Letters

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  • Cells in a tissue layer arrange themselves in orientationally ordered structures. Now two types of liquid crystalline order have been shown to coexist, with nematic order dominating large length scales and hexatic order dominating small length scales.

    • Josep-Maria Armengol-Collado
    • Livio Nicola Carenza
    • Luca Giomi
    Letter
  • When electrons in a crystal interact with the surrounding lattice, they can form quasiparticles known as polarons. A computational approach to studying polarons in two-dimensional materials explains why they are rarely observed in these systems.

    • Weng Hong Sio
    • Feliciano Giustino
    Letter
  • Quantum systems produce correlations that cannot be mimicked by classical resources, which can be used to certify quantum states without trusting the underlying devices. A network can perform this procedure for pure states with any number of systems.

    • Ivan Šupić
    • Joseph Bowles
    • Matty J. Hoban
    Letter
  • Plasmonics allows precise engineering of light–matter interactions and is the driver behind many optical devices. The local observation of a plasmonic quantum wave packet is a step towards bringing these functionalities to the quantum regime.

    • Sebastian Pres
    • Bernhard Huber
    • Tobias Brixner
    Letter
  • A scanning nitrogen-vacancy microscope is used to image ferroelectric domains in piezoelectric and improper ferroelectric samples with high sensitivity. The technique relies on the nitrogen-vacancy’s Stark shift produced by the samples’ electric field.

    • William S. Huxter
    • Martin F. Sarott
    • Christian L. Degen
    LetterOpen Access
  • Icephobic surfaces are helpful for increasing safety and sustainability in engineering applications. A study of the behaviour of supercooled droplets freezing on superhydrophobic surfaces now provides insights into ice-repellency mechanisms.

    • Henry Lambley
    • Gustav Graeber
    • Dimos Poulikakos
    LetterOpen Access
  • The presence of small thermal regions in a many-body localized system could lead to its delocalization. An experiment with cold atoms now monitors the delocalization induced by the coupling of a many-body localized region with a thermal bath.

    • Julian Léonard
    • Sooshin Kim
    • Markus Greiner
    Letter
  • Photonic waveguides with appropriately engineered interactions allow the experimental realization of non-Abelian quantum holonomies of the symmetry group U(3), which is known from the strong nuclear force.

    • Vera Neef
    • Julien Pinske
    • Alexander Szameit
    LetterOpen Access
  • The Luttinger liquid is a theoretical concept used to describe interacting fermions in a 1D system. Now it is shown that the model also describes electron physics in η-Mo4O11, a quasi-2D material in which 1D chains cross each other.

    • X. Du
    • L. Kang
    • L. X. Yang
    Letter
  • During development, tissues with complex topology emerge from collections of cells with simple geometry. This process in neuroepithelial organoids is governed by two topologically distinct modes of epithelial fusion.

    • Keisuke Ishihara
    • Arghyadip Mukherjee
    • Frank Jülicher
    LetterOpen Access
  • The notion of chirality in dynamical systems with broken spatial symmetry but preserved time inversion symmetry has led to the concept of truly chiral phonons. These have now been observed in bulk HgS using circularly polarized Raman spectroscopy.

    • Kyosuke Ishito
    • Huiling Mao
    • Takuya Satoh
    LetterOpen Access