Condensed-matter physics articles within Nature

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  • Letter |

    In graphene nanoribbons of ‘zigzag’ edge orientation, the edges host unpaired electron spins that couple to generate long-range magnetic order (switching from antiferromagnetic to ferromagnetic inter-edge configuration as the ribbon width increases) under ambient conditions, enhancing the prospects for graphene-based spintronic devices.

    • Gábor Zsolt Magda
    • , Xiaozhan Jin
    •  & Levente Tapasztó

  • News & Views |

    Large quasiparticles known as Rydberg excitons have been detected in a natural crystal of copper oxide. The result may find use in applications such as single-photon logic devices. See Letter p.343

    • Sven Höfling
    •  & Alexey Kavokin

  • Letter |

    Rydberg excitons (condensed-matter analogues of hydrogen atoms) are shown to exist in single-crystal copper oxide with principal quantum numbers as large as n = 25 and giant wavefunctions with extensions of around two micrometres; this has implications for research in condensed-matter optics.

    • T. Kazimierczuk
    • , D. Fröhlich
    •  & M. Bayer

  • News & Views |

    Low-energy electrons have been found to mimic relativistic high-energy particles in cadmium arsenide. This defines the first stable '3D Dirac semimetal', which holds promise for fundamental-physics exploration and practical applications.

    • Zhihuai Zhu
    •  & Jennifer E. Hoffman

  • Letter |

    The magnetoresistance effect in WTe2, a layered semimetal, is extremely large: the electrical resistance can be changed by more than 13 million per cent at very high magnetic fields and low temperatures.

    • Mazhar N. Ali
    • , Jun Xiong
    •  & R. J. Cava

  • Letter |

    A series of long-lived excitons in a monolayer of tungsten disulphide are found to have strong binding energy and an energy dependence on orbital momentum that significantly deviates from conventional, three-dimensional, behaviour.

    • Ziliang Ye
    • , Ting Cao
    •  & Xiang Zhang

  • News & Views |

    The experimental realization of amorphous pure metals sets the stage for studies of the fundamental processes of glass formation, and suggests that amorphous structures are the most ubiquitous forms of condensed matter. See Letter P.177

    • Jan Schroers

  • Letter |

    The ability of individual ions trapped in separate potential wells to simulate spin–spin interactions is demonstrated by tuning the Coulomb interaction between two ions, independently controlling their local wells and entangling their internal states with a fidelity of approximately 0.82.

    • A. C. Wilson
    • , Y. Colombe
    •  & D. J. Wineland

  • Letter |

    Metallic liquids of single elements have been successfully vitrified to their glassy states by achieving an ultrafast quenching rate in a new experimental design, of which the process has been monitored and studied by a combination of in situ transmission electron microscopy and atoms-to-continuum computer modelling.

    • Li Zhong
    • , Jiangwei Wang
    •  & Scott X. Mao

  • News & Views |

    Topological insulators are materials known for their remarkable electron-transport properties. They now emerge as excellent sources of electron spins for manipulating tiny magnets. See Letter p.449

    • Joo-Von Kim

  • Letter |

    Charge flowing in a thin film of the topological insulator bismuth selenide at room temperature can lead to spin accumulation in the insulator and a resultant strong spin-transfer torque on an adjacent thin film of ferromagnetic nickel–iron alloy, potentially offering a means of controlling the orientation of the alloy’s magnetization.

    • A. R. Mellnik
    • , J. S. Lee
    •  & D. C. Ralph

  • Letter |

    Quantum oscillation measurements in the underdoped copper oxide YBa2Cu3O6 + x reveal a nodal electronic structure from charge order, which helps to characterize the normal state out of which superconductivity emerges in the underdoped regime.

    • Suchitra E. Sebastian
    • , N. Harrison
    •  & G. G. Lonzarich

  • Letter |

    The transition between ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ friction in a model system is found to be quantitatively captured by the same theoretical framework as is used to describe brittle fracture, but deviations from this correspondence are observed as the rupture velocity approaches the speed at which sound waves propagate along the interface.

    • Ilya Svetlizky
    •  & Jay Fineberg

  • Letter |

    Fast optical pulses create a plasma of electrons and holes in a semiconductor in which excitons (pairs of holes and electrons) and combinations of two excitons emerge; now a stable liquid-like droplet of electrons and holes has been detected and called a ‘dropleton’.

    • A. E. Almand-Hunter
    • , H. Li
    •  & S. W. Koch

  • News & Views |

    The observation of path dependence in the response of a superfluid to stirring promises potential applications in precision rotation sensing, and provides a test bed for microscopic theories of ultracold atomic gases. See Letter p.200

    • Matthew J. Davis
    •  & Kristian Helmerson

  • News |

    Ring-shaped flow of ultracold atoms remembers how it has been stirred.

    • Elizabeth Gibney

  • Letter |

    Nanoribbons of graphene grown on electronics-grade silicon carbide conduct electrons much better than expected; at room temperature, the charge carriers travel through the nanoribbons without scattering for a surprisingly long distance, more than ten micrometres.

    • Jens Baringhaus
    • , Ming Ruan
    •  & Walt A. de Heer

  • Letter |

    The unusual structures of quasicrystals, such as the 18-fold symmetry observed in polymer micelles, lack the repeating cell pattern of conventional hard crystals; here their origin is shown to be an extension of Penrose tiling with a simple, generic interparticle interaction.

    • T. Dotera
    • , T. Oshiro
    •  & P. Ziherl

  • News & Views |

    Magnetic monopoles — particles carrying a single magnetic charge — have never been seen. Analogues of these entities have now been produced in an ultracold cloud of rubidium atoms. See Letter p.657

    • Lindsay J. LeBlanc

  • News & Views |

    Superconducting quantum circuits are the core technology behind the most sensitive magnetometers. An analogous device has now been implemented using a gas of ultracold atoms, with possible applications for rotation sensing.

    • Charles A. Sackett

  • News & Views |

    The idea of creating liquids containing magnetic particles that display ferromagnetism has not been realized — until now. Plate-shaped magnets in a liquid crystal have been made that exhibit this property. See Article p.237

    • Noel A. Clark

  • Article |

    The idea that magnetic particles suspended in a liquid crystal might spontaneously orient into a ferromagnetic state has hitherto not been confirmed experimentally, but such a state has now been realized using nanometre-sized ferromagnetic platelets in a nematic liquid crystal.

    • Alenka Mertelj
    • , Darja Lisjak
    •  & Martin Čopič

  • Letter |

    There are many uses for surfaces that can stay dry, self-clean or resist icing, and many applications benefit from minimizing the contact time between a surface and any drops that may come into contact with it; drops are now shown to bounce off faster when using a superhydrophobic surface with a morphology that redistributes the liquid mass so that the centre of the drop assists in the recoil.

    • James C. Bird
    • , Rajeev Dhiman
    •  & Kripa K. Varanasi

  • Letter |

    Most known ferroelectric photovoltaic materials have very wide electronic bandgaps (that is, they absorb only high-energy photons) but here a family of perovskite oxides is described that have tunable bandgaps, allowing their use across the whole visible-light spectrum.

    • Ilya Grinberg
    • , D. Vincent West
    •  & Andrew M. Rappe

  • Letter |

    The structure of molten basalt up to 60 GPa by means of in situ X-ray diffraction is described, with the coordination of silicon increasing from four under ambient conditions to six at 35 GPa, and subsequent reduced melt compressibility, which seems to affect siderophile-element partitioning.

    • Chrystèle Sanloup
    • , James W. E. Drewitt
    •  & Wolfgang Morgenroth

  • News |

    Long-sought effect could turn ordinary conductors into carriers of quantum information.

    • Ron Cowen

  • Letter |

    The unusual ordering of quasicrystals can be induced in thin films of a regular crystalline material; here a two-dimensional quasicrystal has been achieved by growing thin films of the perovskite barium titanate on an appropriately oriented crystalline platinum substrate.

    • Stefan Förster
    • , Klaus Meinel
    •  & Wolf Widdra

  • Letter |

    The density of states in a two-dimensional superconductor has an energy gap that behaves analogously to that in a high-transition-temperature copper oxide superconductor as a function of charge carrier density, suggesting that such behaviour could be a general property of two-dimensional superconductivity.

    • C. Richter
    • , H. Boschker
    •  & J. Mannhart

  • News & Views |

    Two independent experiments have demonstrated control of one mobile quantum of excitation by another. The results are likely to have ramifications for information processing and transfer. See Letters p.71 & p.76

    • Sougato Bose

  • Letter |

    Bound states of elementary spin waves (magnons) have been predicted to occur in one-dimensional quantum magnets; the observation of two-magnon bound states in a system of ultracold bosonic atoms in an optical lattice is now reported.

    • Takeshi Fukuhara
    • , Peter Schauß
    •  & Christian Gross

  • News & Views |

    The push to engineer and probe quantum many-body systems using ultracold gases has reached a milestone with the observation of controlled dynamics caused by interactions between distant molecules trapped in a lattice. See Letter p.521

    • Andrew J. Daley

  • Letter |

    Artificial spin-ice systems are lithographically fabricated arrays of interacting ferromagnetic nanometre-scale islands; a procedure to thermalize two types of artificial spin ice with different geometries has now been developed, resulting in unprecedentedly large ground-state domains in square lattices and crystallites of ordered magnetic charges in kagome lattices.

    • Sheng Zhang
    • , Ian Gilbert
    •  & Peter Schiffer

  • Letter |

    The ‘0.7-anomaly’ — an unexpected feature in the conductance of a quantum point contact — is shown to originate in a smeared van Hove singularity in the local density of states at the bottom of the lowest one-dimensional subband of the point contact.

    • Florian Bauer
    • , Jan Heyder
    •  & Stefan Ludwig

  • News & Views |

    The observation of a triple point of coexistence between two insulating phases and a conducting phase in vanadium dioxide reveals physics that may help to unravel the role of electronic correlations in this material. See Letter p.431

    • Douglas Natelson

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