Reviews & Analysis

Optical atomic clocks are extremely accurate sensors despite the poor use of their resources. A parallel quantum control approach might help to optimize the resources of optical atomic clocks, which could lead to an exponential improvement in their performance.

Precise frequencies of nearly forbidden transitions have been ascertained in the simplest molecule, the molecular hydrogen ion. This work offers a new perspective on precision measurements and fundamental physical tests with molecular spectroscopy.

In its superconducting state, MoTe₂ displays oscillations arising from an edge supercurrent, and when it is near niobium, there is an incompatibility between electron pairs diffusing from niobium and the pairs intrinsic to MoTe₂. Insight into this competition between pairs is obtained by monitoring the noise spectrum of the MoTe₂ supercurrent oscillations.

Predicting the large-scale behaviour of complex systems is challenging because of their underlying nonlinear dynamics. Theoretical evidence now verifies that many complex systems can be simplified and still provide an insightful description of the phenomena of interest.

Predicting the complex flows that emerge in active fluid networks remains a challenge. A combination of experiments and theory was used to determine the hydraulic laws of active fluids. Analogies with frustrated magnetism and loop models explain the emergent flow patterns that result when active fluids explore pipe networks.

Cells actively rearrange their cytoplasmic machinery to perform diverse functions. Now, friction forces generated between cytoplasmic components provide a physical basis for cell shape change.

A promising pathway towards the laser cooling of a molecule containing a radioactive atom has been identified. The unique structure of such a molecule means that it can act as a magnifying lens to probe fundamental physics.

Orderly or coherent multicellular flows are fundamental in biology, but their triggers are not understood. In epithelial tissues, the tug-of-war between cells is now shown to lead to intrinsic asymmetric distributions in cell polarities that drive such flows.

The ability to extract information from diffuse background signals in ultrafast electron diffraction experiments now enables a direct view of the formation of topological defects during a light-induced phase transition.

Subwavelength photonic gratings can host long-lived, negative-effective-mass photonic modes that couple strongly to electron transitions in constituent active materials. The resulting bosonic hybrid light–matter modes, or exciton-polaritons, can be optically configured to accumulate into various macroscopic artificial complexes and lattices of coherent quantum fluids.

Networks of dynamic actin filaments and myosin motors, confined in cell-like droplets, drive diverse spatiotemporal patterning of contractile flows, waves, and spirals. This multiscale active sculpting is tuned by the system dynamics and size.

Trojan beams, which are optical counterparts of Trojan asteroids that maintain stable orbits alongside planets, have been successfully showcased in experiments, opening up possibilities for transporting light in unconventional settings.

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.