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The standard current–phase relation in tunnel Josephson junctions involves a single sinusoidal term, but real junctions are more complicated. The effects of higher Josephson harmonics have now been identified in superconducting qubit devices.
The existence of Bragg glasses—featuring nearly perfect crystalline order and glassy features—has yet to be experimentally confirmed for disordered charge-density-wave systems. A machine-learning-based experimental study now provides evidence for a Bragg glass phase in the charge density waves of PdxErTe3.
During a photoinduced phase transition, electronic rearrangements are usually faster than lattice ones. Time-resolved measurements now show that the insulator-to-metal transition in a thin-film Mott insulator is preceded by lattice reconfiguration.
Inertial confinement fusion experiments in a direct-drive configuration report more energy produced in deuterium–tritium fusion reactions than the amount of energy in the central part of the plasma created by laser irradiation of the fuel capsule.
Hydro-equivalent scaling of recent direct-drive inertial confinement fusion implosions shows that a burning plasma can be achieved with a higher laser energy.
Understanding the mechanism by which magnons—the quanta of spin waves—propagate is important for developing practical devices. Now it is shown that long-range dipole–dipole interactions mediate the propagation in a van der Waals antiferromagnet.
Magnons—quanta of spin waves—have potential applications in signal processing technology. But it is challenging to obtain coupling between different magnons. Now a study achieves this by demonstrating nonlinear magnon mixing in an antiferromagnet.
The electronic transport properties of charge-ordered kagome metals are controversial. Now careful measurements on unperturbed samples show that previously measured anisotropy in the transport occurs only when external perturbations are present.
The thermal Hall effect of phonons does not yet have a definitive explanation. Now a careful study of doped Sr2IrO4 suggests that the mechanism involves the scattering of phonons by impurities embedded in an antiferromagnetic environment.
Heterostructures of transition metal dichalcogenides are known to simulate the triangular-lattice Hubbard model. Now, by combining a monolayer and bilayer of different materials, this idea is extended to multi-orbital Hubbard models.
Understanding the three-dimensional nature of fracture formation and dynamics is challenging. Experiments now show that a fracture front, after originating at a particular locus in a material, propagates jump-wise and expands transversely at high speed.
Physical ageing in glassy materials can be described in a linear way through the concept of material time. Multispeckle dynamic light scattering is now shown to provide experimental access to the material time, in terms of which fluctuations become statistically reversible.
Most quantum simulations of spin models with trapped ions have been restricted to one dimension. Now, tunable simulations of Ising models with single-site detection have been demonstrated in two-dimensional ion crystals.
Observations of strong electron correlation effects have been mostly confined to compounds containing f orbital electrons. Now, the study of the 3d pyrochlore metal CuV2S4 reveals that similar effects can be induced by flat-band engineering.
Cytoplasmic flows in the fruit fly oocyte can reorganize cellular components. These structured vortical flows arise through self-organizing dynamics of microtubules, molecular motors and cytoplasm.
Control over magnetic skyrmions at room temperature has important applications in technology. Now the observation of skyrmions with high topological charge widens the potential for them to be used in unconventional computing techniques.
Quantum gates require controlled interactions between different degrees of freedom. A tunable coupling has now been demonstrated between the phonon modes of a mechanical resonator designed for storing and manipulating quantum information.
Electrons in f orbitals can create localized states that interact strongly and drive strange metal and critical behaviour via the Kondo mechanism. Now a mechanism of geometric frustration enables similar phenomena with d electrons.
Time crystals spontaneously produce periodic oscillations that are robust to perturbations. A time crystal phase with a long coherence time has now been produced using the electron and nuclear spins of a semiconductor sample.
When applying sufficient strain, the flow of dense granular matter becomes critical. It is now shown that this state corresponds to random loose packing for spheres with different friction coefficients and that these packings can be mapped onto the frictionless hard-sphere system.