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Granular charging can create some spectacular interactions, but gravity obscures our ability to observe and understand them. A neat desktop experiment circumvents this problem, shining a light on granular clustering — and perhaps even planet formation.
By eliminating the effects of gravity with a free-falling camera, high-resolution imaging of charged grains reveals Keplerian orbits and electrostatically stable clusters—with implications for astrophysical and industrial cluster formation.
Imaging individual atoms in an optical lattice with single-site resolution has so far only been possible for bosonic species, but thanks to electromagnetically-induced-transparency cooling fermionic species can now also be imaged.
Transistors rely on electrical gates to control conductance but this is challenging on the atomic-scale. It is now shown that individual charged atoms can be used to electrostatically gate a single-molecule transistor with sub-ångström precision.
Small distinctive patterns or ‘motifs’ are more prevalent in real systems than they are in randomly generated networks. It now seems that these motifs emerge naturally according to a principle that favours interconnections biased towards stability.
The evidence for a time-reversal symmetry-breaking phase in high-temperature cuprate superconductors has been contradictory. But these observations are consistent with a theory predicting fractional vortices that form ‘necklaces’.
A foreground galaxy cluster is magnifying a more distant blazar by gravitationally bending the emitted radiation. Using such a lens, it is possible to resolve a jet close to the central supermassive black hole as being the source of the gamma rays.
Reducing the signal-to-noise ratio is a never-ending challenge for many types of experiments. Now, improved ratios are reported for nuclear magnetic resonance set-ups combining an external high-Q resonator and a low-Q input coil.
Terahertz radiation is used to directly probe magnetotransport in metallic multilayers on the timescale of electron momentum scattering—the fundamental conditions of Nevill Mott’s model of spin-dependent conduction in metals.
The general theory of relativity, tested time and time again, is a cornerstone of modern physics — but marrying it with quantum mechanics remains a major challenge.
Quantum many-body systems are often so complex as to be intractable. An algorithm that finds the ground state of any one-dimensional quantum system has now been devised, proving that the many-body problem is tractable for quantum spin chains.
A niobium titanite nitride-based superconducting nanodevice — a Cooper-pair transistor — has a remarkably long parity lifetime, exceeding one minute close to absolute zero.
