Superconductivity, Charge Density Wave, and Supersolidity in Flat Bands with a Tunable Quantum Metric.

Predicting the fate of an interacting system in the limit where the electronic bandwidth is quenched is often highly nontrivial. The complex interplay between interactions and quantum fluctuations driven by the band geometry can drive competition between various ground states, such as charge density wave order and superconductivity. In this work, we study an electronic model of topologically trivial flat bands with a continuously tunable Fubini-Study metric in the presence of on-site attraction and nearest-neighbor repulsion, using numerically exact quantum Monte Carlo simulations. By varying the electron filling and the minimal spatial extent of the localized flat-band Wannier wave functions, we obtain a number of intertwined orders. These include a phase with coexisting charge density wave order and superconductivity, i.e., a supersolid. In spite of the nonperturbative nature of the problem, we identify an analytically tractable limit associated with a "small" spatial extent of the Wannier functions and derive a low-energy effective Hamiltonian that can well describe our numerical results. We also provide unambiguous evidence for the violation of any putative lower bound on the zero-temperature superfluid stiffness in geometrically nontrivial flat bands.

LoRaWAN Battery-Free Wireless Sensors Network Designed for Structural Health Monitoring in the Construction Domain.

This paper addresses the practical implementation of a wireless sensors network designed to actualize cyber-physical systems that are dedicated to structural health monitoring applications in the construction domain. This network consists of a mesh grid composed of LoRaWAN battery-free wireless sensing nodes that collect physical data and communicating nodes that interface the sensing nodes with the digital world through the Internet. Two prototypes of sensing nodes were manufactured and are powered wirelessly by using a far-field wireless power transmission technique and only one dedicated RF energy source operating in the ISM 868 MHz frequency band. These sensing nodes can simultaneously perform temperature and relative humidity measurements and can transmit the measured data wirelessly over long-range distances by using the LoRa technology and the LoRaWAN protocol. Experimental results for a simplified network confirm that the periodicity of the measurements and data transmission of the sensing nodes can be controlled by the dedicated RF source (embedded in or just controlled by the associated communicating node), by tuning the radiated power density of the RF waves, and without any modification of the software or the hardware implemented in the sensing nodes.