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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.
Magnons provide a route for information-processing technologies that are free from charge-related dissipations. Advances in the manipulation of magnons, and the conversion to charge currents, bring magnon-based computing closer to realization.
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.
Topological insulators are often considered to be one-band problems that are easy to solve. However, strongly correlated topological insulators cannot be described by band theory because the electrons fractionalize into other degrees of freedom.
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.
The discovery of spin-triplet Cooper pairs at superconductor/ferromagnet interfaces provides a route for combining superconducting and magnetic orders. Recent advances and challenges in the field of superconducting spintronics are now reviewed.
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.
