Condensed-matter physics articles within Nature Physics

Featured

  • Article |

    Understanding the mechanism by which magnons—the quanta of spin waves—propagate is important for developing practical devices. Now it is shown that long-range dipole–dipole interactions mediate the propagation in a van der Waals antiferromagnet.

    • Yue Sun
    • , Fanhao Meng
    •  & Joseph Orenstein

  • News & Views |

    Multiple mechanisms can create electrons with reduced kinetic energy in solids. Combining these mechanisms now appears as a promising route to enhancing quantum effects in flat band materials.

    • Priscila F. S. Rosa
    •  & Filip Ronning

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The electronic transport properties of charge-ordered kagome metals are controversial. Now careful measurements on unperturbed samples show that previously measured anisotropy in the transport occurs only when external perturbations are present.

    • Chunyu Guo
    • , Glenn Wagner
    •  & Philip J. W. Moll

  • News & Views |

    Phonons do not carry spin or charge, but they can couple to an external magnetic field and cause a sizable transverse thermal gradient. Experiments suggest that phonon handedness is a widespread effect in magnetic insulators with impurities.

    • Valentina Martelli

  • News & Views |

    Electronic transport measurements of the anomalous Hall effect can probe properties of a frustrated kagome spin ice that are hidden from conventional thermodynamic and magnetic probes.

    • Enke Liu

  • Article |

    Observations of strong electron correlation effects have been mostly confined to compounds containing f orbital electrons. Now, the study of the 3d pyrochlore metal CuV2S4 reveals that similar effects can be induced by flat-band engineering.

    • Jianwei Huang
    • , Lei Chen
    •  & Ming Yi

  • Article |

    Physical ageing in glassy materials can be described in a linear way through the concept of material time. Multispeckle dynamic light scattering is now shown to provide experimental access to the material time, in terms of which fluctuations become statistically reversible.

    • Till Böhmer
    • , Jan P. Gabriel
    •  & Thomas Blochowicz

  • News & Views |

    Experiments with unprecedented energy and momentum resolution reveal the nature of the pairing symmetry in KFe2As2 and pave the way for a unified theoretical description of unconventional superconductivity in iron-based materials.

    • Norman Mannella

  • Article |

    Time crystals spontaneously produce periodic oscillations that are robust to perturbations. A time crystal phase with a long coherence time has now been produced using the electron and nuclear spins of a semiconductor sample.

    • A. Greilich
    • , N. E. Kopteva
    •  & M. Bayer

  • Article |

    When applying sufficient strain, the flow of dense granular matter becomes critical. It is now shown that this state corresponds to random loose packing for spheres with different friction coefficients and that these packings can be mapped onto the frictionless hard-sphere system.

    • Yi Xing
    • , Ye Yuan
    •  & Yujie Wang

  • Article |

    Dense suspensions are granular materials suspended in a liquid at high packing fractions, exhibiting high viscosity. The latter is now shown to be related to the formation of a network of rigid clusters at large shear stress.

    • Michael van der Naald
    • , Abhinendra Singh
    •  & Heinrich M. Jaeger

  • Article |

    Inducing coherent interactions between distinct magnon modes—collective excitations of magnetic order—has been challenging. A canted antiferromagnet has demonstrated coherent magnon upconversion induced by terahertz laser pulses.

    • Zhuquan Zhang
    • , Frank Y. Gao
    •  & Keith A. Nelson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The transition from a metastable state to the ground state in classical many-body systems is mediated by bubble nucleation. This transition has now been experimentally observed in a quantum setting using coupled atomic superfluids.

    • A. Zenesini
    • , A. Berti
    •  & G. Ferrari

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Non-Hermitian systems can be described in terms of gain and loss with a coupled environment—a hard feature to tune in quantum devices. Now an experiment shows non-Hermitian topology in a quantum Hall ring without relying on gain and loss.

    • Kyrylo Ochkan
    • , Raghav Chaturvedi
    •  & Ion Cosma Fulga

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Electric polarization is well defined for insulators but not for metals. Electric-like polarization is now realized via inhomogeneous lattice strain in metallic SrRuO3, generating a pseudo-electric field. This field affects the material’s electronic bands.

    • Wei Peng
    • , Se Young Park
    •  & Daesu Lee

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Phases of matter can host different transport behaviours, ranging from diffusion to localization. Anomalous transport has now been observed in an interacting Bose gas in a one-dimensional lattice subject to a pulsed incommensurate potential.

    • Toshihiko Shimasaki
    • , Max Prichard
    •  & David M. Weld

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Using the valley degree of freedom in analogy to spin to encode qubits could be advantageous as many of the known decoherence mechanisms do not apply. Now long relaxation times are demonstrated for valley qubits in bilayer graphene quantum dots.

    • Rebekka Garreis
    • , Chuyao Tong
    •  & Wei Wister Huang

  • Editorial |

    Two-dimensional crystals have revolutionized fundamental research across a staggering range of disciplines. We take stock of the progress gained after twenty years of work.

  • Research Briefing |

    In its superconducting state, MoTe2 displays oscillations arising from an edge supercurrent, and when it is near niobium, there is an incompatibility between electron pairs diffusing from niobium and the pairs intrinsic to MoTe2. Insight into this competition between pairs is obtained by monitoring the noise spectrum of the MoTe2 supercurrent oscillations.

  • Article |

    The Haldane model is a paradigmatic example of topological behaviour but has not previously been implemented in condensed-matter experiments. Now a moiré bilayer is shown to realize this model with the accompanying quantized transport response.

    • Wenjin Zhao
    • , Kaifei Kang
    •  & Kin Fai Mak

  • News & Views |

    The ability to extract information from diffuse background signals in ultrafast electron diffraction experiments now enables a direct view of the formation of topological defects during a light-induced phase transition.

    • Isabella Gierz

  • Article |

    Bound states in the continuum are topological states with useful symmetry protection properties. An experiment now shows how to use them to form macroscopically coherent complexes of polariton condensates.

    • Antonio Gianfrate
    • , Helgi Sigurðsson
    •  & Daniele Sanvitto

  • News & Views |

    Understanding the mechanism underlying light-induced superconductivity could help manifest it at higher temperatures. Experiments now show that the excitation of a specific phonon leads to a resonant enhancement of this effect in K3C60.

    • Jingdi Zhang

  • News & Views |

    Semiconducting dipolar excitons — bound states of electrons and holes — in artificial moiré lattices constitute a promising condensed matter system to explore the phase diagram of strongly interacting bosonic particles.

    • Nadine Leisgang

  • Comment |

    Kenneth Wilson worked on the renormalization group during the Cold War, when communication between scientists in the Soviet Union and in the West was restricted. Nevertheless, Soviet physicists had a strong influence on Wilson’s work.

    • P. Chandra

  • News & Views |

    The Kondo effect — the screening of an impurity spin by conduction electrons — is a fundamental many-body effect. However, recent experiments combined with simulations have caused a long-standing model system for the single-atom Kondo effect to fail.

    • Jörg Kröger
    •  & Takashi Uchihashi

  • Comment |

    The renormalization group evolved from ad hoc procedures to cope with divergences in perturbative calculations. This Comment summarizes efforts to develop a mathematically rigorous approach to renormalization group calculations.

    • Antti Kupiainen

  • Comment |

    Renormalization began as a tool to eliminate divergences in quantum electrodynamics, but it is now the basis of our understanding of physics at different energy scales. Here, I review its evolution with an eye towards physics beyond the Wilsonian paradigm.

    • Philip W. Phillips

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Interactions between a localized magnetic moment and electrons in a metal can produce an emergent resonance that affects the metal’s properties. A realization of this Kondo effect in MoS2 provides an opportunity to study it in microscopic detail.

    • Camiel van Efferen
    • , Jeison Fischer
    •  & Wouter Jolie

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