Physics articles within Nature Physics

Featured

  • Research Highlights |

    • Alison Wright

  • Research Highlights |

    • Abigail Klopper

  • Editorial |

    Two big-science projects — the Large Hadron Collider and the Planck satellite — are set to deliver major results in the coming year.

  • News & Views |

    Geomagnetic storms driven by the solar wind can cause the flux of high-energy electrons in the Earth's Van Allen belts to rapidly fall. Analysis of data obtained during one such event from multiple spacecraft located at different altitudes in the magnetosphere reveals just where these electrons go.

    • Mary K. Hudson

  • News & Views |

    Squeezed states push the limits of quantum measurement precision, but observing them is never straightforward. In spin-1 Bose–Einstein condensates, an elegant algebra reveals squeezed states that would otherwise go unnoticed.

    • Austen Lamacraft

  • Letter |

    Squeezed states—which permit precision beyond the scope of Heisenberg’s uncertainty relation—are well established for spin-1/2 particles. Now an elegant demonstration of squeezing in spin-1 condensates generalizes the criteria for squeezed states to higher spin dimensions.

    • C. D. Hamley
    • , C. S. Gerving
    •  & M. S. Chapman

  • Letter |

    Magnetic reconnection is a process by which the field lines of a magnetized plasma undergo dramatic realignment, releasing large amounts of energy. Large-scale simulations of reconnection events in the Earth’s magnetosphere suggest that this process takes place over much greater distances than previously expected.

    • J. Egedal
    • , W. Daughton
    •  & A. Le

  • Letter |

    An experiment demonstrates that the motion of so-called skyrmions—topologically quantized magnetic whirls—causes an emergent electric field that inherits the topological quantization of the skyrmions and is directly visible in the Hall effect.

    • T. Schulz
    • , R. Ritz
    •  & A. Rosch

  • News & Views |

    Confining liquid 3He in porous silica aerogel prepared with strong anisotropy stabilizes a state of axial superfluidity.

    • Vladimir P. Mineev

  • Letter |

    Liquid 3He in silica aerogel exhibits no trace of the chiral superfluid phase present in bulk 3He. Stretching the aerogel axially introduces an anisotropy that stabilizes the chiral phase, supporting a transition to a new disordered phase at low temperatures.

    • J. Pollanen
    • , J. I. A. Li
    •  & J. A. Sauls

  • News & Views |

    A single photon can alter the shape of a molecule. It is now shown that quantum effects can play an important role in this change leading to conformation relaxation rates hundreds of times faster than previously expected.

    • Shaul Mukamel

  • News & Views |

    Mechanical oscillations of microscopic resonators have recently been observed in the quantum regime. This idea could soon be extended from localized vibrations to travelling waves thanks to a sensitive probe of so-called surface acoustic waves.

    • Aashish Clerk

  • Article |

    Mechanical oscillations of microscopic resonators have recently been observed in the quantum regime. This idea could soon be extended from localized vibrations to travelling waves thanks to a sensitive probe of so-called surface acoustic waves.

    • Martin V. Gustafsson
    • , Paulo V. Santos
    •  & Per Delsing

  • Article |

    A molecule can alter shape as it absorbs a photon. It is now shown that quantum effects can play an important role in this change leading to conformation rates hundreds of times faster than previously expected.

    • J. Clark
    • , T. Nelson
    •  & G. Lanzani

  • Letter |

    One proposed explanation of unconventional superconductivity involves describing it in terms of a crossover from a conventional superconducting state to a Bose–Einstein condensate state. Angle-resolved photoelectron measurements of an iron chalcogenide superconductor could provide evidence for such crossover behaviour.

    • Y. Lubashevsky
    • , E. Lahoud
    •  & A. Kanigel

  • News & Views |

    Two-qubit entanglement can be preserved by partially measuring the qubits to leave them in a 'lethargic' state. The original state is restored using quantum measurement reversal after the qubits have travelled through a decoherence channel.

    • Alexander N. Korotkov

  • News & Views |

    Graphene exhibits many extraordinary properties, but superconductivity isn't one of them. Two theoretical studies suggest that by decorating the surface of graphene with the right species of dopant atoms, or by using ionic liquid gating, superconductivity could yet be induced.

    • Oskar Vafek

  • News & Views |

    In quantum control there is an inherent tension between high fidelity requirements and the need for speed to avoid decoherence. A direct comparison of quantum control protocols at these two extremes indicates where the sweet spot may lie.

    • Lloyd C. L. Hollenberg

  • Article |

    Superfluorescence—the emission of coherent light from an initially incoherent collection of excited dipoles—is now identified in a semiconductor. Laser-excited electron–hole pairs spontaneously polarize and then abruptly decay to produce intense pulses of light.

    • G. Timothy Noe II
    • , Ji-Hee Kim
    •  & Junichiro Kono

  • Letter |

    Measurements of Hanbury Brown and Twiss correlations in atomic gases near the Bose–Einstein condensation threshold reveal strong signatures of interactions between the constituent atoms, and establish such correlation measurements as a sensitive probe for the quantum properties of matter-wave sources.

    • A. Perrin
    • , R. Bücker
    •  & J. Schmiedmayer

  • Letter |

    Geomagnetic storms driven by the solar wind can cause a dramatic drop in the flux of high-energy electrons in the Earth’s outer Van Allen belt. Analysis of data obtained during such an event by three different sets of spacecraft suggests that these electrons are directed into space rather than lost to the atmosphere.

    • Drew L. Turner
    • , Yuri Shprits
    •  & Vassilis Angelopoulos

  • News & Views |

    Brillouin scattering of light is now shown to attenuate the Brownian motion of microscopic acoustic resonators. This electrostrictive phenomenon could be a useful complement to the ponderomotive and photothermal effects that can optically control optomechanical systems.

    • Ivan Favero

  • News & Views |

    The electronic degrees of freedom in semiconductor membranes provide an innovative new way of cooling mechanical motion.

    • Andrew Armour

  • Letter |

    A novel mechanism for cooling tiny mechanical resonators is now demonstrated. Inelastic scattering of light from phonons in an electrostrictive material attenuates the Brownian motion of the mechanical mode.

    • Gaurav Bahl
    • , Matthew Tomes
    •  & Tal Carmon

  • Article |

    Chiral superconducting states are expected to support a variety of exotic and potentially useful phenomena. Theoretical analysis suggests that just such a state could emerge in a doped graphene monolayer.

    • Rahul Nandkishore
    • , L. S. Levitov
    •  & A. V. Chubukov

  • Article |

    A novel mechanism for cooling nanomechanical objects has now been demonstrated. Optically excited electron–hole pairs produce a mechanical stress that damps the motion of a gallium arsenide membrane. In this way, the nanoscale resonator is cooled from room temperature to 4 K.

    • K. Usami
    • , A. Naesby
    •  & E. S. Polzik

  • Article |

    The transport measurements of an interacting fermionic quantum gas in an optical lattice provide a direct experimental realization of the Hubbard model—one of the central models for interacting electrons in solids—and give insights into the transport properties of many-body phases in condensed-matter physics.

    • Ulrich Schneider
    • , Lucia Hackermüller
    •  & Achim Rosch

  • Letter |

    According to Heisenberg, the more precisely, say, the position of a particle is measured, the less precisely we can determine its momentum. The uncertainty principle in its original form ignores, however, the unavoidable effect of recoil in the measuring device. An experimental test now validates an alternative relation, and the uncertainty principle in its original formulation is broken.

    • Jacqueline Erhart
    • , Stephan Sponar
    •  & Yuji Hasegawa

  • News & Views |

    A macroscopic quantum pendulum has now been created by confining a polariton condensate in a parabolic optical trap. Spectacular images of multiparticle wavefunctions are obtained by purely optical means.

    • Alexey Kavokin

  • Article |

    Rapid particle acceleration is possible using a fixed-field alternating-gradient machine—but ‘scaling’ in its design has been necessary to avoid beam blow-up and loss. The demonstration now of acceleration in such a machine without scaling has positive implications for future particle accelerators.

    • S. Machida
    • , R. Barlow
    •  & T. Yokoi

  • Letter |

    Graphene exhibits many extraordinary properties. But, despite many attempts to find ways to induce it, superconductivity is not one of them. First-principles calculations suggest that by decorating the surface of graphene with lithium atoms, it could yet be made to superconduct.

    • Gianni Profeta
    • , Matteo Calandra
    •  & Francesco Mauri

  • Letter |

    The presence, or otherwise, of magnetism in graphene has been the subject of much debate. A systematic study of point defects—a widely suggested source of ferromagnetism in graphene—suggests that although they can exhibit net spin, they remain paramagnetic, even at liquid helium temperature.

    • R. R. Nair
    • , M. Sepioni
    •  & I. V. Grigorieva

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