Physics articles within Nature Physics

Featured

  • Perspective |

    Quantum computers promise to efficiently predict the structure and behaviour of molecules. This Perspective explores how this could overcome existing challenges in computational drug discovery.

    • Raffaele Santagati
    • , Alan Aspuru-Guzik
    •  & Clemens Utschig-Utschig
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Combining multiparticle levitation with cavity control enables cavity-mediated interaction between levitated nanoparticles, whose strength can be tailored via optical detuning and position of the two particles.

    • Jayadev Vijayan
    • , Johannes Piotrowski
    •  & Lukas Novotny
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Photon-mediated entanglement in atomic ensembles coupled to cavities enables the engineering of quantum states with a graph-like entanglement structure. This offers potential advantages in quantum computation and metrology.

    • Eric S. Cooper
    • , Philipp Kunkel
    •  & Monika Schleier-Smith
  • Article |

    Most applications of surface plasmons are based on their near-field properties. These properties are now shown to be governed by nonclassical scattering between multiparticle plasmonic subsystems.

    • Mingyuan Hong
    • , Riley B. Dawkins
    •  & Omar S. Magaña-Loaiza
  • News & Views |

    Electric dipoles are common in insulators, but extremely rare in metals. This situation may be about to change, thanks to flexoelectricity.

    • Gustau Catalan
  • Article |

    Topologically protected hinge modes could be important for developing quantum devices, but electronic transport through those states has not been demonstrated. Now quantum transport has been shown in gapless topological hinge states.

    • Md Shafayat Hossain
    • , Qi Zhang
    •  & M. Zahid Hasan
  • News & Views |

    Ageing is a non-linear, irreversible process that defines many properties of glassy materials. Now, it is shown that the so-called material-time formalism can describe ageing in terms of equilibrium-like properties.

    • Beatrice Ruta
    •  & Daniele Cangialosi
  • News & Views |

    Interacting emitters are the fundamental building blocks of quantum optics and quantum information devices. Pairs of organic molecules embedded in a crystal can become permanently strongly interacting when they are pumped with intense laser light.

    • Stuart J. Masson
  • News & Views |

    Some quantum acoustic resonators possess a large number of phonon modes at different frequencies. Direct interactions between modes similar to those available for photonic devices have now been demonstrated. This enables manipulation of multimode states.

    • Audrey Bienfait
  • Measure for Measure |

    Adaptive optics allows scientists to correct for distortions of an image caused by the scattering of light. Anita Chandran illuminates the nature of the technique.

    • Anita Mary Chandran
  • News & Views |

    The integration of theory and experiment makes possible tracking the slow evolution of a photodoped Mott insulator to a distinct non-equilibrium metallic phase under the influence of electron-lattice coupling.

    • Denitsa R. Baykusheva
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The standard current–phase relation in tunnel Josephson junctions involves a single sinusoidal term, but real junctions are more complicated. The effects of higher Josephson harmonics have now been identified in superconducting qubit devices.

    • Dennis Willsch
    • , Dennis Rieger
    •  & Ioan M. Pop
  • News & Views |

    Quantum simulators can provide new insights into the complicated dynamics of quantum many-body systems far from equilibrium. A recent experiment reveals that underlying symmetries dictate the nature of universal scaling dynamics.

    • Maximilian Prüfer
  • News & Views |

    Some cerium and uranium compounds exhibit unusual transport properties due to localized electron states. Recent experiments demonstrate that quantum interference on frustrated lattices provides an alternative route to this behaviour.

    • William R. Meier
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The existence of Bragg glasses—featuring nearly perfect crystalline order and glassy features—has yet to be experimentally confirmed for disordered charge-density-wave systems. A machine-learning-based experimental study now provides evidence for a Bragg glass phase in the charge density waves of PdxErTe3.

    • Krishnanand Mallayya
    • , Joshua Straquadine
    •  & Eun-Ah Kim
  • News & Views |

    Some exotic metals exhibit competing electronic states that can be influenced by small perturbations. Now, a study of a kagome superconductor shows that this competition is exquisitely sensitive to weak strain fields, providing insight into its anomalous electronic properties.

    • Stephen D. Wilson
  • News & Views |

    When cracks creep forward in our three-dimensional world, they do so because of accompanying cracks racing perpendicular to the main direction of motion with almost sonic speed. Clever experiments have now directly demonstrated this phenomenon.

    • Michael Marder
  • News & Views |

    Inertial confinement represents one of two viable approaches for producing energy from the fusion of hydrogen isotopes. Scientists have now achieved a record yield of fusion energy when directly irradiating targets with only 28 kilojoules of laser energy.

    • Vladimir Tikhonchuk
  • Article |

    Understanding the mechanism by which magnons—the quanta of spin waves—propagate is important for developing practical devices. Now it is shown that long-range dipole–dipole interactions mediate the propagation in a van der Waals antiferromagnet.

    • Yue Sun
    • , Fanhao Meng
    •  & Joseph Orenstein
  • News & Views |

    Multiple mechanisms can create electrons with reduced kinetic energy in solids. Combining these mechanisms now appears as a promising route to enhancing quantum effects in flat band materials.

    • Priscila F. S. Rosa
    •  & Filip Ronning
  • News & Views |

    Phonons do not carry spin or charge, but they can couple to an external magnetic field and cause a sizable transverse thermal gradient. Experiments suggest that phonon handedness is a widespread effect in magnetic insulators with impurities.

    • Valentina Martelli
  • Article |

    Physical ageing in glassy materials can be described in a linear way through the concept of material time. Multispeckle dynamic light scattering is now shown to provide experimental access to the material time, in terms of which fluctuations become statistically reversible.

    • Till Böhmer
    • , Jan P. Gabriel
    •  & Thomas Blochowicz
  • Article |

    Observations of strong electron correlation effects have been mostly confined to compounds containing f orbital electrons. Now, the study of the 3d pyrochlore metal CuV2S4 reveals that similar effects can be induced by flat-band engineering.

    • Jianwei Huang
    • , Lei Chen
    •  & Ming Yi
  • News & Views |

    Experiments with unprecedented energy and momentum resolution reveal the nature of the pairing symmetry in KFe2As2 and pave the way for a unified theoretical description of unconventional superconductivity in iron-based materials.

    • Norman Mannella
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Quantum gates require controlled interactions between different degrees of freedom. A tunable coupling has now been demonstrated between the phonon modes of a mechanical resonator designed for storing and manipulating quantum information.

    • Uwe von Lüpke
    • , Ines C. Rodrigues
    •  & Yiwen Chu
  • Research Briefing |

    Studies of a biological active nematic fluid reveal a spontaneous self-constraint that arises between self-motile topological defects and mesoscale coherent flow structures. The defects follow specific contours of the flow field, on which vorticity and strain rate balance, and hence, contrary to expectation, they break mirror symmetry.

  • Article |

    Time crystals spontaneously produce periodic oscillations that are robust to perturbations. A time crystal phase with a long coherence time has now been produced using the electron and nuclear spins of a semiconductor sample.

    • A. Greilich
    • , N. E. Kopteva
    •  & M. Bayer
  • Article |

    Dense suspensions are granular materials suspended in a liquid at high packing fractions, exhibiting high viscosity. The latter is now shown to be related to the formation of a network of rigid clusters at large shear stress.

    • Michael van der Naald
    • , Abhinendra Singh
    •  & Heinrich M. Jaeger
  • Article |

    When applying sufficient strain, the flow of dense granular matter becomes critical. It is now shown that this state corresponds to random loose packing for spheres with different friction coefficients and that these packings can be mapped onto the frictionless hard-sphere system.

    • Yi Xing
    • , Ye Yuan
    •  & Yujie Wang
  • Article |

    Inducing coherent interactions between distinct magnon modes—collective excitations of magnetic order—has been challenging. A canted antiferromagnet has demonstrated coherent magnon upconversion induced by terahertz laser pulses.

    • Zhuquan Zhang
    • , Frank Y. Gao
    •  & Keith A. Nelson