Volume 3 Issue 4, April 2021

As superconducting quantum computing research progresses in industry and academic laboratories, researchers are increasingly aware of the importance of the big picture — a full quantum stack where each layer presents specific and related technical challenges.

Science in Asia is often overlooked in the West. Ayumi Koso draws on her experience as a press officer in Japanese research organizations to offer some simple tips for English-language science communication.

Nuclear physics experiments give reaction rates that, via modelling and comparison with primordial abundances, constrain cosmological parameters. The error bars of a key reaction, D(p,γ)³He, were tightened in 2020, revealing discrepancies between different analyses and calling for more accurate measurements of other reactions.

If graphene and related 2D materials are to be used commercially, buyers need to have confidence in the measured properties of the material they obtain from suppliers. Scientists from international standards committees describe how the first joint ISO/IEC measurement standard, published this month, will help.

A paper in Science Advances reports a new approach to simultaneously detecting the colour and polarization of light, based on the eyes of mantis shrimps.

Antihydrogen was first produced in the lab in 1995 and in 2011 it was successfully trapped for longer periods. From there, one step at a time, physicists have been overcoming technical challenges to recently achieve a milestone: the laser cooling of antihydrogen.

A clock using the excitation of a low-energy excited state in the ²²⁹Th nucleus promises high accuracy and sensitivity to new physics. The recently measured properties of this nucleus will lead to nuclear laser spectroscopy with trapped Th ions and Th-doped crystals.

The search for topological phases of matter is evolving towards strongly interacting systems, including magnets and superconductors. This Review discusses the proof-of-principle methodologies applied to probe topological magnets and superconductors with scanning tunnelling microscopy.

X-ray lasers offer unprecedented capabilities, with their tunable, intense and short X-ray pulses. This Technical Review discusses the current and future use of X-ray lasers for probing molecular catalysts and metalloenzymes and their chemical reactions in real time and under functional conditions.

First-principles calculations have been very successful in predicting topological quantum materials. This Technical Review covers topological band theory and provides a guide to the study of topological materials with first-principles methods.