Volume 4 Issue 9, September 2008

Analysis of the best available data on the behaviour of a large number of glass-forming organic liquids suggests that the widespread belief that a glass ceases to flow below its transition temperature could be wrong.

Recent work on Bose–Einstein condensation of short-lived 'quasiparticles' in solid-state systems opens up the new field of non-equilibrium condensates.

A demonstration of electronic operations on photons in an excitonic integrated circuit shows a possible route towards nanoscale optoelectronics.

The ability to optically drive a single electron spin confined to a quantum dot from an absorbing state to a trapped coherent dark state could be the key to realizing optical switches and other quantum optical devices.

Quantum mechanics enables distant events to be more strongly correlated than is possible classically. The proposal for a new family of experimental tests, and the implementation of one of them, provides further insight into the nature of such non-local correlations.

Micrometre-scale superconducting circuits can act as quantum two-level systems, but unlike in their natural counterparts—such as atoms—the parameters of these ‘artificial qubits’ can be controlled externally. This tunability has now been used to break the symmetry of the system hamiltonian in a controlled manner.

Coherent population trapping is a process by which a particle is induced to exist in a superposition of two ground states. This has now been demonstrated for an electron spin on a single quantum dot, which could prove useful in a variety of photonic and information-processing applications.

The checkerboard pattern observed in high-temperature superconductors by scanning tunnelling microscopy is widespread, but what does it mean? And what does it say about the mysterious ’pseudogap’?

The observation of so-called Bogoliubov excitations provides the first sign of possible superfluid behaviour in an exciton-polariton condensate.

When a superfluid—such as liquid helium—is set in rotation, vortices appear in which circulation around a closed loop can take only discrete values. Such quantized vortices have now been observed in a solid-state system—a Bose–Einstein condensate made of exciton polaritons.

A simulation establishes the relationship between structural relaxation in a supercooled liquid and the low-frequency dynamics in the underlying inherent structures.

Maxwell’s equations describing electric and magnetic fields limit the shapes field lines can take. But exotic solutions exist where the field lines are linked and knotted. A proposal now shows how such solutions could be realized experimentally.

Detailed analysis of multiscale structures and the identification of long-lived streamer-like wavemodes in a magnetically confined plasma provides new insight into the physics of plasma turbulence.

A class of quantum-cryptographic protocols is proposed that involves back-and-forth communication between two parties. The approach is shown to provide enhanced security and should tolerate higher levels of noise and loss than conventional ‘one-way’ protocols.

The experimental demonstration of a continuous and irreversible transfer of cold atoms from a ‘source mode’ to a ‘laser mode’ represents a step closer to a fully continuous atom laser.

Analysis of the best available data on the behaviour of a large number of glass-forming organic liquids suggests that the widespread belief that a glass ceases to flow below its transition temperature could be wrong.

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