Review Articles

The chiral anomaly, originally studied in pion decay, leads to related effects in Dirac and Weyl semimetals. This Review surveys recent experiments that address the appearance of the anomaly in parallel electric and magnetic fields.

Present-day understanding of planet formation has strongly been influenced by laboratory work under microgravity. This Review discusses the numerous experiments on the processes involved, from the onset of planet formation in sticking collisions to erosion of planetesimal surfaces.

Low-energy neutrons are key for understanding fundamental concepts of quantum mechanics and physics beyond the standard model. This Review addresses topics such as matter-wave interferometry, quantum mechanical relations and hypothetical dark sector models and interactions.

Spin currents, which are generated by chiral structures, can be used to manipulate chiral topological magnetic excitations. This Review brings together advances in chiral molecules, chiral magnetic structures and chiral topological matter to provide an outlook towards potential applications.

The search for topological phases of matter is evolving towards strongly interacting systems, including magnets and superconductors. This Review discusses the proof-of-principle methodologies applied to probe topological magnets and superconductors with scanning tunnelling microscopy.

A clock using the excitation of a low-energy excited state in the ²²⁹Th nucleus promises high accuracy and sensitivity to new physics. The recently measured properties of this nucleus will lead to nuclear laser spectroscopy with trapped Th ions and Th-doped crystals.

Semiconductor qubits are expected to have diverse future quantum applications. This Review discusses semiconductor qubit implementations from the perspective of an ecosystem of applications, such as quantum simulation, sensing, computation and communication.

Geometric insights into the structure and function of complex networks have led to exciting developments in network science. This Review Article summarizes progress in network geometry, its theory, and applications to biological, sociotechnical and other real-world networks.

Conventional solar cells suffer from the thermalization energy loss of hot carriers, which sets the Shockley–Queisser limit. This Review highlights the insightful mechanisms of slow hot carrier cooling dynamics and efficient carrier transport/extraction in 2D van der Waals heterojunctions, following opportunities in practical hot carrier solar cells.

Economic complexity methods predict changes in the geography of economic activities and explain differences in economic growth, inequality, greenhouse emissions and labour market outcomes. This Review summarizes a decade of research on economic complexity and its applications.

Viruses display fascinating dynamics during their life cycle. Only recently has it become possible to probe viral dynamics at the single-particle level. This Review discusses dynamical properties of viruses and recent developments in physical virology approaches to probe such dynamics.

Strong correlations may produce states of matter that do not have non-interacting counterparts, with new types of quantum criticality, superconductivity, and topological phases being recent highlights. This Review describes the physics underlying these correlated states and points to their potential for quantum applications.

Since the first measurement of the spin structure of the proton, there has been significant theoretical and experimental progress in understanding the origins of the proton spin. This Review discusses what we have learned so far, what is still missing and what to expect from the upcoming experiments.

A variety of quantum programming languages have been developed over the past few years, enabling newcomers and seasoned practitioners alike. This Review gives a brief introduction to quantum programming, overviewing some of the existing languages and the ecosystem around them.

The rapidly developing field of topological data analysis represents data via graphs rather than as solutions to equations or as decompositions into clusters. This Review discusses the methods and provides examples from physics and other sciences.

The past decade has witnessed remarkable progress in our understanding of equilibration, thermalization and prethermalization, due in large part to experimental breakthroughs in ultracold atomic gases. This Review discusses theoretical and experimental advances on these topics and the challenges ahead.

Axion fields provide a unique way to understand large quantized electromagnetic responses in topological insulators and dynamics in Weyl semimetals. This Review discusses the theory of axion fields in condensed matter, their experimental realization and their application in next-generation devices.

The charge radius of the proton is controversial because measurements by different methods disagree. Recent results indicate that these measurements might be reconciled. In this Review, we discuss the experimental techniques used to measure the proton radius and describe the current status of the field as well as forthcoming experiments.

Holographic duality is an equivalence relation between a gravitational system and a quantum many-body system. The Review discusses various insights obtained from the duality into properties of strongly coupled matter, quantum many-body chaos and deep connections between quantum information and geometry.

The coupling of photons to material quasiparticles such as plasmons, phonons and excitons opens new possibilities in light–matter interactions. This Review presents a generalized view of such quasiparticles and the technique that describes their interactions with matter: macroscopic quantum electrodynamics.