Large Scale Simulations of Photosynthetic Antenna Systems: Interplay of Cooperativity and Disorder.

Large-scale simulations of light-matter interaction in natural photosynthetic antenna complexes containing more than one hundred thousands of chlorophyll molecules, comparable with natural size, have been performed. Photosynthetic antenna complexes present in Green sulfur bacteria and Purple bacteria have been analyzed using a radiative non-Hermitian Hamiltonian, well-known in the field of quantum optics, instead of the widely used dipole-dipole Frenkel Hamiltonian. This approach allows us to study ensembles of emitters beyond the small volume limit (system size much smaller than the absorbed wavelength), where the Frenkel Hamiltonian fails.

From asking to observing. Behavioural measures of socio-emotional and motivational skills in large-scale assessments.

Socio-emotional and motivational skills are routinely measured using self-reports in large-scale educational assessments. Measures exploiting test-takers' behaviour during the completion of questionnaires or cognitive tests are increasingly used as alternatives to self-reports in the economics of education literature. We compute behavioural measures of socio-emotional and motivational skills using data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

COVID-19 and inequalities in educational achievement in Italy.

We use longitudinal data from over 1.5 million Italian students to examine differences in the mathematics and reading achievement of students who completed primary and lower secondary school in 2020-21 (COVID cohort) and those who completed it in 2018-19 (non-COVID cohort). We also examine the evolution of inequalities by gender, socio-economic condition, and prior academic achievement during the pandemic.

Spectrum statistics in the integrable Lieb-Liniger model.

We address the old and widely debated question of the spectrum statistics of integrable quantum systems, through the analysis of the paradigmatic Lieb-Liniger model. This quantum many-body model of one-dimensional interacting bosons allows for the rigorous determination of energy spectra via the Bethe ansatz approach and our interest is to reveal the characteristic properties of energy levels in dependence of the model parameters. Using both analytical and numerical studies we show that the properties of spectra strongly depend on whether the analysis is done for a full energy spectrum or for a single subset with fixed total momentum.

Performance decline in a low-stakes test at age 15 and educational attainment at age 25: Cross-country longitudinal evidence.

Introduction: Educational attainment is associated with important life outcomes including labour market performance, health status, well-being, civic and political participation. An important question is whether it is possible to identify early those students who lack the achievement motivation that is needed to complete a higher education degree.

Methods: Longitudinal follow-ups of representative samples of participants in the 2000 and 2003 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) from Australia, Denmark and Switzerland (N = 3110; 1130; and 1962; age = 15 to 27; % females 51%, 51%, 49%; ethnicity/race unknown) were used to identify the association between a measure of effort on a cognitively demanding low-stake task at age 15 - performance decline during the test - and educational attainment at age 25-27.

The evolution of the association between community level social capital and COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations in the United States.

We use county level data from the United States to document the role of social capital the evolution of COVID-19 between January 2020 and January 2021. We find that social capital differentials in COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations depend on the dimension of social capital and the timeframe considered. Communities with higher levels of relational and cognitive social capital were especially successful in lowering COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations than communities with lower social capital between late March and early April.

Disorder-Enhanced and Disorder-Independent Transport with Long-Range Hopping: Application to Molecular Chains in Optical Cavities.

Overcoming the detrimental effect of disorder at the nanoscale is very hard since disorder induces localization and an exponential suppression of transport efficiency. Here we unveil novel and robust quantum transport regimes achievable in nanosystems by exploiting long-range hopping. We demonstrate that in a 1D disordered nanostructure in the presence of long-range hopping, transport efficiency, after decreasing exponentially with disorder at first, is then enhanced by disorder [disorder-enhanced transport (DET) regime] until, counterintuitively, it reaches a disorder-independent transport (DIT) regime, persisting over several orders of disorder magnitude in realistic systems.

A Review of Evidence on the Role of Digital Technology in Shaping Attention and Cognitive Control in Children.

The role of digital technology in shaping attention and cognitive development has been at the centre of public discourse for decades. The current review presents findings from three main bodies of literature on the implications of technology use for attention and cognitive control: television, video games, and digital multitasking. The aim is to identify key lessons from prior research that are relevant for the current generation of digital users.

Gender disparities in fear of failure among 15-year-old students: The role of gender inequality, the organisation of schooling and economic conditions.

Introduction: Prior research indicates that female students express higher fear of failure than male students and that fear of failure is associated with lower social and emotional well-being and higher levels of stress, anxiety, burnout and depression. Fear of failure also leads individuals to limit their choices and take fewer risks than would be warranted given their ability and context to minimise the possibility of failing.

Methods: We examined cross-country differences in gender gaps in fear of failure as well as factors that explain gender gaps and variations of gender gaps across countries using multilevel modelling techniques.

Bowling together by bowling alone: Social capital and COVID-19.

Social capital describes the social bonds that exist within a community and comprises norms of reciprocity and trust as well as social relationships and social networks. We use data from counties in the United States to identify if community level responses to COVID-19 during the early phase of the pandemic (February 17 - May 10) depended on levels of social capital. We find that individuals who lived in counties with high levels of social capital reduced mobility faster than individuals living in counties with low levels of social capital and that they especially reduced mobility directed at retail and recreational activities, i.

Thermal Decoherence of Superradiance in Lead Halide Perovskite Nanocrystal Superlattices.

Recent experiments by Rainò et al. ( 2018, 563, 671-675) have documented cooperative emission from CsPbBr nanocrystal superlattices, exhibiting the hallmarks of low-temperature superradiance. In particular, the optical response is coherent and the radiative decay rate is increased by a factor of 3, relative to that of individual nanocrystals.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) fatality risk perception of US adult residents in March and April 2020.

The study compares empirical results on the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (causing COVID-19) fatality risk perception of US adult residents stratified for age, gender, and race in mid-March 2020 (N  = 1,182) and mid-April 2020 (N  = 953). While the fatality risk perception has increased from March 2020 to April 2020, our findings suggest that many US adult residents severely underestimated their absolute and relative fatality risk (i.e.

Education and Attitudes Toward Migration in a Cross Country Perspective.

The paper examines the dynamics of native populations' opposition to migration and the role of education in shaping such opposition in European countries using data from the last four editions of the European Social Survey between years 2010 and 2016. We examine both the direct association between education and opposition to migration as well as the mediated association that occurs through feelings of threat. We test for measurement equivalence across countries and years of the two latent constructs in our analyses (opposition to migration and feelings of threat) by applying sequential methods used in alignment optimization to identify partial equivalence and check the level of approximate measurement invariance using BSEM modeling.

Timescales in the quench dynamics of many-body quantum systems: Participation ratio versus out-of-time ordered correlator.

We study quench dynamics in the many-body Hilbert space using two isolated systems with a finite number of interacting particles: a paradigmatic model of randomly interacting bosons and a dynamical (clean) model of interacting spins-1/2. For both systems in the region of strong quantum chaos, the number of components of the evolving wave function, defined through the number of principal components N_{pc} (or participation ratio), was recently found to increase exponentially fast in time [Phys. Rev.

Emergence of correlations in the process of thermalization of interacting bosons.

We address the question of the relevance of thermalization and scrambling to the increase of correlations in the quench dynamics of an isolated system with a finite number of interacting bosons. Specifically, we study how, in the process of thermalization, the correlations between occupation numbers increase in time, resulting in the emergence of the Bose-Einstein distribution. Despite the exponential increase of the number of principal components of the wave function, we show, both analytically and numerically, that the two-point correlation function before saturation increases quadratically in time according to perturbation theory.

Exponentially fast dynamics of chaotic many-body systems.

We demonstrate analytically and numerically that in isolated quantum systems of many interacting particles, the number of many-body states participating in the evolution after a quench increases exponentially in time, provided the eigenstates are delocalized in the energy shell. The rate of the exponential growth is defined by the width Γ of the local density of states and is associated with the Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy for systems with a well-defined classical limit. In a finite system, the exponential growth eventually saturates due to the finite volume of the energy shell.

Will the last be first and the first last? The role of classroom registers in cognitive skill acquisition.

The paper estimates the effect of students' position in the classroom register on their academic performance. We use a unique dataset from Poland which contains information on the academic outcomes of students in the humanities, science and mathematics lower secondary school exams as well as the position students occupy in their classroom register. We find that students whose names are recorded near the end of the class list have lower performance than those students whose names are recorded near the beginning of the list.

Optimal dephasing for ballistic energy transfer in disordered linear chains.

We study the interplay between dephasing, disorder, and coupling to a sink on transport efficiency in a one-dimensional chain of finite length N, and in particular the beneficial or detrimental effect of dephasing on transport. The excitation moves along the chain by coherent nearest-neighbor hopping Ω, under the action of static disorder W and dephasing γ. The last site is coupled to an external acceptor system (sink), where the excitation can be trapped with a rate Γ_{trap}.

Association between literacy and self-rated poor health in 33 high- and upper middle-income countries.

Objectives: To assess the relationship between general literacy proficiency and self-rated poor health by analyzing data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, an international survey conducted from 2011 to 2015 in 33 high- and upper middle-income countries and national sub-regions.

Methods: Logistic regression was used to model general literacy proficiency as a predictor of self-rated poor health.

Results: Data from 167,062 adults aged 25-65 years were analyzed.

Temperature of a single chaotic eigenstate.

The onset of thermalization in a closed system of randomly interacting bosons at the level of a single eigenstate is discussed. We focus on the emergence of Bose-Einstein distribution of single-particle occupation numbers, and we give a local criterion for thermalization dependent on the eigenstate energy. We show how to define the temperature of an eigenstate, provided that it has a chaotic structure in the basis defined by the single-particle states.

Opening-assisted coherent transport in the semiclassical regime.

We study quantum enhancement of transport in open systems in the presence of disorder and dephasing. Quantum coherence effects may significantly enhance transport in open systems even in the semiclassical regime (where the decoherence rate is greater than the intersite hopping amplitude), as long as the disorder is sufficiently strong. When the strengths of disorder and dephasing are fixed, there is an optimal opening strength at which the coherent transport enhancement is optimized.

Cooperative Shielding in Many-Body Systems with Long-Range Interaction.

In recent experiments with ion traps, long-range interactions were associated with the exceptionally fast propagation of perturbation, while in some theoretical works they have also been related with the suppression of propagation. Here, we show that such apparently contradictory behavior is caused by a general property of long-range interacting systems, which we name cooperative shielding. It refers to shielded subspaces that emerge as the system size increases and inside of which the evolution is unaffected by long-range interactions for a long time.

Optimal efficiency of quantum transport in a disordered trimer.

Disordered quantum networks, such as those describing light-harvesting complexes, are often characterized by the presence of peripheral ringlike structures, where the excitation is initialized, and inner structures and reaction centers (RCs), where the excitation is trapped and transferred. The peripheral rings often display distinguished coherent features: Their eigenstates can be separated, with respect to the transfer of excitation, into two classes of superradiant and subradiant states. Both are important to optimize transfer efficiency.

Education and Self-Reported Health: Evidence from 23 Countries on the Role of Years of Schooling, Cognitive Skills and Social Capital.

We examine the contribution of human capital to health in 23 countries worldwide using the OECD Survey of Adult Skills, a unique large-scale international assessment of 16-65 year olds that contains information about self-reported health, schooling, cognitive skills and indicators of interpersonal trust, which represents the cognitive dimension of social capital. We identify cross-national differences in education, skill and social capital gradients in self-reported health and explore the interaction between human capital and social capital to examine if and where social capital is a mediator or a moderator of years of schooling and cognitive abilities. We find large education gaps in self-reported health across all countries in our sample and a strong positive relationship between self-reported health and both literacy and trust in the majority of countries.