Physics articles within Nature

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  • News & Views |

    The finding that some gas-giant exoplanets are much larger than theory predicts has been boggling astronomers' minds. Planetary heating caused by gravitational tidal interactions might be a piece of the puzzle.

    • Pin-Gao Gu

  • Letter |

    Interactions between microscopic particles are usually described as two-body interactions, although it has been shown that higher-order multi-body interactions could give rise to new quantum phases with intriguing properties. Here, effective six-body interactions are demonstrated in a system of ultracold bosonic atoms in a three-dimensional optical lattice.

    • Sebastian Will
    • , Thorsten Best
    •  & Immanuel Bloch

  • Letter |

    Electromagnetically induced transparency enables the transmission of a laser pulse through an optically dense medium to be manipulated using a control beam. Here this technique is scaled down to a single atom, which acts as a quantum-optical transistor with the ability to coherently control the transmission of light through a cavity. This may lead to novel quantum applications, such as dynamic control of the photon statistics of propagating light fields.

    • Martin Mücke
    • , Eden Figueroa
    •  & Gerhard Rempe

  • Letter |

    Recent progress in solid-state quantum information processing has stimulated the search for amplifiers and frequency converters with quantum-limited performance in the microwave range. Here, a phase-preserving, superconducting parametric amplifier with ultra-low-noise properties has been experimentally realized.

    • N. Bergeal
    • , F. Schackert
    •  & M. H. Devoret

  • News & Views |

    Optoelectronic circuits with delayed feedback provide a convenient bench-top platform to study a wide range of nonlinear dynamic systems, from ultrastable clocks to complex chaotic devices.

    • Laurent Larger
    •  & John M. Dudley

  • News |

    Particle physicists in a race against time to overhaul US$1.5-billion cosmic-ray detector.

    • Edwin Cartlidge

  • News & Views |

    Entanglement between particles permits the quantum uncertainty in one variable to be reduced at the cost of increasing that in another. Condensates are an ideal system in which this technique can be studied.

    • Charles A. Sackett

  • News & Views |

    Unlike its neighbours on the right-hand side of the periodic table, boron barely forms an anion. A new trick has been established that allows it to do so, enabling a highly unusual complex to be prepared.

    • Kyoko Nozaki

  • News |

    At 174 trillionths of a trillionth of a newton, new 'yoctoforce' is smallest yet measured.

    • Geoff Brumfiel

  • Letter |

    Here it is shown, both theoretically and experimentally, that non-local correlations between entangled quantum particles can be used for a new cryptographic application — the generation of certified private random numbers — that is impossible to achieve classically. The results have implications for future device-independent quantum information experiments and for addressing fundamental issues regarding the randomness of quantum theory.

    • S. Pironio
    • , A. Acín
    •  & C. Monroe

  • News & Views |

    You have received a device that is claimed to produce random numbers, but you don't trust it. Can you check it without opening it? In some cases, you can, thanks to the bizarre nature of quantum physics.

    • Valerio Scarani

  • News & Views |

    A study of failures in interconnected networks highlights the vulnerability of tightly coupled infrastructures and shows the need to consider mutually dependent network properties in designing resilient systems.

    • Alessandro Vespignani

  • News |

    Quantifying just how unpredictable random numbers really are could aid quantum cryptography.

    • Zeeya Merali

  • Article |

    A quantum spin liquid is a hypothetical system of spins (such as those carried by electrons), the orientations of which continue to fluctuate even at absolute zero. Theoretical and experimental evidence for the existence of such states at the microscopic level is elusive, but these authors have modelled correlated electrons arranged on a honeycomb lattice (such as in graphene), and identified the conditions under which a microscopic quantum spin liquid would be realized in two dimensions.

    • Z. Y. Meng
    • , T. C. Lang
    •  & A. Muramatsu

  • Letter |

    X-ray crystallography has become the most common way for structural biologists to obtain the three-dimensional structures of proteins and protein complexes. However, crystals of large macromolecular complexes often diffract only weakly (yielding a resolution worse than 4 Å), so new methods that work at such low resolution are needed. Here a new method is described by which to obtain higher-quality electron density maps and more accurate molecular models of weakly diffracting crystals.

    • Gunnar F. Schröder
    • , Michael Levitt
    •  & Axel T. Brunger

  • Column |

    Bad risk management contributed to the current financial crisis. Two economists believe the situation could be improved by gaining a deeper understanding of what is not known, as Philip Ball explains.

    • Philip Ball

  • News & Views |

    Bose–Einstein condensates are ideal tools with which exotic phenomena can be investigated. The hitherto-unrealized Dicke quantum phase transition has now been observed with one such system in an optical cavity.

    • Cheng Chin
    •  & Nathan Gemelke

  • Letter |

    Ultracold polar molecules offer the possibility of exploring quantum gases with interparticle interactions that are strong, long-range and spatially anisotropic. Here, dipolar collisions in an ultracold gas of fermionic potassium–rubidium molecules have been experimentally observed. The results show how the long-range dipolar interaction can be used for electric-field control of chemical reaction rates in an ultracold gas of polar molecules.

    • K.-K. Ni
    • , S. Ospelkaus
    •  & D. S. Jin

  • Article |

    A phase transition occurs when a physical system suddenly changes state, for instance when it melts or freezes. The Dicke model describes a collective matter–light interaction and has been predicted to show a quantum phase transition. Here, this quantum phase transition has been realized in an open system formed by a Bose–Einstein condensate coupled to an optical cavity. Surprisingly, the atoms are observed to self-organize into a supersolid phase.

    • Kristian Baumann
    • , Christine Guerlin
    •  & Tilman Esslinger

  • News & Views |

    Non-Abelian anyons are hypothesized particles that, if found, could form the basis of a fault-tolerant quantum computer. The theoretical finding that they may turn up in three dimensions comes as a surprise.

    • Chetan Nayak

  • News & Views |

    Researchers have long wanted to be able to control macroscopic mechanical objects in their smallest possible state of motion. Success in achieving that goal heralds a new generation of quantum experiments.

    • Markus Aspelmeyer

  • Letter |

    The precision of interferometers — used in metrology and in the state-of-the-art time standard — is generally limited by classical statistics. Here it is shown that the classical precision limit can be beaten by using nonlinear atom interferometry with Bose–Einstein condensates.

    • C. Gross
    • , T. Zibold
    •  & M. K. Oberthaler

  • Letter |

    Atom chips provide a versatile quantum laboratory for experiments with ultracold atomic gases, but techniques to control atomic interactions and to generate entanglement have been unavailable so far. Here, the experimental generation of multi-particle entanglement on an atom chip is described. The technique is used to produce spin-squeezed states of a two-component Bose–Einstein condensate, which should be useful for quantum metrology.

    • Max F. Riedel
    • , Pascal Böhi
    •  & Philipp Treutlein

  • Letter |

    A two-dimensional gas of electrons is a powerful test-bed for the fundamental physics of interacting particles, and has been much studied in the context of integer and fractional quantum Hall effects. The latest observations of this system reveal prominent structure in the high energy single particle spectrum that cannot be readily explained with existing models of this system.

    • O. E. Dial
    • , R. C. Ashoori
    •  & K. W. West

  • News Feature |

    Social scientists have embedded themselves at CERN to study the world's biggest research collaboration. Zeeya Merali reports on a 10,000-person physics project.

    • Zeeya Merali

  • Letter |

    Until now, quantum atomic gases and single trapped ions have been treated separately in experiments. Now a hybrid system has been investigated, involving the immersion of a single trapped ion into a Bose–Einstein condensate of neutral atoms. The two systems could be controlled independently and the fundamental interaction processes were studied. Sympathetic cooling of the single ion by the condensate was observed, hinting at the possibility of using these condensates as refrigerators for ion-trap quantum computers.

    • Christoph Zipkes
    • , Stefan Palzer
    •  & Michael Köhl

  • News & Views |

    The golden ratio — an exact 'magic' number often claimed to be observed when taking ratios of distances in ancient and modern architecture, sculpture and painting — has been spotted in a magnetic compound.

    • Ian Affleck

  • Article |

    Quantum mechanics provides an accurate description of a wide variety of physical systems but it is very challenging to prove that it also applies to macroscopic (classical) mechanical systems. This is because it has been impossible to cool a mechanical mode to its quantum ground state, in which all classical noise is eliminated. Recently, various mechanical devices have been cooled to a near-ground state, but this paper demonstrates the milestone result of a piezoelectric resonator with a mechanical mode cooled to its quantum ground state.

    • A. D. O’Connell
    • , M. Hofheinz
    •  & A. N. Cleland

  • Letter |

    An insulator does not conduct electricity, and so cannot in general be used to transmit an electrical signal. But an insulator's electrons possess spin in addition to charge, and so can transmit a signal in the form of a spin wave. Here a hybrid metal–insulator–metal structure is reported, in which an electrical signal in one metal layer is directly converted to a spin wave in the insulating layer; this wave is then transmitted to the second metal layer, where the signal can be directly recovered as an electrical voltage.

    • Y. Kajiwara
    • , K. Harii
    •  & E. Saitoh

  • News & Views |

    Einstein's theory of general relativity has been tested — and confirmed — on scales far beyond those of our Solar System. But the results don't exclude all alternative theories of gravity.

    • J. Anthony Tyson

  • News |

    General relativity fits survey observations but there's still room for its rivals.

    • Zeeya Merali

  • Review Article |

    • T. D. Ladd
    • , F. Jelezko
    •  & J. L. O’Brien

  • Letter |

    The phenomenon of superconductivity continues to intrigue, and several new superconducting materials have been discovered in recent years — but in the case of organic superconductors, no new material system with a high superconducting transition temperature has been identified in the past decade. Now it has been shown that the introduction of potassium into crystals of organic molecule picene can yield superconductivity at temperatures as high as 18 K.

    • Ryoji Mitsuhashi
    • , Yuta Suzuki
    •  & Yoshihiro Kubozono

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