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Manipulating weakly bound helium dimers with ultrafast laser pulses reveals their quantum behaviour. This method opens a route towards studying the low-energy dynamics of other exotic and fragile quantum states.
A class of biological matter including elongated cells and filaments can be understood in the framework of active nematic liquid crystals. Within these systems, topological defects emerge and give rise to remarkable collective behaviours.
When molecular model systems, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, are ionized by ultrashort extreme ultraviolet pulses, their relaxation path proceeds via electron–phonon scattering, linking molecules to typical solid-state matter behaviour.
The contact formalism describes short-range correlations, which play a crucial role in nuclear systems. Initially introduced for ultracold atoms, its generalization to the nuclear case was now validated by ab initio calculations.
Observing accreting black holes in the early Universe allows precise comparison of clocks over intercontinental distances on Earth. This is achieved with a novel observation strategy using the next generation of very long baseline interferometry systems.
Animals seem capable of an infinite variety of movement, yet also exhibit substantial stereotypy in repeated actions. A beautiful view of worm behaviour now shows that the worm’s state evolves deterministically but is bounced chaotically between unstable periodic orbits.
Populations of organisms can be regarded as clouds of genetic variants evolving passively in response to mutation and natural selection. Counterdiabatic driving — a tool borrowed from quantum control — now offers the possibility of actively controlling both the rate and route followed by an evolving population.
An atomic spin oscillator coupled to a mechanical membrane resonator forms an effective negative-mass oscillator. Entanglement in this hybrid quantum system is created by a backaction-evading position measurement, despite the macroscopic separation.
Although quantum mechanics is essential to understand microscopic systems, it has little effect on heavier objects. Experiments have now put strict constraints on theories that use gravity to explain the absence of large-scale quantum effects.
The properties of anyons — two-dimensional particles that are neither fermions nor bosons — have been directly measured in a quantum Hall interferometer.
When a semiconductor is embedded inside a microcavity, infrared photons have been shown to bind electrons and holes together as excitons. This result opens the door for quantum material engineering based on light–matter interactions.
The discussion of the quantum mechanical Wigner’s friend thought experiment has regained intensity. Recent theoretical results and experimental tests restrict the possibility of maintaining an observer-independent notion of measurement outcomes.
A mooted advantage of high-dimensional states is their robustness to noise, yet their fragility in noisy channels has hindered their deployment. A demonstration shows how to exploit entanglement to restore quantum correlations lost in transmission.
Squeezed light is useful for metrology and quantum information. An optomechanical squeezed light source that works at room temperature will facilitate the technological applications of quantum light.
Near-term quantum computations are susceptible to noise that — left uncorrected — can destroy the correlations responsible for quantum computational speedups. New work develops tools for bolstering the noise resilience of these speedups.
Novel non-equilibrium phases of matter have recently become the focus of intense interest. The realization of topological phases which cannot exist under the constraints of thermodynamic equilibrium is a key aim.
Everybody who has ever made a paper airplane and been disappointed as it spins out of control, crashing to the ground, knows how tricky achieving suitable trim and stability for gliding can be. But, somehow, wiggling flying snakes glide without tumbling.
An elegant experiment showing that acoustic waves are amplified after scattering by a rotating body demonstrates an effect predicted in 1971 by Yakov Zel’dovich. This result has implications for the understanding of scattering from black holes.
