News & Comment

Simon Batzner, Albert Musaelian and Boris Kozinsky discuss how exploiting the symmetry of Euclidean space can help tackle challenges in molecular simulations.

A paper in Nature Physics reports on freezing droplets that expel themselves from a textured surface.

A paper in Physical Review Letters reports on droplets that crumple or wrinkle as they dry, depending on whether they are above or below a substrate.

A paper in Journal of Fluid Mechanics presents a detailed characterization of what happens when two droplets hit a solid surface simultaneously — a situation that is relatively little-studied.

A paper in Physical Review Fluids shows that the early stages of growth of a bubble blown with gas from a reservoir can show an unexpected dependence on the reservoir’s initial volume.

A paper in Physical Review Applied reports on how the ink composition evolves over time in an inkjet printhead nozzle that is left idle.

A paper in Physics of Fluids reports on bubbles collapsing near a thin cylindrical fibre, which generate unusual planar jets.

As we go into the Northern Hemisphere summer beach reads season — and the Southern Hemisphere winter fireside time — we share five biographical books we’ve been reading recently.

This is the ‘behind the paper’ story of a 1953 article that established the use of Monte Carlo methods in physics.

In the June issue we celebrate the past and present of quantum physics and try to imagine its future.

Denise Völker, Head of Sustainability at DESY, shares how a dedicated sustainability office can lead the way in cutting the environmental impact of a big science facility.

In 1973, Philip Anderson published a paper introducing the resonating valence bond state, which can be recognized in retrospect as a topologically ordered phase of matter — one that cannot be classified in the conventional way according to its patterns of spontaneously broken symmetry. Steven Kivelson and Shivaji Sondhi reflect on the impact of this paper over the past 50 years.

75 years ago Richard Feynman developed a new approach to non-relativistic quantum mechanics: the path integral formulation.

Dmitry Krotov discusses recent theoretical advances in Hopfield networks and their broader impact in the context of energy-based neural architectures.

One hundred years ago, Louis de Broglie posed a question: could matter particles behave like waves? This duality was already known for light; extending it to electrons and indeed all matter had huge implications, especially for the development of quantum mechanics.

Two recent experiments push the limits of nonlocality using massive particles and mesoscopic systems.

A paper in Physical Review Letters measures the spatial confinement of chiral edge modes and presents a model to show how it varies depending on disorder.

A paper in Nature Physics directly measures quantized conductance arising from the bulk states of a topological insulator.

A paper in Nano Letters uses optical excitations to probe the ultrafast carrier dynamics of magnetic topological insulator heterostructures.

A paper in Physical Review B shows that the layer Hall effect can be quantized in ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic topological insulators.