Physics Articles

Editorial: So long...

...and thanks for all the physics: Bell Labs, home to major experimental and theoretical developments in twentieth-century physics, is turning away from fundamental research.

Nature Physics, vol. 4 #9, pp665-665

News and Views: Glass dynamics: Diverging views on glass transition

Analysis of the best available data on the behaviour of a large number of glass-forming organic liquids suggests that the widespread belief that a glass ceases to flow below its transition temperature could be wrong.

Nature Physics, vol. 4 #9, pp673-673

News and Views: Polariton condensates: A feature rather than a bug

Recent work on Bose–Einstein condensation of short-lived 'quasiparticles' in solid-state systems opens up the new field of non-equilibrium condensates.

Nature Physics, vol. 4 #9, pp673-673

News and Views: Optoelectronics: Electronics lightens up

A demonstration of electronic operations on photons in an excitonic integrated circuit shows a possible route towards nanoscale optoelectronics.

Nature Physics, vol. 4 #9, pp676-677

News and Views: Coherent population trapping: Quantum optics with dots

The ability to optically drive a single electron spin confined to a quantum dot from an absorbing state to a trapped coherent dark state could be the key to realizing optical switches and other quantum optical devices.

Nature Physics, vol. 4 #9, pp678-679

Letter: Testing quantum correlations versus single-particle properties within Leggett’s model and beyond

Quantum mechanics enables distant events to be more strongly correlated than is possible classically. The proposal for a new family of experimental tests, and the implementation of one of them, provides further insight into the nature of such non-local correlations.

Nature Physics, vol. 4 #9, pp681-685

Letter: Two-photon probe of the Jaynes–Cummings model and controlled symmetry breaking in circuit QED

Micrometre-scale superconducting circuits can act as quantum two-level systems, but unlike in their natural counterparts—such as atoms—the parameters of these ‘artificial qubits’ can be controlled externally. This tunability has now been used to break the symmetry of the system hamiltonian in a controlled manner.

Nature Physics, vol. 4 #9, pp686-691

Letter: Coherent population trapping of an electron spin in a single negatively charged quantum dot

Coherent population trapping is a process by which a particle is induced to exist in a superposition of two ground states. This has now been demonstrated for an electron spin on a single quantum dot, which could prove useful in a variety of photonic and information-processing applications.

Nature Physics, vol. 4 #9, pp692-695

Letter: Charge-density-wave origin of cuprate checkerboard visualized by scanning tunnelling microscopy

The checkerboard pattern observed in high-temperature superconductors by scanning tunnelling microscopy is widespread, but what does it mean? And what does it say about the mysterious ’pseudogap’?

Nature Physics, vol. 4 #9, pp696-699

Letter: Observation of Bogoliubov excitations in exciton-polariton condensates

The observation of so-called Bogoliubov excitations provides the first sign of possible superfluid behaviour in an exciton-polariton condensate.

Nature Physics, vol. 4 #9, pp700-705

Letter: Quantized vortices in an exciton–polariton condensate

When a superfluid—such as liquid helium—is set in rotation, vortices appear in which circulation around a closed loop can take only discrete values. Such quantized vortices have now been observed in a solid-state system—a Bose–Einstein condensate made of exciton polaritons.

Nature Physics, vol. 4 #9, pp706-710

Letter: Irreversible reorganization in a supercooled liquid originates from localized soft modes

A simulation establishes the relationship between structural relaxation in a supercooled liquid and the low-frequency dynamics in the underlying inherent structures.

Nature Physics, vol. 4 #9, pp711-715

Letter: Linked and knotted beams of light

Maxwell’s equations describing electric and magnetic fields limit the shapes field lines can take. But exotic solutions exist where the field lines are linked and knotted. A proposal now shows how such solutions could be realized experimentally.

Nature Physics, vol. 4 #9, pp716-720

Letter: Anatomy of plasma turbulence

Detailed analysis of multiscale structures and the identification of long-lived streamer-like wavemodes in a magnetically confined plasma provides new insight into the physics of plasma turbulence.

Nature Physics, vol. 4 #9, pp721-725



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