Phase transitions and critical phenomena articles within Nature

Featured

  • Letter |

    The simplest form of the Hubbard model includes only on-site interactions, but by placing an optical lattice filled with ultracold rubidium atoms into an optical cavity the Hubbard model is implemented with competing long- and short-range interactions; four phases emerge, namely, a superfluid phase, a Mott insulating phase, a supersolid phase and a charge density wave phase.

    • Renate Landig
    • , Lorenz Hruby
    •  & Tilman Esslinger

  • Letter |

    Incomplete premelting at the edges of monolayer colloidal crystals is triggered by a bulk solid–solid phase transition and truncated by a mechanical instability that induces homogeneous bulk melting of the crystal; these observations challenge existing theories of two-dimensional melting.

    • Bo Li
    • , Feng Wang
    •  & Yilong Han

  • Brief Communication |

    • Jeremy C. Palmer
    • , Fausto Martelli
    •  & Pablo G. Debenedetti

  • Letter |

    An analytical framework is proposed for a complex network to accurately predict its dynamic resilience and unveil the network characteristics that can enhance or diminish resilience.

    • Jianxi Gao
    • , Baruch Barzel
    •  & Albert-László Barabási

  • Letter |

    By exciting high-temperature K3C60 with mid-infrared pulses, a large increase in carrier mobility is obtained, accompanied by the opening of a gap in the optical conductivity; these same signatures are observed at equilibrium when cooling K3C60 below the superconducting transition temperature of 20 kelvin, which could be an indication of light-induced high-temperature superconductivity.

    • M. Mitrano
    • , A. Cantaluppi
    •  & A. Cavalleri

  • Letter |

    Raman spectroscopy of three isotopes of hydrogen under very high compression yields evidence of a new phase of hydrogen—phase V—which could potentially be a precursor to the long-sought non-molecular phase.

    • Philip Dalladay-Simpson
    • , Ross T. Howie
    •  & Eugene Gregoryanz

  • Letter |

    To be able to control the properties of a system that has strong electron–electron interactions using only an external electric field would be ideal, but the material must be thin enough to avoid shielding of the electric field in the bulk material; here pure electric-field control of the charge-density wave and superconductivity transition temperatures is achieved by electrolyte gating through an electric-field double layer transistor in the two-dimensional material 1T-TiSe2.

    • L. J. Li
    • , E. C. T. O’Farrell
    •  & A. H. Castro Neto

  • Article |

    Entanglement, which describes non-local correlations between quantum objects, is very difficult to measure, especially in systems of itinerant particles; here spatial entanglement is measured for ultracold bosonic atoms in optical lattices.

    • Rajibul Islam
    • , Ruichao Ma
    •  & Markus Greiner

  • Letter |

    Zero-temperature quantum phase transitions and their associated quantum critical points are believed to underpin the exotic finite-temperature behaviours of many strongly correlated electronic systems, but identifying the microscopic origins of these transitions can be challenging and controversial; Keller et al. (see also the related paper by Iftikhar et al.) show how such behaviours can be engineered into nanoelectronic quantum dots, which permit both precise experimental control of the quantum critical behaviour and its exact theoretical characterization.

    • A. J. Keller
    • , L. Peeters
    •  & D. Goldhaber-Gordon

  • Letter |

    Zero-temperature quantum phase transitions and their associated quantum critical points are believed to underpin the exotic finite-temperature behaviours of many strongly correlated electronic systems, but identifying the microscopic origins of these transitions can be challenging and controversial; Iftikhar et al. (see also the related paper by Keller et al.) show how such behaviours can be engineered into nanoelectronic quantum dots, which permit both precise experimental control of the quantum critical behaviour and its exact theoretical characterization.

    • Z. Iftikhar
    • , S. Jezouin
    •  & F. Pierre

  • Letter |

    Subtle anomalies in how the structure of metallic osmium evolves with pressure are detected using powder X-ray diffraction measurements at ultra-high static pressures; the anomaly at 440 gigapascals is attributed to an electronic transition caused by pressure-induced interactions between core electrons.

    • L. Dubrovinsky
    • , N. Dubrovinskaia
    •  & I. A. Abrikosov

  • Letter |

    X-ray and neutron scattering measurements and ab initio molecular dynamics calculations show that the transition from an insulating phase to a metallic phase in vanadium dioxide is driven primarily by the entropic effects of soft anharmonic lattice vibrations, or phonons, which stabilize the metallic phase.

    • John D. Budai
    • , Jiawang Hong
    •  & Olivier Delaire

  • 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

  • Letter |

    A stable crystal phase and two metastable liquid phases of the ST2 model of water exist at the same deeply supercooled condition, and the two liquids undergo a first-order liquid–liquid transition that meets stringent thermodynamic criteria.

    • Jeremy C. Palmer
    • , Fausto Martelli
    •  & Pablo G. Debenedetti

  • Perspective |

    Strongly connected and interdependent networks create risks of global-scale catastrophic failure; to make networked risks more manageable, it is suggested to establish a ‘Global Systems Science’.

    • Dirk Helbing

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