Letters

A study of the strong coupling of different exciton species in two-dimensional molybdenum diselenide in a cavity uncovers the rich many-body physics and may lead to new devices.

A scanning tunnelling microscopy study of an intercalated iron selenide-based superconductor reveals a sign change in its superconducting gap function, providing indirect evidence for the origin of the pairing mechanism in this system.

Proximity effects enable superconductivity to leak into normal metals. In graphene, a Klein-like tunnelling of superconducting pairs from a high-temperature superconductor allows the proximity effects to be tuned by electric fields.

In nanoscale electronic circuits, controlling the flow of heat is essential. A demonstration of a heat Coulomb blockade arising from thermal many-body effects shows that thermal transport follows distinct rules in the quantum regime.

Electrons are diffracted by a standing light wave of light, a phenomenon known as the Kapitza–Dirac effect. A generalization of this effect opens perspectives for the manipulation of ultrashort electron wavepackets by intense laser fields.

Acoustic Weyl points are realized in a three-dimensional chiral phononic crystal that breaks inversion symmetry, with the topological nature of the associate surface states providing robust modes that propagate along only one direction.

A classical algorithm solves the boson sampling problem for 30 bosons with standard computing hardware, suggesting that a much larger experimental effort will be needed to reach a regime where quantum hardware outperforms classical methods.

Mechanism-based metamaterials leverage geometric design to control deformations — a strategy that works well on small scales. But the discovery of a characteristic length scale suggests that the underlying mechanism is distorted for larger systems.

The photoactive properties of microalgae are well documented when it comes to photosynthesis and motility. But it seems their adhesion to surfaces can also be manipulated with light, which may serve to optimize their photoactive functionality.

Combining micrometre-sized mechanical resonators with superconducting quantum circuits, quantum information encoded with photons now can be converted to the motion of a macroscopic object.

α-RuCl₃ has recently attracted great interest as a possible experimental realization of the Kitaev model. Neutron scattering measurements of a single crystal of this material reveal signatures of Majorana excitations, consistent with Kitaev’s predictions.

The demonstration of a direct correlation between an optical stimulus and the biological function of a photoreceptor in living brain tissue charts the course for designing tailored pulses to control molecular dynamics in vivo.

Particles in strongly coupled plasmas behave collectively as in liquids, with additional long-range collisions. Experimental evidence is provided that fluctuation theorems obeyed by liquid are also valid for strongly coupled dusty plasmas.

When molten tin droplets impact clean substrates, they either stick or spontaneously detach depending on the substrate temperature. Competition between heat extraction and fluidity controls this behaviour, forgoing the need for surface treatment.

Traditionally quantum state tomography is used to characterize a quantum state, but it becomes exponentially hard with the system size. An alternative technique, matrix product state tomography, is shown to work well in practical situations.

Magneto-optical trapping and sub-Doppler cooling of atoms has been instrumental for research in ultracold atomic physics. This regime has now been reached for a molecular species, CaF.

Understanding crack formation is important for improving the mechanical performance of materials. A new theory is now presented for the description of cracks propagating at high speeds, with elastic nonlinearity as the underlying principle.

Graphene systems are clean platforms for studying electron–electron (e–e) collisions. Electron transport in graphene constrictions is now found to behave anomalously due to e–e interactions: conductance values exceed the maximum free-electron value.

Experimental signatures of a Berry phase for composite fermions in the fractional quantum Hall effect provide support for the predictions that these composite fermions are Dirac particles.

Semiconductor nanowires with superconducting leads are considered promising for quantum computation. The current–phase relation is systematically explored in gate-tunable InAs Josephson junctions, and is shown to provide a clean handle for characterizing the transport properties of these structures.