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The existence of Bragg glasses—featuring nearly perfect crystalline order and glassy features—has yet to be experimentally confirmed for disordered charge-density-wave systems. A machine-learning-based experimental study now provides evidence for a Bragg glass phase in the charge density waves of Pd_xErTe₃.

During a photoinduced phase transition, electronic rearrangements are usually faster than lattice ones. Time-resolved measurements now show that the insulator-to-metal transition in a thin-film Mott insulator is preceded by lattice reconfiguration.

Mathematical proofs of black hole physics are becoming too complex even for specialists.

Some exotic metals exhibit competing electronic states that can be influenced by small perturbations. Now, a study of a kagome superconductor shows that this competition is exquisitely sensitive to weak strain fields, providing insight into its anomalous electronic properties.

When cracks creep forward in our three-dimensional world, they do so because of accompanying cracks racing perpendicular to the main direction of motion with almost sonic speed. Clever experiments have now directly demonstrated this phenomenon.

Inertial confinement represents one of two viable approaches for producing energy from the fusion of hydrogen isotopes. Scientists have now achieved a record yield of fusion energy when directly irradiating targets with only 28 kilojoules of laser energy.

Inertial confinement fusion experiments in a direct-drive configuration report more energy produced in deuterium–tritium fusion reactions than the amount of energy in the central part of the plasma created by laser irradiation of the fuel capsule.

Hydro-equivalent scaling of recent direct-drive inertial confinement fusion implosions shows that a burning plasma can be achieved with a higher laser energy.

Understanding the mechanism by which magnons—the quanta of spin waves—propagate is important for developing practical devices. Now it is shown that long-range dipole–dipole interactions mediate the propagation in a van der Waals antiferromagnet.

Multiple mechanisms can create electrons with reduced kinetic energy in solids. Combining these mechanisms now appears as a promising route to enhancing quantum effects in flat band materials.

Magnons—quanta of spin waves—have potential applications in signal processing technology. But it is challenging to obtain coupling between different magnons. Now a study achieves this by demonstrating nonlinear magnon mixing in an antiferromagnet.

The electronic transport properties of charge-ordered kagome metals are controversial. Now careful measurements on unperturbed samples show that previously measured anisotropy in the transport occurs only when external perturbations are present.

Phonons do not carry spin or charge, but they can couple to an external magnetic field and cause a sizable transverse thermal gradient. Experiments suggest that phonon handedness is a widespread effect in magnetic insulators with impurities.

The thermal Hall effect of phonons does not yet have a definitive explanation. Now a careful study of doped Sr₂IrO₄ suggests that the mechanism involves the scattering of phonons by impurities embedded in an antiferromagnetic environment.

Heterostructures of transition metal dichalcogenides are known to simulate the triangular-lattice Hubbard model. Now, by combining a monolayer and bilayer of different materials, this idea is extended to multi-orbital Hubbard models.

Understanding the three-dimensional nature of fracture formation and dynamics is challenging. Experiments now show that a fracture front, after originating at a particular locus in a material, propagates jump-wise and expands transversely at high speed.

Electronic transport measurements of the anomalous Hall effect can probe properties of a frustrated kagome spin ice that are hidden from conventional thermodynamic and magnetic probes.

Physical ageing in glassy materials can be described in a linear way through the concept of material time. Multispeckle dynamic light scattering is now shown to provide experimental access to the material time, in terms of which fluctuations become statistically reversible.

Most quantum simulations of spin models with trapped ions have been restricted to one dimension. Now, tunable simulations of Ising models with single-site detection have been demonstrated in two-dimensional ion crystals.

Observations of strong electron correlation effects have been mostly confined to compounds containing f orbital electrons. Now, the study of the 3d pyrochlore metal CuV₂S₄ reveals that similar effects can be induced by flat-band engineering.