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Polaritons are hybrid states of light and matter that occur in a wide range of physical platforms. When a nanosphere is levitated inside an optical cavity, light can hybridize with the motion on a plane rather than along an axis, resulting in ‘vectorial’ polaritons.
The freedom to manipulate quantum gases with external fields makes them an ideal platform for studying many-body physics. Floquet engineering using time-periodic modulations has greatly expanded the range of accessible models and phenomena.
Some material defects have quantum degrees of freedom that are measurably disturbed by environmental changes, making them excellent sensors. A two-dimensional material with such defects could improve the versatility of quantum-sensing technologies.
Light propagating in the topological edge channel of an array of ring resonators is predicted to generate nested frequency combs: like a Matryoshka doll containing a set of smaller dolls, each ‘tooth’ of the comb comprises another frequency comb.
The state that forms at low temperatures in a quantum antiferromagnet on a kagome lattice has been debated for decades. Nuclear magnetic resonance has now shown the gradual emergence of entangled spin singlets in a disordered kagome antiferromagnet.
Frictional sliding starts with a crack front propagating across an interface — a process that is well described by fracture mechanics. Experiments now show that the onset of crack formation is governed by physics that is yet to be fully understood.
Spin waves can carry information that could be used for data processing, but producing and controlling them can be challenging. Now it is possible to generate short-wavelength coherent spin waves that can travel at high speed over a long distance.
Using pressure to tune the balance of interactions in a new class of kagome superconductor results in a surprising competition between states — and hints at an unusual, electronically intertwined order.
The flagella of microorganisms have provided inspiration for many synthetic devices, but they’re typically not easy to produce. A new class of swimmer makes it look simple by spontaneously growing a tail that it can whip to self-propel.
Single-molecule experiments can now quantify the surface forces that compete to package tethered DNA into a protein-rich condensate — providing much-needed mechanistic insight into the phase behaviour of the entangled genome in the nucleus.
Cells moving on microprinted tracks reveal a preference for regions that they have already visited, suggesting an update to a century of dynamical models for cell trajectories.
The ATLAS Collaboration has confirmed with top quark events that the coupling of charged leptons to the weak interaction is universal — showcasing the feasibility of performing high-precision electroweak measurements at proton–proton colliders.
Nonlinearity and topology are both linked to symmetries, but what happens when the two are combined is not a trivial question. In a nonlinear photonic higher-order topological insulator, solitons localize on the corners together with the topological modes.
Many aspects of gauge theories — such as the one underlying quantum chromodynamics, which describes quark physics — evade common numerical methods. Tensor networks are getting closer to a solution, having successfully tackled the related problem of a three-dimensional quantum link model.
