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

Adatoms on the surface of silicon can create two-dimensional superconductivity, but the order parameter symmetry is currently not known. Now, scanning tunnelling spectroscopy measurements suggest it could be a d-wave state that is topological and hence would host chiral edge modes.

See Ming et al.

The renormalization group method is routinely employed to study critical behaviour in many areas of physics, especially those that can be described by field theories. Now, a framework based on such a description of information diffusion extends renormalization group methods to the study of complex networks.

See Villegas et al. and Klemm

The intermediate states in photo-excited phase transitions are expected to be inhomogeneous. In this work, a spatially resolved ultrafast X-ray imaging technique shows that the early part of the metal–insulator transition in VO2 is homogeneous and that the inhomogeneity only develops after a few hundred femtoseconds.

See Johnson et al.

When algorithms are run on a computer, they are broken down into logical operations that are implemented by the hardware. Ji Chu and co-workers have demonstrated a quantum logical AND gate by utilizing a third level in their qubits, and this could substantially improve the efficiency of near-term quantum computers.

See Chu et al. and Jiang