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Volume 13 Issue 11, November 2017

Water droplets skid across hot surfaces, hovering imperceptibly as they undergo rapid vaporization. Elastic solids are now shown to exhibit a variant of this behaviour, engaging in sustained bouncing by coupling vapour release to elastic deformation. Letter p1095 IMAGE: SCOTT WAITUKAITIS, LEIDEN UNIVERSITY COVER DESIGN: BETHANY VUKOMANOVIC

Editorial

  • The 2017 Nobel prize in Physics has been awarded to Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves”.

    Editorial

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Commentary

  • The emergent phenomena that characterize quantum materials have received prominent exposure thanks to experimental techniques based on photoemission. In turn, the challenges and opportunities presented by quantum materials have driven improvements in the photoemission technology itself.

    • Nuh Gedik
    • Inna Vishik
    Commentary
  • The validity of our scientific descriptions of reality does not hinge on their emergence from a more fundamental theory.

    • George Ellis
    • David Sloan
    Commentary
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Thesis

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Books & Arts

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Research Highlights

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News & Views

  • Topological states of matter offer new opportunities to improve the way we transmit acoustic or optical signals, but existing technologies have proven difficult to scale. The field of active metamaterials may be able to help.

    • Andrea Alù
    News & Views
  • By engineering photosensitive proteins and tweaking the classical properties of light, it should be possible to tune the response of a cell equipped with photoreceptors. But would these cells be able to sense the subtle quantum properties of light?

    • Elisabetta Collini
    News & Views
  • A state of matter known as a quantum spin liquid has been predicted to host Majorana fermions. Recent neutron scattering and specific heat results add to the growing body of evidence suggesting they exist in the quantum magnet α-RuCl3.

    • Natalia Perkins
    News & Views
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Review Article

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Letter

  • Physical rotation can create fictitious magnetic fields, a phenomenon that stems from Larmor's theorem. The effect on a nuclear spin ensemble was measured using the spin–echo of nitrogen–vacancy centres in rapidly spinning diamond. Interestingly, the rotationally induced magnetic fields can cancel a conventional magnetic field for the nuclear spins.

    • A. A. Wood
    • E. Lilette
    • A. M. Martin
    Letter
  • α-RuCl3 has recently attracted great interest as a possible experimental realization of the Kitaev model. Neutron scattering measurements of a single crystal of this material reveal signatures of Majorana excitations, consistent with Kitaev’s predictions.

    • Seung-Hwan Do
    • Sang-Youn Park
    • Sungdae Ji
    Letter
  • The anomalous Nernst effect is usually associated with ferromagnets — enabling a temperature gradient to generate a transverse electric field — but the Berry curvature associated with Weyl points can drive this phenomenon in chiral antiferromagnets.

    • Muhammad Ikhlas
    • Takahiro Tomita
    • Satoru Nakatsuji
    Letter
  • Ensuring topological protection of the edge states in candidate topological insulators is complicated by the need to break time-reversal symmetry. Polar active liquids present an innovative solution to this problem, as a new metamaterial design shows.

    • Anton Souslov
    • Benjamin C. van Zuiden
    • Vincenzo Vitelli

    Collection:

    Letter
  • Deformable polygons are shown to form fibres when the energies associated with attraction and deformation are comparable. The fibres constitute a kinetically trapped metastable state, reminiscent of irreversible protein assembly in living systems.

    • Martin Lenz
    • Thomas A. Witten
    Letter
  • The demonstration of a direct correlation between an optical stimulus and the biological function of a photoreceptor in living brain tissue charts the course for designing tailored pulses to control molecular dynamics in vivo.

    • Kush Paul
    • Parijat Sengupta
    • Stephen A. Boppart
    Letter
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Article

  • The 2D electron gas has long been a popular physical system. Now, experiments with GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructures have revealed phases displaying negative permittivity, due to an attractive exchange-correlation energy competing with Coulomb repulsion.

    • B. Friess
    • Y. Peng
    • J. H. Smet
    Article
  • In the charge-density wave state of tantalum sulfide, tantalum atoms group into a Star-of-David arrangement. Experiments show that the polaron spins associated with these atomic clusters can form a quantum spin liquid.

    • Martin Klanjšek
    • Andrej Zorko
    • Denis Arčon
    Article
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Measure for Measure

  • Wonder material graphene makes metrology practical and relaxed, says Andre Geim.

    • Andre Geim
    Measure for Measure
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