Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Recognizing a superfluid when we see one may be more difficult than we originally thought. Simulations suggest that the sharp peaks associated with superfluidity in ultracold atoms do not provide a unique signature after all.
Measurements of the position of a nanoscale beam using a microwave cavity detector represents a promising step towards being able to measure displacements at the quantum limit.
Nanoscale beams are one platform for exploring quantum-mechanical phenomena in ever-larger systems. The collective motion of a macroscopic ensemble of ultracold atoms confined in an optical cavity is established as an alternative approach.
When a thermodynamic system is changed sufficiently slowly, entropy is generally conserved and the process is adiabatic, and therefore reversible. However, this adiabaticity does not seem to hold for low-dimensional systems with a high-density of low-energy states.
Solitons are encountered in a wide range of nonlinear systems, from water channels to optical fibres. They have also been observed in Bose–Einstein condensates, but only now have such ‘ultracold solitons’ been made to live long enough for their dynamical properties to be studied in detail.
Accurate measurement of the phase of the high harmonics emitted from aligned CO2 molecules in a strong laser field represent an important step in the generation of shaped attosecond pulses and the coherent control of matter.
Control over the distribution of electrons in a relativistic particle beam enables the realization of a bright, narrow, tunable source of terahertz radiation.
The energy of an atom binding one photon in a cavity can be derived classically. But when two photons are bound to the atom, signatures of light quantization appear in the spectrum. These have now been observed in the optical domain.
A systematic study of ionization and high harmonic generation in strong laser fields at long wavelengths confirms predictions made 40 years ago, and has important implications for the development of attosecond light sources.
Although a driven colloidal suspension is not at equilibrium, a systematic study shows that such a system can still undergo a phase transition — albeit to a randomly organized state.
The requirement for an object to be surrounded by empty space when imaged by coherent X-ray diffraction was once thought to be a fundamental limitation. A variant of coherent diffractive imaging proves this not to be the case, and substantially widens its potential use.
