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Wrinkling happens because of mechanical instabilities arising from length mismatches. A theory now describes wrinkling in confined elastic shells and is expected to be relevant for the controlled design of complex wrinkle patterns.
Predictions of the properties of 208Pb from first principles augmented by statistical learning techniques reproduce those seen in experiments but rule out very thick neutron skins.
Control of magnetization is important for applications in spintronics. Now, the piezomagnetic effect allows strain to control the anomalous Hall effect in a metal at room temperature by rotating its antiferromagnetic order.
In active solids, work is performed by elastically coupled units. By studying a minimal experimental model of an active solid, actuation mechanisms resulting in a collectively oscillating displacement field that drives work cycles are now identified.
A superconducting diode effect is observed at zero magnetic field in twisted trilayer graphene. This suggests that time-reversal symmetry is intrinsically broken and leads to pairing between electrons with non-zero centre-of-mass momentum.
Supercooled water undergoes a liquid–liquid phase transition. The authors show that the two phases have distinct hydrogen-bond networks, differing in their degree of entanglement, and thus the transition can be described by the topological changes of the network.
Long-lived entanglement is a key resource for quantum metrology with optical clocks. Rydberg-based entangling gates within arrays of neutral atoms enable the generation of clock-transition Bell states with high fidelity and long coherence times.
Cilia are composed of cytoskeletal filaments and molecular motors and are characterized by a wave-like motion. Here the authors show that this motion is reconstituted in vitro from the self-assembly of polymerizing actin filaments and myosin motors.
When independent layers of electrons and holes are in close proximity to each other, their Coulomb interaction allows them to pair into neutral bosons and form an insulating state. This phenomenon is reported in a heterostructure of 2D materials.
The simulation of quantum dynamics is a challenging task to solve with classical resources. An experiment with a trapped-ion quantum processor now shows the efficient simulation of the evolution of large-scale many-body quantum systems.
X-ray ultrafast transient absorption spectroscopy captures the charge migration in neutral silane molecules, which shows in the spectra as pairs of quantum beats.
A self-assembled DNA structure is coupled to a nanopore and exhibits continuous rotation in the presence of nanoscale flows driven by electric fields or ionic gradients.
Interactive protocols can verify that a quantum computer exhibits a computational speedup using only classical analysis of its output. Exploiting a connection to Bell’s theorem gives a simpler protocol that is much less demanding for experiments.
Epithelial tissues such as those in the gut or skin are strongly polar, generating electric fields that play a role in wound healing and nutrient transport. Changing the field direction in a layer of tissue disrupts its homeostatic stability.
Non-Abelian Thouless pumping, whose outcome depends on the order of pumping operations, has been observed in photonic waveguides with degenerate flat bands.
Living cells change their behaviour in response to the viscosity of the medium surrounding them. An in vitro study shows that cells spread wider and move faster in a highly viscous medium, provided they have an actively ruffling lamellipodium.
Avalanches can occur when a porous snow layer lies beneath a dense cohesive snow slab. Field experiments and simulations now reveal different crack-propagation regimes in slab avalanches, similar to rupture propagation following an earthquake.
Experiments inspired by the behaviour of active matter show that an external optical stimulus can spatially reconfigure colloidal random lasers and continuously tune their lasing threshold.
In generic quantum many-body systems, initial configurations far from equilibrium are expected to undergo general thermalization. An experiment with ultracold atoms now shows evidence of a class of spin-helix states that evade such behaviour.