Physical sciences articles within Nature Physics

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  • News & Views |

    Spatial heterogeneity in disease transmission rates and in mixing patterns between regions makes predicting epidemic trajectories hard. Quantifying the mixing rates within and between spatial regions can improve predictions.

    • Emily Paige Harvey
    •  & Dion R. J. O’Neale

  • Article |

    Applications of atom interferometry require sufficiently long coherence times. Now, confining atoms in an optical lattice shows that the decoherence rate slows down markedly at hold times that exceed tens of seconds.

    • Cristian D. Panda
    • , Matthew Tao
    •  & Holger Müller

  • Article |

    Remote detection protocols use waves scattering off a target, but a formal description of how waves acquire and transmit information about objects has been lacking. The density and flux of Fisher information now provide a way to understand this process.

    • Jakob Hüpfl
    • , Felix Russo
    •  & Stefan Rotter

  • Article |

    The observation of edge modes in topological systems is challenging because precise control over the sample and occupied states is required. An experiment with atoms in a driven lattice now shows how edge modes with programmable potentials can be realized.

    • Christoph Braun
    • , Raphaël Saint-Jalm
    •  & Monika Aidelsburger

  • Article |

    Topological boundary modes within charge-ordered states have not yet been observed experimentally. Now an in-gap boundary mode, stemming solely from the charge order, is visualized in the topological material Ta2Se8I.

    • Maksim Litskevich
    • , Md Shafayat Hossain
    •  & M. Zahid Hasan

  • Article |

    An analysis of images from the Juno spacecraft reveals dynamics at high latitudes that are reminiscent of the generation of frontal structures in Earth’s atmosphere and oceans.

    • Lia Siegelman
    •  & Patrice Klein

  • News & Views |

    A superfluid is a macroscopic system with zero viscosity through which entropy is reversibly transported by waves. An unexpected transport phenomenon has now been observed between two superfluids, where irreversible entropy transport is enhanced by superfluidity.

    • Marion Delehaye

  • News & Views |

    In solids, the quantum metric captures the quantum coherence of the electron wavefunctions. Recent experiments demonstrate the detection and manipulation of the quantum metric in a noncollinear topological antiferromagnet at room temperature.

    • Su-Yang Xu

  • News & Views |

    Multi-step transitions between a variety of topological spin textures have been unveiled in a centrosymmetric magnet, which may enable efficient multistate memory and logic devices.

    • Jayjit Kumar Dey
    •  & Sujit Das

  • Article |

    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.

    • Mathilde Lacroix
    • , Bart Smeets
    •  & Pascal Silberzan

  • Article |

    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.

    • Yichi Zhang
    • , Hui Zhang
    •  & Changgan Zeng

  • News & Views |

    A clear picture of how and why cells inevitably lose viability is still lacking. A dynamical systems view of starving bacteria points to a continuous energy expenditure needed for maintaining the right osmotic pressure as an important factor.

    • Ann Xu
    •  & Hyun Youk

  • Research Briefing |

    Ultrafast light pulses, if they are sufficiently intense, can induce phase transitions on ultrafast timescales. It is now shown that when a system is first excited by a weak preparatory pulse, this generates local changes in structure that transiently lower the energy barrier to the phase transition, enabling high-speed and energy-efficient transitions.

  • News & Views |

    A single light-emitting dye molecule precisely placed within the tiny gap of a metal nanodimer boosts light–matter coupling — a step closer to the development of quantum devices operating at room temperature.

    • Rohit Chikkaraddy

  • Review Article |

    Molecular ions and hybrid platforms that integrate cold trapped ions and neutral particles offer opportunities for many quantum technologies. This Review surveys recent methodological advances and highlights in the study of cold molecular ions.

    • Markus Deiß
    • , Stefan Willitsch
    •  & Johannes Hecker Denschlag

  • Review Article |

    The study of quantum systems in a programmable and controllable fashion is one of the aims of both quantum simulation and computing. This Review covers the prospects and opportunities that ultracold molecules offer in these fields.

    • Simon L. Cornish
    • , Michael R. Tarbutt
    •  & Kaden R. A. Hazzard

  • Article |

    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.

    • Unai Aseginolaza
    • , Josu Diego
    •  & Ion Errea

  • Review Article |

    Ultracold atoms are a well-established platform for quantum sensing and metrology. This Review discusses the enhanced sensing capabilities that molecules offer for a range of phenomena, including symmetry-violating forces and dark matter detection.

    • David DeMille
    • , Nicholas R. Hutzler
    •  & Tanya Zelevinsky

  • Review Article |

    Ultracold molecules and ion–neutral systems offer unique access to chemistry in a coherent quantum regime. This Review charts the progress of studies of quantum chemistry in such platforms, highlighting the synergy between theory and experiments.

    • Tijs Karman
    • , Michał Tomza
    •  & Jesús Pérez-Ríos

  • Review Article |

    Cold and ultracold molecules have emerged in the past two decades as a central topic in quantum gas studies. This Review charts the recent advances in cooling and quantum state control techniques that are shaping this evolving field.

    • Tim Langen
    • , Giacomo Valtolina
    •  & Jun Ye

  • Article |

    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.

    • Shubham P. Jain
    • , Joseph T. Iosue
    •  & Victor V. Albert

  • Article |

    Active cell contraction drives hole nucleation, fracture and crack propagation in a tissue monolayer through a process reminiscent of dewetting thin films.

    • Jian-Qing Lv
    • , Peng-Cheng Chen
    •  & Bo Li

  • News & Views |

    Spiral waves of cell density can form and propagate through bacterial biofilms. These waves are formed by a self-organization process that coordinates pulling forces between neighbouring cells.

    • Guram Gogia
    •  & David R. Johnson

  • News & Views |

    The properties of quantum matter arise from the combined effects of dimensionality, interactions and quantum statistics. An experiment now studies what happens to ultracold bosons when the dimensionality of the system changes continuously between one and two dimensions.

    • Jérôme Beugnon

  • News & Views |

    The determination of the order parameter symmetry is a critical issue in the study of unconventional superconductors. Ultrasound measurements on UTe2, a candidate spin-triplet superconductor, now provide evidence for the single-component nature of its order parameter.

    • Bohm-Jung Yang

  • Research Briefing |

    The nuclear pore complex of eukaryotic cells senses the mechanical directionality of translocating proteins, favouring the passage of those that have a leading mechanically labile region. Adding an unstructured, mechanically weak peptide tag to a translocating protein increases its rate of nuclear import and accumulation, suggesting a biotechnological strategy to enhance the delivery of molecular cargos into the cell nucleus.

  • Article |

    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.

    • Zhenyuan Zeng
    • , Chengkang Zhou
    •  & Shiliang Li

  • Research Briefing |

    Rotational symmetry is shown to protect the quadratic dispersion of out-of-plane flexural vibrations in graphene and other two-dimensional materials against phonon–phonon interactions, making the bending rigidity of these materials non-divergent. The quadratic dispersion is then consistent with the propagation of sound in the graphene plane.

  • Article
    | Open Access

    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.

    • Simon Geyer
    • , Bence Hetényi
    •  & Andreas V. Kuhlmann

  • Research Briefing |

    The Q-value of electron capture in 163Ho has been determined with an uncertainty of 0.6 eV c–2 through a combination of high-precision Penning-trap mass spectrometry and precise atomic physics calculations. This high-precision measurement provides insight into systematic errors in neutrino mass measurements.

  • Research Briefing |

    As counterparts to optical frequency combs, magnonic frequency combs could have broad applications if their initiation thresholds were low and the ‘teeth’ of the comb plentiful. Progress has now been made through exploiting so-called exceptional points to enhance the nonlinear coupling between magnons and produce wider magnonic frequency combs.

  • Research Briefing |

    A practical and hardware-efficient blueprint for fault-tolerant quantum computing has been developed, using quantum low-density-parity-check codes and reconfigurable neutral-atom arrays. The scheme requires ten times fewer qubits and paves the way towards large-scale quantum computing using existing experimental technologies.

  • Article |

    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.

    • Congyi Wang
    • , Jinwei Rao
    •  & Wei Lu

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