Nanoscience and technology articles within Nature Physics

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  • News & Views |

    Fractional charges are one of the hallmarks of topological matter and the building blocks of various topological devices. Now, there are indications that their fingerprint in terms of electrical noise is less obvious, but more universal, than expected.

    • Stefano Roddaro

  • News & Views |

    Experiments with chiral magnets may hold the key to a better understanding of fundamental aspects of transformations between different skyrmionic states, necessary for magnetic memory and logic applications to become a reality.

    • Alexey A. Kovalev

  • Letter |

    Stacking monolayer WS2 on top of bilayer WSe2 creates conditions where electrons and holes can coexist in the structure. Their Coulomb interaction allows them to form bound pairs and hence an excitonic insulator state.

    • Dongxue Chen
    • , Zhen Lian
    •  & Su-Fei Shi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Continuously changing the coupling between a magnetic impurity and a superconductor allows the observation of the reversal of supercurrent flow at the atomic scale.

    • Sujoy Karan
    • , Haonan Huang
    •  & Christian R. Ast

  • News & Views |

    Quantum confinement effects offer a more comprehensive understanding of the fundamental processes that drive extreme optical nonlinearities in nano-engineered solids, opening a route to unlocking the potential of high-order harmonic generation.

    • Julien Madéo
    •  & Keshav M. Dani

  • Letter
    | Open Access

    Magnetic skyrmions—a type of localized spin texture—have been theoretically predicted to annihilate with counterparts known as antiskyrmions. By means of electron microscopy, such annihilation has now been observed in a cubic chiral magnet.

    • Fengshan Zheng
    • , Nikolai S. Kiselev
    •  & Rafal E. Dunin-Borkowski

  • Measure for Measure |

    The shift of the definition of the kilogram in 2019 away from an artefact to one relying on the Planck constant inspires technological innovation, as Naoki Kuramoto elucidates.

    • Naoki Kuramoto

  • News & Views |

    Quantum waves can have stronger correlations than classical ones because of their particle nature. This effect has now been observed using quantum sound waves travelling in an acoustic waveguide.

    • H. Yamaguchi
    •  & D. Hatanaka

  • Article |

    Non-classical vibrations are generated and transmitted along a mechanical waveguide, providing a platform for distributing quantum information and realizing hybrid quantum devices using phonons in a solid-state system.

    • Amirparsa Zivari
    • , Robert Stockill
    •  & Simon Gröblacher

  • Article |

    Thermal transport measurements provide a complementary view of the electronic structure of a material to electronic transport. This technique is applied to twisted bilayer graphene, and highlights the particle–hole asymmetry of its band structure.

    • Arup Kumar Paul
    • , Ayan Ghosh
    •  & Anindya Das

  • Letter |

    Heat transport in electronic systems is influenced by nearby superconductors due to the so-called proximity effect. Combining this with the manipulation of superconductivity using magnetic fields enables the control of nanoscale thermal transport.

    • Nadia Ligato
    • , Federico Paolucci
    •  & Francesco Giazotto

  • News & Views |

    Low-temperature measurements on twisted bilayer graphene show that the exotic ‘strange metal’ state is almost certainly caused by interactions between electrons.

    • Tobias Stauber
    •  & José González

  • News & Views |

    Experiments show that interactions between electrons in twisted bilayer graphene can create a spatial order that doubles the size of the twisted unit cell.

    • Eric Spanton

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The charge transport mechanism in MXenes—an emerging class of layered materials—is not yet fully understood. A combination of terahertz spectroscopy and transport measurements shows that the formation of large polarons play a crucial role.

    • Wenhao Zheng
    • , Boya Sun
    •  & Mischa Bonn

  • News & Views |

    A rare-earth ion in a long-lived clock state can control a nearby ensemble of nuclear spins. Interfacing this pristine photon emitter with a small quantum processor may be a route towards making identical solid-state nodes for quantum networks.

    • Claire Le Gall

  • News & Views |

    Light travels through disordered media on a random path that is hard to control. A comprehensive study has now shown that optical energy can be deposited at a desired depth in a disordered waveguide by injecting a light field with a particular shape.

    • Oluwafemi S. Ojambati

  • Letter |

    Twisted double bilayer graphene is predicted to be a topological insulator under certain conditions. Simultaneous bulk and edge measurements now show metallic transport with a bulk bandgap, suggestive of this prediction.

    • Yimeng Wang
    • , Jonah Herzog-Arbeitman
    •  & Emanuel Tutuc

  • News & Views |

    Magnons are collective spin excitations that can propagate over long distances — an attractive trait for information-transfer technologies — but we need to better understand their thermodynamic properties. A platform using graphene may hold the key.

    • Matteo Carrega
    •  & Stefan Heun

  • Letter
    | Open Access

    Although magnons in the quantum Hall regime of graphene have been detected, their thermodynamic properties have not yet been measured. Now, a local probe technique enables the detection of the magnon density and chemical potential.

    • Andrew T. Pierce
    • , Yonglong Xie
    •  & Amir Yacoby

  • News & Views |

    Most systems exhibiting topological superconductivity are artificial structures that require precise engineering. Now, a layered material shows tantalizing signs of the phenomenon.

    • Jose L. Lado
    •  & Peter Liljeroth

  • Article |

    Quantum networks require a connection between quantum memories and optical links, which often operate in different frequency ranges. An optomechanical device exploiting the strain dependence of a colour-centre spin provides such a spin–optics interface at room temperature.

    • Prasoon K. Shandilya
    • , David P. Lake
    •  & Paul E. Barclay

  • News & Views |

    Some material defects have quantum degrees of freedom that are measurably disturbed by environmental changes, making them excellent sensors. A two-dimensional material with such defects could improve the versatility of quantum-sensing technologies.

    • J.-P. Tetienne

  • 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

  • Article |

    A study of the dynamics of polymer translocation through synthetic nanopores provides a direct observation of tension propagation—a non-equilibrium description of the process of unfolding that a polymer undergoes during translocation.

    • Kaikai Chen
    • , Ining Jou
    •  & Nicholas A. W. Bell

  • Article |

    Quantum systems make it challenging to determine candidate Hamiltonians from experimental data. An automated protocol is presented and its capabilities to infer the correct Hamiltonian are demonstrated in a nitrogen-vacancy centre set-up.

    • Antonio A. Gentile
    • , Brian Flynn
    •  & Anthony Laing

  • Letter |

    The two-dimensional electron gas at an oxide interface is patterned to form a channel with a periodic potential imposed on top. This replicates the textbook Kronig–Penney model and leads to fractionalization of electron bands in the channel.

    • Megan Briggeman
    • , Hyungwoo Lee
    •  & Jeremy Levy

  • Comment |

    Scientific progress has always been driven by the ability to build an instrument to answer a specific question. But spreading the news of how to replicate that tool is an evolving art, ripe for an open-source revolution.

    • Georg E. Fantner
    •  & Andrew C. Oates

  • 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

  • News & Views |

    Multiplexing increases the capacity of optical communication, but it is limited by the number of modes and their orbital angular momentum. A robust vortex laser now solves this problem by emitting several beams, all carrying large topological charges.

    • Ren-Min Ma

  • Article |

    In principle skyrmions are topologically protected, but the crystal lattice interferes with this protection so that they should be unstable to switching of their winding number. Here this process is understood via scanning tunnelling microscopy.

    • Florian Muckel
    • , Stephan von Malottki
    •  & Markus Morgenstern

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