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Certain bacteria cells respond to the stress of long-term exposure to antibiotics by changing their shape. Single-cell experiments and modelling cast this as a mechanical feedback strategy that makes bacteria more adaptive to surviving antibiotics.
A supersolid is a phase of matter featuring both crystalline order as a solid and global phase coherence as a superfluid. Now an experiment shows how this global phase coherence can be established across the system in a non-equilibrium process.
A spectroscopic study shows that vibrational pumping can be used to coherently control optical d–d transitions of electronic origin in the transition metal oxide system CuGeO3.
Repeatedly measuring an array of qubits can create topologically distinct phases depending on which measurements are applied. Lavasani et al. show that critical behaviour can arise from the competition between different choices of measurements.