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Volume 19 Issue 5, May 2023

Ice expulsion

Icephobic surfaces can have many applications in engineering, where they are helpful for increasing safety and sustainability among other things. Poulikakos and co-workers report a study of the behaviour of supercooled droplets freezing on superhydrophobic surfaces and provide insights into ice-repellency mechanisms.

See Lambley et al. and Boreyko

Image: Henry Lambley and Gustav Graeber of ETH Zurich. Cover Design: Amie Fernandez

Editorial

  • The eco-system of companies and start-ups developing quantum technologies is booming, but the disparity between private and public funding may become an issue in the absence of commercial uses.

    Editorial

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Thesis

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Books & Arts

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News & Views

  • Phase-change processes, such as condensation or freezing, are known to compromise a surface’s water-repelling capability. It now turns out that tuning the freezing conditions can enable the spontaneous expulsion of water droplets.

    • Jonathan B. Boreyko
    News & Views
  • Quantum correlations between entangled particles can be used by parties in a network to verify that they share a specific quantum state. A proposal for network-assisted self-testing generalizes this approach to states of any number of qubits.

    • Anna Pappa
    News & Views
  • Despite its technological importance, there remain gaps in our understanding of silicon’s electronic behaviour, especially at low temperatures. Measurements close to a metal–insulator transition show signs of a collective many-body quantum state.

    • Mark Lee
    News & Views
  • ‘Squeezing’ of light can be used to alter the distribution of quantum noise to benefit quantum sensing and other applications. An improved design for a microwave photon squeezer provides high performance over a large bandwidth.

    • Baleegh Abdo
    News & Views
  • Controlling the response of a material to light at the single-atom level is a key factor for many quantum technologies. An experiment now shows how to control the optical properties of an atomic array by manipulating the state of a single atom.

    • Rivka Bekenstein
    • Susanne F. Yelin
    News & Views
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Research Briefings

  • Coherent multidimensional spectroscopy with nanoscale spatial resolution was used to directly probe a plasmon polariton quantum wave packet. To reproduce these results an improved quantum model of photoemission was required, in which the coherent coupling between plasmons and electrons is accounted for with the plasmon excitations extending beyond a two-level model.

    Research Briefing
  • A DNA-based nanorobotic arm connected to a base plate through a flexible joint can be used to store and release mechanical energy. The joint acts as a torsion spring that is wound up by rotating the arm using external electric fields and is released using a high-frequency electrical pulse.

    Research Briefing
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Letters

  • When electrons in a crystal interact with the surrounding lattice, they can form quasiparticles known as polarons. A computational approach to studying polarons in two-dimensional materials explains why they are rarely observed in these systems.

    • Weng Hong Sio
    • Feliciano Giustino
    Letter
  • A scanning nitrogen-vacancy microscope is used to image ferroelectric domains in piezoelectric and improper ferroelectric samples with high sensitivity. The technique relies on the nitrogen-vacancy’s Stark shift produced by the samples’ electric field.

    • William S. Huxter
    • Martin F. Sarott
    • Christian L. Degen
    Letter Open Access
  • Icephobic surfaces are helpful for increasing safety and sustainability in engineering applications. A study of the behaviour of supercooled droplets freezing on superhydrophobic surfaces now provides insights into ice-repellency mechanisms.

    • Henry Lambley
    • Gustav Graeber
    • Dimos Poulikakos
    Letter Open Access
  • Plasmonics allows precise engineering of light–matter interactions and is the driver behind many optical devices. The local observation of a plasmonic quantum wave packet is a step towards bringing these functionalities to the quantum regime.

    • Sebastian Pres
    • Bernhard Huber
    • Tobias Brixner
    Letter
  • Quantum systems produce correlations that cannot be mimicked by classical resources, which can be used to certify quantum states without trusting the underlying devices. A network can perform this procedure for pure states with any number of systems.

    • Ivan Šupić
    • Joseph Bowles
    • Matty J. Hoban
    Letter
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Articles

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Measure for Measure

  • Despite their differences, the six regional metrology organizations work together to provide and advance the global equivalence of national measurements standards, as Hyun Min Park explains.

    • Hyun Min Park
    Measure for Measure
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