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Supracellular cues play a key role in directing collective cell migration in processes such as wound healing and cancer invasion. New findings emphasize the importance of all length scales of the microenvironment in shaping cell migration patterns.
The nature of turbulence that occurs when fluids flow in a pipe is still controversial. Now the onset of turbulence in pipe flow has been shown to be a directed-percolation phase transition.
Quantum geometry and electron–phonon coupling are two fundamental concepts in condensed matter physics that govern many correlated ground states. Now a generalized theory connects these two ideas.
The nature of the fractional quantum Hall state when the lowest Landau level is half-filled remains controversial. Now, the observation of a topological phase transition at related filling fractions suggests that the half-filled state is non-Abelian.
The sign of the Casimir force depends on the electric permittivities and the magnetic permeabilities of the materials involved. For a gold sphere immersed in a ferrofluid, tuneability of the Casimir force by means of a magnetic field is now shown.
The Leidenfrost effect—a droplet hovering on a hot surface due to vapour in between—requires a surface temperature of about 230 °C. Now a tailored microstructured surface is shown to enable quick hovering of water droplets at 130 °C.
When bacteria starve, their cytoplasm detaches from the cell wall. A model now shows that this process determines bacterial death rates and can be controlled to keep bacteria viable in a starved state.
The mechanism by which two-dimensional materials remain stable at a finite temperature is still under debate. Now, numerical calculations suggest that rotational symmetry is crucial in suppressing anharmonic effects that lead to structural instability.
Active cell contraction drives hole nucleation, fracture and crack propagation in a tissue monolayer through a process reminiscent of dewetting thin films.
Many recent experiments have stored quantum information in bosonic modes, such as photons in resonators or optical fibres. Now an adaptation of the classical spherical codes provides a framework for designing quantum error correcting codes for these platforms.
Protein transport across the nuclear membrane is regulated by the nuclear pore complex. Experiments now show that the rates of nuclear transport rely on the presence of locally mechanically soft regions of the transported proteins.
Laser-driven proton acceleration experiments achieve energies of up to 150 MeV with particle yields that are relevant for applications such as radiobiology.
A Dirac quantum spin liquid phase is predicted to have a continuum of fractionalized spinon excitations with a Dirac cone dispersion. A spin continuum consistent with this picture has now been observed in neutron scattering measurements.
The symmetry of the superconducting order parameter in UTe2 is still debated. Now ultrasound experiments suggest that the order parameter can only have one component.
Some magnetic phase transitions can be understood as Bose–Einstein condensation of magnons. Close to a quantum critical point, YbCl3 now provides a realization of a Bose–Einstein condensate that is dominated by two-dimensional physical behaviour.
The hybrid architecture of Andreev spin qubits made using semiconductor–superconductor nanowires means that supercurrents can be used to inductively couple qubits over long distances.
A successful silicon spin qubit design should be rapidly scalable by benefiting from industrial transistor technology. This investigation of exchange interactions between two FinFET qubits provides a guide to implementing two-qubit gates for hole spins.
Frequency combs, which are important for applications in precision spectroscopy, depend on material nonlinearities for their function, which can be hard to engineer. Now an approach combining magnons and exceptional points is shown to be effective.
Quantum low-density parity-check codes are highly efficient in principle but challenging to implement in practice. This proposal shows that these codes could be implemented in the near term using recently demonstrated neutral-atom arrays.