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Near-term quantum computations are susceptible to noise that — left uncorrected — can destroy the correlations responsible for quantum computational speedups. New work develops tools for bolstering the noise resilience of these speedups.
Novel non-equilibrium phases of matter have recently become the focus of intense interest. The realization of topological phases which cannot exist under the constraints of thermodynamic equilibrium is a key aim.
Everybody who has ever made a paper airplane and been disappointed as it spins out of control, crashing to the ground, knows how tricky achieving suitable trim and stability for gliding can be. But, somehow, wiggling flying snakes glide without tumbling.
An elegant experiment showing that acoustic waves are amplified after scattering by a rotating body demonstrates an effect predicted in 1971 by Yakov Zel’dovich. This result has implications for the understanding of scattering from black holes.
Experiments show how the magnetic order in antiferromagnets can be manipulated through lattice vibrations excited by a laser. This induces a large and reversible magnetic moment at very high speed.
Quantum cascade lasers are bright and compact semiconductor lasers that emit light in the mid- to far-infrared spectral region. The use of a closed ring cavity has now set them on the path towards ultrafast pulses.
A laser–plasma experiment has recreated shock waves in collisionless, weakly magnetized conditions and evidenced electron acceleration to relativistic energies, offering unprecedented insight into a long-standing problem in astrophysics.
Microscopic motile cilia, beating in synchrony across large scales, move the liquid lining of our lungs, protecting from infection and dirt. Surprisingly, a disordered arrangement of cilia, as observed in nature, is shown to be optimal for airway clearance.
Systems of neutral atoms are gradually gaining currency as a promising candidate for realizing large-scale quantum computing. The achievement of a record-high fidelity in quantum operation with alkaline-earth Rydberg atoms is a case in point.
This Perspective argues that an approach called extreme value theory is appropriate for understanding the so-called tail risk of epidemic outbreaks, in particular by demonstrating that the distribution of fatalities due to epidemic outbreaks over the past 2500 years is fat-tailed and dominated by extreme events.
The identification of superconductivity and strong interactions in twisted bilayer 2D materials prompted many questions about the interplay of these phenomena. This Perspective presents the status of the field and the urgent issues for future study.
Equilibrium self-assembly processes find free-energy minima but no such general statement holds for systems driven out of equilibrium. A new study has employed laser-induced convective flows to achieve dissipative self-assembly across multiple scales with universal growth and fluctuation statistics.
The Future Circular Colliders are proposed as a future step after the Large Hadron Collider has stopped running. The first stage foresees collision of electron–positron pairs before a machine upgrade to allow proton–proton operation.
Artificial neural networks now allow the dynamics of supercooled liquids to be predicted from their structure alone in an unprecedented way, thus providing a powerful new tool to study the physics of the glass transition.
Proposals for the particle physics programmes in the United States and Asia are discussed; mainly the International Linear Collider in Japan, the Circular Electron–Positron Collider in China and accelerator-based long-baseline neutrino experiments in the United States.
The Compact Linear Collider is a proposed high-luminosity electron–positron collider that can reach TeV-scale energies. Its accelerator design and physics programme, mainly focusing on precision measurements and new physics searches, are discussed.
Within the Physics Beyond Collider programme, complementary methods to high-energy frontier particle colliders to investigate the physics of elementary particles and their interactions are studied.
Single rare-earth ions are hard to observe and even harder to use as qubits. However, with the help of coupling to an optical cavity and clever engineering of selection rules, a big step has been taken to establish their new role in the quantum world.
Spin ice is known as the magnetic analogue of ordinary ice, where the behaviour of its spins closely mirrors that of protons in water ice. It now has a sibling based on higher-order magnetic octupoles.
