Peer-reviewed open-access physics journal published by the American Physical Society, covering high-impact research across all areas of physics.
Physicists at HKUST and the University of Tokyo predict that heat turns nearly every sharp phase boundary in classical pyrochlore spin ice into a crossover. The result is a theory of model magnets, and its tie to high-pressure water ice runs through a simplified model.
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Yale researchers built a microfluidic chip whose flexible fibers switch between two stable states, so each one can hold a bit of flow history. The Physical Review X study points to all-fluid controllers for soft robots, though the account of it describes only a chip.
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An MIT team led by Eleanor Crane calculates that cavity-based hybrid quantum hardware could tolerate 1,000 times the error rate of qubit-only machines. The toolkit, published in Physical Review X, was checked on a simplified model only; the proposed experiment is the next step.
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Researchers at Harvard and other institutions say isolated quantum systems keep lasting traces of their initial states, in a Physical Review X paper. If it holds, a state that looks fully scrambled still differs from a random one in how likely it is to revisit its history.
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Illinois physicists extend closed-system stability rules to open quantum systems in Physical Review X, splitting phases an older method grouped together. The work is pure theory, and its value for noise-prone quantum hardware depends on whether experiments can tell the newly separated phases apart.
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Innsbruck physicists prove that, in some environments, an ideal agent extracts the most energy only by forgetting parts of its own action history. Lead author Lukas Fiderer said today's computers are still far from that limit, so for now the result sketches what efficient agents could look like.
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Rice physicists led by Pengcheng Dai find spins in YbMnBi2 favouring some directions from about 400 K, though magnetic order only sets in at 290 K. The team proposes this 'spin nematic' state is why the compound deflects charge and heat currents so strongly in a magnetic field.
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Ritsumeikan physicist Daisuke Shimamoto's team used knot theory to design a knit stitch that shrinks a single dropped-stitch defect row by row until it stops. The protection covers isolated slips only; once more than one stitch slips in a row, defects grow again.
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Physicists at Tampere, Harvard and TU Dresden find a chaotic quantum wave stays at least twice as likely to be in its starting state as in any comparable one. Their paper treats quantum scars, an anomaly known since 1984, as one case of a memory every quantum system keeps.
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Physicists led by Graz's Peter Puschnig mapped an exciton's wavefunction and watched it shrink about 25% within 400 femtoseconds. Using that to design better solar-cell materials depends on ab-initio modelling of the data and on donor/acceptor measurements the team has not yet made.
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A group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison reports in Physical Review X that a vertically aligned nanotube foam returns to a mechanical state it held before, with the record kept in nanoscale stick-slip friction.
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Screening the Coulomb interaction killed superconductivity in magic-angle graphene outright, which is strong evidence that the electrons do the pairing. It killed the correlated insulators too, narrowing the mechanism debate but not settling it.
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The team reconstructed an exciton wave function's shape and phase in an ordered 6T film on copper, which is the first stretch of the path from photon to current and stops well short of the step where the bound pair breaks apart.
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A Physical Review X paper reports that stretching hexagonal manganese telluride merges its magnetic domains and reverses the sign of its anomalous Hall voltage, leaving the magnetic order intact.
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