Physical sciences articles within Nature

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  • Letter |

    Three exoplanets around the star HR 8799 have recently been discovered by differential imaging with large telescopes. In such cases, bright scattered starlight means that large angular offsets of the star are required for high-contrast imaging of the planets. Imaging at small angles requires a technique for reducing starlight and associated noise while still transmitting light from the planet. Here such a technique is described: all three HR 8799 planets have been detected using a vector vortex coronagraph on a small-aperture system.

    • E. Serabyn
    • , D. Mawet
    •  & R. Burruss

  • News & Views |

    A study of failures in interconnected networks highlights the vulnerability of tightly coupled infrastructures and shows the need to consider mutually dependent network properties in designing resilient systems.

    • Alessandro Vespignani

  • Books & Arts |

    Our stereotypical view of mathematicians shifted during the Romantic era from worldly scholar to tortured soul, explains Jascha Hoffman.

    • Jascha Hoffman

  • Books & Arts |

    While pursuing his doctorate in dynamical systems, John Sims was drawn to explore the connections between mathematics and art. Now curating a year-long series of maths–art shows at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City, the conceptual artist explains the cultural significance of maths.

    • Jascha Hoffman

  • News & Views |

    You have received a device that is claimed to produce random numbers, but you don't trust it. Can you check it without opening it? In some cases, you can, thanks to the bizarre nature of quantum physics.

    • Valerio Scarani

  • News |

    Quantifying just how unpredictable random numbers really are could aid quantum cryptography.

    • Zeeya Merali

  • Article |

    A quantum spin liquid is a hypothetical system of spins (such as those carried by electrons), the orientations of which continue to fluctuate even at absolute zero. Theoretical and experimental evidence for the existence of such states at the microscopic level is elusive, but these authors have modelled correlated electrons arranged on a honeycomb lattice (such as in graphene), and identified the conditions under which a microscopic quantum spin liquid would be realized in two dimensions.

    • Z. Y. Meng
    • , T. C. Lang
    •  & A. Muramatsu

  • Letter |

    A challenge in the semiconductor industry is to create integrated circuits that use new physical state variables — other than charge or voltage — to offer memory and logic functions. Memristive devices, which combine the electrical properties of a memory element and a resistor, use resistance instead, and here such 'memristors' are shown to perform logic operations as well.

    • Julien Borghetti
    • , Gregory S. Snider
    •  & R. Stanley Williams

  • Letter |

    The strength of conventional metals is determined by the interaction of dislocations with obstacles such as grain boundaries. Molecular dynamics simulations reveal that the strength of ultrafine-grained copper containing twin boundaries can be controlled by a dislocation nucleation mechanism activated below a critical twin thickness. Below this thickness the material becomes softer. The smaller the grains, the smaller the critical twin boundary spacing, and the higher the metal's maximum strength.

    • Xiaoyan Li
    • , Yujie Wei
    •  & Huajian Gao

  • Letter |

    ε Aurigae is a bright, eclipsing binary star system but the cause of each 18-month-long eclipse has been unknown for nearly 190 years, because the companion was, until recently, undetectable. The preferred explanation has been a tilted disk of opaque material and here the authors report interferometric images that do indeed show an opaque disk of very low mass, tilted as expected, crossing the disk of the F star.

    • Brian Kloppenborg
    • , Robert Stencel
    •  & Sean M. Carroll

  • News & Views |

    For more than a century, the binary star system ε Aurigae has been a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. But no more — the system's previously inferred but unseen disk of dust has been detected.

    • Edward Guinan

  • News & Views |

    Microfluidic devices have many applications in chemistry and biology, but practical hitches associated with their use are often overlooked. One such device that optimizes catalysts tackles these issues head-on.

    • Robert C. R. Wootton
    •  & Andrew J. deMello

  • Letter |

    X-ray crystallography has become the most common way for structural biologists to obtain the three-dimensional structures of proteins and protein complexes. However, crystals of large macromolecular complexes often diffract only weakly (yielding a resolution worse than 4 Å), so new methods that work at such low resolution are needed. Here a new method is described by which to obtain higher-quality electron density maps and more accurate molecular models of weakly diffracting crystals.

    • Gunnar F. Schröder
    • , Michael Levitt
    •  & Axel T. Brunger

  • Column |

    Bad risk management contributed to the current financial crisis. Two economists believe the situation could be improved by gaining a deeper understanding of what is not known, as Philip Ball explains.

    • Philip Ball

  • Editorial |

    Scientists must be more proactive in encouraging good cybersecurity practices.

  • News & Views |

    Bose–Einstein condensates are ideal tools with which exotic phenomena can be investigated. The hitherto-unrealized Dicke quantum phase transition has now been observed with one such system in an optical cavity.

    • Cheng Chin
    •  & Nathan Gemelke

  • News & Views |

    The asteroid belt is classically considered the domain of rocky bodies, being too close to the Sun for ice to survive. Or so we thought — not only is ice present, but at least one asteroid is covered in it.

    • Henry H. Hsieh

  • Letter |

    Ultracold polar molecules offer the possibility of exploring quantum gases with interparticle interactions that are strong, long-range and spatially anisotropic. Here, dipolar collisions in an ultracold gas of fermionic potassium–rubidium molecules have been experimentally observed. The results show how the long-range dipolar interaction can be used for electric-field control of chemical reaction rates in an ultracold gas of polar molecules.

    • K.-K. Ni
    • , S. Ospelkaus
    •  & D. S. Jin

  • Letter |

    It has been suggested that Earth's current supply of water was delivered by asteroids. The presence of water on the surface of some asteroids has been inferred from the comet-like activity of several small asteroids, including two members of the Themis dynamical family, but hitherto has not been measured. Here, infrared spectra of the asteroid 24 Themis are reported; the results show that ice and organic compounds are not only present, but also prevalent, on its surface.

    • Humberto Campins
    • , Kelsey Hargrove
    •  & Julie Ziffer

  • Letter |

    A major pursuit in the chemical community involves the search for efficient and inexpensive catalysts that can produce large quantities of hydrogen gas from water. Here, a molybdenum-oxo complex has been identified that can catalytically generate hydrogen gas either from pure water at neutral pH, or from sea water. The work has implications for the design of 'green' chemistry cycles.

    • Hemamala I. Karunadasa
    • , Christopher J. Chang
    •  & Jeffrey R. Long

  • Letter |

    Light beams can be engineered to carry orbital angular momentum, with application as, for instance, optical 'spanners' — essentially a 'twisted' variant of the more familiar optical tweezers. Here it is shown that it is, in principle, possible to engineer similar behaviour into an electron beam. Such a beam could find use in a variety of spectroscopy and microscopy techniques.

    • Masaya Uchida
    •  & Akira Tonomura

  • Article |

    A phase transition occurs when a physical system suddenly changes state, for instance when it melts or freezes. The Dicke model describes a collective matter–light interaction and has been predicted to show a quantum phase transition. Here, this quantum phase transition has been realized in an open system formed by a Bose–Einstein condensate coupled to an optical cavity. Surprisingly, the atoms are observed to self-organize into a supersolid phase.

    • Kristian Baumann
    • , Christine Guerlin
    •  & Tilman Esslinger

  • News & Views |

    Non-Abelian anyons are hypothesized particles that, if found, could form the basis of a fault-tolerant quantum computer. The theoretical finding that they may turn up in three dimensions comes as a surprise.

    • Chetan Nayak

  • News & Views |

    Researchers have long wanted to be able to control macroscopic mechanical objects in their smallest possible state of motion. Success in achieving that goal heralds a new generation of quantum experiments.

    • Markus Aspelmeyer

  • Letter |

    Atom chips provide a versatile quantum laboratory for experiments with ultracold atomic gases, but techniques to control atomic interactions and to generate entanglement have been unavailable so far. Here, the experimental generation of multi-particle entanglement on an atom chip is described. The technique is used to produce spin-squeezed states of a two-component Bose–Einstein condensate, which should be useful for quantum metrology.

    • Max F. Riedel
    • , Pascal Böhi
    •  & Philipp Treutlein

  • Letter |

    The precision of interferometers — used in metrology and in the state-of-the-art time standard — is generally limited by classical statistics. Here it is shown that the classical precision limit can be beaten by using nonlinear atom interferometry with Bose–Einstein condensates.

    • C. Gross
    • , T. Zibold
    •  & M. K. Oberthaler

  • Column |

    The US defence department should be at the centre of the nation's energy policy, says Daniel Sarewitz.

    • Daniel Sarewitz

  • Letter |

    Thermophilic bacteria and archaea use carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide as a starting material for making the organic substances used in cellular molecules. A central enzyme in this pathway has now been discovered, namely fructose 1,6-bisphosphate aldolase/phosphatase. This enzyme might represent the ancestral gluconeogenic enzyme.

    • Rafael F. Say
    •  & Georg Fuchs

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