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In December, physicists met in Paris to discuss how to push the limits of what can be measured with quantum sensors and how to keep moving them towards practical applications.
The three-body problem is relevant for astrophysical phenomena such as black hole mergers. It famously lacks a general analytical solution, but a new statistical solution relates the distributions of final and initial states, while requiring fewer assumptions than previous approaches.
The Hubble constant can be estimated from measurements of both the early and late Universe, but the two estimates disagree. In 2019 a number of independent measurements using different methods made this discrepancy harder to ignore.
As the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) celebrates its 10th anniversary, scientists look back on a challenging yet successful decade of research made possible by national and international collaboration.
Knowing which atomic, molecular and optical physics computer code to use and how is a challenge. Andrew Brown surveys the available software packages and discusses how code development practices in academia could be improved.
Numerical methods such as the close-coupling, R-matrix and Kohn variational methods have been around for decades, but more recently they have been applied to the treatment of the time-dependent interaction of strong electromagnetic fields with atoms and molecules.
In 2019, new optical phenomena have been revealed in stacks of atomically thin semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides. These effects can be understood in terms of well-known, but also new, exotic, types of exciton.
Writing in Physical Review Letters the XENON collaboration reports how it is pushing the limits of the XENON1T experiment, further constraining the regions where light dark matter could be lurking.
Topological insulator band theory usually neglects electron correlations as these are overridden by spin–orbit coupling. Now, two papers strongly confine 1D topological edge states in order to study the effect of correlations.
Pseudo-electromagnetic fields emerge in inhomogeneous materials. This Review discusses the properties of such fields in the context of 3D topological semimetals, the origin and consequences of pseudo-fields in real materials and their field theory description.
Biological tissues are scaffolded by the extracellular matrix, but details of how this network of fibre-like macromolecules is patterned have remained elusive. Two papers demonstrate the role of feedback between cells and matrix, and identify how the mechanism is regulated.
Two studies published in Phys. Rev. Lett. predict new types of topological insulators that could be observed in places such as twisted bilayer graphene or periodically driven systems.
Artificial spin ices are metamaterials displaying fascinating phenomena arising from the collective behaviour of nanoscale magnets. We review recent developments in terms of emergent magnetic monopoles, phase transitions, dynamics and geometries, and discuss future directions for research and potential applications.
This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of George Gabriel Stokes, a physicist and mathematician best known for his contributions to fluid dynamics, but whose work was broader than that.
Quantum sensors based on atom interferometry are moving from fundamental research towards commercial applications in metrology, geophysics, space, civil engineering, oil and minerals exploration, and navigation, but a number of challenges need to be overcome.
In September, scientists gathered at the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the institute, an event marked by a symposium discussing future prospects in cosmology, large-scale structure and galaxy formation.
The fluid mechanics of active materials, built around the idea of living systems as condensed matter made of free-energy-consuming particles, gives insight into biology and opens new directions in physics. Sriram Ramaswamy discusses the history and future of the field.
More than 1,700 planetary scientists from 52 countries gathered in Geneva, Switzerland, in September for the joint meeting of the Europlanet Society’s European Planetary Science Congress and the meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society.
