Research Highlights in 2023

Two recent studies report on progress in using 2D materials for photonic waveguides.

20 years ago, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to to Vitaly Ginzburg, Alexei Abrikosov and Anthony Leggett.

40 years ago the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and William Alfred Fowler.

60 years ago the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Eugene Wigner, J. Hans D. Jensen and Maria Goeppert Mayer.

80 years ago, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Otto Stern.

100 years ago, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Robert Millikan.

Papers in Science Advances and Science present strategies for autonomous control of robots.

Astroparticle physicists met for the 38th edition of the biennial series of the International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2023), which took place in late July in Nagoya, Japan.

A paper in Nature Communications shows that a hyperbolic map can still be useful for navigating a real-world network, even if the information about the network is incomplete.

Twenty-five years ago, Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz published ‘Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks’, a paper that helped kickstart the modern era of network science.

A paper in Physical Review E shows that in several real-world networks, the number of cliques grows faster than the number of links, and the number of big cliques grows even faster than the number of small cliques.

A paper in Science Advances puts forward a framework for quantifying the level of homophily in group interactions, and shows that simple-seeming definitions of group homophily are constrained by combinatorics in ways that are not immediately obvious.

A paper in Communications Physics shows that effective interventions to increase the visibility of minorities in networks should consider both increasing the size of the minority and changing how connections are made.

A paper in Physical Review X puts forward a model that yields networks with a maximum distance between individuals of exactly six.

10 years on from the discovery of the quantum anomalous Hall effect, Yoshinori Tokura discusses the new physics it has opened up.

A paper in Nature Physics reports on freezing droplets that expel themselves from a textured surface.

A paper in Physical Review Letters reports on droplets that crumple or wrinkle as they dry, depending on whether they are above or below a substrate.

A paper in Journal of Fluid Mechanics presents a detailed characterization of what happens when two droplets hit a solid surface simultaneously — a situation that is relatively little-studied.

A paper in Physical Review Fluids shows that the early stages of growth of a bubble blown with gas from a reservoir can show an unexpected dependence on the reservoir’s initial volume.

A paper in Physical Review Applied reports on how the ink composition evolves over time in an inkjet printhead nozzle that is left idle.