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Cooling the motion of mechanical resonators to the ground state and subsequent advances in cavity optomechanics have been made possible by resolved-sideband cooling — an atomic-physics-inspired technique — first demonstrated in a 2008 Nature Physics paper.
A new measurement from the LHCb experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider impinges on a puzzle that has been troubling physicists for decades — namely the breaking of the symmetry between matter and antimatter.
A model describing spin-dependent conduction in metals underpins modern magnetic technologies. Magnetotransport under the fundamental conditions of this model has now been probed experimentally.
The traditional approaches to quantum information processing using either discrete or continuous variables can be combined in hybrid protocols for tasks including quantum teleportation, computation, entanglement distillation or Bell tests.
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.
Similar to orbital angular momentum-carrying optical beams, it is now possible to engineer structured electron beams that could find applications in imaging, nanofabrication and the study of fundamental phenomena.
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.
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 transition to widespread connectivity in networks is aptly described by concepts borrowed from percolation theory. Attempts to delay the transition with small interventions lead to explosive percolation, with drastic consequences for the system.
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.
