Condensed-matter physics articles within Nature

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  • News & Views |

    Twenty-five years on from its discovery, high-temperature superconductivity remains without a satisfactory explanation. The latest studies on the electronic phase diagram of copper oxide compounds reveal why this is so. See Letter p.73

    • Paul Michael Grant

  • News & Views |

    The presence of magnetic moments in materials known as Kondo lattices can lead to an exotic transformation in their properties. The first successful endeavour into imaging such a transformation has now been made. See Letter p.362

    • Piers Coleman

  • News & Views |

    The trend towards using ultracold atoms as simulators of condensed-matter and many-body phenomena is gaining momentum. These systems can now be used to simulate quantum magnetism. See Article p.307

    • Ian B. Spielman

  • News & Views |

    An exquisitely sensitive technique shows that a magnetic field only a few hundred times greater than Earth's can bring an exotic phase of matter known as a quantum spin liquid to an ordered magnetic state. See Letter p.612

    • Thomas F. Rosenbaum

  • News & Views |

    The finding that a cobalt oxide insulator's magnetism is similar to that of cuprate superconductors lends support to the popular but contentious idea that stripe-like electronic order is present in the latter materials. See Letter p.341

    • Jan Zaanen

  • Letter |

    Neutron scattering measurements of spin fluctuations in hole-doped high-Tc copper oxides have revealed an unusual 'hour-glass' feature in the momentum-resolved magnetic spectrum. There is no widely accepted explanation for this feature. One possibility is that it derives from a pattern of alternating spin and charge stripes. Many copper oxides without stripe order, however, also exhibit an hour-glass spectrum. This paper reports the observation of an hour-glass magnetic spectrum in a hole-doped antiferromagnet from outside the family of superconducting copper oxides. The system has stripe correlations and is an insulator, which means its magnetic dynamics can conclusively be ascribed to stripes. The results provide compelling evidence that the hour-glass spectrum in the copper-oxide superconductors arises from fluctuating stripes.

    • A. T. Boothroyd
    • , P. Babkevich
    •  & P. G. Freeman

  • Letter |

    Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) is widely used to study the electronic structure of a wide range of correlated materials. Time-resolved ARPES allows the study of the response of such electronic features on ultrafast timescales; this paper now adds an exciting new dimension by using high photon energies that allow the study of ultrafast dynamics at high momenta, where often the most interesting fundamental phenomena occur. The technique is applied to the charge density wave material 1T-TiSe2 and it is shown with stroboscopic imaging of the electronic band structure at high momentum that atomic-scale periodic long-range order collapses on a surprisingly short timescale of 20 femtoseconds.

    • Timm Rohwer
    • , Stefan Hellmann
    •  & Michael Bauer

  • News & Views |

    The idea of using ultracold atoms to simulate the behaviour of electrons in new kinds of quantum systems — from topological insulators to exotic superfluids and superconductors — is a step closer to becoming a reality. See Letter p.83

    • Michael Chapman
    •  & Carlos Sá de Melo

  • Letter |

    Spin–orbit coupling describes the interaction between a quantum particle's spin and its momentum, and is important for many areas of physics such as spintronics and topological insulators. However, in systems of ultracold neutral atoms, there is no coupling between the spin and the centre of mass motion of the atom. This study uses lasers to engineer such spin–orbit coupling in a neutral atomic Bose–Einstein condensate, the first time this has been achieved for any bosonic system. This should lead to the realization of topological insulators in fermionic neutral atom systems.

    • Y.-J. Lin
    • , K. Jiménez-García
    •  & I. B. Spielman

  • News & Views |

    Stacking two oxide insulators together is known to yield a conducting system at the interface between the oxides. But the discovery that simply cleaving such an insulator yields the same outcome is unexpected. See Letter p.189

    • Elbio Dagotto

  • Letter |

    This study measures 'puddles' of charge in a fractional quantum Hall device and finds new evidence for the existence of quarter charge particles, thereby boosting confidence in the prospects for topological quantum computation.

    • Vivek Venkatachalam
    • , Amir Yacoby
    •  & Ken West

  • News |

    Quantum bit based on electron spin offers advantages for electronics and optical devices.

    • Jon Cartwright

  • Letter |

    Motion of electrons can influence their spins through a fundamental effect called the spin–orbit interaction. Here, a spin–orbit quantum bit (qubit) is implemented in an indium arsenide nanowire, which should offer significant advantages for quantum computing. The spin–orbit qubit is electrically controllable, and information can be stored in the spin. Moreover, nanowires can serve as one dimensional templates for scalable qubit registers, and are suited for both electronic and optical devices.

    • S. Nadj-Perge
    • , S. M. Frolov
    •  & L. P. Kouwenhoven

  • News & Views |

    The structure of a mineral has been validated, ending the controversy about its potential usefulness as a model of an unusual magnetic lattice. This model might provide insight into superconductivity.

    • Mark A. de Vries
    •  & Andrew Harrison

  • News & Views |

    Extensive mapping of local electronic structure in copper oxide superconductors reveals fluctuating stripe-like electron patterns that appear as a high-temperature precursor to superconductivity. See Letter p.677

    • Kathryn A. Moler

  • Letter |

    A long-standing question has been the interplay between pseudogap, which is generic to all hole doped copper oxide superconductors, and stripes, whose static form occurs in only one family of copper oxides over a narrow range of the phase diagram. This study reports observations of the spatial reorganization of electronic states with the onset of the pseudogap state at T* in the high temperature superconductor Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+x using scanning tunnelling microscopy. The onset of the pseudogap phase coincides with the appearance of electronic patterns that have the predicted characteristics of fluctuating stripes. The experiments indicate that stripes are a consequence of pseudogap behaviour rather than its cause.

    • Colin V. Parker
    • , Pegor Aynajian
    •  & Ali Yazdani

  • Letter |

    The development of table-top femtosecond electron diffraction sources in recent years has opened up a new way to observe atomic motions in crystalline materials undergoing structural changes. Here, the technique is used to study the charge density wave material 1T-TaS2, where a modulation of the electron density is accompanied by a periodic lattice distortion. In this femtosecond electron diffraction experiment, where atomic motions are observed in response to a 140 femtosecond optical pulse, the periodic lattice distortion is found to collapse on an exceptionally fast timescale (about 250 femtoseconds), indicative of an electronically driven process involving a highly cooperative process.

    • Maximilian Eichberger
    • , Hanjo Schäfer
    •  & R. J. Dwayne Miller

  • Letter |

    Bose–Einstein condensation has been observed in several physical systems, but is not predicted to occur for blackbody radiation such as photons. However, it becomes theoretically possible in the presence of thermalization processes that conserve photon number. These authors experimentally realise such conditions, observing Bose–Einstein condensation of photons in a dye-filled optical microcavity. The effect is of interest for fundamental studies and may lead to new coherent ultraviolet sources.

    • Jan Klaers
    • , Julian Schmitt
    •  & Martin Weitz

  • News & Views |

    The discovery of predicted collective electronic behaviour in copper-oxide superconductors in the non-superconducting state provides clues to unlocking the 24-year-old mystery of high-temperature superconductivity. See Letter p.283

    • Chandra Varma

  • News & Views |

    An approach that entails printing compound-semiconductor ribbons on a silicon substrate offers the means to build nanoscale transistors that can be switched on and off much more effectively than their bulk analogues. See Letter page 286

    • John A. Rogers

  • Letter |

    Recent findings indicate that the pseudogap regime in the high-transition-temperature copper oxides constitutes a new phase of matter rather than a mere crossover phenomenon. These authors report inelastic neutron scattering results for HgBa2CuO4+δ that reveal a fundamental collective magnetic mode associated with the unusual order, further supporting this picture. The mode's intensity rises below the pseudogap characteristic temperature and its dispersion is weak.

    • Yuan Li
    • , V. Balédent
    •  & M. Greven

  • Letter |

    A potential route to enhancing the performance of electronic devices is to integrate compound semiconductors, which have superior electronic properties, within silicon, which is cheap to process. These authors present a promising new concept to integrate ultrathin layers of single-crystal indium arsenide on silicon-based substrates with an epitaxial transfer method borrowed from large-area optoelectronics. With this technique, the authors fabricate thin-film transistors with excellent device performance.

    • Hyunhyub Ko
    • , Kuniharu Takei
    •  & Ali Javey

  • Letter |

    Isolated magnetic atoms doped into a semiconductor represent an interesting system for spintronics applications and a possible means of constructing quantum bits. So far, however, it has not been possible to study the correlation between the local atomic structure and the dopant's magnetic properties. Here, sensitive scanning probe techniques have been developed that allow the spin excitations of individual magnetic dopants within a two-dimensional semiconductor system to be measured.

    • Alexander A. Khajetoorians
    • , Bruno Chilian
    •  & Roland Wiesendanger

  • News & Views |

    Interfaces can have quite different properties from those of their constituent materials. But it's surprising that the adsorption of a single organic molecule onto a magnetic surface can drastically modify that surface's magnetism.

    • Stefano Sanvito

  • News |

    Successes at entangling three-circuit systems brighten the prospects for solid-state quantum computing.

    • Eugenie Samuel Reich

  • News & Views |

    The trend towards using ultracold atomic gases to explore emergent phenomena in many-body systems continues to gain momentum. This time around, they have been used to explore novel pairing mechanisms in one dimension. See Letter p.567

    • Immanuel Bloch

  • Letter |

    Quantum entanglement is a key resource for technologies such as quantum communication and computation. A major question for solid-state quantum information processing is whether an engineered system can display the three-qubit entanglement necessary for quantum error correction. A positive answer to this question is now provided. A circuit quantum electrodynamics device has been used to demonstrate deterministic production of three-qubit entangled states and the first step of basic quantum error correction.

    • L. DiCarlo
    • , M. D. Reed
    •  & R. J. Schoelkopf

  • Letter |

    Electron spins generated by phosphorus dopant atoms buried in silicon represent well-isolated quantum bits with long coherence times, but so far the control of such single electrons has been insufficient to use them in this way. These authors report single-shot, time-resolved readout of electron spins in silicon, achieved by coupling the donor atoms to a charge-sensing device called a single-electron transistor. This opens a path to the development of a new generation of quantum computing and spintronic devices in silicon.

    • Andrea Morello
    • , Jarryd J. Pla
    •  & Andrew S. Dzurak

  • News |

    Doubts over the existence of the mysterious quantum phenomenon may soon be laid to rest.

    • Eugenie Samuel Reich

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