Browse Articles

Unusual optical phenomena arise when light interacts with time-varying dielectric media. Here, relativistic propagation of a photoconductivity front in silicon is exploited to temporally stretch and time-reverse terahertz pulses.

The kagome lattice is an ideal platform for studying the effects of frustration in spin systems. Here, the authors investigate a half-integer spin chain placed on a one-dimensional kagome system finding a rich phase diagram that presents a gapless spin-liquid phase and supports their results through a resonating dimer–monomer model

Majorana fermions are elusive particles which have proven extremely tricky to observe experimentally, with current efforts focused on hybrid superconducting devices. Here, the authors theoretically propose a set up combining a Josephson junction and a skyrmion crystal to create and control the Majorana bound states.

Light-matter interaction is not only used to melt electronic orders, but also carry the potential as a non-thermal tuning knob to enhance emergent orders. Here the authors demonstrate a light-induced transient enhancement of superconductivity in an iron chalcogenide superconductor via terahertz optical conductivity and terahertz third-harmonic generation by the injection of photo-carriers.

Dissipative Kerr solitons are the key phenomenon underpinning the generation of broad and coherent frequency combs on a photonic chip. This work extends the notion of dissipative Kerr solitons to the case of two coupled resonators possessing an exceptional point.

Drawing around 60 attendees and 20 presenters to a virtual lecture room, April’s CHI-2 Photonics in Microresonators and Beyond conference explored recent progress in the use of microresonators and integrated photonic devices exhibiting second-order nonlinearity for optical frequency conversion.

Subject to a periodic drive, quantum materials can develop nontrivial bulk topological state, termed a Floquet topological insulator, which differs from its static counterpart due to the nontrivial role played by the time dimension. Here, the authors theoretically demonstrate that such dynamic topology can be probed by bulk dislocation lattice defects, realizable in state-of-the-art experiments in quantum crystals, cold atomic systems and various metamaterials.

The inherently broad bandwidth of attosecond pulses conflicts with the coherence requirements of lensless imaging. Here, broadband holography-assisted coherent imaging is demonstrated with a resolution of less than 35 nm.

This perspective presents current and future possibilities offered by space technology for testing quantum mechanics, with a focus on mesoscopic superposition of nanoparticles and the potential of interferometric and non-interferometric experiments in space.

Managing heat dissipation in nanoscale electronic devices and understanding the underlying mechanisms complicated due to the reduced scale at the interface between the various materials. Here, the authors detect an extremely small interface thermal resistance is in amorphous-(a-) GeS/epitaxial-(e-) PbTe superlattice and perform calculations showing that heat conduction in nanoscale systems with high density interfaces might be controlled by phonon density of states and group velocity similarities.

Advanced time-resolved structural probes are enabling new views of rapid interactions and optical switching between symmetry-broken phases in quantum materials. Here, using relativistic ultrafast electron diffraction the authors investigate the dynamics of TaTe2 and chart the evolution of a distinct superstructure of trimer clusters which dissolve and form on picosecond time scales.

Analog Ising machines are promising fast computing schemes for some difficult optimization problems, yet their analog nature is known to cause errors and inhibit computational performance. Here, the authors investigate how the choice of nonlinear transfer functions partly suppresses errors caused by analog amplitude inhomogeneity, which leads to order-of-magnitude differences in the computation time.

While the Landau-Zener problem is conventionally used to describe defects formation in quantum systems, it cannot be applied to non-interacting Bose excitations as the adiabatic perturbation theory assumptions are violated by Bose statistics. Here, the author investigates adiabatic cycles across quantum critical points with harmonic Bose quasi-particles and shows that adiabaticity breakdown is a universal feature of these systems

Understanding and predicting fluctuations of the neutron population within a nuclear reactor is of fundamental importance for nuclear safety, especially in connection with reactor control at startup and shutdown. The study presents experiments and Monte Carlo simulations of persistent neutron fluctuations and correlations (stochastic noise and neutron clustering) in nuclear reactors which are interpreted by stochastic modelling based on branching random walks.

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.

The electrical and optical properties of a material depend strongly on the details of its crystal structure. Here, the authors report a technique to mechanically deform the lattice of monolayer graphene with strain, and electrically detect the generation of a scalar potential that modifies the graphene work function.

Low-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides are an ideal platform to investigate strongly correlated phenomena with excitons. Here, the authors theoretically demonstrate that bilayer heterostructures of these materials can be used to realize the strongly correlated many-particle states of charged interlayer excitons that can be controlled by the interlayer separation adjustment and can be tuned by both electro- and magneto-static external fields.

Electronic devices operating at the nanoscale can exhibit unique electrical and thermal phenomena that can affect overall performance and so it is necessary to understand and control these types of fluctuations. Here, the authors theoretically and experimentally investigate quantum phase slips which can proliferate at low-temperatures in miniaturised superconducting devices and determine how this impacts on the resultant transport properties.

Floquet topological engineering describes the driving of a topologically trivial system into transitory non-trivial state and there are many open questions about the underlying mechanisms. Here, the authors theoretically investigate the time evolution of a topological mode when the bulk band structure is driven into a topologically trivial structure, and show that it can survive unexpectedly long in a "frozen” regime, before gradually disappearing in the "melting” regime.