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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
‘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.
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.
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.
An atomic Bose–Fermi mixture was driven through a quantum phase transition by varying an applied magnetic field to tune the interspecies interactions. This approach enabled the efficient generation of sodium–potassium molecules in the quantum degenerate regime.
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.
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.
The charge density wave state in kagome superconductors is not fully understood. Now, evidence suggests that the rotational symmetry of the lattice is broken before coherence of unidirectional quasiparticles is established at a lower temperature.
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.
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.
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.
Certain fish shoals ward off bird attacks by touching the water surface in a manner resembling waves observed in stadiums. This behaviour exhibits characteristics that suggest the fish might operate close to criticality.
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.
Heavily doping silicon with phosphorus produces a dense population of metallic conduction electrons and localized magnetic moments. Low-temperature measurements show evidence of strongly correlated state.
Strong correlations between electrons in topological surface states drive the formation of surface van Hove singularities. These may be linked to charge density waves in the surface states.
Composite fermions emerge in the fractional quantum Hall effect. Now, it has been shown that these objects can group into bubbles and that these can order into a lattice.
The Lindemann criterion states that crystals melt when thermal vibrations overcome binding forces. It is now found that this picture does not hold for glasses, and that there is a universal relationship between glass temperature and thermal expansion.
Premelting refers to the formation of a thin liquid film on a crystal’s surface before it properly melts. Now, a similar mechanism is shown to occur before solid–solid transitions in colloidal crystals: the formation of a polymorphic crystalline layer.
Parametric amplifiers are a key component in the operation and readout of superconducting quantum circuits. An improved travelling-wave amplifier design enables broadband squeezing and high-performance operation.
The realization of efficient light–matter interfaces is important for many quantum technologies. An experiment now shows how to coherently switch the collective optical properties of an array of quantum emitters by driving a single ancilla atom to a Rydberg state.
Tuning interspecies interactions in atomic Bose–Fermi mixtures is shown to drive the system through a quantum phase transition. This enables the generation of heteronuclear molecules in the quantum-degenerate regime.
Photonic systems can exploit time as a degree of freedom analogous to space, eliminating the need for spatial patterning to achieve functionality. A Green’s function approach allows the design of disordered time scatterers with desired properties.
Bulk active fluids are unstable because activity destroys long-range ordering. Now, a model of 3D active liquids shows that stable states can form at fluid–fluid surfaces.
A technique called error mitigation can significantly improve the performance of large-scale quantum computations on near-term devices without the significant resource overheard of fault-tolerant quantum error correction.
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.