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Spin ice is known as the magnetic analogue of ordinary ice, where the behaviour of its spins closely mirrors that of protons in water ice. It now has a sibling based on higher-order magnetic octupoles.
Experiments carried out at the National Ignition Facility show that the degree of degeneracy can be varied for an electron plasma. Partially degenerate electron plasmas make up most of the interiors of low mass stars, brown dwarfs and giant planets.
Speed is of the essence when it comes to signal processing, but electronic switching times have reached a limit. Optically controlled tunnel currents across a nanoscale plasmonic gap could considerably accelerate future nanoelectronic devices.
A small twist to a field theory, a giant leap for its phenomenology. Waiving the standard requirement of energy conservation in linear elasticity unravels unexpected mechanical behaviour that has previously been overlooked.
Complex contagions — for example when ideas spread across a network — are thought to be different from the simple contagions observed for infections. Simple contagions are now shown to exhibit a key macroscopic characteristic of complex behaviour when they interact.
Despite the wide use of mode-locked lasers, no general theory for mode-locking exists. An attractor dissection approach provides some intuitive understanding of the complex dynamics in one type of mode-locking.
Cooling of trapped ions with a neutral buffer gas makes the study of atom–ion hybrid systems possible in the quantum regime. The new record low achieved opens the door to numerous opportunities, including full control over the atom–ion interactions.
An electoral model predicts that polarized and alienated voters lead to unstable elections, like phase transitions in an Ising model. Such physics-inspired models may help political scientists devise electoral reforms to quench instability.
Electrons driven through a suspended carbon nanotube by a constant bias excite mechanical vibrations — including self-sustaining oscillations — and, in some cases, even suppress them down to only a few quanta.
Synchronization of biochemical oscillators that are responsible for biological rhythms costs free energy. This theoretical result suggests that part of the adenosine triphosphate molecules consumed by a Kai oscillator is necessary for synchronization.
A layer-by-layer study of TaSe2 shows how this material becomes increasingly insulating as it thins to a monolayer. Scanning tunnelling microscopy reveals the electronic correlations underlying this insulator with atomic resolution.
Planets are assembled from the ground up, beginning with millimetre-sized interstellar dust grains. Microgravity experiments suggest that centimetre-sized dust aggregates form from these smaller grains via collisional charging.
High-magnetic-field experiments on the recently discovered unconventional superconductor UTe2 are consistent with p-wave pairing arising while time-reversal symmetry is broken. In turn, this suggests that this material is a candidate for a chiral superconductor that may be exploited for topological quantum computing.
Qubits cannot exist without nonlinearity, but nonlinear elements in superconducting circuits lead to losses. A superconducting qubit has now been realized by nonlinearly coupling two microwave resonators, offering the promise of long coherence times.
Finding ground states of given Hamiltonians is crucial for quantum simulation — a promising application of quantum computers. An algorithm now finds these states using minimal resources, making it implementable in near-term noisy devices.
The ferromagnetism of iron has been known for millennia. Now a rotational form of spontaneous crystallographic ordering has been discovered. This touches upon fundamental questions about the relation between symmetry, structure and order in matter.
Physical forces have a profound influence on bacterial cell function and physiology. The new tools of nanophysics are bringing to light a tight connection between biomolecular mechanisms and mechanical forces in bacterial cell division.
It is generally difficult to know in advance if a sheet of paper can be folded into an origami shape, but for quadrilateral crease patterns a tiling approach can identify all possible ways of folding them.
