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Exploring and exploiting electric dipole arrangements analogously to what is possible with magnetic spin textures is an emerging prospect. Now a spontaneous toroidal polar topology is observed in ferroelectric liquid crystals.
Computing is central to the enterprise of physics but few undergraduate physics courses include it in their curricula. Here we discuss why and how to integrate computing into physics education.
Injustices and oppression are pervasive in society, including education. An intersectional, equity-oriented approach can help remove systemic obstacles and improve the experience of marginalized people in physics education through decolonial and critical race lenses.
Increasingly, physics graduates take jobs outside academia. Active teaching approaches lead to deeper conceptual understanding and a more varied skill set and are therefore more likely to prepare students for successful careers.
Encouraging students to take ownership of their learning can improve their outcomes. This Perspective discusses ways to achieve this in the context of physics education and how digital technology can help Gen Z students in particular.
Women and ethnic and racial minority students are underrepresented in physics. This Review summarizes research on equity and inclusion in physics education and makes recommendations for making physics learning environments more equitable.
The local electronic structure of interface states between topologically distinct domains is imaged and controlled, allowing visualization of the interplay between strong interactions and non-trivial topology.
Copper-based and iron-based compounds exhibit an interplay between magnetism and superconductivity. Now, this idea is extended to two-dimensional oxide heterostructures, where a spatially varying superconducting order is demonstrated at the EuO/KTaO3 interface.
Cooling efficiency in thermoelectric devices decreases considerably at lower temperatures. Now thermoelectric cooling at cryogenic temperatures is directly imaged in a van der Waals semimetal.
The concept of temporal mode-locking has been leveraged to study the interplay between laser mode-locking and photonic lattices that exhibit non-Hermitian topological phenomena. The results suggest new opportunities to study nonlinear and non-Hermitian topological physics as well as potential applications to sensing, optical computing and frequency-comb design.
Excitation of magnons — quanta of spin-waves — in an antiferromagnet can be used for high-speed data processing. The addition and subtraction of two such modes opens up possibilities for magnon-based information transfer in the terahertz spectral region.
The Hamiltonian describing a quantum many-body system can be learned using measurements in thermal equilibrium. Now, a learning algorithm applicable to many natural systems has been found that requires exponentially fewer measurements than existing methods.
Despite being essential to many applications in quantum science, entanglement can be easily disrupted by decoherence. A protocol based on repetitive quantum error correction now demonstrates enhanced coherence times of entangled logical qubits.
Complexity of learning Hamiltonians from Gibbs states is an important issue for both many-body physics and machine learning. The optimal sample and time complexities of quantum Hamiltonian learning for high temperature has now been proven.
Quantum computers promise to efficiently predict the structure and behaviour of molecules. This Perspective explores how this could overcome existing challenges in computational drug discovery.