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Volume 11 Issue 3, March 2015

By engineering the electron wavefunction, it is possible to create Aharonov–Bohm-like phases and relativistic effects such as length contraction and time dilation in a non-relativistic setting and in the absence of electromagnetic fields.Article p261; News & Views p211 IMAGE: IDO KAMINER COVER DESIGN: ALLEN BEATTIE

Editorial

  • Scientists involved in nuclear research before and after the end of the Second World War continue to be the subjects of historical and cultural fascination.

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Commentary

  • Magnetocaloric and electrocaloric effects are driven by doing work, but this work has barely been explored, even though these caloric effects are being exploited in a growing number of prototype cooling devices.

    • Xavier Moya
    • Emmanuel Defay
    • Neil D. Mathur
    Commentary
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Thesis

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Research Highlights

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News & Views

  • A self-accelerating electronic wave packet can acquire a phase akin to the Aharonov–Bohm effect, but in the absence of a magnetic field.

    • Maciej Lewenstein
    News & Views
  • Photons immediately spring to mind when we talk about long-distance entanglement. But the spins at the ends of one-dimensional magnetic chains can be entangled over large distances too — providing a solid-state alternative for quantum communication protocols.

    • Chiranjib Mitra
    News & Views
  • Photonic crystals can control the flow of light but they are extremely sensitive to structural disorder. Although this often degrades performance, disorder can actually be used to enhance light collimation.

    • Jorge Bravo-Abad
    News & Views
  • Electrons moving in a one-dimensional crystal can acquire a geometrical phase. Sound waves in phononic crystals are now shown to display the same effect — underlining the similarity between conventional solids and acoustic metamaterials.

    • Julio T. Barreiro
    News & Views
  • The transfer of protons across a high barrier only occasionally occurs through quantum-mechanical tunnelling. Low-temperature scanning tunnelling microscopy shows concerted tunnelling of four protons within chiral cyclic water tetramers supported on an inert surface.

    • Christof Drechsel-Grau
    • Dominik Marx
    News & Views
  • Over the past decade, ultracold polar molecules have found application in hybrid quantum computation and quantum simulation, directions established in three early papers published in Nature Physics.

    • Robin Côté
    News & Views
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Letter

  • The Mott transition is investigated in three different organic insulators with triangular lattices and evidence of quantum criticality in an intermediate temperature regime is uncovered.

    • Tetsuya Furukawa
    • Kazuya Miyagawa
    • Kazushi Kanoda
    Letter
  • Understanding the motion of magnetic skyrmions is essential if they are to be used as information carriers in devices. It is now shown that topological confinement endows the skyrmions with an unexpectedly large mass, which plays a key role in their dynamics.

    • Felix Büttner
    • C. Moutafis
    • S. Eisebitt
    Letter
  • Many-body tunnelling is a complex but important phenomenon. Scanning tunnelling microscopy experiments with a Cl-terminated tip on a cyclic cluster of hydrogen-bonded water molecules now demonstrate controllable concerted tunnelling of four protons.

    • Xiangzhi Meng
    • Jing Guo
    • Ying Jiang
    Letter
  • The behaviour of sound waves in phononic crystals—metamaterials with spatially varying acoustic characteristics—is similar to that of electrons in solids. Now, phononic band inversion and Zak phases have been measured for a 1D phononic system.

    • Meng Xiao
    • Guancong Ma
    • C. T. Chan
    Letter
  • The rotation curve of a galaxy reflects the galactic mass distribution. For the Milky Way, such observational data are incompatible with models based on baryonic matter alone, which could be due to the presence of dark matter in the inner Milky Way.

    • Fabio Iocco
    • Miguel Pato
    • Gianfranco Bertone
    Letter
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