Reviews & Analysis

Nonlocal, nonlinear interactions of optical beams can be described by the Newton–Schrödinger equation for quantum gravity, offering an analogue for studying gravitational phenomena.

Real-time tracking of self-propelled biomolecules provides insight into the physical rules governing self-organization in complex living systems — including evidence to suggest that their alignment requires multiple simultaneous interactions.

For ultracold atoms experiencing a synthetic magnetic field in an optical lattice, it is possible to observe the translational symmetry-breaking pattern determined by the chosen gauge.

Crushing a brittle porous medium such as a box of cereal causes the grains to break up and rearrange themselves. A lattice spring model based on simple physical assumptions gives rise to behaviours that are complex enough to reproduce diverse compaction patterns.

We're well versed on the first-passage time for a random process, but the time required to cover more than one site in a system is a different problem altogether. It turns out that the two measures have more in common than we thought.

Decades-long repeat observations of supernova 1987A offer us unique, real-time insights into the violent death of a massive star and its long-term environmental effects, until its eventual switch-off.

Superpositions of massive objects would be hard to spot on Earth even in well-isolated environments because of the decoherence induced by gravitational time dilation.

When do structures comprising a few crystalline sheets become truly two dimensional? The number of layers certainly plays a role, but in trilayer graphene, the way they're stacked matters too — as shown in a series of Nature Physics papers from 2011.

Granular charging can create some spectacular interactions, but gravity obscures our ability to observe and understand them. A neat desktop experiment circumvents this problem, shining a light on granular clustering — and perhaps even planet formation.

Quantum many-body systems are often so complex as to be intractable. An algorithm that finds the ground state of any one-dimensional quantum system has now been devised, proving that the many-body problem is tractable for quantum spin chains.

The Anderson transition point between localization and diffusion — the mobility edge — has now been directly measured in an ultracold-atom experiment.

A niobium titanite nitride-based superconducting nanodevice — a Cooper-pair transistor — has a remarkably long parity lifetime, exceeding one minute close to absolute zero.

Certain nodes are influential in spreading information — or infection — across a network. But these nodes need not be those with the most connections, and topology can play a key role, as a 2010 paper in Nature Physics established.

The discovery of a new correlation between the incident field and the laser speckle created by multiple scattering takes us a step closer to imaging in turbid media.

Light has long been used to detect the chirality of molecules but high-order harmonic generation now provides access to these chiral interactions on ultrafast timescales.

High-harmonic spectroscopy is a powerful tool for probing the electronic structure of atoms and molecules in gases. Experiments now show that similar emission from solids has a different origin.

Forming molecules from atoms is commonplace in dense atomic gases. But it now seems that some two-dimensional materials provide a suitable environment for creating complex molecular states from the hydrogen-like electron–hole pairs that form in semiconductors.

Three papers published in Nature Physics in 2009 revealed the intriguing three- and four-body bound states arising from the predictions by Vitaly Efimov nearly half a century ago. But some of these findings continue to puzzle the few-body physics community.

Condensation usually describes a winner-takes-all phenomenon, in which a single state is macroscopically occupied. Game theory now reveals a mechanism for selecting an entire network of condensate states in a driven quantum system.

New observations suggest that two highly debated mechanisms for type Ia supernovae — our standard distance 'candles' for astrophysical objects — may both be correct.