Browse Physics

Macroscopic quantum properties of helium-$4$, one of the simplest and oldest elements in the universe, continue to puzzle and amaze scientists. Supertransport in solid helium-$4$ is the most elusive and controversial conundrum of all.

Dynamical heterogeneity, spatiotemporal fluctuations in local dynamical behavior, may explain the statistical mechanics of amorphous solids that are mechanically rigid but have a disordered structure similar to that of a dense liquid.

A new class of high-temperature iron-based superconductors lacks features in its electronic band structure that, based on current theoretical understanding, were considered essential. In a field that has produced quite a few surprises, this is the biggest yet.

Even though global warming remains a heated political topic, physicists should not ignore the intellectual challenge of trying to model climate change.

Allured by the chic perception and higher funding levels of disease-oriented research, many physicists have migrated to cell biology. Does physics really play a dominant role, or is cellular physiology slave to genetics and chemistry?

After twenty years of effort, definitive quantum oscillations that could be used to map the Fermi surface were finally observed in a high-temperature cuprate superconductor in 2007. This and subsequent studies reveal a profound rearrangement of the Fermi surface in underdoped cuprates. The cause of the reconstruction, and its implication for the origin of high-temperature superconductivity, is a subject of active debate.

Theoretical methods have greatly influenced experiment in search of the elusive marriage between semiconductor electronics and magnetism, and the development of spintronics. The path has not always been a straight one, but realizing the limitations and strengths of theoretical approaches promises a straighter course.

The idea behind adaptive behavioral epidemiology is that groups and individuals respond to the knowledge of a disease threat by changing their habits to avoid interactions with those who are contagious. Network-based models take this adaptive behavior into account by allowing the network to “rewire” its connections.

A prediction that resonantly interacting particles can form weakly bound trimer states remained a mere theoretical oddity for more than three decades until tunable ultracold gases caused the field to explode, with enormous progress in just the last year.

Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider are at the start of a challenging hunt for the Higgs boson, a particle thought to confer the property of mass on every other particle.

Scientists and novelists have been intrigued for centuries by the possibility of hiding an object so completely that neither trace of the object nor of its cloak is to be found. Recent theoretical developments show that cloaking is, in principle, possible for electromagnetic waves and to a limited extent for other types of wave, such as acoustic waves. An energetic program of experimental research has shown some of the schemes to be realizable in practice.

Is there a fundamental lower bound on viscosity? To answer this question, we can look at the coldest and hottest fluids that laboratories are able to produce.

Convection in a fluid heated from below, known as Rayleigh-Bénard convection, is an important turbulent process that occurs in the sun, planetary atmospheres, industrial manufacturing, and many other places. Physicists and engineers have made much progress in understanding this phenomenon in simple laboratory geometries, but still have a way to go before they are able to extrapolate to the extreme conditions often encountered in nature.

Advances in experimental techniques that measure nuclear reactions that occur in stars are opening new opportunities for understanding the stellar and chemical evolution of our Universe.

The spin-orbit effect is at the heart of efforts to merge spintronics—where information is carried and stored by spin, rather than by charge—with semiconductor technology.

Coherent optical systems combined with micromechanical devices may enable development of ultrasensitive force sensors and quantum information processing technology, as well as permit observation of quantum behavior in large-scale structures.

Creating a practical solid-state quantum computer is seriously hard. Getting such a computer to operate at room temperature is even more challenging. Is such a quantum computer possible at all? If so, which schemes might have a chance of success?

The field of multiferroics has greatly expanded in the last few years, particularly with the discovery of so many different types of multiferroic materials. This review organizes these materials according to the microscopic origin of their properties and explores how we can expect to find similar multiferroic behavior in systems that we have been studying all along.

Large-scale quantum computers are hard to construct because quantum systems easily lose their coherence through interaction with the environment. Researchers have tried to avoid this problem by using geometric phase shifts in the design of quantum gates to perform information processing. Experiments and simulations have shown that these gates may be tolerant to certain types of faults, and may therefore be useful for robust quantum computation.

A new class of high-temperature superconductors has been discovered in layered iron arsenic compounds. Results in this rapidly moving field may shed light on the still unsolved problem of high-temperature cuprate superconductivity.