Editor's Highlights - Communications Physics

One main obstacle of flow cytometry techniques is the inability to image internal structure of live cells on the go, posing challenges in deciphering their biological mechanisms. To overcome this limit, the authors devise a light-sheet-based multichannel, multisheet and multicolor volume imaging cytometry for interrogating cells flowing simultaneously through microfluidic channels.

High-repetition rate microresonator-based frequency combs offer powerful and compact optical frequency comb sources that are of great importance to various applications. Here, the authors extend the tunability of the Kerr soliton frequency combs by exploiting thermal effects and frequency stabilization techniques.

Revived interest in proton-boron fusion has been fuelled by new laser matter interaction schemes with several possible applications. The authors report on a tabletop laser experiment that observes proton-boron fusion with an emphasis on the secondary cross-section peak around 150 keV.

Realising a topological superconductor with non-Abelian excitations is a central goal for the development and application of topological qubits. Here, the authors theoretically predict the emergence of intrinsic non-Abelian topological superconductivity that occurs when a ‘maximal’ twist angle of 30 degrees is introduced between two layers of a topologically trivial spin-triplet valley-singlet superconductor.

Optomechanics deals with the control and applications of mechanical effects of light on matter. Here, these effects on single-material and multimaterial larger particles with size ranging from 20 nm to a 1 μm are investigated in proximity of epsilon-near-zero metamaterials exploiting different theoretical methods.

Air lasing is a cavity-free lasing action that is generated in air owing to the plasma filamentation process of high-power femtosecond laser pulses. The authors demonstrate that air lasing can be used to generate structured light, obtaining optical vortex beams and optical vector beams via superfluorescence from N₂⁺.

Migration is one of the hallmarks of biological cells and often results from intracellular flows caused by contractility gradients. Here the authors theoretically analyze if and how the experimental tool of optogenetics can be used to control cell migration through light-induced contractility.

The paper explores the possibility of creating ansatz wave-functions for the variational quantum eigensolver that are much more compact than ADAPT-VQE while achieving chemical accuracy. The proposed Overlap-ADAPT-VQE combined with the classical selected-CI approach can reach chemical accuracy for a stretched linear H6 chain using an ansatz with only 40 operators compared to more than 150 for ADAPT-VQE.

The authors propose and experimentally demonstrate a magnonic version of a coherent Ising machine that implements a thin film Yttrium Iron Garnet spin-wave delay-line combined with microwave components. The work emphasizes the relative advantages that a slower more compact spin-wave system has over optical machines using similar principles.

An emerging set of proposals seeks to use arrays of optomechanical sensors to detect weak distributed forces, for applications ranging from gravity-based subterranean imaging to dark matter searches. We propose an array of entanglement-enhanced optomechanical sensors to improve the broadband sensitivity of distributed force sensing.

Boundary time crystals are gaining attention due to their distinctive features like persistent oscillations at the thermodynamic limit. This work shows that the boundary time crystal phase transition can be exploited for quantum-enhanced sensitivity, which bridges many-body physics and quantum metrology and hence triggers broad interest in the condensed matter and quantum technology communities.

Topological insulators are bulk insulators with conducting zero-energy edge states conventionally predicted by topological indices, such as winding numbers in one-dimensional lattices. Here, the authors use the Jackiw-Rebbi theory to reveal that the number of topologically protected zero-energy states can be higher than the winding number.

Transition metal dichalcogenide-based photovoltaics offer the prospect of increased specific power compared to incumbent solar technologies but there are engineering challenges that come with integrating these materials into high-efficiency devices. Here, the authors develop a model to describe the relationship between material quality and the performance limits of single junction solar cells built with various transition metal dichalcogenides.

Quantifying, controlling, and correcting noise related errors is one of the current challenges in quantum computing. Here, the authors study the time dependence of the relaxation of a stationary state simulated on a quantum computer, and show that such spectroscopic signature is unique and can be used to characterize the noise on individual quantum computers.

Cavity optomechanics studies interactions between mechanical oscillators and the radiation pressure induced by intracavity photons. The authors embedded a nonlinear Josephson junction in their microwave cavity to make the cavity response highly nonlinear and observed a counter-intuitive optomechanical process, blue-tone mechanical cooling.

Drainage and imbibition in porous media are two opposite fluid displacement scenarios with remarkably different underlying mechanisms. Here, the authors demonstrate that strong imbibition in porous media shows features of self-organized criticality previously observed only in drainage

The presence of geometric boundaries is known to affect the collective behaviour of active particles. Here, the authors unravel exotic patterns of self-propulsion and non-equilibrium shape fluctuations in a system of active particles enclosed in a droplet and interacting with its soft boundaries.

Auxetics are an unusual family of materials that, for instance, when stretched in a particular direction will exhibit an expansion of the dimensions that are perpendicular to the applied stress; however, despite many known examples of auxectics there is no universal description of the material properties. Here, the authors report a model based on antiferromagnetic spins and demonstrate how this can be used to design a auxetic material with a Poisson ratio of -1 over a range of finite strain.

The move to the quantum internet demands developments in communication networks that are based on quantum entanglement. The authors discuss the phenomenon of entanglement percolation in a quantum network presenting solutions to significantly accelerate the intensive computation effort involved in the process.

The authors study an interesting phenomena of shape coexistence in ¹⁸⁶Pb. In an elegant and well-documented experiment, they confirm the coexistence of the three 0⁺ states in the ¹⁸⁶Pb nucleus and reassign the shapes associated with the excited 0⁺ states.

Most bound quantum states in condensed matter systems emerge due to two-body interactions. Here, the formation of a stable three-particle bound state, induced by irreducible three-particle interactions in an antiferromagnetic spin ladder, is evidenced analytically and numerically for realistic material parameters.

The non-Hermitian skin effect comprises of boundary localised eigenmodes and has been realised in a range of 1D systems such as photonics and metamaterials. Here, the authors achieve the same effect in a quantum many-body setting using ultra-cold gases and, by tuning the strength of the spin orbit coupling, realise a non-trivial band topology.

X-ray phase-contrast tomography offers a highly sensitive 3D imaging approach to investigate different disease-relevant networks at levels ranging from single cell through to intact organ. The authors present a concomitant study of the evolution of tissue damage and inflammation in different organs affected by the disease in the murine model for multiple sclerosis.

The bulk-boundary correspondence is a defining feature of non-trivial topological matter and extends from the many topological orders that can exist in these systems. Here, the authors theoretically propose a feature distinct from the conventional bulk-boundary correspondence whereby localised modes exist between two flat-band systems with different geometric characters.

Interaction of active matter with geometrical and topological constraints is a topic of intense research in the recent few years due to its potential for design and control of active flow patterns. Here, the authors experimentally study the growth and expansion of cell aggregates interleaved by passive colloidal particles, showing that inert particles can reshape the collective pattern formation in cellular aggregates.

While 3D printing applications range from aerospace manufacturing to the design of drug delivery systems, current technologies reaching the micro and nanoscale resolution are limited by the complexity and cost of their components. Here, the authors show that nanoscale cost-effective 3D printing can be achieved by using a gaming console optical drive pickup for 3D photopolymerization.

Intermediate band solar cell is a type of photovoltaic cell which includes additional narrow band states which allow absorption of low energy below-bandgap photons that might otherwise be transmitted from the host material. Here, the authors report a type of ratchet intermediate band solar cell prepared by doping GaAs with erbium and investigate the underlying energy transfer mechanisms.

Characterizing the interactions between viral and human proteins is key to understand the function and structure of viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 and for informing drug design and repurposing strategies. Here, the authors use statistical physics techniques to perform a systematic multiscale comparison of the effects on the human interactome of SARS-CoV-2 with respect to other viruses, and find that COVID-19 exhibits properties typical of systemic diseases.

URu₂Si₂ is known to exhibit a lower temperature phase transition termed a ‘hidden order’ due to the difficulty its detection using conventional solid-state probes and the exact mechanism still remains unknown. Here, the authors use scanning tunnelling microscopy to reveal a 1D charge density wave for cleaved samples of URu₂Si₂ and demonstrate a potential connection with the hidden order state.

Atoms embedded in dense hot plasmas are affected by complex many-body interactions which challenges our capacity to model high energy density plasma. The authors propose a solution to the effects of many-body interactions on ions in dense plasmas, with a particular focus on the threebody interaction.

Implementing large-scale quantum networks is one of the challenges at the core of quantum communication. Here, the authors present NetSquid, a quantum network simulator that allows studying how such networks can be built, including physical hardware modelling, modularity, scalability, and examples.

Emerging experimental observation suggests that asymmetrical partitioning in cell division plays an important role in cell-to-cell variability, cell fate determination, cellular aging, and rejuvenation. Here, the authors propose a method based on multicolor flow cytometry to measure asymmetric division of cellular organelles, finding that cell cytoplasm is divided symmetrically but mitochondria and membrane lipids are asymmetrically distributed, and explain these observations through a minimal model of asymmetric partitioning based on biased binomial statistics.

The manipulation of spins with ultrafast lasers is a promising route to control the properties of a wide variety of quantum materials. Here, the authors present a simulation of Floquet-engineered spin fluctuations in a correlated system and of their fingerprints in ultrafast inelastic X-ray scattering experiments.

The gain and loss inherent in non-Hermitian quantum systems can modify the flow of coherence between subsystems, which may be lost or recovered from the environment. Here, the coherence flow in PT-symmetric and anti-PT symmetric systems is investigated experimentally and theoretically.

Mechanical forces play important roles in cell biology and traction force microscopy (TFM) experiments have enabled quantification of the cell-generated forces when placed on substrates of distinct stiffnesses. Here the authors evaluate the effect of the Poisson’s ratio- one of the main descriptors of the material’s mechanical behaviour together with the Elastic Modulus, in the context of TFM experiments.

Liquid scintillator detectors have been used to study neutrinos ever since their discovery in 1956. The authors introduce an opaque scintillator detector concept for future neutrino experiments with increased capacity for particle identification and a natural affinity for doping.