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Controlled switching of interacting ferroelectric surface domains leads to a variety of regular and chaotic patterns, and could provide a physical platform for performing calculations.
Can a photon be separated from its polarization; or an electron from its magnetic moment? Recent work suggests that in certain contexts, this might not be as impossible as it sounds.
In the presence of light-induced spin–orbit coupling, ultracold atoms form pairs with a spin-triplet component. Creating these pairs is an important step towards realizing atomic superfluids with topological excitations.
According to classical nucleation theory, a crystal grows from a small nucleus that already bears the symmetry of its end phase — but experiments with colloids now reveal that, from an amorphous precursor, crystallites with different structures can develop.
A careful revision of the rudiments of statistical physics shows that negative temperatures are artefacts of Boltzmann's approximate definition of entropy. Gibbs' version, however, forbids negative absolute temperatures and is consistent with thermodynamics.
Femtosecond pulses from X-ray free-electron lasers offer a powerful method for studying charged collective excitations in materials, and provide a potential route to identifying bosonic quasiparticles in condensed-matter systems.
When the atmospheric surface pressure is just right, a temperature difference can drive a continuous flow of rarefied gas through the soil matrix — a previously unrecognized process on Mars.
Long-pulse plasmas created in the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) mark another advance in fusion. The Chinese tokamak now demonstrates a method for controlling the instabilities at the plasma edge that might otherwise limit the performance of prototypical fusion power plants such as ITER.
The spin lifetime of a paramagnetic molecule on a superconducting surface is increased by orders of magnitude thanks to the effect of the superconducting gap, leading to improved control of molecular spin systems.
Small Fermi surfaces have been observed by quantum oscillations in the YBCO family of copper oxide superconductors, but until now it has been unclear whether they are specific to YBCO or universal to all underdoped cuprates.
Information theory was originally developed to study the fundamental limits of telecommunication. But thanks to recent extensions it can now also be applied to solid-state physics.
When a single atom in a condensate is excited to its Rydberg state, its electron orbit encloses the entire condensate. Such a peculiar quantum system could find practical and fundamental applications in atomic physics and quantum information science.
Coupling a single electron level to dissipative leads allows the study of unusual behaviour near a quantum critical point, including the fractionalization of the resonant level into two Majorana fermions.
The latest data from the Planck satellite have consolidated our understanding of the cosmic microwave background and the early Universe — except for some large-angle anomalies. These effects could be accounted for by invoking SU(2) gauge symmetry for photon propagation.
Light pulses with positive and negative effective masses are now generated using optical fibres. Nonlinear interactions between the two can then create self-accelerating pulse pairs, opening a new route to pulse steering.
High-cadence images link the phenomena required for particle acceleration at the Sun. A plasmoid-driven shock wave accelerates electrons in intermittent bursts.
For almost a century, deviations of Ohm's law have been known to occur in electrolyte solutions. Now, lattice model simulations of these systems are providing valuable insight into the microscopic mechanisms involved.
Rapid cooling across a phase transition leaves behind defects; from domain walls in magnets to cosmic strings. The Kibble–Zurek mechanism that describes this formation of defects is seen at work in the spontaneous creation of solitons in an atomic Bose–Einstein condensate.
Cold atoms trapped in dissipative optical lattices can behave in ways that cannot be described within the framework of Boltzmann–Gibbs statistical mechanics. Recent theoretical and experimental developments may lead to a better understanding of these processes.
