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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.
Chemical substitution often mimics the effects of applied pressure on a compound, and ‘doping’ is a standard way to reach a quantum critical point from a given phase. However, CeCoIn5 is a natural quantum critical superconductor, and Cd-doping tunes the system away from criticality. Applied pressure reverses the effect of doping, but although superconductivity is restored, quantum criticality is not.
Double quantum dots are proving themselves to be an excellent test bed for many-body physics. These artificial atoms now demonstrate a phenomenon in which the capacitive coupling between them causes the spin and charge degrees of freedom of the electrons in the system to become entangled—the so-called SU(4) Kondo effect.
Frequency combs provide a broad series of well-calibrated spectral lines for highly precise metrology and spectroscopy, but this usually involves a trade-off between power and accuracy. A comb created by adjusting the time delay between two optical pulses now enables both. This so-called Ramsey comb could probe fundamental problems such as determining the size of the proton.
CeCoIn5 is a d-wave heavy-fermion superconductor. By tuning the coupling between magnetic and superconducting order, a phase with inhomogeneous p-wave superconductivity can be detected, which coexists with d-wave superconductivity and spin-density-wave order.
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.
