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A planet's rings can be distorted by the gravitational pull of its satellites, and these complex interactions have been difficult to disentangle. Saturn's moon Prometheus, however, has now been caught returning to the scene of the crime.
The spin of a photoluminescent nitrogen centre in diamond has a long life-time that could be useful as a qubit, for example. It's difficult enough to image such a single spin — imagine using that bright spin to detect nearby invisible 'dark' spins.
An atomic Bose–Einstein condensate represents a highly correlated, coherent state of matter. Experiments now reveal that the collective matter-wave properties extend to include coherent dynamics of the spin degrees of freedom.
Excited quantum states in nature are normally extremely short-lived, and this certainly applies to most nuclei. But what makes the metastable nuclear states different? And how can we exploit them for useful applications?
Whether or not a superconductor is truly superconducting depends on its size and even its shape. In a geometry intermediate between one and two dimensions, it seems a thin film does not reach a state of zero resistance except at zero temperature.
Read-heads based on the manipulation of spin have already revolutionized the performance of magnetic data storage devices. The development of more-complex spin-devices using carbon nanotubes could enable the next logical step in spintronics.