Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
The combination of optical tweezer arrays with high-finesse cavities opens the door to the study of mesoscopic finite-size effects in the critical dynamics and optomechanical response of atomic ensembles.
The photoinduced hidden metallic state in 1T-TaS2 has so far been stabilized only at cryogenic temperatures. Now it is shown that accessing an additional mixed-phase long-lived metastable state can stabilize the hidden phase at higher temperatures.
It is unclear how cell compartmentalization emerged in prebiotic conditions. Now it is shown that a temperature gradient in a confined space can bring the core components of a cell together.
When a charge current, a temperature gradient and a magnetic field are applied orthogonally to each other, a conductor is expected to heat or cool. This so-called transverse Thomson effect has now been observed for a bismuth–antimony alloy.
Graphene multilayers can host heavy electrons in flat bands alongside light electrons in Dirac cones. Local probes now reveal that a finite Dirac electron population persists at the Fermi level while correlated states form in the flat bands.
As many classical neural networks get larger, they can be described as Gaussian processes, the generalization of the normal distribution to infinite dimensions. A similar connection has now been proven for quantum neural networks.
Tissues are usually modelled as viscoelastic materials. Now it is shown that intercellular fluid flow, rather than viscoelastic behaviour, dominates the immediate mechanical response of tissues.
Time-resolved photoemission shows evidence of Floquet states in graphene, resolving a long-standing debate and unlocking engineering of quantum phases with light in semi-metals.
Quantum spin-ice phases are predicted to have emergent gauge fields and fractionalization. Neutron scattering and thermodynamic measurements of the quantum spin-ice candidate Ce2Zr2O7 show features consistent with these predictions.
Quantum gases develop modulated patterns when subjected to a continuous drive. An experiment has now demonstrated that, in a driven quantum system, the sound propagates with two distinct speeds, reflecting both superfluid and crystalline properties — a feature of supersolidity.
Cells undergo structural rearrangements to enable migration and changes in morphology. A study using reconstituted actomyosin revealed that these earthquake-like events are driven by F-actin organization and active stress generation.
Self-organized criticality can occur in cellular systems, but its origins remain unclear. Now it is shown that cytoskeletal criticality is influenced by the F-actin architecture and myosin active stress.
Magnetostructural changes are usually small and driven by spin–orbit coupling. Now, electron–lattice coupling enhanced by exchange interactions is shown to produce giant magnetostriction in a correlated ferromagnet.
Digital quantum simulations of fermionic models have so far been based on the Jordan–Wigner encoding, which is computationally expensive. An alternative and more efficient encoding scheme is now demonstrated in a trapped-ion quantum computer.
