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  • Article
    | Open Access

    The strong ionic bond in salt is broken by electrostatic interactions with water, but direct observation at the level of a single ion is challenging. Here, the authors have visualized the preferential dissolution of an anion by manipulating a single water molecule.

    • Huijun Han
    • , Yunjae Park
    •  & Hyung-Joon Shin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    T centers in silicon are promising candidates for quantum applications yet suffer from weak optical transitions. Here, by integrating with a silicon nanocavity, the authors demonstrate an enhancement of the photon emission rate for a single T center.

    • Adam Johnston
    • , Ulises Felix-Rendon
    •  & Songtao Chen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors propose that screw or edge dislocations can trap Majorana zero modes in the absence of an external magnetic field. They predict that the Majoranas will appear as second-order topological modes on the four corners of an embedded 2D subsystem defined by the cutting plane of the dislocation.

    • Lun-Hui Hu
    •  & Rui-Xing Zhang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Recently, signatures of quantum spin liquid have been reported in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides. Here the authors report evidence of such state in 1T-NbSe2 via the measurements of the Kondo effect in a 1T-1H heterostructure, further supported by measurements for magnetic molecules on 1T-NbSe2.

    • Quanzhen Zhang
    • , Wen-Yu He
    •  & Yeliang Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors theoretically propose a simple microscopic mechanism for light-induced superconductivity based on a boson coupled to an electronic interband transition. The electron-electron attraction needed for the superconductivity can be resonantly amplified when the boson’s frequency is close to the energy difference between the two electronic bands. The model can be engineered using a 2D heterostructure.

    • Christian J. Eckhardt
    • , Sambuddha Chattopadhyay
    •  & Marios H. Michael

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here the authors experimentally demonstrate the anomalous and Chern topological phases in a hyperbolic non-reciprocal scattering network, establishing unidirectional channels to induce new and exciting wave transport properties in curved spaces.

    • Qiaolu Chen
    • , Zhe Zhang
    •  & Romain Fleury

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Strongly interacting interlayer excitons and the interplay between excitons and electronic states have recently been studied in moire superlattices. Here the authors study moire WS2/WSe2 heterobilayer with tuneable electron and exciton populations and find signatures of an excitonic Mott insulating state.

    • Beini Gao
    • , Daniel G. Suárez-Forero
    •  & Mohammad Hafezi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Gapped quantum antiferromagnets can undergo field or pressure induced phase transitions to the magnetically ordered state, which have distinct critical exponents. While there are many examples of field induced transitions, thus far the pressure induced case has proven difficult to realize. Herein, the authors demonstrate such a pressure driven phase transition in the quantum antiferromagnet, DTN.

    • Kirill Yu. Povarov
    • , David E. Graf
    •  & Sergei A. Zvyagin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Van Hove singularities (VHS) are believed to exist in one and two dimensions, but rarely found in three dimensions (3D). Here the authors report the discovery of 3D VHS in a topological magnet EuCd2As2 by magneto-infrared spectroscopy.

    • Wenbin Wu
    • , Zeping Shi
    •  & Xiang Yuan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Vortex string, hypothetical topological defects in cosmology, are predicted to support massless chiral modes. The authors successfully mimicked vortex-string physics in a metamaterial system and experimentally observed the chiral modes within it.

    • Jingwen Ma
    • , Ding Jia
    •  & Xiang Zhang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Miniaturized and efficient optical modulators are desired for data transmission, processing and communication. Here, the authors report the fabrication of exciton-polariton Mach–Zehnder modulators based on thin WS2 waveguides with a footprint of ~30 μm², modulation ratio up to −6.20 dB and nanosecond response times.

    • Seong Won Lee
    • , Jong Seok Lee
    •  & Su-Hyun Gong

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Contractile rings are formed from cytoskeletal filaments, specific crosslinkers and motor proteins during cell division. Here, authors form micron-scale contractile DNA rings from DNA nanotubes and synthetic crosslinkers, with both simulations and experiments showing ring contraction without motor proteins, offering a potential first step towards synthetic cell division machinery.

    • Maja Illig
    • , Kevin Jahnke
    •  & Kerstin Göpfrich

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding machine learning models’ ability to extrapolate from training data to unseen data - known as generalisation - has recently undergone a paradigm shift, while a similar understanding for their quantum counterparts is still missing. Here, the authors show that uniform generalization bounds pessimistically estimate the performance of quantum machine learning models.

    • Elies Gil-Fuster
    • , Jens Eisert
    •  & Carlos Bravo-Prieto

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The understanding of salty water droplet freezing is limited. The authors examine the formation of brine film on top of frozen salty droplets and discover a new ice crystal growth pattern sprouting from the bottom of the brine film.

    • Fuqiang Chu
    • , Shuxin Li
    •  & Nenad Miljkovic

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Polaritons, light-matter hybridized quasiparticles, are the fundamental excitation of strong coupling systems and are widely applicable in information technologies. Here the authors applied the concept of time-of-flight measurement in terahertz induced second harmonic generation experiments in various systems to comprehensively study the dispersion relation of phonon-polaritons and reveal potential spin-lattice couplings.

    • Tianchuang Luo
    • , Batyr Ilyas
    •  & Nuh Gedik

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Interfacing single-photon emitters (SPEs) with high-finesse cavities can prevent decoherence processes, especially at elevated temperature, but its implementation remains challenging. Here, the authors report room-temperature strong coupling of SPEs in hexagonal boron nitride with a dielectric cavity based on bound states in the continuum, showing a Rabi splitting of ~ 4 meV.

    • T. Thu Ha Do
    • , Milad Nonahal
    •  & Son Tung Ha

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Recently there has been a surge of interest in using magnons, the quasi-particles of spin-waves in magnetic systems, for information processing, driven by the potentially very low energy consumption. Here, by adjusting the magnetic compensation in a ferrimagnet, Li et al demonstrate magnon–magnon coupling, and controllable spin wave mediated spin current transmission.

    • Yan Li
    • , Zhitao Zhang
    •  & Xixiang Zhang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Forecasting the future behaviors based on observed data remains a challenging task especially for large nonlinear systems. The authors propose a data-driven approach combining manifold learning and delay embeddings for prediction of dynamics for all components in high-dimensional systems.

    • Tao Wu
    • , Xiangyun Gao
    •  & Jürgen Kurths

  • Article
    | Open Access

    R. Khasanov et al. report thermodynamic and muon-spin-rotation measurements on the Mo5Si3−xPx superconducting family. They find that a flat band reaches the Fermi level at x ≃ 1.3, leading to enhancement of electronic correlations and an abrupt change of the superconducting properties.

    • Rustem Khasanov
    • , Bin-Bin Ruan
    •  & Zurab Guguchia

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The spin texture of a magnetic system can host a variety of topological spin textures, the most famous of these being skyrmions. Here, Volkov et al demonstrate higher order vorticity in magnetic wireframe nanostructures and introduce a general protocol for the creation of arbitrary numbers of vortices and antivortices in such wireframe structures.

    • Oleksii M. Volkov
    • , Oleksandr V. Pylypovskyi
    •  & Denys Makarov

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Artificial magnetic fields have been meticulously engineered in a 3D acoustic crystal, facilitating the creation of 3D flat bands through Landau quantization of quasiparticles arising from nodal-ring band degeneracies.

    • Zheyu Cheng
    • , Yi-Jun Guan
    •  & Baile Zhang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How fast can animals run? Here, the authors show that maximum running speed is limited by different musculoskeletal constraints across animal size: kinetic energy capacity in small animals, and work capacity in large animals.

    • David Labonte
    • , Peter J. Bishop
    •  & Christofer J. Clemente

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The delivery of therapeutic payloads and living vectors to tumors remains a clinical challenge. Here the authors explore a spatially targeted control strategy applying torque density to magnetotactic bacteria, demonstrating feasibility in vitro and in vivo.

    • Nima Mirkhani
    • , Michael G. Christiansen
    •  & Simone Schuerle

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Authors control heat transfer through twisting moiré conductive thermal metasurface, showcasing the potential for manipulating thermal conductivity and temperature gradients with imitated magic angles, thereby realizing multifunctional thermal metadevices.

    • Huagen Li
    • , Dong Wang
    •  & Cheng-Wei Qiu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The fundamental hallmark of altermagnetism lies in the spin splitting of electronic valence bands. Here, the authors observe splitting in metallic CrSb, revealing an exceptionally large value and energetic placement just below the Fermi energy.

    • Sonka Reimers
    • , Lukas Odenbreit
    •  & Martin Jourdan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A spin torque nano-oscillator consists of a free magnetic layer and a reference magnetic layer. Many works have examined the behaviour of droplet solitons in the free magnetic layer. Here, Jiang et al. extend this to pair of droplet solitons, with one in the free layer and one in the reference layer.

    • S. Jiang
    • , S. Chung
    •  & J. Åkerman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Quickly acquiring topographical information from a sample remains a challenge in optics. Here, the authors introduce encoded search focal scan, a technique for sub-micrometric imaging of tens of topographies per second based on collecting a reduced set of images.

    • Narcís Vilar
    • , Roger Artigas
    •  & Guillem Carles

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dielectric constant of non-fullerene acceptors plays a critical role in organic solar cells in terms of exciton dissociation and charge recombination. Here, authors report selenium substitution on central core of acceptors to improve dielectric constant, realizing devices with efficiency of 19.0%.

    • Xinjun He
    • , Feng Qi
    •  & Wallace C. H. Choy

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    Reservoir Computing has shown advantageous performance in signal processing and learning tasks due to compact design and ability for fast training. Here, the authors discuss the parallel progress of mathematical theory, algorithm design and experimental realizations of Reservoir Computers, and identify emerging opportunities as well as existing challenges for their large-scale industrial adoption.

    • Min Yan
    • , Can Huang
    •  & Jie Sun

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Several recent works have highlighted the importance of the orbital currents in transferring angular momentum within materials. In combination with spin-orbit coupling, such orbital currents can be used to alter the magnetization of a material. Herein, the authors demonstrate the inverse effect, showing orbital current driven terahertz emission in Nickel based heterostructures.

    • Yong Xu
    • , Fan Zhang
    •  & Weisheng Zhao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The ability to characterize large and complex nuclear-spin networks could enable quantum applications, such as quantum simulations of many-body physics. Here the authors develop a high-resolution quantum-sensing method and use it to image a network of 50 nuclear spins surrounding a single NV center in diamond.

    • G. L. van de Stolpe
    • , D. P. Kwiatkowski
    •  & T. H. Taminiau

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The bulk photovoltaic effect and DC photocurrent generation can be used to detect topology and geometry in non-centrosymmetric quantum materials. Here, the authors theoretically propose the detection of DC shot noise as a diagnostic tool for the characterization of the band quantum geometry under relaxed symmetry conditions.

    • Longjun Xiang
    • , Hao Jin
    •  & Jian Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Computing platforms based on chemical processes can be an alternative to digital computers in some scenarios but have limited programmability. Here the authors demonstrate a hybrid computing platform combining digital electronics and an oscillatory chemical reaction and demonstrate its computational capabilities.

    • Abhishek Sharma
    • , Marcus Tze-Kiat Ng
    •  & Leroy Cronin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors propose a generalization of the equipartition theorem of thermal physics to account for non-Hermitian trapping forces, relevant for the problems in non-equilibrium open systems and advanced nanotechnology.

    • Xiao Li
    • , Yongyin Cao
    •  & Jack Ng

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Current approaches for volumetric super-resolution microscopy can yield large and complex PSF spatial footprints. Here, the authors show a super-resolution microscopy approach using a hexagonal microlens array, which offers speed improvements in volumetric imaging compared to other single-molecule methods.

    • Sam Daly
    • , João Ferreira Fernandes
    •  & Steven F. Lee

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, the authors use high-resolution electron energy-loss spectroscopy to study the phonon dispersion of monolayer hexagonal boron nitride. They observe that the longitudinal optical (LO) and transverse optical (TO) phonons at the Brillouin zone centre exhibit no energy splitting, contrary to the conventional LO-TO splitting seen in bulk materials.

    • Jiade Li
    • , Li Wang
    •  & Xuetao Zhu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    FeGe is a Kagome metal that exhibits a very rich array of magnetic and electronic phases. Here, using neutron scattering, Chen et al add to this zoo, by showing the emergence of a spin density wave order.

    • Lebing Chen
    • , Xiaokun Teng
    •  & Pengcheng Dai

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Recent theoretical work has shown that quasicrystal (QC) superconductors should exhibit unconventional behaviors, such as vortex pinning without impurities and FFLO-like states. Here, Y. Tokumoto et al. report experimental observation of bulk superconductivity in Ta1.6Te, a van-der-Waals-layered QC with Tc = 1 K.

    • Yuki Tokumoto
    • , Kotaro Hamano
    •  & Keiichi Edagawa

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Using gas cells for spectroscopic studies opens possibility for miniaturized platforms that can be integrated with other optical components. Here the authors demonstrate molecular rovibrational spectroscopy by confining molecules in a cell of subwavelength thickness.

    • Guadalupe Garcia Arellano
    • , Joao Carlos de Aquino Carvalho
    •  & Athanasios Laliotis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Learning the dynamics governing a simulation or experiment usually requires coarse graining or projection, as the number of transition rates typically grows exponentially with system size. The authors show that transformers, neural networks introduced initially for natural language processing, can be used to parameterize the dynamics of large systems without coarse graining.

    • Corneel Casert
    • , Isaac Tamblyn
    •  & Stephen Whitelam

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