Volume 16 Issue 11, November 2020

Scaling arguments provide valuable analysis tools across physics and complex systems yet are often employed as one generic method, without explicit reference to the various mathematical concepts underlying them. A careful understanding of these concepts empowers us to unlock their full potential.

A mooted advantage of high-dimensional states is their robustness to noise, yet their fragility in noisy channels has hindered their deployment. A demonstration shows how to exploit entanglement to restore quantum correlations lost in transmission.

Using scanning tunnelling spectroscopy, the flat bands in twisted bilayer WSe₂ are shown near both 0° and 60° twist angles.

By sliding one layer with respect to the other in a van der Waals heterostructure, Edelberg et al. create a honeycomb network of solitons. Vertices of the network trap electrons, allowing strain-tunable control of confined states.

A quasiparticle in Andreev levels was coupled to a superconducting microwave resonator and its spin was monitored in real time. This has potential applications in the readout of superconducting spin qubits and measurements of Majorana fermions.

Thermal transport measurements show that there is a thermal Hall effect in the out-of-plane direction in two cuprates in the pseudogap regime. This indicates that phonons are carrying the heat and that they have a handedness of unknown origin.

Higher-dimensional entanglement between two photons can be preserved for a photon passing through a complex medium by applying an appropriate scrambling operation on the entangled partner that does not enter the complex medium.

An optomechanical cavity comprising a re-entrant cavity and membrane resonators can be tuned in and out of the Casimir regime. At the transition between the two regimes, the mechanical resonators exhibit a change in stiffness—the Casimir spring.

Energy–momentum phase-matching enables strong interactions between free electrons and light waves. As a result, the wavefunction of the electron exhibits a comb structure, which was observed using photon-induced near-field electron microscopy.

A transient intermediate complex in a chemical reaction—formed from collisions between molecules with a few atoms—is observed under ultracold conditions. Its lifetime can be directly measured after suppression of the photo-excitation process.

Weyl points in three-dimensional systems with certain symmetry carry non-Abelian topological charges, which can be transformed via non-trivial phase factors that arise upon braiding these points inside the reciprocal space.

The native environment of the cell is crowded by DNA, proteins and other biomolecules. Here, the authors show that crowding slows down groups of kinesin motors but has no effect on single motors.

The authors engineer Escherichia coli into two distinct strains with tunable motility. The induced control of motility leads to the formation of patterns through a self-organizing mechanism that is specific to multi-component active systems.

The flow of fluid, such as mucus in the human respiratory tract, can affect biological function. Here the authors show that the hydrodynamic interactions mediated by mucus are essential for the directional coordination of ciliary beating in the lungs.

In first-century China, emperor Wang Mang standardized weights and measures in his newly established dynasty. Noa Hegesh tells the story of sound as the basis for this standardization.