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The visible mass in the Universe emerged when hadrons — the building blocks of atomic nuclei — formed from a hot fireball made of quarks and gluons. This mechanism has now been investigated in baryon-rich matter at relatively low temperatures.
Two-level quantum systems are routinely excited by resonant pump beams. Experiments now show resonant excitation through dichromatic, detuned pumps — providing a coherent control technique that will also aid single-photon emission from solid-state devices.
Floquet engineering harnesses alternating fields to create a topological band structure in an otherwise ordinary material. These fields drive plasmons that can spontaneously split into chiral circulating modes and induce magnetization.
Photonic circuits naturally implement boson sampling, a quantum algorithm that is classically hard to solve. Four photon pairs produced and processed within a single silicon chip have now been used to run it, a step towards besting classical computers.
The superconductor–insulator phase transition is a quantum phenomenon that reveals a competition between the superconducting phase order and charge localization. Now, microwave spectroscopy is shown to be a promising approach to investigate this effect in controllable one-dimensional Josephson arrays.
A demonstration that Michael Berry’s legacy can inform our understanding of Lamb waves in stratified fluids serves as a reminder of the reach of topological thinking — as well as its potential utility.
A rich pattern of fractional quantum Hall states in graphene double layers can be naturally explained in terms of two-component composite fermions carrying both intra- and interlayer vortices.
A type of stochastic neural network called a restricted Boltzmann machine has been widely used in artificial intelligence applications for decades. They are now finding new life in the simulation of complex wavefunctions in quantum many-body physics.
The detection of the quantum state of tens of neutral atoms arranged in arrays has reached a new record fidelity. This brings fault-tolerant quantum computation and simulation closer to reality.
A theoretical analysis of exotic superconductors suggests that it is possible to manipulate the state of their order parameter with light. This will help engineer devices from topological superconductors by patterning regions with different orders.
While Bose–Einstein condensates of atoms were achieved in the mid-1990s, extending the regime of quantum degeneracy to polar molecules took another two decades of dedicated work. The researchers that contributed to this achievement span many generations of students in many different laboratories around the world.
The transport properties of many two-dimensional systems are strongly affected by the proximity of a periodic pattern. Colloidal particles are now shown to have preferred sliding routes due to competing symmetries between two unmatched crystalline surfaces.
A measurement based on quantum entanglement of the parameter describing the asymmetry of the Λ hyperon decay is inconsistent with the current world average. This shows that relying on previous measurements can be hazardous.
A variety of magnetic structures based around ferromagnetic spin spirals have been the topic of intense study over the past decade. The discovery of spin spirals that arise from antiferromagnetic order has just broadened the horizons for magnetic possibilities even further.
Experiments and simulations show that trains of droplets in microfluidic networks undergo synchronized oscillations, and that strategies to prevent these oscillations can help maintain uniform distribution of red blood cells in microcirculation.
An experimental study of living cells suggests that single myosin molecules are capable of generating unusually large forces. The observation is supported by a theoretical model — and demonstrates the complexity of in vivo force generation.
The mechanics of many materials can be modelled by a network of balls connected by springs. A bottom-up approach based on differential geometry now captures changes in mechanics upon network growth or merger, going beyond the linear deformation regime.
Rich data are revealing that complex dependencies between the nodes of a network may not be captured by models based on pairwise interactions. Higher-order network models go beyond these limitations, offering new perspectives for understanding complex systems.
One of the fundamental radioactive decay modes of nuclei is β decay. Now, nuclear theorists have used first-principles simulations to explain nuclear β decay properties across a range of light- to medium-mass isotopes, up to 100Sn.