Articles in 2022

Cervix and breast carcinomas are highly heterogeneous in their mechanical properties across scales. This heterogeneity provides the tumour with stability and room for cell motility.

Shot noise has traditionally been used to measure the charge of quasiparticles in a variety of mesoscopic systems. However, at sufficiently low temperatures, this usual notion tends to break down for fractional quantum Hall effect states.

Unconventional quasiparticles carrying spin but not electric charge emerge in quantum spin liquid phases. The Kondo interaction of these spinon quasiparticles with magnetic impurities may now have been observed.

A quantum rotor periodically kicked stops absorbing energy after a certain time and enters into a localized regime. Two experiments with cold atoms have now shown how many-body interactions can suppress dynamical localization.

Periodic kicking of a quantum system leads to dynamical localization and to the failure of thermalization. Measurements on a kicked Bose–Einstein condensate now show how many-body interactions induce the breakdown of dynamical localization.

The quantum kicked rotor is a paradigmatic non-interacting model of quantum chaos and ergodicity breaking. An experiment with a kicked Bose–Einstein condensate now explores the influence of many-body interactions on the onset of quantum chaos.

Laser light is usually limited to the same wavelength range as the spontaneous emission of the active material. A judicious choice of dielectric coatings on the cavity has now enabled laser emission far beyond the spectral range of the gain medium.

A Mott insulator forms when strong interactions between particles cause them to become localized. A cold atom simulator has now been used to realize a selective Mott insulator in which atoms are localized or propagating depending on their spin state.

As laser action emerges from fluorescence, its emission wavelength lies within the fluorescence spectrum. Exploiting multiphonon processes can take the laser emission far beyond the spectral limits defined by a material’s intrinsic fluorescence.

Using a quantum annealer to simulate the dynamics of phase transitions shows that superconducting quantum devices can coherently evolve systems of thousands of individual elements. This is an important step toward quantum simulation and optimization.

Declaring a cosmopolitan right to scientific progress risks perpetuating the inequities it aims to overcome. Instead, science ought to be reimagined in a way that directly addresses its links to nationalist projects and harmful capitalist practices.

Numerical studies have predicted that solids at extremely high pressures should exhibit changes in structure driven by quantum mechanical effects. These predictions have now been verified in magnesium.

Limits on the quantum entanglement entropy in one dimension have been a key factor in understanding the physics of many-body systems. A bound that applies in any dimension has now been derived for a different measure known as entanglement spread.

A proposed materials design principle can facilitate the discovery of strongly correlated topological semimetals. It predicts promising candidate materials by cross referencing theoretical models based on realistic crystal structures with a materials database. This approach is verified by synthesizing and experimentally investigating a proposed material.

Entanglement entropy between two parts of a quantum state generally grows with volume, but for one-dimensional and some two-dimensional ground states, it scales with area. An area law has now been proven for a related metric in any dimension or geometry.

Strongly correlated topological materials are hard to identify. Now a design principle suggests a method for producing many topological metals where strong electron–electron interactions are a driving force.

The coherent dynamics of the transverse-field Ising model driven through a quantum phase transition can be accurately simulated using a large-scale quantum annealer.