Peer-reviewed journal of the American Physical Society publishing concise, high-impact letters on major advances across all areas of physics.
University of Vienna physicists recovered an ultrathin magnet's internal pattern and an 81-nanometer sensor height from external field maps. The authors say other imaging techniques can adopt the principle, though the test used one material and one sensor type.
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Italian physicists report a calculation that matches the roughly 20% shortfall in electron neutrinos captured by gallium-71. If it holds, the anomaly needs no sterile neutrino to explain it, and the next test is scrutiny from other theorists.
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CEA physicists formed hexagonal close-packed superionic ice from ultrapure water at 130-200 GPa and above 1800 K. The team says the finding gives a rationale for adding the phase to models of Uranus and Neptune, though confirming it exists inside either planet is the next step.
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Auburn physicists used laser pulses to align polar islands in modified strontium titanate for one picosecond. Light both created and read the pattern, but storing information would need order that outlasts that instant.
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UChicago PME researchers published a framework in Physical Review Letters that models the full optical cycle of spin defects, including internal conversion. In a silicon carbide divacancy it found a substantial, previously overlooked contribution to the triplet lifetime.
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University of Antwerp physicists trace confined water's dielectric response, over 10 times ordinary water's along the plates, to hydrogen-bond correlations. The Physical Review Letters work is a mathematical model, phys.org reported.
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UC Berkeley, Austrian Academy of Sciences and Caltech researchers propose a superfluid helium gyrometer to detect Earth's frame-dragging in a lab. The case rests on a new thermal-noise analysis, since random phases can swamp the signal.
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Princeton physicists calculate that heating a fusion plasma before adding density is the lowest-energy route to ignition. The paper, in Physical Review Letters, is theory only, so the ordering still has to be tested on hardware.
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Argonne and Illinois researchers coupled spin waves to a superconducting resonator in a layered device. The hybrid mode travels in one direction, a preference spin waves show under certain conditions.
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Shandong University researchers verified entanglement on all six links of a four-user quantum network without trusting the measurement devices. The method, in Physical Review Letters, drops the extra test photons an earlier approach needed.
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Waseda University physicists simulated an optical skyrmion beam pushing one magnetic skyrmion into three distinct kinds of motion. The work is micromagnetic simulation on a thin magnetic layer, and the source describes no laboratory test.
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Authors of a Physical Review Letters paper say they derive Einstein's equations from quantum relative entropy evaluated at a horizon. Their stated gain is mathematical rigor, since the ingredients were already known.
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Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory calculations suggest heating plasma before raising its density could reach fusion ignition with far less energy. The Physical Review Letters paper keeps the Lawson criterion's endpoint and ranks the routes toward it by energy cost.
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Physicists in Kiel and San Sebastian sorted three kinds of excitation in a single cobaltocene molecule by charging it and applying a magnetic field. The labels come from measurement first, with theory used only to check them.
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Physicists at Tsinghua University and Boston College found charge stripes that strengthen around vortex cores in an iron superconductor doped with 6% cobalt. The result links a form of charge order to the vortex states that quantum-computing proposals rely on, though so far the evidence is a spatial correlation.
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Mengfei He of Harvard and colleagues found random flow fluctuations let a soft cone valve close at about a tenth of the pressure smooth flow needs. Pig mitral valves also closed against backflow, but the noise effect was shown only in the cone, so its role in a living heart is untested.
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Okayama University physicists stretched the kagome metal CsV3Sb5 by 0.90% and found two separate superconducting transitions, one nodal and one nodeless. The team argues both states overlap in unstrained crystals, so earlier experiments may each have caught a different one.
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A Warwick-led team imaged the interior of a 214 cuprate crystal at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility and found two slightly different atomic arrangements. The boundaries between them are hundreds of times wider than expected.
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PPPL physicists added four real-world effects to the Lawson criterion and found that heating plasma before adding fuel reaches ignition with the least energy. The calculation, published in Physical Review Letters, bears on the order in which tokamak and stellarator builders plan heating and fuelling.
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Physicists in Basel and Paderborn used an optical cavity to make quantum-dot cascade photons 90% indistinguishable, up from 60%. The fix targets the timing correlations that have limited these on-demand sources, and brightness and entanglement performance have yet to be reported.
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