Physics articles within Nature Physics

Featured

  • News & Views |

    Stable regions in four-dimensional phase space have been observed by following the motion of accelerated proton beams subject to nonlinear forces. This provides insights into the physics of dynamical systems and may lead to improved accelerator designs.

    • Giulio Stancari
  • Comment |

    Increasingly, physics graduates take jobs outside academia. Active teaching approaches lead to deeper conceptual understanding and a more varied skill set and are therefore more likely to prepare students for successful careers.

    • Jenaro Guisasola
    •  & Kristina Zuza
  • Comment |

    Computing is central to the enterprise of physics but few undergraduate physics courses include it in their curricula. Here we discuss why and how to integrate computing into physics education.

    • Marcos D. Caballero
    •  & Tor Ole B. Odden
  • Comment |

    Injustices and oppression are pervasive in society, including education. An intersectional, equity-oriented approach can help remove systemic obstacles and improve the experience of marginalized people in physics education through decolonial and critical race lenses.

    • Geraldine L. Cochran
    • , Simone Hyater-Adams
    •  & Ramón S. Barthelemy
  • Perspective |

    Encouraging students to take ownership of their learning can improve their outcomes. This Perspective discusses ways to achieve this in the context of physics education and how digital technology can help Gen Z students in particular.

    • Nam-Hwa Kang
  • News & Views |

    Excitation of magnons — quanta of spin-waves — in an antiferromagnet can be used for high-speed data processing. The addition and subtraction of two such modes opens up possibilities for magnon-based information transfer in the terahertz spectral region.

    • Brijesh Singh Mehra
    •  & Dhanvir Singh Rana
  • News & Views |

    The Hamiltonian describing a quantum many-body system can be learned using measurements in thermal equilibrium. Now, a learning algorithm applicable to many natural systems has been found that requires exponentially fewer measurements than existing methods.

    • Sitan Chen
  • Article |

    Despite being essential to many applications in quantum science, entanglement can be easily disrupted by decoherence. A protocol based on repetitive quantum error correction now demonstrates enhanced coherence times of entangled logical qubits.

    • Weizhou Cai
    • , Xianghao Mu
    •  & Luyan Sun
  • Perspective |

    Quantum computers promise to efficiently predict the structure and behaviour of molecules. This Perspective explores how this could overcome existing challenges in computational drug discovery.

    • Raffaele Santagati
    • , Alan Aspuru-Guzik
    •  & Clemens Utschig-Utschig
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Combining multiparticle levitation with cavity control enables cavity-mediated interaction between levitated nanoparticles, whose strength can be tailored via optical detuning and position of the two particles.

    • Jayadev Vijayan
    • , Johannes Piotrowski
    •  & Lukas Novotny
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Photon-mediated entanglement in atomic ensembles coupled to cavities enables the engineering of quantum states with a graph-like entanglement structure. This offers potential advantages in quantum computation and metrology.

    • Eric S. Cooper
    • , Philipp Kunkel
    •  & Monika Schleier-Smith
  • Article |

    Most applications of surface plasmons are based on their near-field properties. These properties are now shown to be governed by nonclassical scattering between multiparticle plasmonic subsystems.

    • Mingyuan Hong
    • , Riley B. Dawkins
    •  & Omar S. Magaña-Loaiza
  • News & Views |

    Electric dipoles are common in insulators, but extremely rare in metals. This situation may be about to change, thanks to flexoelectricity.

    • Gustau Catalan
  • Article |

    Topologically protected hinge modes could be important for developing quantum devices, but electronic transport through those states has not been demonstrated. Now quantum transport has been shown in gapless topological hinge states.

    • Md Shafayat Hossain
    • , Qi Zhang
    •  & M. Zahid Hasan
  • News & Views |

    Ageing is a non-linear, irreversible process that defines many properties of glassy materials. Now, it is shown that the so-called material-time formalism can describe ageing in terms of equilibrium-like properties.

    • Beatrice Ruta
    •  & Daniele Cangialosi
  • News & Views |

    Interacting emitters are the fundamental building blocks of quantum optics and quantum information devices. Pairs of organic molecules embedded in a crystal can become permanently strongly interacting when they are pumped with intense laser light.

    • Stuart J. Masson
  • News & Views |

    Some quantum acoustic resonators possess a large number of phonon modes at different frequencies. Direct interactions between modes similar to those available for photonic devices have now been demonstrated. This enables manipulation of multimode states.

    • Audrey Bienfait
  • Measure for Measure |

    Adaptive optics allows scientists to correct for distortions of an image caused by the scattering of light. Anita Chandran illuminates the nature of the technique.

    • Anita Mary Chandran
  • News & Views |

    The integration of theory and experiment makes possible tracking the slow evolution of a photodoped Mott insulator to a distinct non-equilibrium metallic phase under the influence of electron-lattice coupling.

    • Denitsa R. Baykusheva
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The standard current–phase relation in tunnel Josephson junctions involves a single sinusoidal term, but real junctions are more complicated. The effects of higher Josephson harmonics have now been identified in superconducting qubit devices.

    • Dennis Willsch
    • , Dennis Rieger
    •  & Ioan M. Pop
  • News & Views |

    Quantum simulators can provide new insights into the complicated dynamics of quantum many-body systems far from equilibrium. A recent experiment reveals that underlying symmetries dictate the nature of universal scaling dynamics.

    • Maximilian Prüfer
  • News & Views |

    Some cerium and uranium compounds exhibit unusual transport properties due to localized electron states. Recent experiments demonstrate that quantum interference on frustrated lattices provides an alternative route to this behaviour.

    • William R. Meier
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The existence of Bragg glasses—featuring nearly perfect crystalline order and glassy features—has yet to be experimentally confirmed for disordered charge-density-wave systems. A machine-learning-based experimental study now provides evidence for a Bragg glass phase in the charge density waves of PdxErTe3.

    • Krishnanand Mallayya
    • , Joshua Straquadine
    •  & Eun-Ah Kim
  • News & Views |

    Some exotic metals exhibit competing electronic states that can be influenced by small perturbations. Now, a study of a kagome superconductor shows that this competition is exquisitely sensitive to weak strain fields, providing insight into its anomalous electronic properties.

    • Stephen D. Wilson
  • News & Views |

    When cracks creep forward in our three-dimensional world, they do so because of accompanying cracks racing perpendicular to the main direction of motion with almost sonic speed. Clever experiments have now directly demonstrated this phenomenon.

    • Michael Marder
  • News & Views |

    Inertial confinement represents one of two viable approaches for producing energy from the fusion of hydrogen isotopes. Scientists have now achieved a record yield of fusion energy when directly irradiating targets with only 28 kilojoules of laser energy.

    • Vladimir Tikhonchuk