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Hydro-equivalent scaling of recent direct-drive inertial confinement fusion implosions shows that a burning plasma can be achieved with a higher laser energy.

A burning plasma, a critical step towards self-sustaining fusion, is achieved at the US National Ignition Facility, with a subset of experiments demonstrating fusion self-heating beyond radiation and conduction losses.

Identifying jets originating from heavy quarks plays a fundamental role in hadronic collider experiments. In this work, the ATLAS Collaboration describes and tests a transformer-based neural network architecture for jet flavour tagging based on low-level input and physics-inspired constraints.

This study applies topological analysis to hippocampal ripple waveforms, uncovering a low-dimensional continuum that encodes layer-specific synaptic input information. It also reveals how ripple waveforms vary during wakefulness, sleep and learning.

Broken and tailored symmetries have a fundamental role in wave phenomena and their applications. This Review surveys the recent progress in the domain of artificial phononic media with an emphasis on the role of symmetry breaking, in both space and time, for advanced wave phenomena.

By synthesizing information on archaeological sites, palaeoclimate reconstructions and ancient DNA, Betti et al. show that the Neolithic expansion in Europe was not a continuous process of diffusion, but a series of climate-driven episodes of varying speeds.

JWST/NIRSpec observations of the 49 Ceti debris disk reveal spatially resolved, fluorescently excited CO emission, indicating a secondary origin of the gas in debris disks (that is, from the collision of volatile-rich bodies).

Here, the authors present trained models of genetically regulated enhancer RNA expression, finding that genetically regulated expression predicts chromatin contact frequency and that enhancer RNAs play a key role in complex trait heritability.

The LHCb experiment at CERN has observed significant asymmetries between the decay rates of the beauty baryon and its CP-conjugated antibaryon, thus demonstrating CP violation in baryon decays.

Inertial confinement fusion experiments in a direct-drive configuration report more energy produced in deuterium–tritium fusion reactions than the amount of energy in the central part of the plasma created by laser irradiation of the fuel capsule.

Entanglement was observed in top–antitop quark events by the ATLAS experiment produced at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN using a proton–proton collision dataset with a centre-of-mass energy of √s  = 13 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 140 fb⁻¹.

Recent improvements in the indirect-drive inertial confinement fusion experiments include the achievement of burning plasma state. Here the authors report the scaling of neutron yield in a burning plasma of Deuterium-Tritium fusion reaction by including the mode-2 asymmetry.

A statistical approach to designing and predicting the fusion yield of cryogenic deuterium–tritium implosions leads to tripled yield in direct-drive laser fusion of deuterium–tritium layered targets.

The periodical change of the Crab nebula’s jet direction challenges our understanding of astrophysical jet dynamics. Here the authors use high-power lasers to create a jet that can be directly compared to the Crab nebula’s, and report the detection of plasma instabilities that mimic kink behaviour.

The ATLAS Collaboration reports the observation of the electroweak production of two jets and a Z-boson pair. This process is related to vector-boson scattering and allows the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking to be probed.

The ATLAS Collaboration reports a measurement of the ratio of the decay rates of W bosons to τ leptons and muons, in agreement with universal lepton couplings as postulated in the standard model of particle physics.

Observations of optical flares from AT2022tsd (the ‘Tasmanian Devil’) show that they have durations on the timescale of minutes, occur over a period of months, are highly energetic, are probably nonthermal and have supernova luminosities.

The ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider reports a search for charged-lepton-flavour violation in decays of Z bosons into a τ lepton and an electron or muon of opposite charge.

The Large Hadron Collider beauty collaboration reports a test of lepton flavour universality in decays of bottom mesons into strange mesons and a charged lepton pair, finding evidence of a violation of this principle postulated in the standard model.

The existence and properties of tetraquark states with two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks have been widely debated. Here, the authors use a unitarized model to study the properties of an exotic narrow state compatible with a doubly charmed tetraquark.

Nonreciprocal acoustic and elastic wave propagation may enable the creation of devices such as acoustic one-way mirrors, isolators and topological insulators. This Review presents advances in the creation of materials that break reciprocity and realize robust, unidirectional acoustic and elastic wave steering.

Ten years after the discovery of the Higgs boson, the ATLAS  experiment at CERN probes its kinematic properties with a significantly larger dataset from 2015–2018 and provides further insights on its interaction with other known particles.

Fast-ignition laser fusion involves directing an intense relativistic electron beam onto a fuel target. Experiments and simulations now enable a visualization of the location of fast electrons and the energy-coupling mechanisms at play.

One of the challenges in fast-ignition fusion is to laser-compress an asymmetric cone-in-shell target to a density at which it can be ignited by a second laser. Theobald et al. report the achievement of areal densities in excess of 300 mg cm⁻², to a point at which ignition might soon be possible.

The potential for neutrinos to travel faster than light challenges fundamental physics, yet remains unconfirmed. The authors utilize the KM3NeT neutrino telescope to impose stringent constraints on Lorentz-violating superluminal neutrino velocities, reinforcing the standard understanding of Lorentz symmetry and impacting future theoretical and experimental explorations in particle physics.

Inertial confinement fusion, based on laser-heating a deuterium–tritium mixture, is one of the approaches towards energy production from fusion reactions. Now, record energy-yield experiments are reported—bringing us closer to ignition conditions.

The LHCb collaboration reports an improved measurement of the oscillation frequency of mesons consisting of a bottom quark and strange quark, which is then combined with previous results.

CP violation has deep implications for particle physics and cosmology. Previously observed only in meson decays, signs of CP violation have now been spotted in baryon decays by analysing the proton–proton collision data from the LHCb detector.

The gondwanatherians were mammals known only from teeth and some jaw fragments that lived in the southern continents alongside dinosaurs; here the entire cranium of a bizarre and badger-sized fossil mammal from the Cretaceous of Madagascar shows that gondwanatherians were related to the better-known multituberculates, a long-lived and successful group of now-extinct rodent-like mammals.

FRESH, a multi-lab collaboration, reveals how data quality, analysis pipelines, and researcher expertise influence reproducibility in fNIRS neuroimaging, highlighting key factors driving variability in hypothesis outcomes.

Ignition of a millimetre-sized pellet containing a mix of deuterium–tritium, published in 2022, puts to rest questions about the capability of lasers to ignite thermonuclear fuel.

In burning plasma, alpha particles from fusion reactions are the dominant source of heating. The design choices that resulted in reaching this state in experiments at the National Ignition Facility are reported.

Serial femtosecond crystallography of the human δ-opioid receptor in complex with an endomorphin-derived peptide reveals interactions that are important for understanding the pharmacology of opioid peptides and developing analgesics with reduced side effects.