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Edge modes are a key feature of topological materials, but their propagation is difficult to directly observe in condensed matter systems. The controlled injection and propagation of chiral edge modes has now been shown in a rotating ultracold gas.
The dimensionality of a many-body system strongly impacts its physical behaviour. Now, a crossover from 1D to 2D has been observed in the Bose–Einstein condensate of a photon gas.
Approximate—rather than exact—quantum error correction is a useful but relatively unexplored idea in quantum computing and many-body physics. A theoretical framework has now been established based on connections with quantum circuit complexity.
Magnetic phases that are stabilized by quantum fluctuations in low dimensions are rare. A thickness-dependent crossover from three-dimensional antiferromagnetism to a two-dimensional vestigial nematic state that is driven by fluctuations has now been observed.
For solid-state qubits, the material environment hosts sources of errors that vary in time and space. This systematic analysis of errors affecting high-fidelity two-qubit gates in silicon can inform the design of large-scale quantum computers.
Leader cells play an important role in guiding migratory clusters in various biological processes. Now, the mechanical organization of leader and followers within a cell cluster is shown to enable collective migration.
Heterostructures of ferromagnets and superconductors may host exotic superconducting states. Now a circuit quantum electrodynamics technique is demonstrated that provides evidence for triplet p-wave pairing in such a heterostructure.
Treadmilling of cytoskeletal filaments is crucial for their functional self-organization. Now the mechanism underpinning this collective organization is shown to be the dissolution of misaligned filaments.
Fluctuating hydrodynamics posits that thermalization in non-equilibrium systems depends on equilibrium transport coefficients. This hypothesis is now tested by exploring the emergence of fluctuations in non-equilibrium dynamics of ultracold atoms.
The Fermi liquid state in highly doped superconducting cuprates is normally thought of as disordered. Now, an observation of broken mirror symmetry in that phase suggests otherwise.
The pseudogap in cuprates is often linked to superconductivity. Now bulk evidence for a pseudogap is found in doped non-superconducting Sr2IrO4, revealing that pseudogaps in doped Mott insulators are not necessarily a precursor to superconductivity.
Quantum correlations are strong enough that classical users can verify that a device produces quantum entangled states using only the outcomes of local measurements. This self-testing approach has now been extended to verifying quantum measurements.
Generating highly squeezed states for quantum sensing requires precise entanglement properties, which makes it a hard task. Now a conjecture identifies a realistic regime of magnetic order at finite temperatures that enables scalable spin squeezing.
The identification of dark states—quantum states that do not interact with photons—in real materials may help to address many unsolved issues in condensed-matter physics. Now, they have been identified in palladium diselenide.
The ducts of many fluid-pumping organs feature cilia. Two structural parameters organize the different types of ducts into a continuous spectrum between ciliary carpet and flame designs depending on the fluid-pumping requirements.
Warm dense copper, created by an X-ray free-electron laser, features a transition from reverse saturable absorption to saturable absorption. The results can be used to benchmark non-equilibrium models of electronic structure in warm dense matter.
A lack of non-destructive measurements and difficulty in tuning direct coupling between motional modes limits quantum information processing with trapped ions. Both features have now been achieved in an ion crystal using oscillating electric fields.
An experiment proves that strongly interacting Fermi gases driven into a superfluid phase by two different quenches display the same universal dynamics in the framework of the Kibble–Zurek mechanism.
The tuneable and nonlinear nature of the interactions between two optically levitated nanoparticles allows the observation of the system’s non-Hermitian dynamics and a mechanical lasing transition.