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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Optical Society’s Frontiers in Optics conference held in Washington DC, USA, this September brought together students and Nobel Laureates alike to discuss the wide-ranging fields of optics and photonics.
This month we publish a Review and an Expert Recommendation on multi-messenger astrophysics, a field that inherently involves big collaborations, big instruments and big data.
Insects have mastered flight to a degree that scientists are only now starting to comprehend. Itai Cohen and colleagues discuss some of the outstanding challenges and opportunities for studying this fascinating and beautiful behaviour.
This October, the new user facilities at the Cornell High-Energy Synchrotron Source will open their doors to researchers following a major upgrade project.
