Articles in 2026

Accurate atomic data are crucial for plasma diagnostics and various scientific applications, yet current methods for determining fine structure energy levels are labor-intensive and inefficient. The authors introduce a graph reinforcement learning approach to automate this process, achieving significant accuracy and efficiency improvements, potentially transforming atomic spectroscopy and related fields.

Accurately sensing atmospheric turbulence is vital for optical communications, yet standard methods often obscure the spatial nature of these distortions. Via numerical simulations, the authors show that two-dimensional orbital angular momentum spectroscopy resolves turbulence across radial dimensions, enhancing the accuracy of environmental sensing.

Catalytic majorization describes when one state can be transformed into another with the help of an auxiliary “catalyst”, but deciding this normally requires checking infinitely many inequalities. The authors derive a finite set of sufficient conditions that guarantee such catalytic transformations and extend these results to thermal processes.

Non-equilibrium Rydberg gases exhibit unique many-body phases arising from the interplay of coherent interactions and dissipation, yet controlling their temporal order remains challenging. This work demonstrates injection locking of a Rydberg dissipative time crystal using a radio-frequency electric field, achieving full synchronization and revealing dynamical behavior relevant to precision sensing and quantum metrology.

Chiral active Brownian particles convert stored or environmental energy into both self-propulsion and autonomous rotation, driving systems far from equilibrium. Here, the authors combine experiments and theory to reveal a nonmonotonic diffusion enhancement in chiral active Brownian particles confined within an annular channel, driven by obstacle interactions, offering insights into nonequilibrium transport in biologically relevant settings.

Higher-order exceptional points in non-Hermitian systems enable extraordinarily sensitive detection, but require complex nonlinear gain. The authors show that frequency-dependent gain from simple impedance observers achieves a third-order exceptional point in a parity-time-symmetric dimer and a fifth-order exceptional point in an anti-parity-time-symmetric trimer, offering a practical route to enhanced sensing without nonlinear complications

Hermitian and non-Hermitian topological phases in open quantum dynamics are known to exhibit distinct damping landscapes, namely extremal edge damping and chiral damping. Here, the authors demonstrate a route to observe both during the evolution, enabled by an intricate separation of their respective time scales.

High-energy nuclear scattering experiments face challenges in understanding jet energy loss and entropy production. Here, the authors use 1+1-d massive QED to simulate real-time scattering, identifying regimes of probe evolution and demonstrating that energy loss scales linearly with path length, offering insights for future quantum simulations of nuclear interactions.

Optimizing ultra-intense lasers requires precise spatiotemporal measurements, but their single-shot operation makes this highly challenging. The authors introduce SIFAST, a novel technique combining a fiber array and spectral interferometry to capture the complete 3D structure of a laser pulse in a single shot.

Can single non-Hermitian impurities induce bound states? Here, the authors show that a complex defect in a tight-binding lattice yields dimension-dependent properties, including the collapse and re-emergence of bound states, scale-free localised modes, and cross-shaped localized states with strongly anisotropic decay, unlike standard exponential localisation.

The absence of odd Shapiro steps in microwave-irradiated Josephson junctions (JJs) is considered to be a possible indicator of 4π-periodic supercurrents that are induced by Majorana bound states. Here, by conducting measurements on Al/WTe₂ JJs, the authors suggest that the missing first Shapiro step can instead arise from the intrinsic non-linearity of the current–voltage characteristics in low-to-moderate transparency junctions.

Complex systems often interact through groups rather than simple pairwise connections, which can reshape how dynamics unfold on networks. Here, the authors develop a framework based on system disorder to quantify how dynamics transform across higher-order structures, uncover structural and dynamical governing factors, and demonstrate its applicability across contagion and opinion processes.

Quantum simulations are often limited by incompatible wavefunction representations across different algorithmic frameworks, hindering efficient integration. Here, the authors introduce a hybrid quantization scheme that efficiently converts between first and second quantization formalisms, significantly reducing the computational costs of electronic simulations, with potential applications in various chemical and physical processes.

The Efimov effect is a quantum phenomenon in which three particles form an infinite series of low-energy bound states at resonance, previously observed in three-dimensional systems. The authors extend this celebrated effect to long-range quantum spin systems, demonstrating long-range spin chains can also host Efimov states with widely tunable scaling ratios controlled by the interaction range.

Bloch points are 3D hedgehog-like spin configurations in magnetic materials whose motion is hard to describe within standard models because they are singular at the origin. Here, the authors propose a method which yields well-defined Bloch point dynamics and allows stable, physically meaningful predictions of their motion.

Vacuum ultraviolet light beams with orbital angular momentum are needed to study fast electron dynamics in solids. The authors demonstrate through simulations that these vortex beams can be generated in a compact, table-top setup using nearthreshold harmonics in rare gases.

Driven by strong fields, vacuum manifests itself as a nonlinear polarization medium, yet this hallmark prediction of quantum electrodynamics remains experimentally elusive for 90 years. Here, the authors uncover a super light-by-light scattering effect in vacuum, and propose an experimental scheme that holds promise for single-shot detection of this vacuum polarization effect with current technologies

The overdamped approximation, widely used to study micrometer-sized engines, fails to capture their thermodynamics when temperature changes over time, leading to discrepancies in heat dissipation and entropy production that we identify as thermodynamic anomalies. Here, the authors derive analytical expressions for these anomalies and show that viscosity and mass produce distinct behaviors, improving the evaluation of engine efficiency and enabling simple estimation of kinetic energy in overdamped systems.

Discrete time quasi-crystals represent a new kind of non-equilibrium phase of matter that can arise under incommensurate periodic drives, while their specific realization in popular Rydberg atom array platforms remains unexplored. Here, the authors investigate how two coupled PXP models with time-modulated drives give rise to robust quasi-periodic temporal order and discuss the associated experimental feasibility.