Physical sciences articles within Nature Physics

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  • News & Views |

    Networks of dynamic actin filaments and myosin motors, confined in cell-like droplets, drive diverse spatiotemporal patterning of contractile flows, waves, and spirals. This multiscale active sculpting is tuned by the system dynamics and size.

    • Rae M. Robertson-Anderson

  • News & Views |

    Trojan beams, which are optical counterparts of Trojan asteroids that maintain stable orbits alongside planets, have been successfully showcased in experiments, opening up possibilities for transporting light in unconventional settings.

    • Tomáš Tyc
    •  & Tomáš Čižmár

  • Article |

    Twisted structures are shown to confine and guide light without total internal reflection, using an effect analogous to the stable Lagrange points in celestial mechanics.

    • Haokun Luo
    • , Yunxuan Wei
    •  & Mercedeh Khajavikhan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Heating and cooling are shown to happen along distinct thermodynamic pathways, which makes the former faster than the latter. This finding calls for a rethink of the fundamentals of thermalization processes at the microscale and of devices like Brownian heat engines.

    • M. Ibáñez
    • , C. Dieball
    •  & R. A. Rica

  • Comment |

    Quantum hypothesis testing—the task of distinguishing quantum states—enjoys surprisingly deep connections with the theory of entanglement. Recent findings have reopened the biggest questions in hypothesis testing and reversible entanglement manipulation.

    • Mario Berta
    • , Fernando G. S. L. Brandão
    •  & Marco Tomamichel

  • News & Views |

    Physical networks, composed of nodes and links that occupy a spatial volume, are hard to study with conventional techniques. A meta-graph approach that elucidates the impact of physicality on network structure has now been introduced.

    • Zoltán Toroczkai

  • Editorial |

    Many advances in biological physics result from multidisciplinary collaborations. We celebrate the physics of life with a collection of articles that offer insight into successful interactions between researchers from different fields.

  • News & Views |

    Electrons trapped above the surface of solid neon can be used to create qubits using spatial states with different charge distributions. These charge qubits combine direct electric field control with long coherence times.

    • Atsushi Noguchi

  • Comment |

    Fluid flows play a key part in living systems. Cross-disciplinary engagement between fluid physics and biology greatly benefits both fields.

    • Kirsty Y. Wan

  • 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

  • Comment |

    Historically, most renormalization group studies have been performed for equilibrium systems. Here, I give a personal reflection on the unexpected outcome of studying non-equilibrium flocking using renormalization methods.

    • Yuhai Tu

  • 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 |

    Supersymmetric quantum field theories have special properties that make them easier to study. This Comment discusses how the constraints that supersymmetry places on renormalization group flows have been used to study strongly coupled field theories.

    • Jaewon Song

  • 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

  • News & Views |

    Permanent deformation in solids results from atoms not aligning with the external stress causing the deformation. Detecting such non-affine atomic rearrangements and connecting them to measurable mechanical effects is now shown to be feasible by means of high-energy X-ray diffraction.

    • Saswati Ganguly

  • Research Briefing |

    Neutron spectroscopy, entanglement analysis, and simulations provide evidence that KYbSe2 closely approximates a 2D quantum spin liquid. Although KYbSe2 displays magnetic ordering at low temperatures, its magnetic dynamics are dominated by fractionalized excitations that exhibit anomalously large quantum entanglement, indicating that on finite timescales KYbSe2 exhibits quantum spin liquid physics.

  • Comment |

    Annually, the European Research Council (ERC) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) allocate resources to promote research excellence in Europe and the USA. We observe that European Union (EU)-based researchers rely strongly on United States (US) collaborations to secure top EU funding, while the reverse is much less common.

    • Sandeep Chowdhary
    • , Nicolò Defenu
    •  & Federico Battiston

  • Article |

    Physical networks are systems composed of physical entities, which conventional graph-based approaches fail to capture. Theoretical work now introduces a meta-graph technique to uncover the impact of physicality on the structure of networks.

    • Márton Pósfai
    • , Balázs Szegedy
    •  & Albert-László Barabási

  • News & Views |

    A decade ago, the anti-laser made waves as a new type of perfect absorber that functions as a one-way trap door for light. Experiments have now demonstrated the control of light without absorbing it.

    • A. Douglas Stone

  • Article |

    Network geometry is an emerging framework used to describe several topological and organizational features of complex networks. Now this approach has been extended to directed networks, which contain both symmetric and asymmetric interactions.

    • Antoine Allard
    • , M. Ángeles Serrano
    •  & Marián Boguñá

  • News & Views |

    A detailed understanding of phonon transport is crucial for engineering the thermal properties of materials. A particular doping strategy is now shown to lead to good thermoelectric performance with low thermal conductivity.

    • Zhilun Lu

  • Research Briefing |

    Landau’s theory of Fermi liquids predicts that impurities embedded in a Fermi sea of atoms form quasiparticles called polarons that interact with one another via the surrounding medium. Such mediated polaron–polaron interactions have been directly observed and are shown to depend on the quantum statistics of the impurities.

  • Article |

    Despite the theoretical prediction of spinaron quasiparticles in artificial nanostructures, experimental evidence has not yet been seen. Now it has been observed in a hybrid system comprising Co atoms on a Cu(111) surface.

    • Felix Friedrich
    • , Artem Odobesko
    •  & Matthias Bode

  • News & Views |

    A nonlinear optical approach has now enabled picosecond control of a complex band structure, driving a non-Hermitian topological phase transition across an exceptional-point singularity.

    • Jiangbin Gong
    •  & Ching Hua Lee

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