Reviews & Analysis

Spin–orbit entangled local moments in the iridate material Na₂IrO₃ are subject to strong exchange frustration, driving the system towards a spin-liquid phase with emergent fractional excitations.

Quantum entanglement is as confounding as it is potentially useful. A paper in 2006 suggested that its utility might extend to making sense of a fundamental puzzle in statistical mechanics.

Laser tweezers can be used to control particles in a colloidal glass, thereby influencing the dynamics of their neighbours. The range of this influence — and how it changes — may provide a structural mechanism to explain the solidity of glasses.

Odd-denominator fractional quantum Hall states are routinely observed in high-mobility gallium arsenide heterostructures. Now, a 5/2 state has been observed in an oxide heterostructure — an unexpected state in an unexpected material.

A 2006 Nature Physics paper reported phonons in a one-dimensional crystal of aqueous droplets traversing a laminar oil flow — putting microfluidics on the map as a tool for unravelling the mechanisms behind regularity in thermodynamically open systems.

A recent experiment has provided tantalizing evidence in favour of the elusive 'giant pairing vibration' — an exotic excitation of the atomic nucleus.

Classically, it is impossible to infer causal dependencies from the correlations between two variables alone, but in the quantum world causal relationships exist that can be completely characterized by observing the correlations between two systems.

Photons emitted by extragalactic sources provide an opportunity to test quantum gravity effects that modify the speed of light in vacuum. Studying the arrival times of these cosmic messengers further constrains the energy scales involved.

The photons that make up visible light are indivisible. But certain organic materials can use singlet fission to divide the energy from one photon equally between two molecules. Experiments now reveal the molecular dynamics behind this phenomenon.

Over the past decade, ultracold polar molecules have found application in hybrid quantum computation and quantum simulation, directions established in three early papers published in Nature Physics.

Electrons moving in a one-dimensional crystal can acquire a geometrical phase. Sound waves in phononic crystals are now shown to display the same effect — underlining the similarity between conventional solids and acoustic metamaterials.

The transfer of protons across a high barrier only occasionally occurs through quantum-mechanical tunnelling. Low-temperature scanning tunnelling microscopy shows concerted tunnelling of four protons within chiral cyclic water tetramers supported on an inert surface.

Selective evaporation of one component from a mixture is a common process, but in the case of ultracold atomic gases, distillation is more complex.

The Rosetta orbiter following Comet 67P has captured not only the public imagination but also actual dust grains from the comet's nucleus, revealing their composition, morphology and strength.

The monopole picture for spin ice offers a natural description of a confounding class of materials. A 2009 paper in Nature Physics applied it to study the dynamical properties of these systems — sparking intense experimental and theoretical efforts in the years that followed.