Volume 4 Issue 7, July 2022

In the 20th century, Bell Labs was a renowned industrial research lab in the US, known as the birthplace of the transistor and for the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation. It was also home to a 40-year minority outreach programme that went on to create a generation of Black scientists. What can initiatives today learn from the success of this fellowship?

The development of time-resolved, multiscale and multi-modal X-ray imaging techniques at advanced light sources raises challenges on the data processing end — but image processing methods from other research areas will help.

Twenty years ago, the particle physics community launched Indico, an open-source software package for handling all aspects of meetings. This is brief guide to what Indico can do, and how the wider physics community could benefit from adopting it.

Sebastiaan Huber describes AiiDA, an open source system to manage complex workflows and heterogeneous data.

How did the leopard get its spots? According to Rudyard Kipling’s 1902 children’s story, the leopard’s spots were created by fingerprints of an Ethiopian man. Fifty years later, Alan Turing laid the mathematical foundations of our understanding of leopard spots today.

A paper in Journal of the Royal Society Interface reports the physics of how the structure of part of the ear of wheat contributes to fungal spores being agglomerated by the dew cycle.

A study in Physical Review Letters reports new evidence for high-energy neutrinos being associated with cataclysmic phenomena known as tidal disruption events.

Polaritonics is the physics of strongly coupled light–matter states that studies condensates and superfluids of bosonic quasiparticles in solid-state systems. Coherent flows of exciton–polaritons can be used for classical and quantum information processing, offering advantages of full optical control and read-out.

The polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) may shed light on the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and on the origin of all structures in the Universe. Discovering a signature of such new physics in the CMB will require new observational and calibration strategies for future CMB experiments.

The study of Bose–Einstein condensation in photonic systems has attracted strong interest in a variety of physical platforms, including conventional lasers and optical parametric oscillators, exciton and exciton–polariton gases, and photons in dye-filled cavities and propagating geometries. The focus of this Review is to highlight those universal phenomena that stem from the driven-dissipative, non-equilibrium nature of these systems and affect the static, dynamic, superfluid and coherence properties of the condensate.

The standard Hamiltonian approach to quantum field theory violates Poincaré invariance, leading to predictions with artificial dynamical effects and potentially obscuring the fundamental description of a physical system. This Perspective explains how such issues are avoided by using light-front Hamiltonian quantization.