Browse Articles

Elastocaloric materials exhibit temperature changes under applied stress and could be the basis for an environmentally friendly cooling system if issues with their long term stability can be addressed. Here, the authors design and build an elastocaloric device using evaporation and condensation of a fluid achieving enhanced specific cooling power and long term stability.

Sections of the Large Hadron Collider generate more secondary electrons, which induce heat load problems and limit collider performance. Here, beamline components are examined, surface modifications responsible for enhanced secondary electron emission are identified, and curative solutions are proposed.

The manipulation of spin degree of freedom allows the exploration of novel phenomena at the nanoscale. The authors achieved unprecedented submicroKelvin temperatures in the spin system of nuclei embedded in low dimensional semiconductors. A result that opens the way to the investigation of spin-spin interactions and exotic spin-ordered phases.

The evolution of epidemic outbreaks in urban settings is known to stem from the interplay between demographic, structural, and economical characteristics. Here, the authors combine a data driven approach with meta-population modelling to show that the epidemic vulnerability of cities hinges on the morphology of human flows, and propose how a city’s mobility backbone could be modified to minimize the epidemic risk.

The Kuramoto model describes how collective synchronization appears spontaneously in a population of rhythmic units and is typically studied on a one dimensional circle. Here, the authors generalise the Kuramoto model on higher-dimensional manifolds and show that it achieves almost global convergence to synchronization and, in even dimensions, the fully synchronized state is attainable for nonidentical frequencies, in sharp contrast with the classical one-dimensional model.

Here, Zanin and Olivares review the permutation patterns-based metrics used to distinguish chaos from stochasticity in discrete time series. They analyse their performance and computational cost, and compare their applicability to real-world time series.

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.

Photon activation analysis is a non-destructive technique for material characterization that require high photon energies. Here, laser-driven accelerator is considered as a high-energy photon source and its optimization for photon activation analysis explored theoretically.

Excitonic physics dominates the optical response of semiconductor monolayers but single particle band structure parameters are hard to probe experimentally. Here, spin-orbit splitting in the conduction band of monolayer WSe₂ is revealed by the identification of the Rydberg series of dark excitons.

Controlling the generation of solitons in multimode photonic systems may boost the performance of optical communication networks. Here, the conditions under which an experimentally observed walk-off multimode soliton is generated are revealed.

Droplet impact on surfaces has wide applications regardless of the discipline area and several hypotheses have been put forward to explain the mechanism of film boiling. Here, the authors combine theory and experiment to investigate liquid drop impact off hot hydrophilic substrates, and explain the transition between deposition and rebound in terms of vapour percolation.

Ion-solid interactions are governed by a range of complex processes the direct experimental observation of which pose their own set of challenges. Here, the authors present a joint experimental and first-principles approach to study and describe the underlying mechanism of electron capture for an ion travelling through layers of graphene with monolayer precision.

Spintronic devices, where the spin of the electron becomes the main carrier of information, offer a promising avenue to develop quantum devices. The authors experimentally and theoretically investigate spin-polarization and spin-orbit mixing in a W(110) surface, and provide a mean to fine tune the quantum (de)coherence of materials by changing the spin polarization of a conduction electron in a spintronic device

Quantum compilers are characterized by a trade-off between the length of the sequences, the precompilation time, and the execution time. Here, the authors propose an approach based on deep reinforcement learning to approximate unitary operators as circuits, and show that this approach decreases the execution time, potentially allowing real-time quantum compiling.

Skyrmions are topologically non-trivial, vortex-like magnetic structures the dynamics of which have been mostly studied in 2D systems, but they are also able to exist as 3D tube-like structures. Here, the authors report a combination of experimental and computational results investigating the annihilation dynamics of 3D skyrmion structures in order to better understand how to stabilise topological structures in other bulk magnetic systems.

Photovoltaic devices require reliable and scalable growth methods to produce the constituent materials. Here, the authors report a tiny-seed-assisted solution processing strategy to grow Sb₂S₃/TiO₂ nanoarray heterojunction of which the hybrid solar cell without negative impact of photogenerated electric field exhibits a power efficiency of 5.70%.

Noether’s Theorem relates symmetries to fundamental physical laws. Rather than applying the concept to an action integral in order to obtain conservation laws, here the authors consider Statistical Mechanical objects, such as the free energy and density and power functionals to derive exact force and torque sum rules.

Low-loss multimode optical nanofibers could provide a platform for studying and technologically exploiting nonlinear light-matter interactions. Here, adiabatic transport of multiple modes and highly efficient fundamental-to-fundamental third harmonic generation is demonstrated in a submicron silica fiber.

Electron-phonon coupling plays a central role in a variety of low dimensional structures. The authors unveiled the subtle interaction between optical phonons and charge carriers by applying Raman spectroscopy to plasmonic nanostructures fabricated on atomically thin InSe. These findings provide insights to develop future high-performance nanoelectronic devices.