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Alice does not have a quantum computer so she delegates a computation to Bob, who does own one. But how can Alice check whether the computation that Bob performs for her is correct? An experiment with photonic qubits demonstrates such a verification protocol.
On cooling, transition metal oxides often undergo a phase change from an electrically conducting to an insulating state. Now it is shown that the metal–insulator transition temperature of vanadium dioxide thin films can be controlled by applying strain.
The current understanding of the relaxation dynamics in quantum many-body systems is still incomplete, but an ultracold atom experiment brings new insights by confirming the local emergence and propagation of thermal correlations.
The role that quasi-bound spins play in the '0.7 anomaly' is controversial. One study suggests that two or more quasi-bound spins may be involved; another advocates that the 0.7 anomaly is a density-of-states effect, needing neither a quasi-bound spin nor spontaneous spin polarization.
The significance of 'stripes' in certain high-temperature superconductors has been hotly debated for decades. Now a consensus is emerging that there may, in fact, be two networks of different stripes in which shape resonances play a key role in the superconductivity.
A relativistic electron beam travelling on an undulating path interacts with a laser and emits light carrying orbital angular momentum. The wavelengths of these bright twisted-light beams can go down to those of hard X-rays.
The metallic sheet at the heterointerface between two different insulating and non-magnetic oxides displays seemingly conflicting ferromagnetic properties that may be explained by the presence of a spiral magnetic structure.
Although electrically charged black holes seem remote from superconductors and strange metals in the laboratory, they might be intimately related by the holographic dualities discovered in string theory.
A simulation study of a model that mimics certain colloidal particles reveals a surprising low-temperature triumph of entropy, whereby the liquid state persists down to zero temperature.
An electrically controllable spin–orbit interaction at the surface of transition-metal dichalcogenides highlights the wealth of unexpected physics that two-dimensional systems can offer.
Distinguishing between different sources of noise in quantum dots could help to develop single-photon devices that are suitable for long-range entanglement.
A microscopic one-photon subsystem can be entangled with a macroscopic subsystem of thousands of photons: such hybrid micro–macro entanglement, now efficiently produced and verified, should be useful for quantum metrology and for fundamental tests of quantum mechanics.
High-resolution imaging of neuronal networks reveals that spontaneous bursts of collective activity are a consequence of an implosive concentration of noise.
Scanning tunnelling spectroscopy in a heavy-fermion superconductor provides direct access to the anisotropy of the pairing gap, opening a window for investigating the nature of the pairing interaction.
Transformation optics is an invaluable tool for designing metamaterials. The same idea, it is now shown, could also prove to be a boon for nanoplasmonics.
In their search for more favourable environments bacteria choose new directions to explore, usually at random. In a marine bacterium with a single polar flagellum it is now shown that this quest is enhanced by a buckling instability.
