Physical sciences articles within Nature

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  • News |

    Samples collected during Apollo missions suggest a wet interior, raising questions about lunar origins.

    • Eric Hand

  • Review Article |

    • T. D. Ladd
    • , F. Jelezko
    •  & J. L. O’Brien

  • Letter |

    Current models indicate that the Milky Way's stellar halo was assembled from many smaller systems, and recent studies claimed that the true Galactic building blocks must have been vastly different from the surviving dwarfs. But the overall abundance pattern of elements in S1020549, the most iron-poor star in the Sculptor dwarf galaxies, is now found to follow that seen in low-metallicity halo stars, indicating that the systems destroyed to form the halo billions of years ago were not fundamentally different from the progenitors of present-day dwarfs.

    • Anna Frebel
    • , Evan N. Kirby
    •  & Joshua D. Simon

  • Letter |

    To integrate microchips with optical communications a photodetector is required to mediate the optical and electronic signals. Although germanium photodetectors are compatible with silicon their performance is impaired by poor intrinsic noise. Here the noise is reduced by nanometre engineering of optical and electrical fields to produce a compact and efficient photodetector.

    • Solomon Assefa
    • , Fengnian Xia
    •  & Yurii A. Vlasov

  • Letter |

    The phenomenon of superconductivity continues to intrigue, and several new superconducting materials have been discovered in recent years — but in the case of organic superconductors, no new material system with a high superconducting transition temperature has been identified in the past decade. Now it has been shown that the introduction of potassium into crystals of organic molecule picene can yield superconductivity at temperatures as high as 18 K.

    • Ryoji Mitsuhashi
    • , Yuta Suzuki
    •  & Yoshihiro Kubozono

  • Letter |

    The addition of shear orthogonal to the tension-loading plane of crack propagation generates an instability that results in three-dimensional helical crack propagation, atomically rough surfaces and a fracture pattern resembling a series of lance shapes. Here numerical simulations reveal a new law that governs crack propagation in space for materials subject to general stress conditions.

    • Antonio J. Pons
    •  & Alain Karma

  • News & Views |

    A neat mode of operation of the atomic force microscope has been used to probe the interface between mica and water. The results help to settle a long-standing debate about the nature of this interface.

    • Joost W. M. Frenken
    •  & Tjerk H. Oosterkamp

  • News & Views |

    Catastrophic breakage of brittle materials such as ceramics is usually triggered by the rapid spreading of cracks. Computer simulations have now cracked the three-dimensional details of this process.

    • Markus J. Buehler
    •  & Zhiping Xu

  • News & Views |

    Superconductivity has been discovered in the materials that form when alkali metals react with a solid hydrocarbon. This is the first new class of organic, high-temperature superconductor in a decade.

    • Matthew J. Rosseinsky
    •  & Kosmas Prassides

  • Opinion |

    The US Congress should discourage efforts to advance the technology to make fuel for nuclear reactors, say Francis Slakey and Linda R. Cohen — the risks outweigh the benefits.

    • Francis Slakey
    •  & Linda R. Cohen

  • Books & Arts |

    Paul Davies's latest book argues that the search for intelligent life beyond Earth should be expanded. Chris McKay considers why we should look closer to home — perhaps even in our DNA.

    • Chris McKay

  • News |

    Sound-based lasers could improve imaging and electronics.

    • Geoff Brumfiel

  • Letter |

    WASP-12b is a planet of 1.4 Jupiter masses that orbits at a mean distance of only 3.1 stellar radii from its star; its orbital period is 1.1 days, and its radius (1.79 times that of Jupiter) is unexpectedly large. An analysis of its properties now reveals that the planet is losing mass to its host star at a rate of ∼10−7 Jupiter masses per year, and that dissipation of the star's tidal perturbation in the planet's convective envelope provides the energy source for its large volume.

    • Shu-lin Li
    • , N. Miller
    •  & Jonathan J. Fortney

  • Letter |

    In principle, it is possible to simulate some astrophysical phenomena inside the highly controlled environment of an atomic physics laboratory: previous work on the thermodynamics of a two-component Fermi gas (a system suited for such studies) led to thermodynamic quantities averaged over the trap. Now a general experimental method is reported that yields the equation of state of a uniform gas, providing new physical insights and enabling a detailed comparison with existing theories.

    • S. Nascimbène
    • , N. Navon
    •  & C. Salomon

  • Letter |

    Many technological materials are intentionally 'doped' with foreign elements to impart new and desirable properties, a classic example being the doping of semiconductors to tune their electronic behaviour. Here lanthanide doping is used to control the growth of nanocrystals, allowing for simultaneous tuning of the size, crystallographic phase and optical properties of the hybrid material.

    • Feng Wang
    • , Yu Han
    •  & Xiaogang Liu

  • News & Views |

    The finding that the normal phase of an ultracold gas of fermionic atoms in the strongly interacting regime is close to a Fermi liquid isn't quite what theorists expected for these systems.

    • Yong-il Shin

  • News & Views |

    A mathematical method has been developed that distinguishes between the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and those of his imitators. But can the approach be used to spot imitations of works by any artist?

    • Bruno A. Olshausen
    •  & Michael R. DeWeese

  • News |

    Nanowires growing from bacteria might link up distant chemical reactions in sediments.

    • Katharine Sanderson

  • News |

    Catastrophic failure that caused accelerator shutdown was not a freak accident, says project physicist.

    • Geoff Brumfiel

  • News |

    Astrophysicists ponder whether ultrahigh-energy particles really do come from the centre of galaxies.

    • Eric Hand

  • Letter |

    One of the central predictions of general relativity is that a clock in a gravitational potential well runs more slowly than a similar clock outside the well. This effect, known as gravitational redshift, has been measured using clocks on a tower, an aircraft and a rocket, but here, laboratory experiments based on quantum interference of atoms are shown to produce a much more precise measurement.

    • Holger Müller
    • , Achim Peters
    •  & Steven Chu

  • Letter |

    Type Ia supernovae are thought to be associated with the thermonuclear explosions of white dwarf stars, but the nuclear runaway that leads to the explosion could occur through two different pathways with different X-ray signatures. The X-ray flux from six nearby elliptical galaxies and galaxy bulges is now observed to reveal that it is a factor of about 30–50 less than predicted by the accretion scenario, where a white dwarf accumulates material from a companion star.

    • Marat Gilfanov
    •  & Ákos Bogdán

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