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The behaviour of sound waves in phononic crystals—metamaterials with spatially varying acoustic characteristics—is similar to that of electrons in solids. Now, phononic band inversion and Zak phases have been measured for a 1D phononic system.
Josephson vortices are circulating supercurrents with an inner structure that is challenging to probe experimentally. Scanning tunnelling microscopy now shows that such vortices contain non-superconducting cores.
The transfer of protons across a high barrier only occasionally occurs through quantum-mechanical tunnelling. Low-temperature scanning tunnelling microscopy shows concerted tunnelling of four protons within chiral cyclic water tetramers supported on an inert surface.
An experiment reveals the dynamics of singly and doubly occupied sites in an atomic Bose gas in a one-dimensional optical lattice, which may provide a better understanding of thermalization and quantum correlations in many-body systems.
Many-body tunnelling is a complex but important phenomenon. Scanning tunnelling microscopy experiments with a Cl-terminated tip on a cyclic cluster of hydrogen-bonded water molecules now demonstrate controllable concerted tunnelling of four protons.
A comprehensive experimental investigation of a PrPtAl single crystal concludes that it displays modulated magnetic order driven by quantum critical phenomena.
The Mott transition is investigated in three different organic insulators with triangular lattices and evidence of quantum criticality in an intermediate temperature regime is uncovered.
The rotation curve of a galaxy reflects the galactic mass distribution. For the Milky Way, such observational data are incompatible with models based on baryonic matter alone, which could be due to the presence of dark matter in the inner Milky Way.
