Research articles

The many phases of water ice continue to be fertile ground for surprising discoveries. This latest study reveals that ice II vanishes from the phase diagram of water upon the addition of small amounts of ammonium fluoride.

Experiments on a magnetostrictive material reveal the conversion between coherent magnons and phonons that have spin.

Epithelial cells are shown to scale via a shape distribution that is common to a number of different systems, suggesting that cell shape and shape variability are constrained through a relationship that is purely geometrical.

Optomechanical coupling to macroscopic phonon modes of a bulk acoustic-wave resonator is demonstrated, providing access to high acoustics quality factors for phononic modes at high frequencies that are robust to decoherence.

Finding the relevant degrees of freedom of a system is a key step in any renormalization group procedure. But this can be difficult, particularly in strongly interacting systems. A machine-learning algorithm proves adept at identifying them for us.

A quantity that connects quantum information and gravity in the light of gauge/gravity correspondence is pointed out, leading to interesting properties of the entanglement of purification predicted in the holographic theories.

Doppler-free, ultrahigh-resolution rotational spectroscopy is reported for small molecular ions in a linear quadrupole trap. With 10^–9 fractional linewidth, this method has a 50-fold improvement over previous reports.

By means of a sensitive neutron spectroscopy approach the magnetic excitations in the heavy fermion superconductor CeRhIn₅ are probed, revealing a uniaxial anisotropy that can be tuned with an external magnetic field.

When an electron with specific orbit — either clockwise or anticlockwise — in a rare gas atom is selectively ionized, the remaining ion will possess a stationary ring current, which can be probed in a time-delayed second ionization step.

A metamaterial-based acoustic sink has been designed to serve the purpose of absorbing the diverging waves and demonstrating three-dimensional sub-diffraction spherical sound wave focusing.

Erasing a bit of information has a fundamental, minimal energy cost that is given by the Landauer limit. The erasure of quantum information from a quantum-spin memory register encoded in a molecular nanomagnet is shown to obey the same principle.

Magnetotransport measurements show that ZrTe₅ exhibits an anomalous Hall effect without magnetic ordering, a signature of Berry curvature introduced by Weyl nodes. This indicates that ZrTe₅ may be a Weyl semimetal, even though this was not predicted.

Cavity polaritons whose matter component is composed of highly excited Rydberg atoms are shown to act as a zero-dimensional quantum dot. Trapping 150 polaritons led to the observation of blockaded photon transport.

Complex networks are not obviously renormalizable, as different length scales coexist. Embedding networks in a geometrical space allows the definition of a renormalization group that can be used to construct smaller-scale replicas of large networks.

Electrons can be accelerated by astrophysical shocks if they are sufficiently fast to start with. As laboratory laser-produced shock experiments reveal, this can be achieved by lower-hybrid waves generated by a shock-reflected ion instability.

Deterministic entanglement of a superconducting qubit and an itinerant microwave photon followed by high-fidelity qubit readout realizes a quantum non-demolition measurement of a microwave photon.

Significant enhancement of carrier injection into the conduction band is observed for GaAs subjected to intense resonant near-infrared laser pumping. Attosecond-resolved investigation reveals the interplay between the intra- and interband transitions.

A technique allows optimal inference of the structure of a network when the available observed data are rich but noisy, incomplete or otherwise unreliable.

The first observational evidence of plasma heating through the dissipation of Alfvén-wave energy in tenuous regions of solar magnetism provides fresh insight into heating processes in the solar atmosphere, and in other magnetohydrodynamic systems.

The Gilbert damping constant, a fundamental parameter to describe magnetization dynamics, is an isotropic scalar for most magnetic materials. Now, at a metal/semiconductor interface, the emergence of anisotropic magnetic damping has been observed.