Volume 4 Issue 8, August 2022

Most physics seminars are seen by dozens at most, but the 2012 announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson reached hundreds of thousands of viewers, including non-physicists. Achintya Rao asks what can this event tell us about opening up science to the general public?

Getting the most from power-law-type data can be challenging. James Sethna points out some of the pitfalls in studying power laws arising from emergent scale invariance, as well as important opportunities.

Wendong Wang introduces a new assembly method of ultraclean van der Waals heterostructures that completely avoids the use of polymers.

A paper in Nature Physics shows how the collective chiral motion of malaria single-cell organisms in mosquito saliva is driven by their physical properties

A paper in Physical Review Letters shows how algae cells collectively form different patterns in response to light.

A paper in Science Advances shows how the transition of bacteria cells from collective active swarms to biofilms is driven by both biological and physical mechanisms.

Fifty years after the publication of Philip Anderson’s landmark essay ‘More is different’ that crystallized the idea of emergence, eight scientists describe the most interesting phenomena that emerge in their fields.

Living cells use geometric, biochemical and mechanical guiding cues to control intracellular protein patterns that regulate many vital functions. This Review discusses mechanisms of pattern guidance unveiled in living cells and how to study them from a physics perspective.

Flat bands enhance the effect of electronic interactions and have emerged as a promising platform for superconductivity. This Review explains the quantum geometric origin of flat-band superconductivity and superfluidity, and discusses its relevance in graphene and ultracold gas moiré systems.

Understanding the fundamental limits to photonic design is both theoretically important and critical to the development of future high-performance photonic devices. This Review surveys progress made in this area and discusses an emerging general framework for evaluating photonic design limits based on conservation principles and optimization theory.