News & Comment

Quantum hypothesis testing—the task of distinguishing quantum states—enjoys surprisingly deep connections with the theory of entanglement. Recent findings have reopened the biggest questions in hypothesis testing and reversible entanglement manipulation.

The hectare has a long association with the metric system, but its most recent status has created some ambiguity as to its future application. Richard Brown surveys the lay of the land.

Invest in fostering a culture of collaboration to help break down barriers between disciplines.

Fluid flows play a key part in living systems. Cross-disciplinary engagement between fluid physics and biology greatly benefits both fields.

Multidisciplinary residential programmes and workshops help advance all the fields involved.

Creating a common culture and language for successful collaboration across disciplines benefits both researchers and scientific discovery.

Macroscale analogies are a powerful conceptual tool with which we can gain insight into the structures and processes of the microscopic world of cell biology.

Many advances in biological physics result from multidisciplinary collaborations. We celebrate the physics of life with a collection of articles that offer insight into successful interactions between researchers from different fields.

It has been around fifty years since Kenneth Wilson’s work on the renormalization group. Nature Physics celebrates this anniversary with a collection of Comments on its development and applications.

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier “for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter”.

Although its measurement was considered an experimental nightmare for decades, the Stefan–Boltzmann constant was assigned an exact value in 2019. Massimiliano Malgieri and Pasquale Onorato explain what this story teaches us.

Kenneth Wilson worked on the renormalization group during the Cold War, when communication between scientists in the Soviet Union and in the West was restricted. Nevertheless, Soviet physicists had a strong influence on Wilson’s work.

Historically, most renormalization group studies have been performed for equilibrium systems. Here, I give a personal reflection on the unexpected outcome of studying non-equilibrium flocking using renormalization methods.

The renormalization group is a key ingredient in methods of improving perturbative computations in particle physics. Here I briefly discuss its role in perturbative quantum chromodynamics and particularly the running of its coupling constant.

Supersymmetric quantum field theories have special properties that make them easier to study. This Comment discusses how the constraints that supersymmetry places on renormalization group flows have been used to study strongly coupled field theories.

The correct microscopic theory of quantum gravity may be an interacting, scale-invariant, ‘asymptotically safe’ model. This Comment discusses the renormalization group’s role in defining asymptotic safety and understanding its consequences.

The renormalization group evolved from ad hoc procedures to cope with divergences in perturbative calculations. This Comment summarizes efforts to develop a mathematically rigorous approach to renormalization group calculations.

Renormalization began as a tool to eliminate divergences in quantum electrodynamics, but it is now the basis of our understanding of physics at different energy scales. Here, I review its evolution with an eye towards physics beyond the Wilsonian paradigm.