News & Views

Interlayer excitons are neutral particles, which are prevalent in transition metal dichalcogenide heterostructures. Now, long-range repulsive interactions between these neutral particles leads to the formation of a crystal.

Cavity-enhanced spectroscopy has now reached temperatures as low as 4 K — colder than most of space. This removes long-standing barriers in measuring hydrogen, which is a benchmark system for testing quantum theory and relevant for metrology.

There are theoretical predictions that topologically non-trivial states in materials leave tell-tale signs in the spatial structure of their wave functions. These have now been observed in monolayer materials.

Robust interference between photonic topological edge states, without compromising unidirectional transmission, is achieved. Optical gain enables fast, reconfigurable control of mode coupling, thus realizing a tunable on-chip topological interferometer.

Excitons are commonly regarded as massive composite quasiparticles. Now, experiments show that, in two-dimensional materials, light–matter interactions can turn excitons into massless collective modes with linear, photon-like dispersions.

Everyday objects often fail from repeated stress. A study shows that fatigue failure in glasses is governed by damage percolation and predictable from early-cycle energy dissipation.

Free-electron lasers generate intense, femtosecond and sub-nanometre wavelength pulses. Incorporating such X-ray light into transient grating spectroscopy reveals electron dynamics at the nanometre length scale.

In a semiconductor bilayer system, local moments in one layer interact with itinerant carriers in the other to realize a two-dimensional topological Kondo insulator.

Irreversibility is linked to the production of entropy and relaxation to thermal equilibrium. Entropy production has now been measured at the nanoscale using quantum dots.

Marine embryos are usually studied in isolation. But when starfish embryos are in a crowd, they self-assemble into living solids with unexpected dynamics, revealing how simple organisms can help understand physics far from equilibrium.

In a Bose–Einstein condensate, bosonic stimulation enhances light scattering. An experiment now reveals that interatomic interactions diminish this effect, offering a probe of quantum correlations.

Quantum states cannot be copied, which could enable encryption schemes that are impossible classically. Now, substantial progress has been made towards a practical uncloneable encryption protocol using ideas from quantum information theory.

Using classical operations to reverse the effects of noise, current quantum devices can outperform classical computers in simulating the dynamics of a chaotic quantum system.

Spin-polarized electron beams are important for fundamental physics, but they could only be generated using DC electron guns. Now, a radiofrequency electron gun for polarized electrons has been realized, promising to overcome beam quality limitations.

The race to demonstrate quantum error correction often focuses on making ever-larger devices. A demonstration showing that splitting a surface-code logical qubit into two simpler repetition codes substantially reduces logical gate errors reminds us that advancing quantum computing does not hinge solely on scaling qubit numbers.

Spontaneous switching between active and inactive states in bacterial chemosensory arrays is shown to operate near a critical point. Through biologically controlled disorder, cells balance high signal gain with fast response.