Techniques and instrumentation articles within Nature Physics

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  • News & Views |

    The transfer of protons across a high barrier only occasionally occurs through quantum-mechanical tunnelling. Low-temperature scanning tunnelling microscopy shows concerted tunnelling of four protons within chiral cyclic water tetramers supported on an inert surface.

    • Christof Drechsel-Grau
    •  & Dominik Marx

  • Letter |

    Many-body tunnelling is a complex but important phenomenon. Scanning tunnelling microscopy experiments with a Cl-terminated tip on a cyclic cluster of hydrogen-bonded water molecules now demonstrate controllable concerted tunnelling of four protons.

    • Xiangzhi Meng
    • , Jing Guo
    •  & Ying Jiang

  • Research Highlights |

    • Luke Fleet

  • Editorial |

    Helium has become a precious resource and its supply must be managed with care.

  • News & Views |

    Determining the sequence of events following photon absorption by a molecule can be a surprisingly challenging task. An innovative use of time-resolved X-ray spectroscopy has revealed an important insight into the ultrafast excited-state dynamics of a well-known inorganic chromophore.

    • James K. McCusker

  • Letter |

    Nanoscale metallic tips are a useful source of electrons for material characterization. It is now shown how terahertz radiation can provide precision control and enhancement of photoelectron emission from these sources. The approach can shape the spectrum of the electron pulse, which could pave the way to improvements in ultrafast electron diffraction and transmission electron microscopy.

    • L. Wimmer
    • , G. Herink
    •  & C. Ropers

  • News & Views |

    The Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction — the mechanism behind weak ferromagnetism — has been difficult to probe experimentally. Now, significant progress is reported that has important implications for a wide range of magnetic phenomena.

    • Chong Der Hu

  • Letter |

    Oxygen-mediated superexchange (or Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya) interactions result in weak ferromagnetism in oxides. A method based on the interference of synchrotron X-ray radiation is now shown to enable the determination of the sign of the Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction in the prototypical weak ferromagnet iron borate.

    • V. E. Dmitrienko
    • , E. N. Ovchinnikova
    •  & M. I. Katsnelson

  • News & Views |

    Controlled switching of interacting ferroelectric surface domains leads to a variety of regular and chaotic patterns, and could provide a physical platform for performing calculations.

    • Alain Pignolet

  • News & Views |

    A combination of two Nobel ideas circumvents the trade-off between power and accuracy in ultraviolet spectroscopy.

    • Scott A. Diddams

  • Letter |

    Frequency combs provide a broad series of well-calibrated spectral lines for highly precise metrology and spectroscopy, but this usually involves a trade-off between power and accuracy. A comb created by adjusting the time delay between two optical pulses now enables both. This so-called Ramsey comb could probe fundamental problems such as determining the size of the proton.

    • Jonas Morgenweg
    • , Itan Barmes
    •  & Kjeld S. E. Eikema

  • Research Highlights |

    • Bart Verberck

  • News & Views |

    Femtosecond pulses from X-ray free-electron lasers offer a powerful method for studying charged collective excitations in materials, and provide a potential route to identifying bosonic quasiparticles in condensed-matter systems.

    • Peter Abbamonte

  • Letter |

    Magnetic monopoles continue to be elusive. However, an experiment now shows that the interaction of an electron beam with the tip of a nanoscopically thin magnetic needle—a close approximation to a magnetic monopole field—generates an electron vortex state, as expected for a true magnetic monopole field.

    • Armand Béché
    • , Ruben Van Boxem
    •  & Jo Verbeeck

  • Letter |

    Being able to sense nuclear spin dimers is an important next step towards single-molecule structural analysis from NMR measurements. Now the sensing of a single 13C–13C nuclear spin dimer near a nitrogen–vacancy centre in diamond is reported, together with a structural characterization at atomic-scale resolution.

    • Fazhan Shi
    • , Xi Kong
    •  & Jiangfeng Du

  • Article |

    Ferroelectric domain switching on the surface of a lithium niobate thin film can be induced by the tip of a scanning probe microscope, and gives rise to both regular and chaotic spatiotemporal patterns. Moreover, the long-range interactions that govern these phenomena can be tuned by varying temperature, humidity, domain spacing and tip bias.

    • A. V. Ievlev
    • , S. Jesse
    •  & S. V. Kalinin

  • Research Highlights |

    • Bart Verberck

  • Letter |

    Ensembles of nuclear spins display thermal fluctuations—spin noise—that interfere with nuclear magnetic resonance measurements of samples below a threshold size. Experiments on nanowires show that by monitoring spin noise in real time and applying instantaneously adjusted radiofrequency pulses, spin polarization distributions that are narrower than the thermal distribution can be obtained.

    • P. Peddibhotla
    • , F. Xue
    •  & M. Poggio

  • News & Views |

    Scanning tunnelling spectroscopy in a heavy-fermion superconductor provides direct access to the anisotropy of the pairing gap, opening a window for investigating the nature of the pairing interaction.

    • Louis Taillefer

  • News & Views |

    In electron spin resonance techniques, spins are usually manipulated by applying external magnetic fields, but the same effect can be obtained by guiding electrons along a meandering path using surface acoustic waves.

    • Masaya Kataoka

  • Letter |

    A matter-wave interferometer is ‘universal’ if it can be applied to any atom or molecule irrespective of its internal state. This removes the need to prepare a spatially coherent incident beam. Such a system is now realized using three separate optical ionization gratings, and interference of molecular clusters with a de Broglie wavelength as small as 275 fm is demonstrated.

    • Philipp Haslinger
    • , Nadine Dörre
    •  & Markus Arndt

  • Article |

    Enhanced control of the nuclear spin orientation of rare isotopes has now been demonstrated. This technique is considerably more efficient than traditional methods and significantly broadens the domain of accessible nuclei, promising insights in nuclear physics and applications in material science.

    • Yuichi Ichikawa
    • , Hideki Ueno
    •  & Mustafa M. Rajabali

  • Letter |

    How and why Fermi arcs—disconnected segments of the Fermi surface—emerge in the pseudogap phase of cuprate superconductors is a mystery. A technique for analysing angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy data that removes momentum broadening effects suggests these arcs do not reflect true Fermi surface states, which would explain why they do not form continuous loops.

    • T. J. Reber
    • , N. C. Plumb
    •  & D. S. Dessau

  • 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

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