Volume 11 Issue 9, September 2015

Condensed-matter physics brings us quasiparticles that behave like massless fermions.

A new measurement from the LHCb experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider impinges on a puzzle that has been troubling physicists for decades — namely the breaking of the symmetry between matter and antimatter.

A thermometer for atomic Bose–Einstein condensates and a new way of cooling below the critical temperature will help the exploration of the coldest states of matter.

A model describing spin-dependent conduction in metals underpins modern magnetic technologies. Magnetotransport under the fundamental conditions of this model has now been probed experimentally.

Granular charging can create some spectacular interactions, but gravity obscures our ability to observe and understand them. A neat desktop experiment circumvents this problem, shining a light on granular clustering — and perhaps even planet formation.

Cooling the motion of mechanical resonators to the ground state and subsequent advances in cavity optomechanics have been made possible by resolved-sideband cooling — an atomic-physics-inspired technique — first demonstrated in a 2008 Nature Physics paper.

The traditional approaches to quantum information processing using either discrete or continuous variables can be combined in hybrid protocols for tasks including quantum teleportation, computation, entanglement distillation or Bell tests.

Despite the very low temperatures quantum gases are cooled to, the entropy per particle remains larger than that of the condensed-matter systems they are supposed to emulate. Using magnons one can produce low-temperature, low-entropy gases.

Experiments show that TaAs is a three-dimensional topological Weyl semimetal.

Experiments show that TaAs is a three-dimensional topological Weyl semimetal.

By eliminating the effects of gravity with a free-falling camera, high-resolution imaging of charged grains reveals Keplerian orbits and electrostatically stable clusters—with implications for astrophysical and industrial cluster formation.

Imaging individual atoms in an optical lattice with single-site resolution has so far only been possible for bosonic species, but thanks to electromagnetically-induced-transparency cooling fermionic species can now also be imaged.

The accurate determination of quark mixing parameters is essential for the understanding of the Standard Model. The LHCb collaboration now reports the coupling strength of the b quark to the u quark through the measurement of a baryonic decay mode.

Experiments show that niobium arsenide is a Weyl semimetal.

The evidence for a time-reversal symmetry-breaking phase in high-temperature cuprate superconductors has been contradictory. But these observations are consistent with a theory predicting fractional vortices that form ‘necklaces’.

Terahertz radiation is used to directly probe magnetotransport in metallic multilayers on the timescale of electron momentum scattering—the fundamental conditions of Nevill Mott’s model of spin-dependent conduction in metals.

Reducing the signal-to-noise ratio is a never-ending challenge for many types of experiments. Now, improved ratios are reported for nuclear magnetic resonance set-ups combining an external high-Q resonator and a low-Q input coil.

Cells rely on coherent oscillatory processes, despite being subject to large fluctuations from their environment. Simple motifs found in all oscillatory systems are studied to determine the thermodynamic cost of maintaining this coherence.

The complex interactions inherent in real-world networks grant us precise system control via manipulation of a subset of nodes. It turns out that the extent to which we can exercise this control depends sensitively on the number of nodes perturbed.

Family connections.