News & Views in 2023

Physical networks, composed of nodes and links that occupy a spatial volume, are hard to study with conventional techniques. A meta-graph approach that elucidates the impact of physicality on network structure has now been introduced.

Understanding the mechanism underlying light-induced superconductivity could help manifest it at higher temperatures. Experiments now show that the excitation of a specific phonon leads to a resonant enhancement of this effect in K₃C₆₀.

Electrons trapped above the surface of solid neon can be used to create qubits using spatial states with different charge distributions. These charge qubits combine direct electric field control with long coherence times.

Semiconducting dipolar excitons — bound states of electrons and holes — in artificial moiré lattices constitute a promising condensed matter system to explore the phase diagram of strongly interacting bosonic particles.

The Kondo effect — the screening of an impurity spin by conduction electrons — is a fundamental many-body effect. However, recent experiments combined with simulations have caused a long-standing model system for the single-atom Kondo effect to fail.

Permanent deformation in solids results from atoms not aligning with the external stress causing the deformation. Detecting such non-affine atomic rearrangements and connecting them to measurable mechanical effects is now shown to be feasible by means of high-energy X-ray diffraction.

A decade ago, the anti-laser made waves as a new type of perfect absorber that functions as a one-way trap door for light. Experiments have now demonstrated the control of light without absorbing it.

A detailed understanding of phonon transport is crucial for engineering the thermal properties of materials. A particular doping strategy is now shown to lead to good thermoelectric performance with low thermal conductivity.

A nonlinear optical approach has now enabled picosecond control of a complex band structure, driving a non-Hermitian topological phase transition across an exceptional-point singularity.

Understanding lattice-geometry-driven electronic structure and orbital character in a titanium-based superconducting kagome metal provides insights into the non-trivial topology and electronic nematicity of correlated quantum matter.

The simulation of open quantum many-body systems is one of the hardest tasks in computational physics. Now, quantum computers are close to answering crucial questions for such systems in a regime that classical computers cannot reach.

Currently, a general framework explaining the fundamental dynamic transitions from solid to fluid of mechanically probed soft materials is lacking. Now, a unifying van der Waals-like model is proposed that describes the dynamic solid–liquid transition in the rheology of these materials.

Measurements of two neighbouring silicon-based qubits show that the charge noise they each experience is correlated, suggesting a common origin. Understanding these correlations is crucial for performing error correction in these systems.

Disordered systems that are far from equilibrium relax slowly towards their equilibrium. Now, we learn that the irreversible plastic deformations that form the wrinkles of a crumpled sheet result in a complex energy landscape that ages logarithmically.

When a system is driven across a second-order phase transition, defects can form because it cannot respond quickly enough to the new conditions. The Kibble–Zurek mechanism explains this physics, and has now been invoked for Ising-type domains.

A trilayer copper oxide superconductor, which exhibits the highest superconducting critical temperature as a function of the number of copper–oxygen planes, is shown to have unusual doped hole distribution and interaction between the planes.