News & Views in 2014

Plasmons offer the tantalizing prospect of accelerated light–matter interactions. Accelerated dynamics has now been observed in a hybrid plasmonic laser or spaser, capable of producing pulses on ultrafast timescales.

Laser control of atomic ions through dipole-forbidden transitions has provided a way of probing quantum mechanics. These transitions have now been observed in molecular ions, opening the door to a new generation of spectroscopy experiments.

Many networks interact with one another by forming multilayer networks, but these structures can lead to large cascading failures. The secret that guarantees the robustness of multilayer networks seems to be in their correlations.

The myriad creatures that inhabit the waters of our planet all swim using different mechanisms. Now, a simple relation links key physical observables of underwater locomotion, on scales ranging from millimetres to tens of metres.

The electronic coupling between two stacked atomic layers is usually weak if their periodicities are incommensurate. Optical absorption experiments have now revealed unexpectedly strong interlayer coupling in incommensurate double-walled carbon nanotubes.

A superconducting surface under a drop of ionic liquid, when divided into two banks by a strip of insulating material having a single quantum point contact, becomes a device for discovering quantum phenomena.

Hybrid systems offer attractive possibilities for quantum information processing. Experiments show how off-resonant coupling to a microwave resonator can prolong the storage of photons inside a large collection of precessing spins.

Frustration in spin systems can emerge geometrically in the absence of intrinsic energetic degeneracy — a topologically induced state that can be visualized in terms of a lattice walk. Now, evidence confirms that the exotic 'shakti' lattice gives rise to such a topology.

A cable-like ring of biopolymers helps to pull cells together across the site of a wound. Widely thought to be homogeneous, the traction forces involved are actually remarkably heterogeneous — revealing an unexpected pattern of force generation during wound repair.

Measurements of laser-induced magnetization dynamics suggest that spin currents can be generated on ultrafast timescales. Now it is shown that such currents may be capable of exerting ultrafast spin-transfer torques.

The jury's still out on how glasses and other disordered materials form. However, a new framework suggests that we can understand their mechanical properties without this information, by using the physics of jamming.

Liquid–liquid phase separation is counted among the peculiar phenomena attributed to pure water, but rapid crystallization has rendered its existence hard to prove. Evidence of a 'naked' liquid–liquid transition in a system unencumbered by crystallization encourages us to keep searching.

Probing an unknown quantum state is a resource-intensive endeavour. Now, it is shown that it may be faster to record observations that are themselves quantum superpositions, rather than classical data.

The ionization of atoms and molecules by strong laser fields has become a core technique in modern laser physics. Now, the electrons emerging from ionized molecules are shown to exhibit a memory of the ionization process, resulting in a spatial phase that may influence the interpretation of imaging data.

The origins of the spin Hall effect are difficult to probe, largely because experiments typically characterize electrons near the Fermi surface. Quantum tunnelling spectroscopy now provides access to its energy dependence.

When a bubble bursts at a liquid–gas interface, a portion of gas is released from the liquid. Now, another, counterintuitive process is reported: rapid motion generated by bubble-bursting transports oil droplets from the surface into the interior of a volume of water.