Materials science articles within Nature Physics

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  • News & Views |

    • Bart Verberck

  • Article |

    Topological effects have been found in a range of classical-wave systems, but it was unclear if the concept could be extended to diffusion. An approach using spatiotemporal modulations has now implemented them in a diffusive system

    • Guoqiang Xu
    • , Yihao Yang
    •  & Cheng-Wei Qiu

  • Letter |

    Active matter exhibits a plethora of collective phenomena in both biological and artificial systems. In a model system of colloidal rollers, polar states in active liquids can be controlled.

    • Bo Zhang
    • , Hang Yuan
    •  & Alexey Snezhko

  • Article |

    Insulating states that are formed because of pairing between electrons and holes are known to exist in engineered bilayer structures in high magnetic fields. Now evidence suggests they can occur in a monolayer crystal at zero field.

    • Yanyu Jia
    • , Pengjie Wang
    •  & Sanfeng Wu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Exciton condensation has been observed in various three-dimensional (3D) materials. Now, monolayer WTe2—a 2D topological insulator—also shows the phenomenon. Strong electronic interactions allow the excitons to form and condense at high temperature.

    • Bosong Sun
    • , Wenjin Zhao
    •  & David H. Cobden

  • News & Views |

    When crystal defects are present in an ensemble of spinning colloids that induce transverse forces on each other, the defects assemble into grain boundaries that can break the system apart into a set of crystal whorls.

    • Cynthia J. O. Reichhardt
    •  & Charles Reichhardt

  • Article |

    The addition of transverse forces to an ensemble of colloidal spinners induces the appearance of odd elastic crystals, featuring self-propelled defects that organize the system into a ‘self-kneading’ crystal whorl state.

    • Ephraim S. Bililign
    • , Florencio Balboa Usabiaga
    •  & William T. M. Irvine

  • Perspective |

    Superconductivity and ordered states formed by interactions—both of which could be unconventional—have recently been observed in a family of kagome materials.

    • Titus Neupert
    • , M. Michael Denner
    •  & M. Zahid Hasan

  • News & Views |

    Charge density waves are the periodic spatial modulation of electrons in a solid. A new experiment reveals that they can originate from two different electronic bands in a prototypical transition metal dichalcogenide, NbSe2.

    • Young-Woo Son

  • Measure for Measure |

    The laws governing electrolysis developed by Michael Faraday, who originally trained as a bookbinder, led to the determination of the Faraday constant, as Daren Caruana recounts.

    • Daren Caruana

  • News & Views |

    Active matter can have macroscopic properties that defy the usual laws of hydrodynamics. Now these tell-tale properties have been traced down to the non-equilibrium character and handedness of interactions between individual particles.

    • Patrick Pietzonka

  • Article |

    Active fluids exhibit properties reminiscent of equilibrium systems when their degrees of freedom are statistically decoupled. A theory for the fluctuating hydrodynamics of these fluids offers a probe of their anomalous transport coefficients.

    • Ming Han
    • , Michel Fruchart
    •  & Vincenzo Vitelli

  • Article |

    The cell cortex stiffens during cell division, facilitating the necessary shape changes. Microrheology measurements now reveal that the rest of the cell interior actually softens, in a process that probably involves two key biomolecules trading roles.

    • Sebastian Hurst
    • , Bart E. Vos
    •  & Timo Betz

  • Letter |

    A study of growing apples shows that the singular cusp at the stalk has a universal form that arises due to the differential growth of a soft solid. Although the cusps are usually symmetric, they can lose stability to form lobes that depend on the geometry of the fruit.

    • Aditi Chakrabarti
    • , Thomas C. T. Michaels
    •  & L. Mahadevan

  • Article |

    Moiré potentials substantially alter the electronic properties of twisted bilayer graphene at a magic twist angle. A propagating plasmon mode, which can be observed with optical nano-imaging, is associated with transitions between the moiré minibands.

    • Niels C. H. Hesp
    • , Iacopo Torre
    •  & Frank H. L. Koppens

  • News & Views |

    Scanning tunnelling microscopy reveals an unexpected periodicity in the local density of states of a transition metal dichalcogenide — with a puzzling wavelength that casts the material as a quantum spin liquid.

    • Carmen Rubio-Verdú
    •  & Abhay N. Pasupathy

  • News & Views |

    The state that forms at low temperatures in a quantum antiferromagnet on a kagome lattice has been debated for decades. Nuclear magnetic resonance has now shown the gradual emergence of entangled spin singlets in a disordered kagome antiferromagnet.

    • Martin Klanjšek

  • News & Views |

    Frictional sliding starts with a crack front propagating across an interface — a process that is well described by fracture mechanics. Experiments now show that the onset of crack formation is governed by physics that is yet to be fully understood.

    • Anders Malthe-Sørenssen

  • Letter |

    Ultrashort light pulses generate nanometre-scale wavepackets of magnons that propagate coherently and at high speed in an antiferromagnet. This pushes antiferromagnetic magnonics forward as a future platform for information processing.

    • J. R. Hortensius
    • , D. Afanasiev
    •  & A. D. Caviglia

  • News & Views |

    Using pressure to tune the balance of interactions in a new class of kagome superconductor results in a surprising competition between states — and hints at an unusual, electronically intertwined order.

    • Stephen D. Wilson

  • News & Views |

    The flagella of microorganisms have provided inspiration for many synthetic devices, but they’re typically not easy to produce. A new class of swimmer makes it look simple by spontaneously growing a tail that it can whip to self-propel.

    • Sophie Ramananarivo

  • Article |

    Excitons have been predicted to form spontaneously—without external excitation—in some materials. Low-temperature ARPES measurements on Ta2NiSe5 now provide evidence for such an excitonic insulator and for so-called preformed excitons.

    • Keisuke Fukutani
    • , Roland Stania
    •  & Han Woong Yeom

  • Article |

    Macroscale patterns seen in biological systems such as animal coats or skin can be described by Turing’s reaction–diffusion theory. Now Turing patterns are shown to also exist in bismuth monolayers, an exemplary nanoscale atomic system.

    • Yuki Fuseya
    • , Hiroyasu Katsuno
    •  & Aharon Kapitulnik

  • News & Views |

    Light pulses transiently change a metal to an insulator by unveiling a hidden ordered state.

    • Chong-Yu Ruan

  • News & Views |

    Introducing non-local effects to metamaterials increases the complexity of their dispersion relation, which allows carefully designed elastic structures to mimic the peculiar roton behaviour of correlated quantum superfluids.

    • Romain Fleury

  • News & Views |

    A type of polar self-propelled particle generates a torque that makes it naturally drawn to higher-density areas. The collective behaviour this induces in assemblies of particles constitutes a new form of phase separation in active fluids.

    • Olivier Dauchot

  • Article |

    A two-fold rotational symmetry is observed in the superconducting state of NbSe2. This is strikingly different from the three-fold symmetry of the lattice, and suggests that a mixed conventional and unconventional order parameter exists in this material.

    • Alex Hamill
    • , Brett Heischmidt
    •  & Vlad S. Pribiag

  • Letter |

    Transport and thermodynamic measurements on strongly correlated Kondo metal YbB12 reveal the coexistence of charged and charge-neutral fermions in the material and the crucial role played by the latter in the quantum oscillations of resistivity.

    • Ziji Xiang
    • , Lu Chen
    •  & Lu Li

  • News & Views |

    The patterning dynamics of confined immiscible fluids has inspired an elegant and versatile approach to building periodic three-dimensional multi-material architectures. The technique extends to triphasic composites, three-dimensional droplet networks and even biological tissues.

    • Séverine Le Gac

  • Comment |

    Passing a supercurrent through a topological material can highlight the existence of higher-order boundary states, and may lead to applications in topological superconductivity.

    • Yaojia Wang
    • , Gil-Ho Lee
    •  & Mazhar N. Ali

  • Article |

    The functionality of electron energy loss spectroscopy can be extended to include a polarization analogue constructed via the dipole transition vector between two electronic states, bringing it closer to its optical counterpart.

    • Hugo Lourenço-Martins
    • , Davy Gérard
    •  & Mathieu Kociak

  • Letter |

    Non-Hermitian concepts together with optical gain allow the tailoring of short- and long-range exchange interactions in integrated topological photonics, and an exact Haldane model can be realized in this way.

    • Yuzhou G. N. Liu
    • , Pawel S. Jung
    •  & Mercedeh Khajavikhan

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