano carries both the longest gap of the three and rule 3's preference for a longer single block. It's line building's second lap, and rather than repeat lap one's guide tones — the notes a line is built to touch — today moves to the approach around them: the enclosure, which surrounds a target chord tone from both sides chromatically before landing on it. Key is A♭ major, a fourth from the one line-building key already used and, at four flats, one where the half-step neighbor tones the pattern needs don't fall under the fingers by habit.
src twelve-keys/src/exercises/enclosures/exercise.py
Powell's right-hand lines here are enclosures end to end — barely a target note arrives without a chromatic neighbor on either side of it first, taken at a tempo fast enough that the approach has to be automatic rather than planned in the moment. Listen for how often a phrase's most emphasized note is the one that got surrounded rather than the one that got the most notes around it; that's the same arrival today's musical target is asking a 4-bar line to produce twice, not sixteen times.
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Alto takes today's slot — three days since its last session is the longest gap of the three instruments right now, and trumpet went yesterday, so the two chops-dependent instruments don't land back to back. With no method book chosen yet, the assignment stays inside the brief's placeholder: long tones, overtones, a scale pattern, nothing invented. Today's fundamental is low G, continuing the upward semitone climb the survey has held since it passed E♭, and both the warmup shape and the musical-target pattern continue their own second circuits — a diminuendo taper after last time's held tone, and the widest interval skip tried yet.
Konitz wrote this contrafact of "What Is This Thing Called Love" with Lennie Tristano in 1949, and it's a fair specimen of the whole Tristano school's melodic habit: reaching for the next idea by leap rather than by step, where the more chromatic bebop mainstream of the same years mostly ran lines. Today's musical target asks for exactly that shape at a much smaller, more mechanical scale — a scale broken into skips wide enough that the ear has to track where the line actually is rather than where a stepwise run would predict, the same demand Konitz's phrasing makes on a listener here across a whole improvised chorus.
Galaxy surveys have long used the two-point correlation function (clustering strength versus separation) and, more recently, the three-point function to constrain cosmology and galaxy bias. The connected four-point correlation function (4PCF) - the part of the 4-point statistic that is not just a product of lower-order correlations, i.e. genuinely irreducible four-galaxy information - has been computable in theory and tested on mock catalogs, but until now had not been measured on real observational data with any confidence. Using DESI Year 1 luminous red galaxies (0.4 < z < 1.1, with a higher-density 0.4 < z < 0.8 subsample also tested), this analysis finds a clear detection of the even-parity connected 4PCF at roughly 12 to 17σ in a full-sky analysis, robust across north/south hemisphere splits, redshift range, and sample-completeness cuts. A second check - cross-correlating spatially separated, largely independent patches, which removes leading-order mismatch between the data's covariance and the mock catalogs' - still finds ~15σ evidence, in some configurations at a cost to raw sensitivity.
src Ortolá Leonard, Krolewski, Slepian, Greco, May, et al. (DESI Collaboration); arXiv:2609.09340 (2026-09-08)
The proton and neutron have almost identical mass despite wildly different electromagnetic structure - a nearly-zero net charge distribution for the neutron versus the proton's well-measured ~0.84 fm charge radius - because nucleon mass is generated almost entirely by the strong force (via the QCD trace anomaly and the gluon field) rather than by quark rest mass, which contributes only a few percent. Mapping that mass-generating field directly requires a strong-interaction probe rather than an electromagnetic one, and the J/ψ - a compact color-singlet charm-anticharm dipole - couples to the proton's gluon field almost exclusively, making near-threshold J/ψ photoproduction (recently measured with much improved precision at Jefferson Lab) a comparatively clean handle on it. The authors combine those photoproduction results with existing quark-sector (charge and mass distribution) data to extract the color field's spatial distribution, reporting an overall "strong-interaction" radius of 0.94 ± 0.09 fm - nominally larger than both the charge radius and the (smaller) mass radius, though the gap over the charge radius is only about as big as its own combined uncertainty.
src Ji, Joosten, Meziani, Pefkou; arXiv:2609.09318 (2026-09-08)
1ES 1927+654 is the changing-look AGN that famously lost and then rapidly rebuilt its X-ray corona in 2018, and has been watched closely ever since. Since a renewed X-ray brightening beginning mid-2022, this team's combined VLBA imaging and multi-band, time-resolved VLA monitoring shows it transitioning from a radio-quiet, non-jetted state to a radio-loud AGN with a bipolar, GHz-peaked jet - the spectral signature of a young, compact jet. For the first time during an active jet-formation episode, the team detects linear polarization, appearing above ~3 GHz with fractional polarization climbing from ~0.2% to ~6% as frequency increases; no circular polarization is seen at any epoch. Across 2026 the polarization angle (EVPA) executes a smooth, coherent rotation of about 137° over roughly 81 days while the source's total radio intensity stays flat, then partially swings back - the signature of an organized disturbance propagating through the compact emitting region rather than a random turbulent wander.
src Shuvo, Meyer, Laha, Roychowdhury, Sadaula, Clarke, Peters, Begelman, Georganopoulos, Mbarek, Hankla, Philippov, Sridhar; arXiv:2609.09539 (2026-09-08)
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Trumpet takes today's slot: three days since its last session is the longest gap of the three instruments right now, and piano — which went yesterday — stays off regardless, since it's the one that rewards a longer, less frequent block rather than today's short turnaround. Five sessions into the 14 Characteristic Studies, each one has isolated a demand the others didn't touch — endurance, dynamic contrast, legato across a register break, slur-to-tongue switching, a soft level held without swelling. No. 6, marked Moderato, sits in a tempo none of those five occupied: too measured to let a busy run blur past a listener, too moving to let a long tone carry the phrase on its own. What it asks for is pulse — a dense group of notes and a sparse one landing in exactly the same tempo, with nothing in the writing to hide a rush or a drag.
src Arban, Complete Conservatory Method — 14 Characteristic Studies
Cut in February 1955 with the classic quintet — Harold Land, Richie Powell, George Morrow and Max Roach — "Sandu" is a medium-tempo blues built on exactly the contrast today's technical target is chasing: Brown moves between dense bebop runs and long, held notes without the tempo ever flexing to accommodate either one. Listen to how a phrase can get busy and settle back down without the underlying pulse ever seeming to notice the difference — that steadiness under changing note density is the whole of what today's warmup and technical target are built to train.
In 2022 the Carpet air-shower array at Baksan recorded a ~300 TeV photon from GRB 221009A ("the BOAT"), roughly 2 billion light-years away. At that energy a photon should convert away against the cosmic microwave and extragalactic background light long before covering that distance - standard propagation models give it essentially no chance of arriving intact. Galanti and Roncadelli show the arrival is incompatible with axion-like-particle (ALP) photon-oscillation alone, but is accounted for by combining ALP oscillation with a small Lorentz-invariance violation (LIV) in the photon dispersion relation, which lets the photon travel a "fast lane" through the background that a strictly Lorentz-invariant photon cannot. Fitting the combined mechanism to the Carpet detection constrains the effective LIV energy scale to below roughly 1021 GeV in the linear-dispersion case and 1013 GeV in the quadratic case at 95% confidence - and the same model predicts the 300 TeV photon should arrive about an hour after the burst's lower-energy LHAASO photons, which is what was observed.
src Galanti, Roncadelli; Physical Review Letters (2026), arXiv:2504.01830, doi:10.1103/zjh2-mc47
Yang, Wang and thirteen coauthors report a dual electro-optic sub-cycle timing detector (DEST) built on thin-film lithium niobate that resolves timing jitter as small as 11 yoctoseconds at 1 MHz - comparable to the time light takes to cross two protons - over an unambiguous range of 6.15 ps and better than 155 dB of dynamic range, on a chip measuring 18 x 2 x 1 mm. Yoctosecond-scale jitter sensitivity has been demonstrated before, in tightly synchronized mode-locked Ti:sapphire lasers occupying an optical table; the new part is reaching the same precision on an integrated chip, and the authors argue that arraying several units could push toward sub-10-rontosecond (10-27 s) sensitivity. The paper is one day old (submitted 2026-09-08, v1, no journal listed) and its stated applications - gravitational-wave detection, probing quantum vacuum fluctuations - are proposed future uses, not measurements made in this work, which is why it is marked incremental rather than new despite the record-setting number.
src Yang, Wang, Shen, Pan, Chen, Zheng, Wang, Fang, Zhang, Zhang, Yao, Chen, Wu, Yang, Xin; arXiv:2609.08192 (2026-09-08)
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Piano gets today's block alone: it carries the longest gap of the three, and alto went yesterday, so the two chops-dependent instruments don't land back to back either way. It's modes & scales family's second lap, and rather than repeat lap one's altered scale — a dominant-tension sound built to resolve into a target chord — today moves to the opposite kind of scale: dorian, a plain diatonic minor mode with no altered tones, sitting over one static m7 chord with nowhere it needs to go. Key is B♭ minor, a fourth away from the one minor key this rotation has already used and, at five flats, one that does not read easily.
src twelve-keys/src/exercises/dorian/exercise.py
The tune the exercise itself names as dorian's home turf: sixteen bars of D dorian answered by eight of E♭ dorian and back, with Bill Evans and the rhythm section never once implying a chord change under the melody. Listen to how Davis and Coltrane's solos build whole phrases with nothing to resolve into — the same demand today's musical target is asking of an 8-bar improvisation over one static chord.
CKM unitarity - the requirement that |V_ud|2 + |V_us|2 + |V_ub|2 = 1 - is one of the Standard Model's cleanest falsifiable predictions, and current kaon- and tau-based determinations of |V_us| sit in mild but persistent tension with it, a puzzle known as the Cabibbo angle anomaly. Hyperon semileptonic decays offer an independent handle on the same matrix element, but every prior measurement lacked enough kinematic information to isolate the individual form factors, leaving the channel effectively unusable for a precision extraction. BESIII gets around this by using the polarization and quantum entanglement of Lambda-Lambdabar pairs produced at the J/psi resonance: from 10.087 billion J/psi events they isolate 1854 +/- 49 double-tagged Lambda -> p e- nu-bar-e decays, and the correlations between the two hyperons' spins supply the missing kinematic constraints, yielding the first measured weak-electricity coupling and absolute branching fraction for this decay alongside the axial-vector and weak-magnetism couplings. Combined with lattice QCD input, the result is |V_us|_LQCD = 0.2339 +/- 0.0041 - consistent with CKM unitarity at the 1.4 sigma level, but about two standard deviations above the older Cabibbo-era kaon-based value, so it does not resolve the anomaly either way.
src BESIII Collaboration; Nature (2026-09-02), doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10818-8
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LaTeX News 43 (June 2026) said of the kernel's new template-based heading
commands: "Over the summer we intend to add emulations for the titlesec
package interfaces ... so stay tuned." Summer is over; the answer, read
straight out of the experimental latex-lab bundle's own source, is not yet.
latex-lab-sec-template.dtx, the file implementing the new heading commands,
carries a subsection titled "Support for the titlesec package interfaces" —
and the line directly under that heading is the literal word TODO. Below it
are the intended call signatures for \titleformat and \titlespacing,
copied from titlesec's own syntax, with no macro definition anywhere in the
3,613-line file that implements either one. Its companion file,
latex-lab-sec.dtx, mentions titlesec exactly once, to warn that the new
code "will probably break with ... titlesec." No LaTeX News issue has shipped
since 43; the next is due 2026-11-01, per the project's own six-month
cadence, so this is the freshest answer available, not a stale one.
src latex-lab-sec-template.dtx, v0.9l (2026-08-08), latex3/latex2e develop branch
Set one bar of a lead sheet line — "A-ma-zing grace, how sweet the sound" —
with the chord that falls on each syllable sitting directly above it, using a
two-row table rather than hand-placed boxes: chords in the top row, one
syllable per cell in the bottom row, chord cells left blank wherever the
harmony hasn't changed. Something like C on "A-", F on "-zing", C again on
"grace,". In LaTeX, build it as a tabular with two rows and no visible
rules; in Typst, the same shape as a grid with two rows and one column per
syllable. Both engines then guarantee the alignment as a side effect of the
column model — nothing is nudged into place by hand.
src Overleaf LaTeX table documentation; Typst grid reference
On September 4, following the hearing covered here last week, Judge Talwani granted a preliminary injunction in California v. USPS, superseding the 14-day temporary restraining order before it expired. The new order again bars USPS from enforcing the mandatory ballot-envelope and return-envelope design standards, the portal-registration and voter-data-upload requirements, and USPS's claimed authority to refuse noncompliant ballots, for elections on or before November 3, 2026 — the same relief as the TRO, on a standard requiring likelihood of success rather than only a threat of immediate harm. Talwani found the states likely to succeed on claims that USPS lacked statutory authority to issue the rule and that its mandates on states and mail carriers are independently unconstitutional, and again wrote that the record contains no evidence of the mail-voting fraud the rule was written to address. The government's first emergency application at the Supreme Court (No. 26A297), filed September 3 against the about-to-expire TRO, was withdrawn as moot once the preliminary injunction issued; the government filed a second application (No. 26A305) on September 6 asking the Court to stay the new injunction so USPS can enforce the rule while the case proceeds. Justice Jackson, who handles emergency applications arising from the First Circuit, set a deadline of 4:00pm EDT September 9 for the states to respond.
src D. Mass. (No. 1:26-cv-13917); Supreme Court No. 26A305 (No. 26A297 withdrawn as moot)
On August 31 the Supreme Court stayed, 5-4, the D.D.C. district court's March 31 preliminary injunction in National Trust for Historic Preservation v. National Park Service, which had let below-ground work on the new East Wing military installation continue but barred any above-ground construction of the new ballroom except as "strictly necessary" to protect the White House, the President, and his staff. The stay runs pending the government's petition for certiorari, if timely sought, and lapses automatically if certiorari is denied. The per curiam majority — Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett — held the government is likely to prevail on the theory that the Trust's plaintiff, preservationist Elizabeth Hoagland, lacked Article III standing: her stated injury, distress at a structure she found aesthetically incompatible with the White House, was "disagreement with the activities of others," not a concrete harm, in the majority's view. The Court also found irreparable harm favored the government, citing intelligence and military declarations that delaying the project's integrated design threatened security operations. Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, dissented, arguing Hoagland's documented preservation expertise and regular access to the White House grounds supported standing on the same footing courts recognize for plaintiffs with aesthetic interests in particular wildlife or landscapes, and that Congress had barred construction on the grounds without express statutory authority the government does not have.
src Supreme Court of the United States (No. 26A203)
The Senate passed its version of H.R. 6500 90-6 on August 8; the House concurred in the Senate amendment 370-48 on September 1; the President signed it September
src 119th Congress, H.R. 6500, Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2027 (Public Law, signed 2026-09-02)
BLS's Employment Situation report for August, released September 4, put nonfarm payroll growth at +162,000, above the prior 12-month average of +31,000, with the unemployment rate unchanged at 4.1% and labor-force participation up slightly to 61.6% — still 0.5 points below January. Average hourly earnings rose 0.3% on the month and 3.1% over the year, to $37.75. June and July payrolls were revised up a combined 55,000: June from +20,000 to +31,000, and July from -23,000 to +21,000.
src Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Employment Situation — August 2026
Alto takes today's slot — three days since its last session is the longest gap of the three instruments right now, and trumpet went yesterday, so the two chops-dependent instruments don't land back to back. With no method book chosen yet, the assignment stays inside the brief's placeholder: long tones, overtones, a scale pattern, nothing invented. Today's fundamental is low F♯, continuing the upward semitone climb the survey has held since it passed E♭, and both the warmup shape and the musical-target pattern open their second circuit in the same order the first one used — a held, level tone after last time's swell, and a wider skip than any tried before.
Cut in 1969 with Herbie Hancock on electric piano under Don Sebesky's arrangement, Desmond's reading of the Simon & Garfunkel tune sits at one hushed dynamic for nearly the whole take — long notes that neither swell into the next phrase nor thin out at the end of a breath, the exact quality today's held-tone warmup is chasing. The tune's own melody keeps stepping up by a wide skip and settling there rather than resolving stepwise, which is most of what a phrase built from broken fifths is asking the ear to do.
Kagome superconductors' pairing symmetry has stayed unsettled for years because the standard probe of gap structure - electrodynamic response - needs more material than the field's best flakes provide, and different groups measuring different flakes of CsV3Sb5 have reported everything from fully gapped to anisotropic to nodal behavior. This group instead couples an exfoliated CsV3Sb5 flake (Tc = 4.5 K) into a lambda/4 superconducting microwave resonator near 4.9 GHz, contactlessly, and engineers the device geometry to suppress the two-level-system losses that normally swamp a bare chip's intrinsic signal. Measured from the millikelvin regime up past 1 K, the extracted superfluid density falls off linearly with temperature at low T - the signature of a nodal gap - rather than the exponential falloff a fully gapped superconductor would show.
src Lee, Jin, Chandra, Goodge, Lesne, Confalone, Nielsch, Büchner, Tafuri, Massarotti, Haider, Poccia, Felser, Chowdhury, Vool; arXiv:2609.00964 (2026-09)
Classical position claims - a GPS fix, a network address - are trivially spoofable, because nothing stops a prover from lying about where a signal originated. Quantum position verification closes that gap using relativity: a prover must correctly combine information arriving simultaneously from verifiers on opposite sides, and no-cloning plus the speed-of-light limit makes forging a response from the wrong location provably (not just practically) impossible. Every prior demonstration needed true single-photon sources, which cap the achievable rate and distance. This group instead uses phase-randomized weak coherent states - ordinary attenuated laser pulses - and gets two verifiers 2 km apart to jointly confirm a prover's position to better than 75 meters, within the same information-theoretic security framework, at a rate single-photon sources can't sustain.
src Fan-Yuan, Shan, Zhang, Wang, Fan, Xie, He, Wang, Yin, Chen, Fu, Guo, Han (USTC); Nature Physics (2026-09-03), arXiv:2602.01787 (2026-02)
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Trumpet takes today's slot, continuing the alto → piano → trumpet three-day cycle this rotation has held since mid-August. Four sessions into the 14 Characteristic Studies, No. 1 asked for endurance, No. 2 for dynamic contrast, No. 3 for legato across a register break and No. 4 for switching cleanly between slur and tongue; No. 5 asks for something none of the first four tested directly — holding a single soft dynamic level evenly through a long slurred phrase without letting it swell, the discipline every one of the earlier demands quietly assumed rather than checked.
src Arban, Complete Conservatory Method — 14 Characteristic Studies
This is the 1954 quartet recording — Baker with Russ Freeman, Carson Smith and Bob Neel — that made the tune Baker's signature, and the whole performance sits at one hushed dynamic level for nearly three minutes without ever pushing to make a phrase land. The trumpet passage especially never swells into its own long notes, which is exactly the habit today's technical target is trying to eliminate, at a tempo and register where a wavering level has nowhere to hide.
CPT and Lorentz invariance are assumed by the Standard Model's underlying quantum field theory rather than derived within it, which is why testing them independently in as many particle systems as possible matters: a violation could in principle couple differently to different quark flavors. LHCb searched for one using interference between B_s0-B_s^0bar mixing and direct decay in B_s0 -> D_s^- pi^+, parameterized by a complex coefficient z that a symmetry violation would push away from zero. Using 6 fb-1 of 13 TeV proton-proton collisions from 2015-2018, they measure Re(z) = 0.018 +/- 0.016 (stat) +/- 0.003 (syst) and Im(z) = 0.003 +/- 0.004 (stat) +/- 0.002 (syst) - both consistent with zero - translating to sensitivity on the relevant Standard-Model-Extension coefficient at the O(10-14) GeV level, which the collaboration reports as the most precise constraint on CPT violation in the B_s system specifically.
src LHCb Collaboration; arXiv:2609.02475 (2026-09-02)
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Piano gets today's block alone: it carries the longest gap of the three, and alto went yesterday, so the two chops-dependent instruments don't land back to back either way. It's blues family's second lap, and rather than repeat a voicing or a rhythmic pattern this family has already drilled, today's exercise changes the demand entirely — a standard 12-bar major blues with bars 5-8 replaced by a chain of descending chromatic ii-Vs, each one implying a resolution that never arrives until the form lands back home at bar 9. This is the harmonic engine under Charlie Parker's densest bebop blues heads, and it rewards exactly the longer single block piano is due today rather than a quick pass. Key is A major, the most-avoided key on the rotation's ledger so far and the first time this ii-V vocabulary gets played outside a flat spelling.
src twelve-keys/src/exercises/bird_blues/exercise.py
This is the tune the exercise is named for — the 1951 quintet side that put the descending chromatic ii-V chain into the standard repertoire. Listen to how the rhythm section tracks the chain in bars 5-8 without ever settling, then lands hard on the ii-V-I at bar 9; that release is the payoff the exercise is building hands toward, and it's audible here in a way no amount of slow practice reveals on its own.
Jones and Formaggio had proposed (arXiv:2412.11765) that a Bose-Einstein condensate of roughly a million electron-capture ⁸³Rb atoms could go superradiant on its own beta/EC decay, collectively shortening the isotope's 86.2-day half-life to about a minute. Two companion papers from Lu, Lin and Ketterle at MIT now rule that out on two independent grounds. First, emitting a ~MeV neutrino kicks the parent atom at a recoil speed equivalent to Mach 10 - roughly a million times the recoil from an optical photon - which throws the atom out of the coherent mode before any collective phase can build. Second, because neutrinos are fermions, the decay proceeds by destructive interference between the amplitudes for different atoms emitting (equivalently, Pauli blockade of the shared final state): solving the fermionic Dicke problem exactly, they show the total emission rate scales as N rather than the N2 superradiance needs, and that this bound - the jump-rate operator's largest eigenvalue is N times the single-atom rate
src Lu, Lin, Ketterle; Phys. Rev. Lett. (2026-09-02), arXiv:2510.21705 - and companion Lin, Lu, Ketterle, Phys. Rev. Lett. (2026-09-02), arXiv:2510.21692, doi:10.1103/rnx6-wqpf
Whether magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene's superconductivity comes from phonons or from the electrons' own correlations has been open since the material's 2018 discovery, because the two mechanisms are hard to pull apart in the same sample. The Manchester-led group built two twisted bilayers, each tuned near the magic angle of about 1.1 degrees, separated by less than a nanometer yet electronically decoupled from each other, and used the second layer as a tunable screening gate: raising its carrier density screens Coulomb interactions in the first layer from a distance as short as 0.3 nm. Doing so suppresses both the superconductivity and the correlated- insulator state in the first layer completely, dropping the critical temperature by more than an order of magnitude. Conventional phonon-mediated pairing is not expected to weaken when Coulomb interactions are screened away - if anything it should hold up or strengthen slightly - so the observed collapse points at pairing driven by the electrons' own collective interactions instead.
src Barrier, Peng, Xu, De Beule, Fal'ko, Watanabe, Taniguchi, Geim, Adam, Berdyugin; Phys. Rev. X (2026-09-04), arXiv:2412.01577
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Alto takes today's slot — three days since its last session is the longest gap of the three instruments right now, and trumpet went yesterday, so the two chops-dependent instruments don't land back to back. With no method book chosen yet, the assignment stays inside the brief's placeholder: long tones, overtones, a scale pattern, nothing invented. Today's fundamental is low F, continuing the upward climb the survey has held since it passed E♭, and both the warmup shape and the musical-target pattern open a second lap rather than reaching for novelty for its own sake — messa di voce is back after four sessions cycling through the other three breath shapes, and the whole-tone scale gets the broken treatment the major-scale patterns already had.
Cut with the Ellington orchestra in October 1940, "Warm Valley" gives Hodges one long unaccompanied-feeling melodic arc built almost entirely out of swells placed inside sustained notes — the same messa di voce shape today's warmup is drilling, except played as the entire point of the performance rather than as an exercise. Listen for how the crescendo and the taper both stay centered in pitch, with neither end of the swell announcing itself as effort.
On Quantinuum's 98-qubit trapped-ion processor Helios, the team encoded two logical qubits in twenty physical qubits at code distance 6 (the 20,2,6 "C4-Helix" code) and ran repeated rounds of quantum error correction, measuring a logical error of 4.6(+6.2/-2.6)x10-5 per logical qubit per QEC cycle. They then benchmarked the full Clifford group on those two logical qubits under active correction (2.8(+1.0/-1.6)x10-4 error per two-qubit logical Clifford gate), and built a fault-tolerant "chain-map" interface joining a C4-Helix block to a separate distance-5 surface code to prepare a three-logical-qubit GHZ state spanning both codes, with a fidelity lower bound of 99.925(+0.068/-0.245)%. In every one of these tests the encoded, corrected result beat its corresponding unencoded physical baseline, with no postselection on favorable outcomes.
src Berthusen, Lavasani, Benhemou, Allman, Dreiling, Estey, Foltz, Jacobs, Mills, Park, Reed, Hayes, Metodi, Potter (Quantinuum); arXiv:2609.03194 (2026)
A University of Houston group demonstrates one-step superconductivity validation using a room-temperature, cryogen-free optically pumped atomic magnetometer to detect the magnetic field of a sample's own remnant supercurrent, with no electrical contacts, coils or integrated sensors on the sample itself. The transition is read directly off two signatures: the abrupt disappearance of the supercurrent's field above Tc, and reversal of the supercurrent's direction when the applied field is reversed. Tested on YBCO microcrystals and REBCO tape, the technique picks up picotesla fields from supercurrents induced by nothing stronger than Earth's ambient field, in a millimeter-scale REBCO disk and in sub-100-micrometer YBCO crystals sized to fit inside a diamond-anvil cell; a ferrite flux guide extends sensing out to centimeter distances.
src Zeng, Qin, Fan, Ahmed, Fang, Long, Shan, Chen, Xu, Deng, Chu, Bao (University of Houston); arXiv:2609.02995 (2026)
Axion haloscopes need a high-Q cavity inside a strong magnet, and standard superconductors suffer severe vortex dissipation at multi-tesla fields while copper is capped around Q ~ 105 by the anomalous skin effect. The CAPP/IBS group built a pole-to-pole three-dimensional cavity from strain-controlled, delaminated REBCO tape, stripping the lossy metallic substrate and using the remaining copper stabilizer as a conductive backing so that the seams between tape segments act as waveguides below cutoff rather than as leakage paths. A 5.4 GHz cavity built to test the material alone reached an unloaded Q0 of 1.4x107 in an 8 T field, two orders of magnitude above the copper baseline. A second, tunable 2.3 GHz version, integrated into the live Pilot Axion Cavity Experiment (CAPP-PACE), reached a 180 mK noise temperature and a 5-fold Q gain over copper, for a combined ~8.4-fold acceleration of the experiment's scan rate.
src Ahn, Kim, Park, Lee, Kwon, Chung, Byun, Uchaikin, van Loo, Nakamura, Youm, Youn, Semertzidis (CAPP/IBS); arXiv:2609.03879 (2026)
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Trumpet takes today's slot — three days since its last session, the longest gap of the three right now, continuing the alto → piano → trumpet three-day cycle this rotation has held since mid-August. Three sessions into the 14 Characteristic Studies, No. 1 asked for endurance, No. 2 for dynamic contrast and No. 3 for legato across a register break; No. 4 moves the demand again, to switching cleanly between slurred and tongued articulation inside a single phrase — the point where a legato group bleeds into the next attack instead of the tongue meeting it right where the slur mark ends.
src Arban, Complete Conservatory Method — 14 Characteristic Studies
Cut in 1961 at a tempo fast enough that nothing can hide, Hubbard's solo here runs long slurred bebop lines straight into single sharply-tongued notes and back again, over and over, without the seam ever softening — exactly the transition today's technical target is chasing, just at a speed where getting it wrong would be impossible to disguise.
Using a Stern-Gerlach-type "Quantum Galileo Interferometer" built into an atom chip, the team split a cloud of 87Rb atoms cooled to 3.3 nK into a coherent superposition of two wavepackets: one held stationary by the chip's magnetic-field gradient, the other released into genuine free fall for up to 2T = 2 ms, reaching a 7.5 micrometre separation before the two were recombined. The relative phase that accumulated between them - about 80 radians across 13 interference fringes - matched the phase predicted by inserting the equivalence principle directly into the Schrodinger equation, Delta-phi = -(m g2 / 3 hbar) T3, with residuals of roughly 2.5% (about 2 radians on 80) between the measured and simulated curves.
src Dobkowski, Trok, Skakunenko, Japha, Groswasser, Efremov, Marletto, Fuentes, Penrose, Vedral, Schleich, Folman; Science Advances (2026-09-02), arXiv:2502.14535
Searching an extended nuclear-recoil energy window up to roughly 270 keV - well above the range a standard WIMP search covers - LUX-ZEPLIN's latest analysis of its full exposure found a single event reconstructed at 248 +/- 23 (stat) +/- 23 (sys) keV, in a region where the collaboration's own background model predicts very little. A profile-likelihood test against the background-only hypothesis rejects that hypothesis at 2.6 sigma global significance once the look-elsewhere effect across the several models tested is included (3.4 sigma local, for the best-fitting model) - short of any discovery threshold.
src LZ Collaboration, arXiv:2609.02823 (2026)
A dual-species (85Rb/87Rb) cold-atom interferometer aboard the China Space Station compared the free-fall acceleration of the two isotopes over 280 days in continuous microgravity, finding them equal to within roughly 5 parts in 108 (Eotvos parameter consistent with zero at that level) - about three orders of magnitude tighter than any previous atom-interferometric test of the weak equivalence principle done in microgravity (drop towers, aircraft, sounding rockets).
src Zhan et al. (Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics); Science Advances (2026-09), arXiv:2603.22981
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Using a 12 GeV photon beam on a proton target in Hall D at Jefferson Lab, the GlueX Collaboration measured the photoproduction cross section for gamma p -> phi(1020) pi+ pi- p and looked at the phi pi+ pi- invariant-mass spectrum for the established phi(2170) resonance (also called Y(2175)). The spectrum does not match the PDG-averaged phi(2170) parameters. Instead it shows a structure at m = 2239.2 +/- 13.4 (stat) MeV, width Gamma = 139.8 +/- 24.0 MeV, with significance 4.8 sigma including systematic uncertainties (5.5 sigma statistics-only) - just under the conventional 5 sigma discovery bar once systematics are folded in - and a second, weaker structure at m = 1828 +/- 12 (stat) +/- 15 (sys) MeV, Gamma = 94 +/- 33 (stat) +/- 37 (sys) MeV, at 3.6 sigma (3.7 sigma statistics-only). Neither mass nor width for the first structure agrees with the quoted phi(2170), and the second sits in a region where no established phi-family state is quoted at all.
src GlueX Collaboration; Phys. Rev. Lett. (2026), arXiv:2512.04136
The Standard Model predicts a Higgs boson total width of 4.1 MeV, roughly 250 times narrower than CMS's diphoton mass resolution - a direct Breit-Wigner fit to the resonance shape cannot see it at all. CMS instead used the full Run 2 dataset (138 fb-1 at 13 TeV) and fit for the interference between resonant gg -> H -> gamma gamma production and the non-resonant gg -> gamma gamma continuum, which distorts the diphoton mass spectrum in a way that depends on the width even when the resonance itself cannot be resolved. The result is Gamma_H < 92 MeV at 95% confidence (expected limit 138 MeV) - the most stringent width bound yet from an on-shell Higgs measurement, though still about four times looser than CMS's existing 22 MeV bound from comparing off-shell to on-shell ZZ -> 4l production.
src CMS Collaboration; arXiv:2609.01385 (2026)
Piano gets today's block alone: it carries the longest gap of the three, and alto went yesterday, so the two chops-dependent instruments don't land back to back either way. The exercise is new territory inside a family piano has already visited once — stride, eight days ago, asked for a bouncing LH alternating bass notes and chords across two octaves. Freddie Green is stride's rhythmic opposite: four flat, identical, unaccented quarter-note attacks per bar in both hands together, so still and so consistent that the chord stops sounding like harmony and starts sounding like a click track. Key is G♭ major, the most distant point on the fourths cycle from the B major this family used last time, and the most awkward key on the exercise's own list.
The exercise being practised today is a piano translation of a guitar part that almost nobody ever actually heard clearly — on the Basie band records that made Green's name, the guitar sits so far back in the rhythm section that it registers as pulse rather than as an instrument. This 1975 quintet session, cut with Herb Ellis, Ray Brown and Jake Hanna rather than the full orchestra, is one of the rare recordings where Green is up front in the mix instead of buried under a big band, so the four flat quarter-note stabs today's technical target is asking for are actually there to hear, one at a time, against Ellis's busier lines.
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Alto takes today's slot — three days since its last session is the longest gap of the three instruments right now, and trumpet went yesterday, so the two chops-dependent instruments don't land back to back. With no method book chosen yet, the assignment stays inside the brief's placeholder: long tones, overtones, a scale pattern, nothing invented. Today's fundamental is low E, the first note this survey has visited past E♭ — every semitone from B♭ up to E♭ has now had its own session, so today opens new range instead of closing another gap.
Ibert wrote this concertino in 1935 for Sigurd Raschèr — the same overtone pioneer named in the 08-26 listening item — after Raschèr spent years asking him for one, and the solo part is built to sit in the altissimo range Raschèr had opened up entirely through overtone technique rather than alternate fingerings. Harle's 1991 recording with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields is the version to hear for exactly that: a saxophone reaching well above the horn's written range with no strain audible in the tone, which is the same claim today's technical target is testing at a much smaller scale, one semitone at a time.
XENONnT - a xenon time-projection chamber built to search for WIMP dark matter - reports the first measurement of low-energy solar neutrinos through elastic neutrino-electron scattering in a dark-matter experiment, reaching a 17 keV threshold, the lowest yet used for any neutrino detection. Using 2.46 tonne-years of exposure over the first two science runs and electron-recoil energies from 1-140 keV, the collaboration rejects the background-only hypothesis at 5.0 sigma and extracts a pp-neutrino flux of (10.2 +/- 2.0) x 1010 cm-2 s-1 - higher than, but statistically consistent with (1.9 sigma), Borexino's dedicated measurement.
src XENONnT Collaboration; arXiv:2608.29450 (2026)
Feynman's 1948 path-integral formulation rests on two postulates: that a transition amplitude is a coherent sum over every possible path, and that every path contributes with equal magnitude while its phase is fixed by the classical action along that path. Both are standard machinery in every QFT course and neither had been checked directly, because tracking a particle's path without disturbing it is exactly what quantum mechanics forbids. This group, using single photons sent through a fixed optical network of mirrors, lenses and nonlinear crystals, instead reconstructed the probability amplitude for each of roughly 1.42 million distinct paths through the network and compared the reconstructed amplitudes' magnitudes and phases against the two postulates directly. The paper (and the press coverage available to this run - the publisher blocked direct access to the full text) reports agreement with both, without quoting a combined statistical figure; this fragment cannot give a tighter number than that, and it should be read as a caveat rather than filled in.
src Wen et al.; Science Advances (2026)
Using the full 401 kiloton-year exposure of Super-Kamiokande's pure-water phase, the collaboration searched for p -> e+ + X and p -> mu+ + X, where X is an invisible, massless, neutral particle - the "invisible" proton-decay channel relevant to models where the missing partner is an axion-like particle, a dark photon, or light dark matter rather than an ordinary meson. No excess above the atmospheric-neutrino background was found. The new 90% C.L. lower limits are tau/B > 1.72 x 1033 years (e+ channel) and 0.61 x 1033 years (mu+ channel), improving on Super-Kamiokande's own previous limits by factors of about 2 and 1.5 respectively.
src Super-Kamiokande Collaboration; arXiv:2608.30361 (2026)
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LaTeX News 43, the release notes for the 2026-06-01 kernel, lists three
places "fake math" — using math mode purely for its built-in box-positioning
machinery — has been removed: \textsuperscript and \textsubscript,
\parbox and \minipage, and "around tabular structures." The reason is
the tagging project: math mode sitting inside what should be ordinary text
confuses the code that builds a PDF's accessibility tree, and it complicates
right-to-left text. TeX Live 2026's own release coverage names the casualty
directly: "With new changes to tabular structures in the LaTeX kernel, the
tabu and tabls packages are no longer supported in TL2026 — they will cause
compile errors now" — packages that patched tabular's column-width and
vertical-alignment limits by reaching into exactly the internals that just
moved. The same kernel release lands the first cut of the reciprocal change:
heading commands "re-implemented ... using the template mechanism," so a
legacy \section can be tagged without titlesec's patches — though
titlesec's own interface is not emulated yet: "Over the summer we intend to
add emulations for the titlesec package interfaces ... so stay tuned."
src LaTeX News, Issue 43 (June 2026)
Write the same two-branch conditional twice, once in TeX and once in Elisp, with a broken command sitting in the branch that never gets taken, and watch it stay silent until it does.
src The Emacs Lisp Reference Manual, "Defining Macros"
In a per curiam order on the emergency docket, the Supreme Court stayed the injunction the District of Massachusetts had entered in the states' suit over Executive Order 14399 (91 Fed. Reg. 17125), pending the Government's appeal to the First Circuit and any subsequent petition for certiorari. The district court's final judgment had barred the Secretary of Homeland Security from compiling "State Citizenship Lists" (§2(a)), the Attorney General from prioritizing prosecution of officials over the order (§2(b)), and the Postal Service from beginning a ballot-rule rulemaking (§3(b)), as to the 23 states and D.C. that sued. The Court held the Government is likely to win on jurisdiction: each provision is an internal executive directive that, by its own terms, may be implemented only "to the extent feasible and consistent with applicable law," so any injury to the states rests on a chain of contingencies the Court called too speculative to support standing or ripeness — addressing §§2(a), 2(b), and 3(b) separately rather than treating the order as one unconstitutional package. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented, in separate opinions.
src Supreme Court of the United States (No. 26A124; No. 26A139 denied as moot)
On August 21 USPS completed rulemaking on "Ballot Mail for Federal Elections" and sent it to the Federal Register for publication; the Government had argued the rule fell outside the existing injunctions because it "applies only to future elections" after November 3. Twenty-three states, D.C., and Pennsylvania's governor sued the day the rule was scheduled to publish, in California v. United States Postal Service (No. 1:26-cv-13917, D. Mass.) — before Judge Indira Talwani, who also presides over League of Women Voters of Massachusetts v. Trump (No. 1:26-cv-11549), the suit whose nationwide injunction the new rule was meant to route around. On August 27 Talwani granted a 14-day temporary restraining order blocking the rule's mandatory ballot-envelope design standards, its requirement that states register in a USPS electronic portal and upload voter data, and USPS's claimed authority to refuse to mail noncompliant ballots — for elections on or before November 3,
src D. Mass. (No. 1:26-cv-13917)
A unanimous three-judge panel (Nelson writing, Bade joining, Lee concurring) affirmed in part the District of Nevada's dissolution of KalshiEX's preliminary injunction against the Nevada Gaming Control Board's cease-and-desist order, which had told Kalshi to stop offering its sports-event contracts in the state. Kalshi's theory was that its contracts are federally regulated "swaps," traded on a CFTC-designated contract market, and that the Commodity Exchange Act's express preemption of state regulation of swaps "traded or executed" on a DCM therefore displaces Nevada's gaming law. The panel disagreed: under the CEA's own definition (7 U.S.C. §1a(47)(A)(ii)), a swap must turn on a "financial, economic, or commercial consequence," and the outcome of a sports contest is none of those — so Kalshi's sports contracts are not swaps at all, and neither express, conflict nor field preemption reaches them. The panel also rejected Kalshi's argument that a CFTC "Special Rule" provision (7 U.S.C. §7a-2(c)(5)(C)) gives the agency exclusive authority to decide whether gaming-linked contracts may be listed, noting that an existing CFTC regulation, 17 C.F.R. §40.11(a), already categorically bars them.
src Ninth Circuit (No. 25-7516)
Judge Jeannette Vargas ruled, in Catholic Legal Immigration Network (CLINIC) v. Rubio (No. 1:26-cv-00858, S.D.N.Y.), that the State Department's policy suspending immigrant-visa issuance to nationals of 75 countries exceeded the Secretary of State's statutory authority, and vacated it. The policy, in effect since January, directed consular officers to refuse immigrant visas to otherwise-eligible applicants from the listed countries without individual review. Vargas held that this predetermination of outcomes by nationality conflicts with the Immigration and Nationality Act's bar on nationality-based discrimination in immigrant-visa issuance and with consular officers' statutory discretion, and that the Administrative Procedure Act does not let an agency adopt a categorical rule where Congress required case-by-case adjudication.
src S.D.N.Y. (No. 1:26-cv-00858)
Trumpet takes today's slot — three days since its last session, the longest gap of the three instruments right now, continuing the alto → piano → trumpet three-day cycle this rotation has held since mid-August. Two sessions into the 14 Characteristic Studies, No. 1 asked for endurance and No. 2 for dynamic contrast; No. 3 asks for something neither of those touched — carrying a slurred phrase smoothly across a register break, so the connection is made with air and voicing rather than papered over with a soft tongue.
src Arban, Complete Conservatory Method — 14 Characteristic Studies
Recorded in January 1955, this is Brown at his most exposed — a ballad with strings and nowhere to hide a seam. Listen for how a register shift in the middle of a phrase never announces itself: the tone doesn't thin, brighten or catch going across the break, which is exactly the join today's technical target is asking a single slurred passage to make.
A fiber-based platform encoding entanglement in time bins rather than polarization or spatial mode measured a CHSH violation of S = 2.583 +/- 0.002, exceeding the local-realist bound by more than 265 standard deviations, while simultaneously closing the locality, freedom-of-choice and postselection loopholes in the same run. The photon-source-to-analyzer separation was only 49.0 +/- 0.7 m - which the authors report as substantially shorter than earlier photonic Bell tests that addressed a comparable combination of spacetime constraints, because time-bin measurement normally requires an interferometer whose need to postselect on detection outcomes has kept genuinely loophole-free time-bin tests rare even though the encoding is the one already used to distribute entanglement over installed fiber.
src Vijayadharan, Bolaños, Pompermaier, Bertapelle, Santagiustina, Agnesi, Vallone, Villoresi; arXiv:2608.28190 (2026)
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Piano gets today's block alone: it carries the longest gap of the three and is the one instrument that rewards sitting with a single idea rather than the short-and-frequent sessions trumpet and alto want, and alto had a session yesterday so the two chops-dependent instruments shouldn't both go today. The block is a genuine change of mode rather than another key in a familiar shape — every piano session so far has drilled major-key ii–V's; today is the first time this rotation asks for the minor version, where the ii becomes half-diminished and both shell voices land a half step lower at the resolution. Key is E♭ minor, the one key context nothing prior has touched and a six-flat read that won't play itself.
"Autumn Leaves" is the standard the exercise's own notes name first as a vehicle for the minor ii–V–i shape, and this 1959 trio recording is the one every later version answers to: Evans, Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian treating the changes as a conversation rather than a chart, with LaFaro answering the LH voice leading almost phrase for phrase. Listen for how little the half-diminished ii ever sounds like a "sad" chord in context — it just tilts the resolution, exactly as today's technical target is isolating in slow motion.
Chung, Son, Lee et al. (Son et al. 2025) reported that Type Ia supernova brightness correlates with host-galaxy/progenitor age at a level implying a 9-sigma tension with LambdaCDM once corrected for - evidence, they argued, for rapidly evolving dark energy or even decelerating expansion. Wiseman et al., in the MNRAS-published version of their response, reanalyze the same class of sample with standard host-galaxy stellar-mass and bias corrections applied: the Hubble-residual-versus-host-age relationship drops to under 1 sigma, and the age-luminosity slope falls from the claimed 0.03 mag/Gyr to -0.007 (+0.012/-0.014) mag/Gyr - statistically consistent with zero, roughly a quarter of the original claim. Chung et al.'s reply, published in the same journal two days later, argues Wiseman et al.'s sample spans too wide a redshift range (0.04 < z < 0.42, over which mean host age evolves by about 3 Gyr), which artificially flattens the measured slope, and that Wiseman et al.'s dust-extinction model requires a host-galaxy-mass dependence opposite to what large galaxy samples actually show. Combining their corrected effects, Chung et al. maintain that their original, non-accelerating conclusion stands.
src Wiseman, Popovic, Sullivan, Riess, Scolnic, Chen, Davis, Galbany, Hook, Jha, Kelsey, Murakami, Rigault, Rose, Schmidt, Smith, Vincenzi; MNRAS 549(3):stag797 (2026); arXiv:2601.13785. Reply: Chung, Son, Park, Yoon, Cho, Lim, Lee; MNRAS stag1513 (2026); arXiv:2605.21586
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Tomorrow, Monday 2026-08-31, is a good day for it: sunny, ~89°F/71°F, calm wind, 0% chance of rain, sunrise 7:03am and sunset 8:01pm (NWS Greenville-Spartanburg; forecast) — no storm risk and over 12 hours of daylight, so timing is about your own morning, not the weather. Surface water is in the 70s-80s°F, but Jocassee is a deep, stratified reservoir, so it's noticeably colder a few feet down; sun is strong at elevation (UV 8-10 typical), so sunscreen and a hat matter more than the air temperature suggests.
Alto takes today's slot — three days since its last session is the longest gap of the three instruments right now, and trumpet went yesterday, so the two chops-dependent instruments don't both land back to back. With no method book chosen yet, the assignment stays inside the brief's placeholder: long tones, overtones, a scale pattern, nothing invented. Today's fundamental is low C♯, the one note left unvisited inside the B♭-to-E♭ span this survey has worked through since 08-11 — closing that gap before pushing the range any further.
"Confirmation" is Parker's own composition and one of the clearest cases of a bebop head built almost entirely from broken triads at speed — the same shape today's musical target is asking a single octave to outline slowly. This is the July 1953 studio quartet take, with Al Haig, Percy Heath and Max Roach, recorded a few years after the tune had already circulated on the bandstand. Listen for how the triad shapes keep their outline even at tempo, landing as harmony rather than as a run of notes — the thing the stop-tempo version of the exercise is rehearsing toward.
Photons confined to a dye-filled microcavity thermalize by radiative contact with the dye molecules rather than by colliding with each other, so the resulting two-dimensional photon gas condenses with negligible interaction between particles - and had been predicted for over a decade to belong to a distinct "ideal Bose gas" universality class, never confirmed experimentally because every previous BEC critical-exponent measurement used an interacting gas and landed in the XY (lambda-transition) class instead. This group measured the spatial correlations of such a photon gas as it approached condensation and extracted the critical exponent governing the divergence of the correlation length: nu = 0.52(3), the first experimental test of the ideal-Bose-gas scaling prediction, as distinct from the well-established interacting-gas value of nu ~ 0.6717.
src Kleebank, Vewinger, Camacho-Guardian, Romero-Rochín, Paredes, Weitz, Schmitt (Bonn/Heidelberg/UNAM); Science Advances (2026); arXiv:2511.14754
CMS measured the transverse-momentum spectra of K0S mesons and Lambda baryons in oxygen-oxygen collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 5.36 TeV (6.8 nb-1), against a proton-proton baseline at the same energy (1.1 pb-1). The K0S spectrum is modified relative to pp in line with inclusive charged hadrons, but the Lambda-to-K0S cross-section ratio is enhanced over the pp baseline in the intermediate-momentum range (2.3-5.2 GeV/c), with the excess reaching 5.0-6.3 standard deviations depending on the momentum bin - the first observation of this baryon-over-meson enhancement, a signature previously recorded only in heavy nucleus-nucleus systems such as Pb-Pb, in a light collision system.
src CMS Collaboration; arXiv:2608.18256 (2026)
Using a gate-defined antidot in bilayer graphene - an electrostatically isolated island whose coupling to the surrounding two-dimensional electron gas can be tuned by a separate gate - this group measured the charge of quasiparticles trapped around the antidot at three even-denominator fractional quantum Hall filling factors: nu = -5/2, -1/2 and 3/2. All three showed a localized charge of e/4, the minimal excitation predicted for the leading non-Abelian candidate ground states at these fillings, while the hole-conjugate state nu = 2/3 showed the expected e/3. Raising the coupling between the antidot-bound states and the extended edge states produced a crossover to roughly twice the minimal gate-voltage period, which the authors attribute to either quasiparticle bunching or a change of transport regime, without settling between the two.
src Di Luca, Hajigeorgiou, Ma, Waldherr, Watanabe, Taniguchi, Banerjee (EPFL); arXiv:2608.27444 (2026)
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Trumpet takes today's slot — three days since its last session, the longest gap of the three instruments right now, continuing the alto → piano → trumpet three-day cycle this rotation has held since early August. Five sessions of drills (tone, thirds, time feel, wide leaps, trills) led into the 14 Characteristic Studies three days ago, which the brief treats as repertoire rather than exercise; today continues that thread with No. 2 instead of opening new ground. Where No. 1 asked for tone that stays full to the last note, No. 2 asks for something closer to musicianship: holding a phrase together through real dynamic contrast instead of just enduring it.
src Arban, Complete Conservatory Method — 14 Characteristic Studies
This is the historical benchmark for exactly today's technical target: control that reads as musicianship rather than as a display of stamina or range. The Victor recording opens with an extended unaccompanied cadenza over four sustained chords, and it's remembered as a trumpet "concerto" — jazz historian Dick Sudhalter's word for it — precisely because Berigan's "impeccable command of his instrument" never announces itself as difficulty. That's the same restraint today's Characteristic Study is asking a phrase full of dynamic contrast to have: control that reads as shape, not as a show of force.
Nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond make compact, chip-scale clocks, but their frequency depends on temperature through the same strong spin-lattice coupling that makes them good sensors, so thermal drift has been the limiting noise source. This group built a composite frequency reference from two transitions in the same NV center - the electronic zero-field splitting D, which is temperature-sensitive, and the ambient nuclear quadrupole splitting of the center's own 14N nucleus, which responds to temperature differently - and combined the two to cancel the first-order temperature dependence rather than stabilizing the temperature itself. Benchmarked against a rubidium vapor-cell standard over ten days, the composite clock reaches fractional instability below 5x10-9 at 200 seconds of averaging (4x better than the D transition alone) and below 1x10-8 at 2x105 seconds, roughly 2.3 days (200x better).
src Lourette, Jarmola, Chathanathil, Acosta, Birdwell, Blumler, Budker, Carrasco, Ivanov, Kolkowitz, Malinovsky; Phys. Rev. Applied (2026); arXiv:2601.00157
Solid-state spin qubits usually get protected from low-frequency environmental noise by dynamical decoupling: sequences of microwave pulses that periodically flip the spin. This group instead drove a silicon-vacancy spin in diamond continuously with a mechanical (phonon) field, putting it into a "dressed" basis defined by that driving rather than by the bare spin states, and performed optical initialization, control and readout entirely within that dressed basis. Because the dressed states are immune to the same low-frequency noise to first order, no separate decoupling sequence is needed - the drive that protects the qubit is the same drive used to control it, reaching Rabi frequencies up to 800 MHz, which the authors report as a record for this platform. The scheme extends the spin's coherence time by roughly a factor of three over the undriven case.
src Cornell, Xu, et al. (Loncar group, Harvard); Nature Physics (2026); arXiv:2508.13356
Photoemission orbital tomography reconstructs a molecular orbital's shape from the angle-resolved momentum distribution of photoelectrons it emits, but recovering a full 3D orbital this way needs photoelectron data across a range of photon energies, which in turn has needed a tunable synchrotron beamline. This group built a table-top source instead - a femtosecond extreme-UV pulse from high-harmonic generation, feeding an ultrafast momentum microscope - and paired it with a reconstruction algorithm redesigned to need far fewer energy points and less data than the synchrotron method. Applied to PTCDA molecules adsorbed on Ag(110), it recovered the full 3D shape of the molecule's highest occupied orbital at a spatial resolution finer than the distance between neighboring carbon atoms, matching what synchrotron-based 3D tomography has achieved.
src Bennecke, Dinh, Bange, Schmitt, Merboldt, Weinhagen, van Wingerden, Frassetto, Poletto, Reutzel, Steil, Luke, Mathias, Jansen; Nature Communications (2026); arXiv:2502.18269
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Piano gets today's block alone: it's the longest-untouched of the three and the one that rewards sitting with a single idea rather than the short-and-frequent sessions trumpet and alto want. The block is quartal voicings — stacked 4ths instead of the tertian harmony every prior piano session has used, so it's a genuinely different sound rather than another variation on a familiar one. Six families have now each had one turn (voicings, progressions, comping, blues, scales, line building), so today restarts the cycle at voicings, but with a different exercise than the upper-structure triads that opened it. Key is B♭m, the ii chord of A♭ major — a key context this rotation hasn't touched, and a five-flat minor tonic that won't read itself.
Tyner is the source of today's technical target — the exercise's own notes name him directly — and this is the recording where the vocabulary is most undiluted: an entire opening track built from exactly the stacked-4ths shapes in today's warmup, vamped and reharmonized against Elvin Jones's drums rather than resolved through changes. Listen for how little the harmony seems to be "going" anywhere, which is the same stillness today's musical target is asking two open hands to find.
Cavity-induced modification of superconductivity has been predicted for years, but what sets its size, and which microscopic channel carries it, was open. This group coupled few-layer NbSe2 to a terahertz split-ring resonator - a "dark" cavity that reshapes the local vacuum electromagnetic field with no photons driving it - and found the effect grows sharply toward the two-dimensional limit: in bilayer NbSe2, Tc rises 10%, from 3.02 K to 3.41 K, on a cavity resonant at 0.92 THz, roughly four times the shift seen in a ten-layer device at the same resonance. Measured across a single continuous flake in one cooldown, the shift tracks the simulated cavity field profile exactly - falling from 0.39 K at the field maximum to zero outside the resonator - which rules out sample-to-sample variation as the explanation. Quantum-electrodynamical DFT calculations attribute this to cavity coupling redistributing spectral weight in the Eliashberg function: it weakens the total electron-phonon coupling while hardening the average phonon frequency, and the competition between the two can flip sign, which is why the effect is enhancement here and not suppression.
src Zhang, Feng, Lu, Rubio, Gao et al.; Nature (2026); arXiv:2606.19171
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Alto takes today's slot — three days since its last session is the longest gap of the three instruments right now, and rule 2 wants a chops-dependent instrument kept short and frequent rather than left to go stale. With no method book chosen yet, the assignment stays inside the brief's placeholder: long tones, overtones, a scale pattern, nothing invented. Today's fundamental is low B, the one semitone in the recent climb (B♭, C, D, E♭) that got skipped over, and the warmup asks for a held dynamic instead of the messa di voce swell drilled the last two sessions — a different half of breath control, holding steady rather than moving through a shape.
Raschèr's whole four-octave range was built on exactly the exercise in today's technical target — his method book Top-Tones for the Saxophone teaches the extended range entirely through the overtone series off a handful of fixed fingerings, sustained tones and terrace dynamics before anything else. Worth hearing for how unforced the top of his range sounds given that it's reached by voicing alone, not by a different fingering or more air pressure — the same claim today's warmup is testing at a much smaller scale.
Large-angle twisted bilayer graphene has been treated as electronically trivial - close enough to a quasicrystal, with no commensurate moire periodicity, that the two layers were expected to behave as decoupled single sheets of graphene. This group used atomic-resolution TEM and magnetotransport on samples near 29 degrees, the crossover between quasicrystalline twelve-fold symmetry and emerging commensurate moire order, and found magneto-intersubband oscillations and a Landau-level spectrum whose degeneracy evolves from 4-fold to 12-fold as temperature rises - a signature the authors say is incompatible with two independently conducting layers, meaning the layers are electronically coupled at this angle after all.
src Chang, Garcia-Ruiz, Chou, Liu, Ho, Hsieh, Kao, Huang, Yang, Watanabe, Taniguchi, Chu, Liu, Chen; Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 076301 (2026); arXiv:2608.18052
Bilayer nickelate superconductivity has two separate stories: strained thin films at ambient pressure, with Tc around 40 K, and bulk crystals that only superconduct near 80 K under tens of GPa - and it has been unclear whether the two are the same phenomenon reached from different directions or genuinely different regimes. This group took a strained La2LnNi2O7 film already superconducting at ambient pressure and applied pressure directly to it, rather than starting from an unstrained bulk crystal, and watched Tc rise continuously from about 40 K to 67-73 K at 16 GPa - approaching, without yet reaching, the bulk high-pressure range, in the same physical sample.
src Osada, Terakura, Imajo, Morée et al.; Nature Materials (2026)
Using roughly 10 billion J/psi events, BESIII measured the semileptonic hyperon decay Xi- -> Lambda e- nu-bar_e for the first time at an electron-positron collider, rather than by the fixed-target and hyperon-beam methods earlier measurements used. The absolute branching fraction comes out to (3.60 +/- 0.40(stat) +/- 0.10(syst)) x 10-4, which sits 3.9 sigma below the current world average built from those earlier methods. An 11-dimensional angular analysis of the same dataset also gives the axial-vector-to-vector coupling ratio g_A/g_V = 0.18 +/- 0.07(stat) +/- 0.01(syst).
src BESIII Collaboration (M. Ablikim et al.); Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 091801 (2026)
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No image or chart embedding exists anywhere in Orrery's pipeline today — not
in the fragment schema orrery-model.el reads, not in either renderer — so
the ASCII diagram in this afternoon's convergence answer was not a shortcut
taken under time pressure, it was the only picture a fragment can carry: a
#+begin_example block is the entire facility for drawing something, and
"always" better than that needs a capability that has not been built, not a
run trying harder.
A sequence converges to a limit L when every tolerance, however small, is eventually respected forever after: for every ε > 0 there is an N past which every later term sits within ε of L, typeset in the usual quantifier order below (the request for a graph gets an honest ASCII one rather than a plotted line, for the reason under Why it matters).
No to both halves of the question. The player asks nothing of your login —
it is a plain sandboxed iframe (allow"encrypted-media"= is the only
permission it is given) that loads and plays for any reader, so nobody
needs to be signed into anything for it to work; the only account in play
is Spotify's, whose cookies land in your browser the moment the frame
loads, login or not. And no, it cannot be added to your past listens
retroactively: data/feed/ is append-only, a fragment already written is
never edited, and the player only appears on a listening item whose own
fragment carries a verified :SPOTIFY: (or :TIDAL:) property — so an
item that shipped without one stays a plain search link forever, no matter
what changes later. (The heading asks about login, the body about
backfilling old listens — both get answered here since neither reading was
the wrong one.)
Five sessions in on drills — tone, intervals, time feel, ornaments — and none of them has asked for a single unbroken musical statement yet. That's what the Characteristic Studies are for: the brief treats them as repertoire rather than exercise, and today is the first time this rotation reaches that section.
src Arban, Complete Conservatory Method — 14 Characteristic Studies
The unaccompanied cadenza that opens this is twelve seconds of an etude turned into repertoire — exactly the jump today's technical target is asking for, from a study played correctly to a study played as a musical statement. Listen for how the phrase never sounds like a display of endurance even though it plainly is one.
Existing quantum low-density-parity-check codes trade off encoding rate, error threshold and hardware feasibility against each other. This paper introduces "Cornucopia" codes, built around a code geometry co-designed with the atom rearrangement and syndrome-extraction schedule available on reconfigurable neutral-atom arrays, and gets an encoding rate above 1/2 with a pseudo-threshold above 0.4% under standard circuit-level noise - comparable to the surface code's threshold. A single 2844,1426,18 code block encodes 1,426 distance-18 logical qubits with an extrapolated logical error rate of 2.6x10-16 per logical qubit per cycle at 0.1% physical error rate. The authors compare this to a bivariate bicycle code, the previous leading practical construction, which would need more than 68,000 physical qubits to match the same logical qubit count at a comparable error rate.
src Lu, Li, Deng; arXiv:2608.02773 (2026)
Electron microscopy resolution is dose-limited: getting atomic-scale detail needs enough electrons that radiation-sensitive samples (individual proteins, for instance) are damaged before the image is good enough. This proposal couples the microscope's free electron beam to ions held in a trapped-ion quantum computer along the beam path, so each electron's interaction with a sample leaves a trace on the ion's quantum state rather than only on a detector. Quantum-computing operations can then combine the accumulated information from several electrons before it is read out, in principle recovering a signal as strong as many more electrons would give classically, without exposing the sample to them.
src Pescoller, Beltran-Romero, Egginger et al.; Phys. Rev. Lett. (2026)
Bilayer nickelate superconductivity was first found only under extreme pressure; strained, ambient-pressure thin films of Sr-doped La3Ni2O7 are a newer route to the same phase, and what symmetry their Cooper pairs have was open. Using micro-ARPES at the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility, this group finds a superconductivity-induced leading-edge gap that does not vanish along the Brillouin-zone diagonal, where cuprates characteristically show nodes - pointing to a pairing symmetry distinct from cuprate d-wave.
src Sun, Jiang, Hao et al.; Nature Physics (2026); arXiv:2507.07409
TIC 433545934 is a 2+2 quadruple: two close, individually-eclipsing binaries (periods 2.07 and 1.41 days) orbiting each other on a 224.5-day outer orbit. That outer orbit is highly eccentric (e = 0.62) and the whole system is nearly coplanar (mutual inclinations under about 2 degrees), which lets the two inner pairs pass close enough, once per outer orbit, for the stars of one binary to eclipse the stars of the other - a mutual eclipse never reported in this class of system before. The gravitational binding of the two pairs is confirmed independently, through eclipse timing variations synchronized between them, from TESS photometry plus ground-based follow-up.
src Borkovits et al.; accepted, Astronomy & Astrophysics (2026); arXiv:2608.13034
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Typst 0.15.0 (June 15, 2026) lists it as a headline change: "HTML export now
supports equations out of the box via MathML." Until this release, the only
way to get an equation into HTML output was a show rule that called
html.frame to rasterize it to an embedded SVG — a picture of the equation,
not text a browser or a screen reader can do anything with. The release notes
say so directly: "If you've previously relied on show rules that use
html.frame to render equations to SVG, try MathML output. Switching to it
will improve the accessibility of your document (though rendering will be
somewhat less consistent across browsers)." HTML export as a whole is still
behind the html feature flag; only the underlying target function was
freed from it this release.
src Typst 0.15.0 release notes
Set a small table — three or four columns of numbers, one column header or one cell carrying a caveat worth footnoting, the kind of thing a physics table actually has ("corrected for background", "this run only") — in both LaTeX and Typst, with a footnote attached to that cell.
src The TeX FAQ, "Footnotes in tables"; Typst footnote reference
A three-judge Ninth Circuit panel, in an opinion by Judge Consuelo Callahan joined by Judges Holly Thomas and Anthony Johnstone, vacated a district court order that had struck down "Example 4" of ATF's 2022 frame-and-receiver rule — the provision treating a partially completed handgun or long-gun receiver as a firearm only when sold with the jig or tools needed to finish it. California and the Giffords Law Center, which had sued arguing Example 4 was too permissive, lacked Article III standing on both causation and redressability: the panel found the state's evidence of harm mostly predated the rule (2016–2022) and that the share of unserialized "ghost guns" recovered in Los Angeles County had fallen, not risen, since Example 4 took effect. The case returns to the district court with instructions to dismiss it without prejudice.
src Ninth Circuit (No. 24-2701)
DHS's interim final rule on mandatory electronic filing took effect August 11,
src Federal Register, 2026-16313
The seven-day stay on Judge Hendrix's August 5 ruling — covered here last week — expired without the government seeking relief from the Fifth Circuit, and the permanent injunction barring ATF and DOJ from enforcing NFA registration requirements against Silencer Shop Foundation and Jensen plaintiffs, and their current and future members and customers, took effect August 13. The government has filed no notice of appeal and no stay application as of this writing. Representative Andrew Clyde has said the administration confirmed to him that DOJ does not intend to appeal at all; that is a lawmaker's account of an informal confirmation, not a DOJ filing or statement, and the government's own filing deadline under the appellate rules runs to October 5, 2026.
src N.D. Tex. (Nos. 6:25-cv-00056, 6:26-cv-00277)
Today is piano, alone: trumpet and alto each had a turn in the last two days and neither wants to be stacked again so soon, while piano hasn't been touched since Thursday and is the one instrument that actually rewards sitting with one thing for a full block. The block is guide tones — the single-note line that traces the 3rd and 7th through a ii–V–I — which nothing in the last five piano sessions has covered: voicings, a reharm, stride, a walking bass and a scale, but never the bare melodic skeleton underneath all of them. Key is D♭ (Ebm7–Ab7–Dbmaj7), the one remote key this rotation hasn't visited yet and a genuinely awkward read for a single treble-clef line, unlike D, which is where strict cycling by fourths would otherwise land next.
"Tune Up" is built almost entirely out of consecutive ii–V–I's stepping down by whole tones, so it's the clearest possible demonstration of a guide tone line doing real work: Miles never runs the changes as an exercise, but the half-step motion under every turnaround is audibly the same shape as today's assignment, just played by a horn instead of a right hand.
Since the 1970s, a proton's baryon number - the quantum charge that makes matter stable rather than able to decay to nothing - has been assigned one-third each to its three valence quarks. An alternative, proposed in 1996 by Dmitri Kharzeev, is that it instead rides on a non-perturbative, Y-shaped "junction" where the gluons connecting the quarks meet. STAR now reports mid-rapidity measurements of baryon number over net electric charge (B/ΔQ) in isobar collisions (Ru+Ru versus Zr+Zr) and of net-proton yield along rapidity in photonuclear collisions. Both show a larger B/ΔQ ratio and a less rapidity-asymmetric net-proton yield than valence-quark-only models predict - consistent instead with baryon number being carried by something that is stopped, and re-emerges perpendicular to the beamline, more readily than a charged quark is.
src C. Y. Tsang et al. (STAR Collaboration); Science (2026); arXiv:2408.15441
DESI's baryon acoustic oscillation measurements have been read, since 2024, as a mild-to-moderate preference for a dark energy equation of state that evolves with redshift, w(a) = w0 + wa(1-a) - the Chevallier-Polarski-Linder (CPL) form - over a static cosmological constant. This paper shows that CPL is being extrapolated into a regime where it is already known to fail, and that using it there rather than marginalizing over the higher-order terms CPL drops injects information the data do not actually contain. Once those terms are marginalized over, the authors find current data do not constrain either the present-day equation of state or its rate of change tightly enough to make a confident claim of evolution away from w = -1.
src Nesseris, Akrami, Starkman; Phys. Rev. D 114, L041305 (2026); arXiv:2503.22529
Using the 4-metre Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, which resolves the photosphere down to roughly 19-20 km, this team finds spinning plasma vortices as small as 20 km across at the edges of magnetic flux concentrations, wherever oppositely-moving plasma streams meet - the same shear-driven Kelvin-Helmholtz instability that curls a breaking ocean wave or bands Jupiter's clouds. The instability had been predicted to occur on the Sun but was below the resolution of every previous instrument; this is the first observation showing it is ubiquitous rather than occasional.
src Kuridze, Wöger, van Noort et al.; Nature 656, 595-601 (2026)
Conformal field theory predicts that at a continuous quantum phase transition, the excited-state energies above the ground state fall into fixed ratios set by the theory's universality class - a prediction used for decades to classify critical phenomena but never directly measured. This group trapped chains of up to 35 strontium atoms in optical tweezers, excited them into Rydberg states to get strong nearest-neighbour interactions, and tuned the chain through phase transitions in the Ising and tricritical Ising universality classes. A new technique they call many-body modulation spectroscopy resolves the finite-size excitation spectrum well enough to recover the universal energy ratios CFT predicts for both classes, matching them directly.
src Caltech (Endres, Alicea groups) et al.; Nature (2026); arXiv:2601.16275
In a repeating partial tidal disruption event, a star survives repeated close passages by a supermassive black hole, shedding mass each time without being fully destroyed. In some observed systems the resulting flares fade steadily from pass to pass; in others they stay roughly the same brightness, and nothing in the standard picture explained the split. This group's models show the difference comes down to the star's spin before its first encounter: a star already rotating rapidly - as expected if it reached its tight orbit via Hills breakup of a tidally locked binary
src Bandopadhyay, Amend, Coughlin, Nixon, Pasham, Wevers; Astrophysical Journal (2026)
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Nothing has changed since data/feed/2026-08-20/learning.org,
data/feed/2026-08-22/learning.org and data/feed/2026-08-23/learning.org:
Voxman, Selected Studies is still the only one of the four candidates with
the key-by-key technique-plus-etude shape trumpet already has under
:METHOD: in model/briefs/music.org, and this run has nothing new to add
to that comparison. This is the fourth entry in the thread asking the same
thing.
Printable, adhesive-backed vinyl sheets fed through an ordinary printer are the whole trick — two guides, Sticker It's and StickerYou's, walk the same four steps: design at 300 dpi and export as a transparent PNG, print on the sheet's printable (non-adhesive) side with a pigment-ink inkjet for water resistance, press on a clear self-adhesive laminate to seal it, then cut. Waterproof vinyl sheets made for inkjet or laser (check which — they are not interchangeable) are the one consumable to buy.
Alto takes today's slot — it's the chops-dependent instrument that's gone longest without attention, and rule 2 wants frequency over a layoff for exactly that kind of instrument. With no method book chosen yet, the assignment stays where the brief's placeholder puts it: long tones, overtones, and a scale pattern, no invented repertoire.
Hodges plays the whole melody as one continuous breath-controlled line, with swells placed inside long notes rather than tacked onto the front of them — the same messa di voce shape today's warmup is isolating, at tempo and in service of an actual phrase instead of an exercise. Listen for where the swell peaks relative to the note's length; it's rarely dead center.
Nothing has changed since data/feed/2026-08-20/learning.org and
data/feed/2026-08-22/learning.org: Voxman, Selected Studies is still the
only one of the four candidates with the key-by-key technique-plus-etude
shape trumpet already has under :METHOD: in model/briefs/music.org, and
this run has nothing to add to that comparison. This is the third entry in
the thread asking the same thing, and re-running the research a third time
would just be a fourth answer identical to the first two.
Using CLS lattice ensembles with improved Wilson fermions and a telescopic window strategy, this group computes the hadronic vacuum polarization entirely from first principles, at permille precision for momentum transfer Q2 <= 12 GeV2, then combines it with perturbative QCD to get the hadronic contribution to the electromagnetic coupling's running up to the Z pole: Delta alpha_had^(5)(M_Z2) = 0.027821(34)_lat(35)_pQCD - more than twice as precise as the standard phenomenological determination built from e+e- -> hadrons cross-section data, and good enough to meet the target precision proposed for a future FCC-ee. At lower momentum transfer, Q2 ~ 1 GeV2, the lattice number deviates from the e+e--based estimate by up to 7 sigma.
src Conigli, Djukanovic, von Hippel, Kuberski, Meyer, Miura, Ottnad, Risch, Wittig; Phys. Rev. Lett. (2026); companion Phys. Rev. D 114, 034508 (2026)
Axion quasiparticles - the collective magnetoelectric excitation that gives a three-dimensional topological insulator its quantized Faraday and Kerr rotation - have an optical signature so weak it has been hard to see cleanly. This paper (theory and numerics; no experimental realization yet) proposes coupling a thin-film topological insulator to an ordinary, non-chiral photonic crystal slab tuned to host a doubly-degenerate quasibound state in the continuum. The axion quasiparticle acts as an effective Zeeman field on that degenerate pair, splitting it into two high-Q states of opposite chirality. In the calculation, that splitting amplifies the polarization conversion efficiency more than 3-fold and the Faraday rotation angle more than 200-fold relative to the bare topological- insulator film's own response, handing the system near-unity circular dichroism and a nonreciprocal response as new, much larger observables.
src Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 076901 (2026)
ATLAS combines its full Run 2 dataset (139 fb-1 at 13 TeV) with new Run 3 data (164 fb-1 at 13.6 TeV, 2022-2024) to measure H -> l+l-gamma with an electron or muon pair of invariant mass under 30 GeV - a loop-induced decay whose Standard Model branching ratio is only about 5% of H -> gamma-gamma's. The combination gives an observed significance of 3.4 sigma (3.3 expected), barely moved from the 2021 result's 3.2 sigma observed on Run 2 alone. The new Run 3 data alone gives a best-fit signal strength mu = 0.64(+0.44/-0.39) against a Standard Model expectation of mu = 1.00 - consistent with the Standard Model, but on the low side and with an uncertainty wide enough that it settles nothing either way.
src ATLAS Collaboration; arXiv:2608.03369 (2026)
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Four sessions in and trumpet has drilled evenness, intervals and time feel, but nothing that asks the fingers and the air to trade off quickly against each other — which is what Ornaments is for. Today moves onto the trill studies, a section that hasn't been touched yet and that stays clear of both the tonguing-speed and high-register work the brief rules out pairing with anything else.
src Arban, Complete Conservatory Method — Ornaments
The Rondo is built almost entirely out of the ornaments today's technical target isolates — trills and turns aren't decoration in it, they're the main material the movement runs on. Listen for how evenly the trills stay spaced even as the tempo pushes forward, which is exactly what today's stop condition is there to protect.
Nothing has changed since the comparison in
data/feed/2026-08-20/learning.org: Voxman, Selected Studies is still the
only one of the four candidates that gives alto the key-by-key
technique-plus-etude shape trumpet already has under :METHOD: in
model/briefs/music.org. Ferling has no technical spine under it, Klosé has
nothing to phrase, and Rubank's own candidate note already calls it "less
musical" — restating the same gaps doesn't change which one clears them.
JWST has been finding hundreds of compact, extremely red sources in the early universe - the "Little Red Dots" - whose spectra look starlike but whose implied stellar masses would break galaxy-formation models if taken at face value. This paper reports MoM-BH*-1, at redshift z = 7.7569 (660 million years after the Big Bang), with a Balmer break of strength 7.7 - against a theoretical ceiling near 3 for any ordinary dust-free stellar population - which no normal star or star cluster can produce. The authors model it instead as roughly a million-solar-mass black hole (~106.3 M_sun) accreting inside a dense hydrogen envelope spanning 10-100 AU, wide enough to reprocess the accretion light into a stellar-looking spectrum while emitting on the order of 100 billion times a single star's luminosity.
src Naidu et al. (Mirage or Miracle survey); Nature 656, 329 (2026)
Heavy-ion collisions at the LHC normally use lead nuclei to make quark-gluon plasma; 2025's dedicated oxygen-oxygen and neon-neon run let CMS ask whether the same collective-flow machinery, if measured precisely enough, can read out the internal geometry of the colliding nuclei themselves. Using 7 nb-1 of O+O data and 0.8 nb-1 of Ne+Ne data at sqrt(s_NN) = 5.36 TeV, CMS measured elliptic (v2) and triangular (v3) flow harmonics from two- and four-particle correlations spanning nearly five units of pseudorapidity in both systems. The centrality dependence of v2, and specifically the ratio of v2 between Ne+Ne and O+O, tracks the quadrupole deformation predicted by ab initio nuclear-structure calculations - oxygen-16's tetrahedral alpha-cluster arrangement versus neon-20's elongated "bowling pin" shape - well enough that hydrodynamic models built on those structure inputs reproduce the pattern.
src CMS Collaboration; Phys. Rev. Lett. (2026), arXiv:2510.02580
Flexoelectricity - charge separation induced by strain gradients rather than uniform strain - is normally a weak effect that only shows up in bulk crystals under substantial bending. This group measured it instead at sub-nanometre curvature in wrinkled monolayer graphene, and found charge separation 105 to 106 times stronger than in the flexoelectric systems it has previously been measured in. The sharpest wrinkles act as narrow regions of shifted electrical potential - "speed bumps" that pass measurable current under about 1 V of bias - and the effect tracks the sharpness of the curvature far more than its height: a tall, gently rounded wrinkle is less active than a short one with curvature concentrated into a narrow kink. The authors attribute the size of the effect to a quantum orbital contribution beyond the classical flexoelectric picture.
src Iyengar, McHugh, Tripathi, Meunier et al. (Rice University); Advanced Materials (2026)
11 items
Judge Indira Talwani, ruling August 11 in /League of Women Voters of Massachusetts v. Trump/, granted a preliminary injunction barring the U.S. Postal Service from implementing or enforcing Section 3 of Executive Order 14399 — the provision letting USPS decline to transmit or process mail and absentee ballots from voters not on a federally verified citizen list — for the November 3 midterms or any earlier federal election, nationwide. This is a second, separate suit from the one that produced Talwani's original June 25 ruling that Sections 2 and 3 of the order were ultra vires (that ruling's own stay was denied by Talwani on July 7 and by the First Circuit on July 25); the government has since asked the Supreme Court to stay the injunction in that earlier case, Trump v. California (No. 26A124), an application fully briefed as of August 12 and still undecided as of this writing.
src D. Mass. (No. 1:26-cv-11549)
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on August 7 that nonfarm payroll employment fell by 23,000 in July, reversing a downwardly revised 20,000-job June gain and well under the 34,000 average monthly gain of the preceding twelve months. May's initial gain was revised down 66,000 to 63,000 and June's down 37,000 to 20,000 — the two months combined 103,000 lower than first reported. The unemployment rate fell to 4.1 percent, but labor force participation dropped to 61.4 percent, its lowest level in more than five years, meaning the falling rate reflects people leaving the labor force rather than finding work. Government employment fell by more than 50,000 and leisure and hospitality by 40,000; economists had forecast job gains in the 80,000-to-95,000 range going in.
src Bureau of Labor Statistics
Sitting en banc, the D.C. Circuit voted 6-4 on August 4 to affirm the preliminary injunction barring EPA and Citibank (the fund's custodian) from terminating or clawing back $20 billion in Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants — the Inflation Reduction Act's $27 billion "green bank" program, awarded to eight nonprofits in August 2024. The six-judge majority held that EPA's termination, made on policy grounds rather than for cause, likely violated the IRA's mandatory appropriation and the Administrative Procedure Act. The court did not reach a full merits ruling: the same six-to-four split, with Judge Millett taking a separate position, left open whether the One Big Beautiful Bill Act's later rescission of the same funds changes the analysis, and that question now returns to the district court for merits proceedings. EPA has said it will seek Supreme Court review.
src D.C. Circuit (Nos. 25-5122, 25-5123)
Judge James Wesley Hendrix, ruling on consolidated challenges brought by Silencer Shop Foundation and Jensen (the latter backed by the NRA), held that the National Firearms Act's registration and approval requirements — 26 U.S.C. §§ 5812, 5822, 5841 and 5861, for suppressors, short-barreled rifles and short-barreled shotguns — can no longer be sustained under the Taxing Clause or Congress's other enumerated powers, because the One Big Beautiful Bill Act reduced the making and transfer taxes on those items to zero. The holding is narrow in scope though not in the questions it opens: the permanent injunction runs only to the named plaintiff organizations and their current and future members and customers, not nationwide, and it leaves 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(4)'s restriction on unlicensed transfers, interstate transport rules, and state-level NFA requirements untouched. The order was stayed seven days to let the government seek relief from the Fifth Circuit, so nothing changed for anyone outside the case as of this writing.
src N.D. Tex. (Nos. 6:25-cv-00056, 6:26-cv-00277)
The Senate passed H.R. 6500, a continuing resolution funding the federal government at current levels through December 11, by a vote of 90-6-1 on August 8, before its August recess. The bill started life as the AGOA Extension Act; the Senate replaced its text with the continuing-resolution language and added defense funding requested by the administration and a temporary block on a proposed rule governing how federal grants are awarded, sought by Democrats. Because the Senate amended rather than passed the House's text, the bill returns to the House, which is not scheduled back from recess until August 31 — leaving about four weeks to pass the Senate version or reconcile a different one before current funding lapses at the end of the fiscal year, September 30.
src Congress.gov, H.R. 6500
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on August 12 that the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers rose 0.1 percent in July, seasonally adjusted, and 3.4 percent over the preceding twelve months, not seasonally adjusted — both down 0.1 point from June. Core CPI (all items less food and energy) rose 0.2 percent on the month and 2.5 percent over the year. Energy prices fell 1.5 percent in July after a 5.7 percent drop in June; food and shelter each rose 0.1 percent. The figures matched economists' forecasts going in.
src Bureau of Labor Statistics
Today is the altered scale, in A — the scale that is the V7alt sound rather than one more mode that happens to fit a chord. A altered is the seventh mode of B♭ melodic minor: A B♭ C C♯ D♯ F G A, which is 1–♭9–♯9–3– ♯11–♭13–♭7 over an A7 chord. It carries the chord's own 3 and ♭7, so the dominant function stays intact while every extension goes maximally chromatic — and then resolves down a fifth into D, a key neither trumpet nor alto has been living in this week, so the ear isn't just repeating territory the other two instruments are already reinforcing.
src twelve-keys/src/exercises/altered_scale/exercise.py
From Somethin' Else (1958). The G7 in the tune's vi–ii–V–i turnaround is exactly the kind of altered dominant this exercise drills — Adderley's solo leans hard on the tension over that chord before letting it fall into the tonic. Listen for how the altered colour never sits still; it's always already moving toward the landing.
Using 11.4 years of data and a new event classification that pushes the analysis threshold down from 35 TeV to 5 TeV, IceCube measures the flavor composition of the all-sky cosmic neutrino flux (5 TeV-10 PeV) as f_e, f_mu, f_tau = 0.30(+0.20/-0.15), 0.37(+0.14/-0.16), 0.33(+0.24/-0.25). Each fraction is constrained to be nonzero at >90% confidence — the first time all three flavors have been established present in the cosmic flux at high confidence, rather than inferred from an incomplete tau sample. Production via free-neutron decay, a proposed exotic source mechanism, is excluded outside the 99% confidence region; the result sits consistent with the standard-oscillation expectation of roughly equal flavors at Earth.
src IceCube Collaboration; Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 081002 (2026); arXiv:2510.24957
Presolar grains — stardust that predates the Sun — carry more molybdenum-94 than nucleosynthesis models predict, and the unresolved question is whether that excess is a real signature of the stellar process that made it or a gap in the nuclear-physics inputs. Niobium-94 sits at the fork: it can beta decay to Mo-94 or capture a neutron to become Nb-95, and only the decay branch had a measured rate. The n_TOF collaboration reports the first measurement of the ⁹⁴Nb(n,γ) cross section, using CERN's neutron time-of-flight facility. The new capture rate is too small to close the gap between predicted and observed Mo-94 — the excess survives this measurement, meaning it isn't sitting in the branch that was previously unmeasured.
src Balibrea-Correa et al. (n_TOF Collaboration, CERN); Phys. Rev. Lett. (2026)
Nonlinear mode coupling in cosmic structure formation is predicted to generate a scale-independent ("white noise") floor of excess power on the largest observable scales, sourced by coupling between short- and long-wavelength density fluctuations. This is the first confrontation of that prediction with data: modifying the CLASS Boltzmann code to include the white-noise term and fitting to current cosmological datasets, the non-detection of any excess large-scale power sets k_BH <= 1.80x10-13 Mpc-1 at 99% confidence. Because the predicted noise amplitude scales with how much small-scale power exists to source it, this bound forces the primordial power spectrum away from a pure scale-invariant form at small scales — either a cutoff near k ~ 3 pc-1 or a running spectral index.
src Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 081003 (2026); companion theory paper arXiv:2511.15803
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Fourth fundamentals session on alto, and the fundamental keeps climbing again — low B♭, then low C, then low D, now low E♭ — but today changes what "dynamic control" is being tested. Last session held a static pp; today the long tones swell from pp to mf and back, which is a harder version of the same question, because the embouchure has to keep the tone centered while it is actively changing rather than while it is holding still.
src generic fundamentals (no method book chosen yet)
Desmond's tone stays just as centered at a whisper as it does at full volume — there is no thin or breathy edge anywhere in his dynamic range, which is exactly what today's messa di voce warmup is chasing rather than just the low end of a static pp. Worth a listen for how little the sound changes character as the dynamic moves, which is the whole point of practising the swell instead of the hold.
Voxman, Selected Studies — it is the only candidate that gives alto the same
two-part shape trumpet already has in model/briefs/music.org: technical
material and musical material organized by key rather than as separate
tracks, so one assignment can pull a scale/technical study and an etude from
the same key, the way trumpet pairs a Scales & Intervals target with an Art
of Phrasing melody.
6 items
The head is built almost entirely from wide, unhesitant interval leaps that never sound reached-for — the exact quality today's technical target is after. Worth a listen once before picking up the horn, to hear what "centered" sounds like at speed, and once after, to hear how close the practice room got.
Today is interval work on trumpet: the last two sessions covered tone and time feel, so intervals are the piece that has gone longest unaddressed — the half of Scales & intervals the brief itself calls neglected. Wide leaps also sit well this soon after a layoff, unlike register or tonguing-speed work, so today stays clear of both.
orrery-test--public-symbols (orrery-test.el:918-930) opens with a call
that touches nothing this codebase built: (mapatoms (lambda (sym) ...)).
mapatoms walks the obarray — Emacs's own global symbol table, every
name interned anywhere in this process, from orrery-build-ir to car to
a variable some other loaded package defined — and calls the given
function once per symbol object, not per string. sym inside that
lambda is not the text "orrery-build-ir", it is the interned symbol
itself, which is why the very next line has to call (symbol-name sym)
to get a string worth pattern-matching with string-prefix-p and
string-match-p. Two predicates then decide whether that symbol is worth
keeping: (fboundp sym) is true when the symbol has a function
definition attached (an orrery-build-ir-shaped symbol), (boundp sym)
is true when it has a variable value attached (an
orrery-test-golden-stamp-shaped one) — a symbol can be neither, either,
or both, which is why the filter is (or (fboundp sym) (boundp sym))
rather than just one of the two. orrery-verify-docs (orrery-test.el:
932-945) then walks that filtered, sorted list and calls (documentation
sym) for anything fboundp and checks the variable-documentation
property for anything boundp, failing the gate if either comes back
nil.
src build/orrery-test.el
Nuclear shape in the heaviest actinides has mostly been inferred indirectly, because the isotopes decay too fast and are made in numbers too small for most spectroscopic techniques. This collaboration ran in-source hot-cavity laser spectroscopy on reactor-produced 255Fm at the RISIKO mass separator, using the PI-LIST ion source to resolve the hyperfine structure of two atomic transitions at 398.4 nm and 398.2 nm. Combined with atomic-structure calculations, the hyperfine pattern gives a magnetic dipole moment mu = -0.75(5) mu_N - consistent with the neutron occupying the 7/2[613] Nilsson orbital - and an electric quadrupole moment Q_s = +5.84(13) eb, confirming a strongly prolate deformation and correcting unphysical values that had stood in standard nuclear-data tables.
src Chhetri, Studer, Raeder, et al. (JGU Mainz / HIM / GSI-FAIR / Gothenburg, 18 institutions); Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 192501 (2026)
Twisted bilayer graphene is well studied near the magic angle (~1.1 degrees) and treated as electronically uninteresting at large twist angles, where the layers are assumed to decouple. This group looked instead at the crossover near 29 degrees, next to the exactly-quasicrystalline 30-degree point. Atomic-resolution TEM shows the two layers sitting in an intermediate, nonperiodic structural regime - near-dodecagonal quasicrystalline symmetry coexisting with emerging moire periodicity, rather than a clean handoff from one order to the other. Magnetotransport in the same samples finds strong interlayer hybridization mediated by Umklapp scattering, showing up as magneto-intersubband oscillations and a Landau-level spectrum that jumps from fourfold to twelvefold degeneracy across the crossover.
src Chang et al.; Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 076301 (2026), Editors' Suggestion
QED predicts that a strong enough magnetic field polarizes the vacuum itself into a birefringent medium, rotating and filtering the polarization of light that passes through it - a 90-year-old prediction never directly tested. Coordinating X-ray polarimetry from IXPE and NICER with radio timing from Parkes on the radio-loud magnetar 1E 1547.0-5408, this team finds phase- and energy-resolved X-ray polarization reaching 65% at 2 keV and dropping sharply between 2-4 keV - a pattern the paper argues standard, non-refractive surface-emission models cannot reproduce, but that vacuum-birefringence-governed propagation through the magnetosphere can. Flagging this explicitly as contested: an independent April 2026 analysis of the same IXPE dataset, using a different geometric model of the emission region, concludes the data do not compel a birefringence interpretation.
src (IXPE/NICER/Parkes collaboration); Nature (2026), arXiv:2509.19446
7 items
Key: E major — four sharps, the next stop on the fourths cycle after 2026-08-15's B major. First blues-family exercise in the rotation; the last three piano sessions worked upper-structure triads, the Coltrane cycle and stride's LH leap, so today swaps all of those for a walking quarter-note bass line — the pianist standing in for the bass player, which is a longer and more sustained physical task than anything piano has drilled yet, and exactly what the longer block today is for.
src twelve-keys/src/exercises/blues_walking_bass/exercise.py
Peterson's solo blues playing is the reference point for exactly today's move — a genuinely walking LH bass line under RH shells and fills, with no bass player to lean on. Listen for how steady the quarter-note pulse stays under the LH alone through the turnarounds, which is precisely what today's chromatic-approach variation is reaching for at a much slower tempo.
The BMW collaboration's hybrid lattice-QCD-plus-data calculation of the leading-order hadronic vacuum polarization contribution to the muon's anomalous magnetic moment, a_μ^HVP,LO = 715.1(3.4)×10⁻¹⁰ at 0.48% precision, pushes the full Standard Model prediction to a_μ = 11,659,205.2(3.6)×10⁻¹⁰ — within roughly 0.5σ of Fermilab's final 127-ppb measurement, a_μ = 11,659,207.05(1.47)×10⁻¹⁰ (arXiv:2606.17323). The twenty-five-year, ~4σ anomaly is gone. What isn't gone: the lattice number disagrees with the traditional data-driven prediction built from four decades of e⁺e⁻→hadrons cross-section measurements — the very calculation the anomaly was originally measured against.
src Nature
A Comment on the widely cited NQR measurement of an "imaginary" charge density wave in the kagome metal CsV₃Sb₅ (responding to Suetsugu et al., Nature Physics, DOI 10.1038/s41567-026-03339-8) argues the reported signature of spontaneous loop currents and time-reversal symmetry breaking at ~120 K does not survive quantitative scrutiny: the NQR linewidth follows an ordinary Curie-Weiss law with no anomaly there, the asymmetric lineshapes taken as evidence of an internal field are reproduced by plain crystalline mosaic spread, and the claimed "emergent field" turns out to be an artifact of the fitting procedure's constraints.
src arXiv
Basson et al. (Carleton College) report the first bounds on all 43 previously unconstrained Lorentz-violating coefficients in the nonrelativistic limit of the Standard-Model Extension's minimal matter sector — the standard parameterization for direction- or velocity-dependent violations of special relativity — completing coverage of all 132 such coefficients and tightening 13 existing limits (Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 081601, 2026). No violation was seen; every coefficient is consistent with zero.
src arXiv / Phys. Rev. Lett.
A reanalysis of DESI DR2 baryon acoustic oscillation data combined with Pantheon+ supernovae and Planck CMB distance priors, fit to the w₀wₐCDM model, finds no statistically robust evidence for a time-varying dark-energy equation of state once redshift subsamples are compared self-consistently — the 2.8–4.2σ preference reported elsewhere is consistent with a statistical fluctuation in the current data.
src arXiv
Every gate in build/orrery-test.el is one function invoked the same way:
Makefile:27,31,35 run emacs -Q --batch -l orrery-test.el -f
orrery-verify-schema (and -golden, -docs) — --batch suppresses the
GUI, the minibuffer and any interactive prompt, then runs exactly the
function named after -f and exits. On failure, none of the three gates
signal a Lisp error. They all route through orrery-test--fail
(orrery-test.el:45-48):
src build/orrery-test.el
9 items
Typst 0.15 (2026-06-15) added native variable font support: the text
function's weight, style, stretch and size now drive a variable
font's standard axes directly, and a new variations parameter
(text(variations: (SOFT: 0))) sets custom designer axes — replacing the
old workaround of shipping four static cuts (regular/bold/italic/bold-italic)
per family. It doesn't close a gap that forced LaTeX outright, since
LuaLaTeX's fontspec has set axes by name (Weight400=) since version 2.9a;
what it closes is the gap next to LuaLaTeX specifically — pdfLaTeX and
XeLaTeX still can't touch variable fonts at all, and typst fonts
--variants lists each font's axes and ranges where fontspec expects you to
already know them.
src Typst 0.15 release notes
Typeset the same three-line derivation — ,
then the ultra-relativistic limit , then the massless case
— in both LaTeX's align environment and Typst's native math mode,
with exactly one equation number attached to the last line and none on the
first two. In LaTeX this takes explicit work: add \notag to every line but
the last (or use align* and hand-place a \tag on the final line), because
align numbers every line by default. In Typst it takes none: a single
$ ... \ ... \ ... $ block under #set math.equation(numbering: "(1)")
numbers the whole block once, on the last line, by default. Success
criterion: each rendered output shows exactly one equation number, on the
final line — count the numbers in the PDF/SVG and confirm it's 1, not 3. Use
Overleaf and the Typst web app to skip installing anything.
src Typst equation reference; amsmath manual
Filed after this run's learning pass, so the daily drain answers it directly rather than leaving it for tomorrow.
The textbook picture assigns a proton's baryon number to its three valence quarks; an alternative picture from QCD predicts it instead sits on a Y-shaped "junction" of gluon field lines connecting them, which should let baryon number travel independently of electric charge in a collision. The STAR Collaboration at RHIC tested this by comparing baryon-number transport to charge transport in three separate systems - isobar heavy-ion collisions, photon-gold collisions, and glancing versus head-on nuclear impacts - and in each case found baryon number carried farther in rapidity and less symmetrically than a valence-quark picture predicts, matching the gluon-junction prediction instead.
src STAR Collaboration; Science 393, 6812 (2026), doi:10.1126/science.ads5962
Glueballs - hadrons made purely of bound gluons, with no quarks - are a direct prediction of QCD's self-interacting gluon field, but assigning any candidate state to the label has been contested for decades because ordinary quark-antiquark mesons can mimic the same mass and quantum numbers. Using 10.087 billion J/psi decays collected at BESIII, the collaboration first fixed X(2370)'s spin-parity to 0-+ (the predicted quantum numbers of the lightest glueball), then searched for the decay X(2370) -> K*(892)K-bar, a channel an ordinary strange-quark-containing meson would be expected to use readily. They found none, setting a branching-fraction limit below 2.7x10-6 at 90% confidence - the suppression that identifies X(2370) as a flavor-singlet state, the property a glueball must have and an ordinary meson generally does not.
src BESIII Collaboration; arXiv:2607.20366, presented at ICHEP 2026
The standard cosmological constraint on dark photon dark matter assumes that when a dark photon resonantly converts to an ordinary photon in the early-universe plasma, it dumps energy into that plasma continuously, and the resulting heating - which would leave a detectable imprint - rules out a wide swath of dark photon parameter space. This paper shows that assumption breaks down: once nonlinear plasma dynamics are included instead of the linear approximation the bound relies on, the resonant conversion self-limits and saturates well below the heating rate the old calculation assumed. Redone with the nonlinear physics, the standard bound is invalid across roughly ten orders of magnitude in dark photon mass, from about 10-15 eV to 10-6 eV.
src Huang, Shalaby, Hook; Phys. Rev. Lett. (2026), doi:10.1103/98cx-7t43, arXiv:2510.13956
Third fundamentals session on alto, and the fundamental keeps climbing: throat tones and low B♭ overtones first, then the register break and low C overtones, now low D and a dynamic change — can the tone stay centered playing quietly rather than at a comfortable mf, which is a different kind of control than reaching a new partial.
src generic fundamentals (no method book chosen yet)
Hodges plays the melody at a hushed dynamic for most of the chorus and never loses the center of the tone doing it — including through slides that are functionally overtone-informed voicing changes rather than fingered portamento. Listen for how little the sound thins as the dynamic drops, which is exactly what today's pp warmup and overtone work are chasing.
orrery-render-html--by-weight (orrery-render-html.el:831-839) sorts panels
for display by descending :weight, but it does not hand sort the panel
list directly. It first calls (seq-map-indexed (lambda (panel i) (cons i
panel)) panels), wrapping every panel in a (INDEX . PANEL) cons, and its
comparator falls back to (< (car a) (car b)) — comparing those original
indices — whenever two weights are equal:
src build/orrery-render-html.el
7 items
Filed after this run's learning pass, so the daily drain answers it directly rather than leaving it for tomorrow.
First Studies and Scales & intervals both asked for accuracy on notes that land on the beat. Syncopation asks the opposite question: can the same evenness of tone survive on notes that deliberately don't. It's the section most players skip because it reads like a rhythm exercise rather than a sound exercise, but a syncopated note that isn't given the same commitment as an on-beat one just sounds tentative, not "off the beat."
src Arban, Complete Conservatory Method — Syncopation
The head is built almost entirely from eighth-note displacement — accents landing where the ear expects rest and vice versa — played with total commitment to every syncopated entrance rather than any hesitation around them. Listen for how solid each off-beat note sounds compared to the beat it's displaced from, which is exactly what today's technical target is chasing at a much slower tempo.
orrery-render-html--escape (orrery-render-html.el:180-185) walks a fixed
alist of four pairs — ("&" . "&"), ("<" . "<"), (">" . ">"),
("\"" . """) — and for each one calls:
src build/orrery-render-html.el
Braiding an Abelian anyon around another just multiplies its wavefunction by a phase; braiding a non-Abelian one instead applies a unitary rotation within a degenerate ground-state manifold - the operation topological quantum computing wants to use as a noise-resistant logic gate. Direct evidence for that non-Abelian case has been elusive. This Weizmann-led group works in the nu=5/2 fractional quantum Hall state, a leading non-Abelian candidate, using a highly dilute one-dimensional edge channel and weak partitioning to separately measure the current-noise statistics of the downstream charged mode and the upstream neutral mode. The time-domain structure of that noise carries the signature expected of a non-Abelian braiding operation rather than a simple Abelian phase.
src Alkalay, Park, Oh, Hong, Lee, Tiwari, Senapati, Umansky, Heiblum, Sim; arXiv:2608.12897 (2026)
Antiferromagnetic skyrmions are predicted to move without the skyrmion Hall effect that deflects their ferromagnetic counterparts sideways - useful, but until now inferred only from transport and static imaging, never watched directly. Using pump-probe scanning transmission X-ray microscopy at BESSY II's MAXYMUS endstation, this team filmed a dense lattice of current-driven antiferromagnetic skyrmions at 20 nm spatial and nanosecond temporal resolution. The skyrmions do move straight along the current direction, confirming the predicted absence of the Hall deflection; individual collision events show an incoherent regime (mobile skyrmions compress against pinned ones, then rebound) and a coherent regime where the whole lattice translates uniformly. Fitting the rebound trajectories to the Thiele equation extracts an exponentially decaying inter-skyrmion repulsion with a 30 nm decay length, matching micromagnetic simulation.
src Bhukta et al. (Kläui group, JGU Mainz); Nature Physics (2026), doi:10.1038/s41567-026-03383-4
Rhombohedral multilayer graphene on hBN hosts fractional Chern insulators (FCIs) - lattice analogues of the fractional quantum Hall effect, at zero magnetic field - but why a moire potential this weak is enough to stabilize them has been unclear, since standard continuum models of the conduction bands alone don't produce a large enough gap. This theory paper identifies the missing piece: filled valence bands develop their own moire-periodic charge-density modulation, which electrostatically imprints an effective potential onto the conduction bands - the "moire capacitor effect" - on top of whatever the substrate directly provides. Including it is what lets first-principles calculations reproduce a stable Chern number C=1 parent state at filling nu=1, matching what's seen experimentally.
src Regnault, Li, Kwan, Bernevig, Herzog-Arbeitman; arXiv:2608.12452 (2026)
7 items
Key: B major — five sharps, and the next stop on the fourths cycle after 2026-08-12's Gb/F#. First comping-family exercise in the rotation; the last two piano sessions were both harmony-shape drills (upper-structure triads, the Coltrane cycle), so today trades chord vocabulary for LH independence — a different muscle, and one that rewards the longer block piano gets today.
src twelve-keys/src/exercises/stride/exercise.py
An uptempo solo stride showcase built almost entirely out of exactly today's move — low bass leaping to a mid-register chord stab, over and over, at a tempo that leaves no room to look for either landing. Listen for how level the time stays through the leaps, which is the whole point of today's technical target at a much slower tempo.
build/orrery.el splits the build into two functions on purpose.
orrery-build-ir (orrery.el:72-83) takes model-dir, feed-dir,
inbox-dir, provenance and generated-at as plain arguments and returns
an IR plist — it never reads a file it wasn't handed, never calls git,
never checks the clock. orrery-build (orrery.el:85-110) is the one
impure wrapper around it: it computes provenance from git and passes
generated-at through to write dist/ir.json, digest.org and
index.html. Only orrery-build-batch (orrery.el:112-121), the actual
make build entry point, calls orrery-now (orrery.el:32-37) to get a
real timestamp. Everything below that layer is a pure function of its
inputs.
src build/orrery-test.el
A running reactor's fission products emit a well-modeled antineutrino flux; less well tested is what happens after shutdown, when long-lived fission isotopes left in the partially burnt core fuel and in nearby spent-fuel cooling pools keep decaying and emitting a much fainter residual flux. Double Chooz's near detector, 400 m from the Chooz B reactor cores in France, took 17.2 days of data while both units were completely shut down and recorded 106 +/- 18 antineutrino candidate events in the energy window where this residual signal is strongest - a 5.9-sigma excess over background, matching simulations of the remaining fuel inventory.
src Double Chooz Collaboration; Phys. Rev. Lett. (2026), doi:10.1103/dr26-j19g, arXiv:2510.04869
The optical Magnus effect is the light analogue of the mechanical one: the intrinsic spin-orbit coupling of a tightly focused, circularly polarized beam displaces its effective interaction profile transverse to propagation, by an amount and direction set by the light's handedness. It has been predicted for tightly focused beams for years but not directly observed in an atom-light interaction. Probing a single trapped 40Ca+ ion on a quadrupole transition and spatially mapping the interaction profile for different beam configurations, the team measured transverse shifts of several hundred nanometers between opposite-handedness beams, tracing the effect to non-paraxial electric-field components that standard tight-focus models for ion addressing omit.
src Leindecker, Gallagher, Brucke, Zehnder, Milanovic, Marinelli, Gerritsma, Spreeuw, Home, Hempel; Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 063202 (2026), doi:10.1103/kj5p-qqs5, arXiv:2601.22981
XENONnT analyzed 7.83 tonne-years of ionization-only ("S2-only") data - 579 days across three science runs, its largest low-threshold exposure to date - built on a newly complete background model for this channel. A blind analysis found no significant excess over background, and the collaboration set new 90%-CL upper limits on spin-independent dark-matter-nucleon and spin-dependent dark-matter-neutron scattering, dark-matter-electron scattering, and axion-like particles and dark photons, reaching dark-matter masses as low as roughly 3 GeV - the tightest limits yet in that range from any liquid-xenon experiment, and close to the "neutrino fog," the point where coherent solar-neutrino scattering becomes an irreducible background indistinguishable from a genuine light-WIMP signal.
src XENON Collaboration; Phys. Rev. Lett. (2026), doi:10.1103/2lrq-f6bk
1T-TaS2 hosts three charge-density-wave (CDW) phases - incommensurate, nearly-commensurate, commensurate - that in bulk crystals give way to a correlated, Mott-like insulating state. Thinning usually weakens a CDW, as screening and structural relaxation degrade the order. Using temperature-dependent Raman spectroscopy and transport down to the true monolayer limit, this team found the opposite: transition temperatures rise as thickness drops, sheet resistance climbs by orders of magnitude, carrier localization length falls sharply, and the bulk's first-order, hysteretic commensurate-to-nearly-commensurate transition disappears entirely in the monolayer. Calculations attribute the enhancement to strengthened long-range Coulomb interactions once out-of-plane dielectric screening is lost.
src Liu et al.; Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 066502 (2026), doi:10.1103/pxpf-6bsv
9 items
Erbium tritelluride (ErTe3) hosts two perpendicular charge-density-wave (CDW) orders: a dominant one that sets in continuously below 265 K, and a subdominant one, superficially similar, that appears below 160 K. Using pump-probe time- and angle-resolved photoemission, the MIT-led team quenched both orders with a first laser pulse and tracked their reformation in momentum space with a second. The dominant CDW reforms uniformly across the sample, the textbook continuous transition. The subdominant CDW instead nucleates in localized domains that grow and merge - a first-order transition - despite the two orders looking nearly identical in equilibrium diffraction and transport measurements.
src Su, Lv, Zong, Muller, Chattopadhyay, Dolgirev, Singh, Straquadine, Choi, Azoury, Mogi, Fisher, Demler, Gedik; Nature Physics (2026), doi:10.1038/s41567-026-03382-5
Altermagnetism, identified in electronic solids only a few years ago, is a magnetic phase that combines zero net magnetization (like an antiferromagnet) with momentum-dependent spin splitting and broken time-reversal symmetry (like a ferromagnet) - a symmetry class, not a special material chemistry. This team built a magnetophotonic crystal with staggered magnetic bias and matched structural anisotropy and found the same three signatures in its photon bands instead of electron bands: momentum-dependent polarization splitting, polarization-momentum locking, and vanishing net magnetization. Solving Maxwell's equations directly for the structure, they confirm the splitting is symmetry-governed rather than a side effect of the ordinary (momentum-independent) gyrotropic magneto-optic effect, which could otherwise fake the same signal.
src Chen, Zheng, Li, Qiu et al.; Nature Physics (2026), doi:10.1038/s41567-026-03405-1
Quantum microscopy by coincidence (QMC), demonstrated by this group in 2023, splits an entangled photon pair so a "signal" photon passes through the sample while its "idler" partner travels a parallel path; coincidence detection makes the pair behave like a single particle with twice the momentum of one photon, beating the classical diffraction limit by a factor of two. The new design, SR4, routes the idler through the same pair of lenses three times before detection instead of once, pushing the effective momentum - and the resolution improvement over a classical microscope - to fourfold.
src Wang lab (Caltech); Science Advances (2026), doi:10.1126/sciadv.aea9457
Second fundamentals session on alto. Last time isolated the throat tones and built the overtone series off low B♭; today asks whether that control transfers to a different part of the horn — the register break, and a new overtone fundamental a step above where it started.
src generic fundamentals (no method book chosen yet)
Desmond's tone is often described as sounding the same from bottom to top of the horn — pick any slow track ("Take Five" is fine, but the melody statement on a ballad shows it better) and listen specifically at the D4/E4 crossing points in his lines. There is no audible seam, which is exactly what today's warmup is chasing.
They solve different problems. org-element-parse-buffer walks the whole
buffer once and returns one recursive tree — every headline, drawer and
paragraph, structured, in memory, no further buffer access needed.
org-element-at-point answers a narrower question: "what element contains
point, right now" — it's built for an interactive command deciding what the
cursor is sitting on, and in a live editing buffer it leans on Org's
buffer-local, change-tracked parse cache (org-element--cache) to make that
one-off lookup cheap.
src build/orrery-model.el
Both files say the rule in their own commentary, but stated separately they read as two heuristics rather than one. Here is the one test: *what does a silently-wrong value cost, and is there a stable way to fill the gap without inventing a fact?*
src build/orrery-inbox.el
Look at what intake.yml actually does with the two fields (lines 90-104):
TITLE is passed straight through as the entry's title, and
orrery-inbox--headline (orrery-inbox.el:204-211) collapses any newlines in
it to spaces before writing it as the * TODO ... heading line — so the
title is the headline that ends up on the dashboard and in the feed
verbatim, one line, no matter how you format it in the GitHub UI. BODY
becomes the entry's body text under the properties drawer, indented two
spaces by orrery-inbox--body, with \"Filed from <url>\" appended by the
workflow. Unlike a feed item's summary (orrery-model--paragraph-text,
first paragraph only), orrery-inbox--text (orrery-inbox.el:92-112) keeps
every paragraph, list and quote in the body — nothing you write past the
first paragraph gets silently dropped the way it would in a feed fragment.
src .github/workflows/intake.yml
orrery-ir--strings (orrery-ir.el:55-59) is three lines doing one job:
src build/orrery-ir.el
6 items
First Studies on 2026-08-10 was about making every note match; today asks a harder question of the same tone — can it hold steady across a leap instead of a step. Intervals are the part of the method most players skip because scales feel more like "practising" and intervals feel like guessing at pitch.
src Arban, Complete Conservatory Method — Scales & Intervals
Shaw built entire solos out of wide, deliberate leaps — fourths and beyond — rather than the stepwise bebop vocabulary most trumpet players default to. Listen for how committed each leap sounds, with no audible search for the landing note, which is exactly what today's interval work is chasing at a much slower tempo.
Deep Hubble imaging of the ultra-diffuse galaxy UGC 9050-Dw1 (35.2+/-2 Mpc) turned up a faint, thin arc of stars trailing one of its globular clusters — the first globular-cluster tidal stream ever resolved outside the Milky Way. Streams like this had long been predicted around other galaxies but never directly imaged; the team modeled the host's gravitational potential from the stream's width and curvature, the same technique used on Milky Way streams like Palomar 5 to map our own halo. The fit favors a massive, extended dark halo and puts no meaningful upper bound on the progenitor's initial mass — consistent with ultra-diffuse galaxies being dark-matter-dominated rather than ordinary galaxies stripped down to unusually diffuse light.
src Holm, Pearson, Nibauer, Sand, Price-Whelan, Starkenburg, Hendel, Fielder; Nature (2026), doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10878-w
Using the same storage-ring dataset that produced the collaboration's final anomalous-magnetic-moment result, but now tracking the average vertical decay angle of the muons' decay positrons — the signature of an electric dipole moment interacting with the ring's magnetic field — the Muon g-2 Collaboration measured d_mu = (-0.35 +/- 0.19_stat +/- 0.34_sys) x 10-19 e*cm, consistent with zero, and sets a new direct limit |d_mu| < 1.10 x 10-19 e*cm at 95% CL. That is roughly 1.6x tighter than the previous best direct limit, BNL E821's 1.8 x 10-19 e*cm, and uses only the first 25% of Fermilab's collected data.
src arXiv:2608.11124 (Muon g-2 Collaboration)
A Wigner crystal is the state electrons fall into when mutual Coulomb repulsion beats their kinetic energy and they freeze into a rigid lattice — predicted in 1934, and previously seen only statically in monolayer WSe2, via exciton diffraction off the crystal's fixed periodic potential (an "umklapp" signature). This group found a distinct set of resonances in cryogenic reflectance spectra of charge-tunable WSe2 — "Wigner polarons" — that form when an exciton locally distorts the electron lattice and hybridizes with the crystal's own collective vibrations, rather than just scattering off its static structure. The energy splitting between Wigner-polaron and ordinary attractive-polaron resonances scales as (electron density)^(1/4), tracking the density-dependence expected of the crystal's phonon-like excitation energy — and the whole effect shows up at zero magnetic field.
src Wang et al.; Nature Physics (2026), doi:10.1038/s41567-026-03395-0
orrery-feed-collect (orrery-feed.el:108-124) is where "the earliest sighting
of an id wins" — the rule README.org states in prose — actually gets enforced,
and it does it without ever comparing two timestamps:
src build/orrery-feed.el
6 items
Cycle: G♭ → D → B♭ → G♭ — Gbmaj7 – A7 – Dmaj7 – F7 – Bbmaj7 – Db7 – Gbmaj7. Six flats resolving through a two-sharp key and back is one of the most disorienting of the twelve starting points: the ear and the hand both want Gb's flats to keep governing the D-major bar, and they don't. That mismatch is the actual difficulty, more than any one chord shape.
src twelve-keys/src/exercises/coltrane_changes/exercise.py
Coltrane's own reharmonization of Tune Up, built by running exactly this major-thirds substitution through all three of the tune's ii–V–I phrases — the same move as today's musical target, at tempo, for real. Listen for how little the melody has to change even though the harmony underneath it is almost unrecognizable.
A USTC team entangled two laser-cooled rubidium-ensemble quantum memories joined by 420 km of deployed telecom fiber - more than four times the previous matter-to-matter distance record. The DLCZ-protocol link uses a two-photon Hong-Ou-Mandel-type heralding scheme that relaxes long-distance phase-stability requirements by roughly seven orders of magnitude versus single-photon heralding, with memory photons converted to the telecom S-band (0.17 dB/km loss) for transmission and a two-stage locking scheme holding the inter-memory phase stable. Past roughly 320 km, the measured entanglement generation rate exceeds what direct optical transmission alone could deliver at that distance - crossing the PLOB bound, the fundamental limit on any repeaterless quantum channel.
src arXiv:2504.05660 (Luo, Wang, Zheng et al., USTC); Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 070801 (2026)
Finding a stellarator's non-planar coils has meant scanning thousands of weighted optimization runs to trade off plasma-confinement quality against buildability (curvature limits, coil-to-coil and coil-to-plasma spacing) - prior state of the art needed roughly 8,500 separate runs on a supercomputer cluster to surface a handful of workable candidates. This paper applies the augmented Lagrangian method - a constrained-optimization algorithm known since 1969 but never systematically applied to this problem - which treats each engineering constraint directly instead of as a tunable penalty weight. It converges to Pareto-superior coil sets, better on physics performance and engineering feasibility simultaneously, in about 40 minutes on a laptop, and the resulting designs outperform published coil sets for operating stellarators including Wendelstein 7-X and HSX.
src arXiv:2507.12681 (Gil, Li, Stratton, Kaptanoglu, Stenson); Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 065101 (2026), doi:10.1103/n7gk-922h
The standard cosmological bound on the summed neutrino mass, Sigma m_nu < 0.056 eV (Planck CMB + CMB lensing + DESI DR2 BAO), assumes flat LambdaCDM
src arXiv:2607.24742 (Qu, Ge, Wang, Schaan et al.)
inbox/ask.org already answered whether the plist/alist split was the
right call (2026-08-08: alist where keys are Greg's own typing, plist where
the key set is this program's fixed vocabulary). This lesson is the
mechanism underneath that answer: why plist-get and assoc cannot be
swapped for each other, even though both walk a list of conses.
src build/orrery-model.el
7 items
With both Chooz-B reactor units fully shut down, Double Chooz's near detector logged 17.2 days of reactor-off data and found 106(+/-18) antineutrino candidate events at 5.9 sigma significance. The source isn't active fission: it's beta decay of long-lived fission products (e.g. 90Y, 92Y, 144Pr) still cooling in the core and in the adjacent spent-fuel pool. This is the first quantitative measurement of that post-shutdown flux, rather than a theoretical estimate of it.
src arXiv:2510.04869 (Double Chooz Collaboration); Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 061803 (2026), doi:10.1103/dr26-j19g
Dual-rail erasure qubits encode each logical qubit across two microwave cavities, so a photon-loss event shows up as a heralded "erasure" at a known location instead of an undetected bit- or phase-flip. The new two-qubit gate — swap-wait-swap — temporarily parks an excitation on the coupling transmon to pick up a strong dispersive shift, runs in about 500 ns, and reaches roughly 99.9% raw two-qubit fidelity with a ~0.5% erasure rate. Post-selecting on no detected erasure, residual Pauli error falls below 0.1%: bit-flip error is suppressed to the parts-per-million level, leaving dephasing as the dominant remaining channel.
src arXiv:2503.10935; Nature 656, 47-53 (2026), doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10822-y
Using ultracold lithium-6 in a Hubbard-regime optical lattice (roughly 300 uniform sites at a target doping, embedded in a ~150-site reservoir), the group combined two independent probes at temperatures only recently reached in these simulators: compressibility measurements showing a doping-dependent maximum that sharpens on cooling, and lattice-modulation spectroscopy showing low-energy spectral weight vanishing non-uniformly across the Brillouin zone — the direct spectroscopic signature of a pseudogap, not an inference from transport. Both probes agree on where the underdoped and overdoped regimes split.
src arXiv:2509.18075 (Greiner group, Harvard); Nature (2026), doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10875-z
The team concentrated broadband, spatially and temporally incoherent sunlight through a Fresnel lens into an optical fiber, then fed it into a periodically-poled KTP crystal inside a polarization Sagnac interferometer — the same spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) geometry normally pumped by a coherent laser — to generate polarization-entangled photon pairs. Full quantum state tomography over three days of outdoor operation gave a Bell-state fidelity of 93.9(+/-2.7)%, concurrence of 0.905(+/-0.053), and a clean CHSH Bell-inequality violation: numbers in the range of conventional laser-pumped SPDC sources.
src arXiv:2602.15655 (MPI for the Science of Light + U. Ottawa); Optica 13(8), 1508 (2026), doi:10.1364/OPTICA.601797
First session on alto in the rotation's recorded history. With no method book chosen yet, today is fundamentals only — tone and pitch center, not repertoire. The open question below is what turns this into a real syllabus.
src generic fundamentals (no method book chosen yet)
Almost any Ellington-era ballad feature — the sound stays centered and level through long notes with barely any attack noise, which is exactly the target of today's long-tone warmup and the overtone work built on top of it. Listen for how little the tone moves within a single note, not for anything around it.
orrery-model--node-properties (build/orrery-model.el:47-58) turns one
headline's PROPERTIES drawer into an alist:
src build/orrery-model.el
7 items
First session on trumpet in the rotation's recorded history, so today is not about pushing anything — it's about finding out what the horn actually sounds like right now. First Studies is the right place to start precisely because it asks for the least: just make every note match.
src Arban, Complete Conservatory Method — First Studies
Any slow, sparse ballad recording — Clifford Brown or Bobby Hackett are both built almost entirely out of long, exposed middle-register notes with no fast technique to hide behind. Listen for how steady the tone stays through a note, not for anything happening around it — that steadiness is exactly what today's warmup and technical target are chasing.
Combining over 140 hours of NASA IXPE X-ray polarimetry with radio polarimetry of the magnetar 1E 1547.0-5408 — the first coordinated radio-plus-X-ray polarization campaign on any magnetar — the team measured a striking phase-averaged X-ray polarization degree of 65% at 2 keV, rising to roughly 80% at some rotational phases, with the polarization angle locked to the star's magnetic field. That's the headline number, but the actual QED prediction under test — a dip in polarization degree between 3-4 keV from partial mode conversion at the vacuum resonance in the magnetized atmosphere — shows up at only about 1 sigma. A separate contemporaneous analysis of the same dataset argues the high overall polarization is explainable by viewing geometry alone, without invoking vacuum birefringence at all.
src arXiv:2509.19446 (Stewart et al.); Nature (2026), doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10859-z
XENONnT's ionization-only channel now totals 7.83 tonne-years across 579 live-days and three science runs — the largest dataset of its kind from a liquid-xenon detector. Sub-keV energy deposits, invisible to the primary scintillation channel, let the collaboration set world-leading 90%-CL limits on axion-like particles and dark photons and on sub-GeV dark-matter-electron scattering. No excess over background appeared anywhere in the search. For the lightest candidate masses, sensitivity is now closing in on the "neutrino fog" — the point where coherent solar-neutrino scattering becomes an irreducible background indistinguishable from a dark-matter signal.
src arXiv:2601.11296 (XENON Collaboration); Phys. Rev. Lett. (2026), doi:10.1103/2lrq-f6bk, Editors' Suggestion
Altermagnets are a magnetic phase identified only in the last few years: zero net magnetization, like an antiferromagnet, combined with momentum-dependent spin splitting, like a ferromagnet — a combination the older symmetry classification missed entirely. Until now it had only been observed in real electronic solids. This group built a magnetophotonic crystal with the equivalent antiunitary C4T symmetry and measured the photonic analogue directly in its band structure: momentum-dependent splitting with a d_xy-wave form factor and alternating polarization, the same signature altermagnetic electrons show in momentum space, here for photons instead.
src arXiv:2605.28656; Nature Physics (2026), doi:10.1038/s41567-026-03405-1
Every physical qubit added to a chip needs its own control line under today's local-control architectures, and that wiring is turning into its own scaling bottleneck well before error rates do. This paper works out a class of cyclic stabilizer codes that run under global control instead — the same iSWAP and single-qubit pulses applied to every qubit at once — while keeping every physical qubit doing computation rather than sitting idle as an ancilla. Numerically, the code family's error-correction threshold comes out roughly seven orders of magnitude higher than earlier estimates for globally-controlled arrays. All of this is simulation and code theory; no hardware implementation exists yet, and no qubit count or physical error rate is being claimed against any real device.
src arXiv:2608.05821
orrery-model--with-org-file (build/orrery-model.el:32-45) reads FILE into a
with-temp-buffer, then does this before calling org-mode:
src build/orrery-model.el
7 items
Key: F♯7 (V of B) — six sharps, and the least-visited key in most players' V7 vocabulary. A real test of whether the upper-structure shapes are actually memorized, rather than just pattern-recognized in the easy keys.
src twelve-keys/src/exercises/upper_structures/exercise.py
The upper_structures exercise notes name this tune directly as the one to test the ♭V→II pair on — its V chords sit still long enough to hear the upper voicing brighten right at the resolution. Listen for that moment against today's technical target.
build/orrery.el line 1: ;;; orrery.el --- Build entry point -*- lexical-binding: t; -*-.
Every file under build/ carries the same cookie. Elisp was dynamically
scoped for its first three decades; lexical binding is a per-*file* opt-in,
read from that comment before the file is loaded or compiled, not a global
setting you flip once.
src build/orrery.el
A hybrid calculation of the leading-order hadronic vacuum polarization (HVP) contribution to the muon's anomalous magnetic moment — lattice QCD for the short- and long-distance windows, e+e- → hadrons cross-section data for the window in between — reaches 0.48% precision and predicts a_mu within about 0.5 sigma of Fermilab's final measurement. That's a near-total collapse of the ~4 sigma gap that has stood since 2021 as the best hint of physics beyond the Standard Model. It doesn't erase the disagreement so much as relocate it: the paper's lattice-based intermediate-window value differs from the KLOE-based e+e- value by 6.2 sigma and from BaBar's by 3.5 sigma, while sitting close to the newer CMD-3 measurement.
src arXiv:2407.10913 (hep-lat/hep-ph); published as Nature (2026), doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10449-z
Using 685 live-days (May 2022-July 2025) of scintillator data at SNOLAB (Sudbury, Ontario, 2 km rock overburden), SNO+ reports the first direct geoneutrino flux measurement outside a Northern-Hemisphere continental craton: 49(+13/-12) TNU (terrestrial neutrino units, events per 1032 target protons per year), consistent with reference geological models of U/Th decay in the crust and mantle. Every prior geoneutrino measurement — KamLAND (Japan), Borexino (Italy) — sat on the same broad crustal province.
src arXiv:2604.05746 (SNO+ Collaboration)
DESI DR2's Lyman-alpha forest BAO measurement (from roughly 2 million quasar sightlines), combined with CMB and galaxy BAO, prefers a time-varying dark-energy equation of state (w0waCDM) over flat LambdaCDM at about 3.1 sigma. Adding different Type Ia supernova compilations swings that number between 2.8 sigma (Pantheon+) and 4.2 sigma (DES-SN5YR); Lyman-alpha plus galaxy BAO alone, with no CMB, gives only 1.6 sigma.
src arXiv:2510.21976 (DESI Collaboration)
On the same ~101-physical-qubit, distance-7 surface-code memory that first went below the error-correction threshold in 2024 (0.143% logical error per cycle), Google now routes the code's own syndrome data to a reinforcement- learning agent that continuously retunes physical control parameters (gate timings and frequencies) during the computation, instead of using that data only to decode logical errors after the fact. Combined with a newer decoder (AlphaQubit2), the logical error rate drops to 7.72(9)x10-4 per cycle — roughly half the 2024 figure — and logical-memory stability against deliberately injected parameter drift improves 3.5-fold. Numerical scaling tests on simulated codes with tens of thousands of control parameters show the RL optimization cost holding flat with system size. This is a scaling and stability improvement on an existing processor generation, not a new quantum-advantage claim or a bigger code.
src arXiv:2511.08493 (Google Quantum AI + Google DeepMind); Nature (2026), doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10759-2
4 items
build/orrery.el is the entry point: five require calls wire the other five
files together (orrery-model, orrery-feed, orrery-ir, orrery-render-org,
orrery-render-html), and orrery-build chains model+feed to ir to two
renderers to dist/. Every stage in the pipeline is named exactly once, in
under forty lines.
src build/orrery.el
None of the six files under build/ require cl-lib. Every sequence
operation goes through seq.el instead: seq-take (orrery-ir.el:86),
seq-filter (orrery-ir.el:111), seq-doseq (orrery-ir.el:142,154),
seq-map-indexed (orrery-render-html.el:210), seq-empty-p
(orrery-render-org.el:54). seq.el's functions are generic over sequences —
the same seq-take works on a list or a vector, dispatching internally —
where the cl-lib equivalents (cl-subseq, cl-remove-if) mostly assume
lists and exist as a Common Lisp compatibility shim.
src build/orrery-ir.el, build/orrery-render-html.el, build/orrery-feed.el
Both are just lists of conses; the difference is what you do with the keys.
A plist ((:id "x" :weight 3)) suits a small fixed vocabulary you know at
write-time — plist-get/plist-put compare keys with eq, and keyword
symbols are interned, so that's a pointer check. An alist
(((key . val) ...)) suits keys you don't control — assoc compares with
equal by default, so arbitrary strings work, and duplicate keys shadow
instead of erroring.
src build/orrery-model.el
Emacs's native json-serialize treats any Lisp list you hand it as a JSON
object, never an array: nil is ambiguous between "false", "null" and
"empty object", and a non-empty list gets read as alist/plist key-value
pairs. A vector is the one shape json-serialize always turns into a JSON
array regardless of contents. That's orrery-ir--strings (orrery-ir.el:51-55):
it wraps (or list []) in vconcat purely to flip list to vector, because an
item's :tags is a real Lisp list of strings, and handed over unchanged it
would be misread as an object.
src build/orrery-ir.el
3 items
orrery-model--prop! signals an error naming the offending panel or item when a
required property is absent, following the same rule as the home-manager config
next door.
orrery-build-ir receives generated-at rather than calling current-time.
Only orrery-build-batch reads the clock.
Six Elisp files under build/: orrery-model.el reads the hand-authored
registry, orrery-feed.el merges agent fragments, orrery-ir.el produces and
validates dist/ir.json, and two renderers turn that same IR into an Org digest
and a standalone page.
src this repository