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Quantum technologies, including quantum sensors, quantum communication and quantum metrology, represent a growing industry. Out in space, such technologies can revolutionize the way we communicate and observe our planet.
Decades-long repeat observations of supernova 1987A offer us unique, real-time insights into the violent death of a massive star and its long-term environmental effects, until its eventual switch-off.
On astronomical scales, gravity is the engine of the Universe. The launch of LISA Pathfinder this year to prepare the technology to detect gravitational waves will help us 'listen' to the whole Universe.
Superpositions of massive objects would be hard to spot on Earth even in well-isolated environments because of the decoherence induced by gravitational time dilation.
When do structures comprising a few crystalline sheets become truly two dimensional? The number of layers certainly plays a role, but in trilayer graphene, the way they're stacked matters too — as shown in a series of Nature Physics papers from 2011.
This year, NASA's Dawn and New Horizons rendezvoused with Ceres and Pluto, respectively. These worlds, despite their modest sizes, have much to teach us about the accretion of the Solar System and its dynamical evolution.
Similar to orbital angular momentum-carrying optical beams, it is now possible to engineer structured electron beams that could find applications in imaging, nanofabrication and the study of fundamental phenomena.
The accurate determination of quark mixing parameters is essential for the understanding of the Standard Model. The LHCb collaboration now reports the coupling strength of the b quark to the u quark through the measurement of a baryonic decay mode.
Cells rely on coherent oscillatory processes, despite being subject to large fluctuations from their environment. Simple motifs found in all oscillatory systems are studied to determine the thermodynamic cost of maintaining this coherence.
A reformulation of quantum theory aims at reconciling transition probabilities with time reversal in connection to Wigner’s notion of symmetry, expanding the known classes of symmetry transformations.
A high-resolution X-ray diffraction study of chromium and niobium diselenide traces the evolution of the ordering wavevector in charge and spin density waves, respectively, as a function of temperature and applied pressure.
New three-dimensional simulations of magnetic reconnection suggest the existence of secondary reconnection sites that could be observed by the new NASA Magnetospheric MultiScale Mission.
Despite the very low temperatures quantum gases are cooled to, the entropy per particle remains larger than that of the condensed-matter systems they are supposed to emulate. Using magnons one can produce low-temperature, low-entropy gases.
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.
