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For turbulent flows, the energy transfer between large and small whirls depends on the dimension of the fluid. Imposing large-scale shear on a three-dimensional system can unexpectedly induce two-dimensional behaviour.
A microscope that can both resolve individual atoms in an optical lattice and control their spin states should enable the exploration of many-body physics.
One of the main uncertainties in the burn-up of X-ray bursts from neutron stars has been removed with the weighing of a key nucleus, 65As, at a new ion storage ring.
Elegant but extremely delicate quantum procedures can increase the precision of measurements. Characterizing how they cope with the detrimental effects of noise is essential for deployment to the real world.
Every metal has a Fermi surface, which gives rise to quantum oscillations in a magnetic field. But the nature of the Fermi surface in cuprate superconductors is a profound mystery that scientists are only starting to unravel.
Rotating black holes twist photons emitted nearby, a peculiar effect in general relativity that is now demonstrated by numerical experiments. This twisted light and its orbital angular momentum could reveal the physics of black holes in more detail than deemed possible before.
Elementary excitations in certain rare-earth titanates emulate the behaviour of a gas of magnetic point charges. Such magnetic monopoles should respond to a magnetic-field pulse exactly as a partially ionized plasma does to an electric-field pulse. This analogy has now been verified.
A thermal Casimir force — an attraction between two metal surfaces caused by thermal, rather than quantum, fluctuations in the electromagnetic field — is now identified experimentally, with implications for our understanding of electrodynamics.
The nonlinear optical process of high-order harmonic generation is usually seen in atomic gases. Now, the process has been observed in a bulk crystalline solid, with important implications for ultrafast coherent short-wavelength sources and perhaps attosecond science.
A study of the autoresonant behaviour of a superconducting pendulum reveals that quantum fluctuations determine only the initial oscillator motion and not its subsequent dynamics. This could be important in the development of more efficient methods for reading solid-state qubits.
Semiconductor quantum dots have good prospects as a platform for implementing a quantum information processor. A demonstration that in such nanostructures quantum information can survive for fractions of a millisecond only adds to this promise.
Emulating condensed-matter physics with ground-state atoms trapped in optical lattices has come a long way. But excite the atoms into higher orbital states, and a whole new world of exotic states appears.
Intuition suggests that the occurrence of large quantum fluctuations should prevent a material from forming a glass, yet theory and simulations that explicitly incorporate such fluctuations suggest the opposite could be true.
