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The SI prefixes provide an essential mechanism for the effective communication of scientific information. Richard Brown and Martin Milton inform us about the latest developments.
Measurements of the switching supercurrent statistics of a superconducting quantum interference device based on bismuth, a second-order topological insulator, reveal that excited Andreev states are surprisingly long-lived. This protection can be attributed to the splitting of the Andreev pairs carrying the supercurrent along separate crystal hinges of opposite helicities.
The critical temperature of a high-temperature superconductor was systematically tuned using an ionic-liquid gating technique. Measurements of this system revealed a universal quantitative relationship between superconductivity and the strange-metal state, which gives insight into the mechanism responsible for high-temperature superconductivity.
Particles in space can be accelerated to high energy, the distribution of which follows a power law. This has now been reproduced in laboratory experiments mimicking astrophysical scenarios, which helps to understand the underlying mechanisms.
Superconductivity can emerge from a strange-metal state, but the exact relationship between them is unknown. Now, quantitative measurements reveal the dependence of resistivity in the strange metal on the superconducting transition temperature.
The transport behaviour of strange metals is distinct from weakly interacting Fermi liquids. Now, a large thermoelectric response has been shown at the transition between those two states.
Laboratory experiments reveal the underlying mechanism of turbulent reconnection, including electron acceleration. These findings are directly relevant for studies of flares in the solar corona.
Laboratory experiments demonstrate that electrons are accelerated to high energies by the reconnection electric field in magnetically driven reconnection. This mechanism is expected to be relevant for many astrophysical environments.
Second-order topological insulators feature helical one-dimensional states located at crystal hinges. Running a supercurrent through such systems is now shown to lead to long-lived excited Andreev pairs due to their separation along hinges with opposite helicity.
Liquid crystal defect structures with topology similar to a Möbius strip can rotate, translate and transform into one another under an applied electric field.
Time-crystalline order appears in periodically driven systems with broken time-translation symmetry. Now, a protocol based on pulse drives of different frequencies is used to create and continuously observe time crystals with long lifetimes.
Multi-parameter metrology requires collective measurements on more than one copy of the same quantum state. Now, an optimal scheme for the estimation of qubit rotations has been demonstrated on superconducting and trapped-ion platforms.
Interactions between photons arise due to the presence of optical nonlinearities. In topological Thouless pumps, a sufficiently strong nonlinearity leads to soliton transport with a fractionally quantized plateau structure—reminiscent of transport in the fractional quantum Hall effect.
Transport measurements between a normal conductor and superconductor show that in this case, the Coulomb drag response can be much larger than that between two normal conductors.
Topological defect structures that swim have been realized in liquid crystals. Now, a range of structures with topology reminiscent of a Möbius strip swim and transform into one another.