Research articles

Cells use pH gradients to drive the synthesis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), but the physicochemical mechanisms that can produce pH gradients in non-equilibrium settings are poorly understood. The authors here theoretically and experimentally investigate the formation of a pH gradient in an acid-base reaction system, driven by a heat flow, providing insights on how crude non-equilibrium systems can feed chemical gradients exploitable by life.

Floquet theory describes transient states driven by a light-matter interaction and could potentially be used to engineer the band structure and the topology of solid-state systems. Here, the authors investigate coherent photoemission from a gold surface caused by a strong surface plasmon polariton excitation, which could be used to realize surface plasmon polariton driven Floquet effects in nanostructures.

Two-dimensional materials look poised to revolutionize information and communication technologies. Here, the authors leveraged spatially resolved ellipsometry to engineer the optical absorption of graphene on hexagonal boron nitride substrates, thereby disclosing effective solutions for flexible optoelectronics.

The first generation of global-scale quantum networks are expected to make extensive use of satellite-mediated channels. As a first step towards this goal, this manuscript proposes a full-scale architecture to implement the exchange of quantum information, taking us from use cases through to a detailed plan for the road ahead.

A quantitative magnetic force microscopy technique is presented that maps one magnetic stray-field component and its spatial derivative at the same time. Furthermore, this technique is applied to investigate individual circular magnetic nano-domains in MnNiGa bulk samples providing bubble diameters and the spatial extent in depth.

When topological materials interact with the environment a phenomenon known as the non-Hermitian skin effect is observed, typically at outer interfaces of crystals. The authors combine self-similar fractal geometries for the tight binding models and non-Hermitian physics to showcase intertwining of topology and skin effect at the inner boundaries of periodic fractal lattices.

High power short pulse lasers are technologically reaching a limit in term of amplification due to the material damage threshold of amplifying media. The authors conduct experiments and numerical simulations to show the possibility of benefiting from transient plasma structures generated from counter propagating pump and seed pulses to amplify high power lasers.

Exhibiting low-energy (un)folding barriers and fast kinetics, ultrafast folding proteins are enticing models to study protein dynamics. The authors use single molecule force spectroscopy AFM to capture the compliant behaviour hallmarking the dynamics of ultrafast folding proteins under force.

Biomolecular condensates are membrane-less organelles performing various functions inside cells which behaviour can be understood in terms of liquid-liquid phase separation and wetting. Here, the authors characterize the low interfacial tension regime of nanodroplets during endocytic and exocytic engulfment within an elastic membrane, study the role of the contact line symmetry, and show that nanodroplets and vesicles mutually remodel one another

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.

Dynamics of droplet fragmentation in turbulence is described by the Kolmogorov-Hinze theory, but at higher concentrations common in most flows a quantitative theory is required. The authors use direct numerical simulations of turbulent multiphase flows finding that larger droplets break up absorbing energy from the flow, while smaller droplets undergo rapid oscillations and tend to coalesce releasing energy to the flow.

Quantum embedding approaches to simulate condensed matter on quantum computers have been proposed, yet applications are limited to simplest models. The authors perform a systematic study of ground state preparation with variational quantum algorithms for correlated multi-orbital impurity models, addressing key issues toward real materials simulations.

Machine learning has demonstrated effectiveness in optimizing complex physical structures. In this study, the authors employ a machine learning approach to inversely design non-Hermitian layered optical systems with gain and loss modulation, showing that the trained network can reveal the relation between asymmetric transmission and reflection spectra.

Real-time spectral measurement technology is of great importance in observing transient phenomena and revealing ultrafast dynamics. This paper presents an approach for real-time observing intracavity soliton evolution processes in a mode-locked fiber laser by synchronizing multi-port time-division multiplexed measurements, pointing towards possible studies of intracavity dynamics in various optical systems.