Alkali metal intercalation into polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) has been studied intensely following reports of superconductivity in a number of potassium-and rubidium-intercalated materials. There are however no reported crystal structures to inform understanding of the chemistry and physics because of the complex reactivity of PAHs with strong reducing agents at high temperature. Here we present the synthesis of crystalline K2Pentacene and K2Picene by a solid-solid insertion protocol that uses potassium hydride as a redox-controlled reducing agent to access the PAH dianions, enabling determination of their crystal structures. In both cases, the inserted cations expand the parent herringbone packings by reorienting the molecular anions to create multiple potassium sites within initially dense molecular layers, and thus interact with the PAH anion π-systems. The synthetic and crystal chemistry of alkali metal intercalation into PAHs differs from that into fullerenes and graphite, where the cation sites are pre-defined by the host structure.Reaction of alkali and alkaline earth metals with carbon-based molecular solids has been extensively studied in the search for novel magnetic and electronic properties, with a particular focus on superconductivity. [1][2][3][4][5][6] For example, alkali metal intercalation into solid C60 produces A3C60 superconductors, with Tc as high as 38 K for Cs3C60 at 7 kbar. 6 In these materials, cations occupy the interstitial voids that already exist in the host e.g., in the fcc lattice of C60 (Figure 1). 7 Reaction of potassium with picene (C22H14), a phenacene composed of five fused benzene rings, has been reported to afford superconductivity at 18 K. 8 Superconductivity in other alkali-metal polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) was subsequently reported in phenanthrene-, dibenzopentacene-and coronene-based materials, with the highest reported Tc of 33 K claimed 2 in potassium-doped 1,2:8,9-dibenzopentacene. [9][10][11] Despite the significant interest in these materials, to date no crystal structure has been determined for any of the alkali-metal PAH systems. This structural information is a prerequisite for materials design and for understanding of both physical properties and reaction chemistry.Picene, like many other PAHs (including molecules such as phenanthrene 12 which is reported to afford superconductivity on cation insertion), crystallises in the herringbone structure, 13 with layers consisting of two parallel one-dimensional chains of molecules with opposing inclinations defined by an intermolecular angle, ω, of 57.89(7)° (Supplementary Figure 1). 14 The largest voids in the structure are located between the picene layers, adjacent to the saturated C-H bonds and far from the electron density of the PAH π-systems ( Figure 1a). This contrasts with C60, where the octahedral and tetrahedral voids in the fcc lattice are adjacent to the conjugated π-electron system (Figure 1b Pentacene is the linear isomer of picene, and also adopts the herringbone structure, 16 with ω = 52...

We study periodically driven closed quantum systems where two parameters of the system Hamiltonian are driven with frequencies ω1 and ω2 = rω1. We show that such drives may be used to tune towards dynamics induced freezing where the wavefunction of the state of the system after a drive cycle at time T = 2π/ω1 has almost perfect overlap with the initial state. We locate regions in the (ω1, r) plane where the freezing is near exact for a class of integrable and a specific non-integrable model. The integrable models that we study encompass Ising and XY models in d = 1, Kitaev model in d = 2, and Dirac fermions in graphene and atop a topological insulator surface whereas the non-integrable model studied involves the experimentally realized one-dimensional (1D) tilted Bose-Hubbard model in an optical lattice. In addition, we compute the relevant correlation functions of such driven systems and describe their characteristics in the region of (ω1, r) plane where the freezing is near-exact. We supplement our numerical analysis with semi-analytic results for integrable driven systems within adiabatic-impulse approximation and discuss experiments which may test our theory.

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The XXZ model on a square lattice in the presence of a transverse magnetic field is studied within the spin wave theory to investigate the resulting canted antiferromagnet. The small and large field regimes are probed separately both for easy-axis and easy-plane scenarios which reveal an unentangled factorized ground state at an intermediate value of the field. Goldstone modes are obtained for the field-free XY antiferromagnet as well as for the isotropic antiferromagnet with field up to its saturation value. Moreover, for an easy-plane anisotropy, we find that there exists a non-zero field, where magnon degeneracy appears as a result of restoration of an U(1) sublattice symmetry and that, across that field, there occurs a magnon band crossing. For completeness, we then obtain the system phase diagram for S = 1/2 via large scale quantum Monte Carlo simulations using the stochastic series expansion technique. Our numerical method is based on a quantization of spin along the direction of the applied magnetic field and does not suffer from a sign-problem, unlike comparable algorithms based on a spin quantization along the axis of anisotropy. With this formalism, we are also able to obtain powder averages of the transverse and longitudinal magnetizations, which may be useful for understanding experimental measurements on polycrystalline samples.

When irradiated via high frequency circularly polarized light, the stroboscopic dynamics in a Heisenberg spin system on a honeycomb lattice develops a next nearest neighbor (NNN) Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) type term 37 , making it a magnonic Floquet topological insulator. We investigate the entanglement generation and its evolution on such systems -particularly an irradiated ferromagnetic XXZ spin-1 2 model in a honeycomb lattice as the system parameters are optically tuned. In the high frequency limit, we compute the lowest quasi-energy state entanglement in terms of the concurrence between nearest neighbor (NN) and NNN pair of spins and witness the entanglement transitions occurring there. For the easy axis scenario, the unirradiated system forms a product state but entanglement grows between the NNN spin pairs beyond some cut-off DM strength. Contrarily in easy planar case, NN and NNN spins remain already entangled in the unirradiated limit. It then goes through an entanglement transition which causes decrease (increase) of the NN (NNN) concurrences down to zero (up to some higher value) at some critical finite DM interaction strength. For a high frequency of irradiation and a suitably chosen anisotropy parameter, we can vary the field strength to witness sudden death and revival of entanglement in the Floquet system. Both exact diagonalization and modified Lanczos techniques are used to obtain the results upto 24 site lattice. We also calculate the thermal entanglement and obtain estimates for the threshold temperatures below which non-zero concurrence can be expected in the system. arXiv:1806.02125v3 [cond-mat.str-el]