Physics articles within Nature

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  • News & Views |

    Skyrmions are a special type of particle that has long been predicted to exist in many fields of physics. Direct images of these structures have now been made in a magnetic material.

    • Christian Pfleiderer
    •  & Achim Rosch

  • News & Views |

    The use of stellar occultations to disclose unknown aspects of our Solar System is not new. But the latest such event to be reported involves an object that lies beyond the orbit of Neptune — and is a first.

    • Bruno Sicardy

  • Letter |

    When a bubble on a liquid–gas or solid–gas interface ruptures, the general expectation is that the bubble vanishes. Here, it is shown that in many cases interfacial bubbles do not simply vanish when they rupture, but rather create numerous small bubbles via unexpected folding of the ruptured bubble as it retracts. The process may increase the efficiency of rupture-induced aerosol dispersal.

    • James C. Bird
    • , Riëlle de Ruiter
    •  & Howard A. Stone

  • Letter |

    Attosecond (10−18 s) laser pulses make it possible to peer into the inner workings of atoms and molecules on the electronic timescale — phenomena in solids have already been investigated in this way. Here, an attosecond pump–probe experiment is reported that investigates the ionization and dissociation of hydrogen molecules, illustrating that attosecond techniques can also help explore the prompt charge redistribution and charge localization that accompany photoexcitation processes in molecular systems.

    • G. Sansone
    • , F. Kelkensberg
    •  & M. J. J. Vrakking

  • Letter |

    A quantum computer based on optical processes requires a source of entangled photons that can be delivered efficiently on demand. Such a source has now been developed: it involves a compact light-emitting diode with an embedded quantum dot that can be driven electrically to generate entangled photon pairs.

    • C. L. Salter
    • , R. M. Stevenson
    •  & A. J. Shields

  • Letter |

    A network is frustrated when competing interactions between nodes prevent each bond from being satisfied. Frustration in quantum networks can lead to massively entangled ground states, as occurs in exotic materials such as quantum spin liquids and spin glasses. Here, a quantum simulation of a frustrated spin system is described, in which there are three trapped atomic ions whose interactions are controlled using optical forces.

    • K. Kim
    • , M.-S. Chang
    •  & C. Monroe

  • News & Views |

    Quantum simulation is a promising tool for navigating the complex world of many-body physics. The technique has now been employed to simulate a frustrated network of three quantum magnets by using trapped ions.

    • Hartmut Häffner

  • Letter |

    Atomic nuclei have a shell structure that allows for 'magic numbers' of neutrons and protons, analogous to the noble gases in atomic physics. Knowledge of the properties of single-particle states outside nuclear shell closures in exotic nuclei is important for the fundamental understanding of nuclear structure and nucleosynthesis. Here, a nucleon-transfer technique has been used to measure the single-particle states of 133Sn, revealing the highly magic nature of 132Sn.

    • K. L. Jones
    • , A. S. Adekola
    •  & J. S. Thomas

  • Books & Arts |

    Brian Greene, author of best-selling books The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos, is a theoretical physicist at Columbia University, New York. As an orchestral work based on his 2008 children's book, Icarus at the Edge of Time, premieres next week, Greene discusses black holes and how music might portray the physics of warped space-time.

    • Jascha Hoffman

  • News & Views |

    By swapping the roles of the target and beam in an experiment that is otherwise impossible to implement, researchers have confirmed the doubly magic nature of the neutron-rich radioactive tin isotope 132Sn.

    • Paul Cottle

  • Careers Q&A |

    Rafael Jaramillo received the 2010 Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award on 4 May from the Advanced Photon Source Users Organization for his work on the fundamentals of magnetism at low temperatures.

    • Virginia Gewin

  • Letter |

    Although compound semiconductors like gallium arsenide (GaAs) offer advantages over silicon for photovoltaic and optoelectronic applications, these do not outweigh the costly process of growing large layers of these materials and transferring them to appropriate substrates. However, a new fabrication approach is now demonstrated: films of GaAs and AlGaAs are grown in thick, multilayered assemblies in a single sequence; the individual layers are then released and distributed over foreign substrates by printing.

    • Jongseung Yoon
    • , Sungjin Jo
    •  & John A. Rogers

  • News & Views |

    Examples of stellar explosions have emerged that fall outside the traditional types of supernova. The nature of the stars that produce them and the mechanism by which they explode is far from clear.

    • David Branch

  • News & Views |

    The finding that some gas-giant exoplanets are much larger than theory predicts has been boggling astronomers' minds. Planetary heating caused by gravitational tidal interactions might be a piece of the puzzle.

    • Pin-Gao Gu

  • Letter |

    Interactions between microscopic particles are usually described as two-body interactions, although it has been shown that higher-order multi-body interactions could give rise to new quantum phases with intriguing properties. Here, effective six-body interactions are demonstrated in a system of ultracold bosonic atoms in a three-dimensional optical lattice.

    • Sebastian Will
    • , Thorsten Best
    •  & Immanuel Bloch

  • Letter |

    Electromagnetically induced transparency enables the transmission of a laser pulse through an optically dense medium to be manipulated using a control beam. Here this technique is scaled down to a single atom, which acts as a quantum-optical transistor with the ability to coherently control the transmission of light through a cavity. This may lead to novel quantum applications, such as dynamic control of the photon statistics of propagating light fields.

    • Martin Mücke
    • , Eden Figueroa
    •  & Gerhard Rempe

  • Letter |

    Recent progress in solid-state quantum information processing has stimulated the search for amplifiers and frequency converters with quantum-limited performance in the microwave range. Here, a phase-preserving, superconducting parametric amplifier with ultra-low-noise properties has been experimentally realized.

    • N. Bergeal
    • , F. Schackert
    •  & M. H. Devoret

  • News & Views |

    Optoelectronic circuits with delayed feedback provide a convenient bench-top platform to study a wide range of nonlinear dynamic systems, from ultrastable clocks to complex chaotic devices.

    • Laurent Larger
    •  & John M. Dudley

  • News |

    Particle physicists in a race against time to overhaul US$1.5-billion cosmic-ray detector.

    • Edwin Cartlidge

  • News & Views |

    Entanglement between particles permits the quantum uncertainty in one variable to be reduced at the cost of increasing that in another. Condensates are an ideal system in which this technique can be studied.

    • Charles A. Sackett

  • News & Views |

    Unlike its neighbours on the right-hand side of the periodic table, boron barely forms an anion. A new trick has been established that allows it to do so, enabling a highly unusual complex to be prepared.

    • Kyoko Nozaki

  • News |

    At 174 trillionths of a trillionth of a newton, new 'yoctoforce' is smallest yet measured.

    • Geoff Brumfiel

  • Letter |

    Here it is shown, both theoretically and experimentally, that non-local correlations between entangled quantum particles can be used for a new cryptographic application — the generation of certified private random numbers — that is impossible to achieve classically. The results have implications for future device-independent quantum information experiments and for addressing fundamental issues regarding the randomness of quantum theory.

    • S. Pironio
    • , A. Acín
    •  & C. Monroe

  • News & Views |

    You have received a device that is claimed to produce random numbers, but you don't trust it. Can you check it without opening it? In some cases, you can, thanks to the bizarre nature of quantum physics.

    • Valerio Scarani

  • News & Views |

    A study of failures in interconnected networks highlights the vulnerability of tightly coupled infrastructures and shows the need to consider mutually dependent network properties in designing resilient systems.

    • Alessandro Vespignani

  • News |

    Quantifying just how unpredictable random numbers really are could aid quantum cryptography.

    • Zeeya Merali

  • Article |

    A quantum spin liquid is a hypothetical system of spins (such as those carried by electrons), the orientations of which continue to fluctuate even at absolute zero. Theoretical and experimental evidence for the existence of such states at the microscopic level is elusive, but these authors have modelled correlated electrons arranged on a honeycomb lattice (such as in graphene), and identified the conditions under which a microscopic quantum spin liquid would be realized in two dimensions.

    • Z. Y. Meng
    • , T. C. Lang
    •  & A. Muramatsu

  • Letter |

    X-ray crystallography has become the most common way for structural biologists to obtain the three-dimensional structures of proteins and protein complexes. However, crystals of large macromolecular complexes often diffract only weakly (yielding a resolution worse than 4 Å), so new methods that work at such low resolution are needed. Here a new method is described by which to obtain higher-quality electron density maps and more accurate molecular models of weakly diffracting crystals.

    • Gunnar F. Schröder
    • , Michael Levitt
    •  & Axel T. Brunger

  • Column |

    Bad risk management contributed to the current financial crisis. Two economists believe the situation could be improved by gaining a deeper understanding of what is not known, as Philip Ball explains.

    • Philip Ball

  • News & Views |

    Bose–Einstein condensates are ideal tools with which exotic phenomena can be investigated. The hitherto-unrealized Dicke quantum phase transition has now been observed with one such system in an optical cavity.

    • Cheng Chin
    •  & Nathan Gemelke

  • Letter |

    Ultracold polar molecules offer the possibility of exploring quantum gases with interparticle interactions that are strong, long-range and spatially anisotropic. Here, dipolar collisions in an ultracold gas of fermionic potassium–rubidium molecules have been experimentally observed. The results show how the long-range dipolar interaction can be used for electric-field control of chemical reaction rates in an ultracold gas of polar molecules.

    • K.-K. Ni
    • , S. Ospelkaus
    •  & D. S. Jin

  • Article |

    A phase transition occurs when a physical system suddenly changes state, for instance when it melts or freezes. The Dicke model describes a collective matter–light interaction and has been predicted to show a quantum phase transition. Here, this quantum phase transition has been realized in an open system formed by a Bose–Einstein condensate coupled to an optical cavity. Surprisingly, the atoms are observed to self-organize into a supersolid phase.

    • Kristian Baumann
    • , Christine Guerlin
    •  & Tilman Esslinger

  • News & Views |

    Non-Abelian anyons are hypothesized particles that, if found, could form the basis of a fault-tolerant quantum computer. The theoretical finding that they may turn up in three dimensions comes as a surprise.

    • Chetan Nayak

  • News & Views |

    Researchers have long wanted to be able to control macroscopic mechanical objects in their smallest possible state of motion. Success in achieving that goal heralds a new generation of quantum experiments.

    • Markus Aspelmeyer

  • Letter |

    The precision of interferometers — used in metrology and in the state-of-the-art time standard — is generally limited by classical statistics. Here it is shown that the classical precision limit can be beaten by using nonlinear atom interferometry with Bose–Einstein condensates.

    • C. Gross
    • , T. Zibold
    •  & M. K. Oberthaler

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