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A clear picture of how and why cells inevitably lose viability is still lacking. A dynamical systems view of starving bacteria points to a continuous energy expenditure needed for maintaining the right osmotic pressure as an important factor.
Ultrafast light pulses, if they are sufficiently intense, can induce phase transitions on ultrafast timescales. It is now shown that when a system is first excited by a weak preparatory pulse, this generates local changes in structure that transiently lower the energy barrier to the phase transition, enabling high-speed and energy-efficient transitions.
A single light-emitting dye molecule precisely placed within the tiny gap of a metal nanodimer boosts light–matter coupling — a step closer to the development of quantum devices operating at room temperature.
Ultracold atoms are a well-established platform for quantum sensing and metrology. This Review discusses the enhanced sensing capabilities that molecules offer for a range of phenomena, including symmetry-violating forces and dark matter detection.
Molecular ions and hybrid platforms that integrate cold trapped ions and neutral particles offer opportunities for many quantum technologies. This Review surveys recent methodological advances and highlights in the study of cold molecular ions.
Ultracold molecules and ion–neutral systems offer unique access to chemistry in a coherent quantum regime. This Review charts the progress of studies of quantum chemistry in such platforms, highlighting the synergy between theory and experiments.
The study of quantum systems in a programmable and controllable fashion is one of the aims of both quantum simulation and computing. This Review covers the prospects and opportunities that ultracold molecules offer in these fields.
Cold and ultracold molecules have emerged in the past two decades as a central topic in quantum gas studies. This Review charts the recent advances in cooling and quantum state control techniques that are shaping this evolving field.
The properties of quantum matter arise from the combined effects of dimensionality, interactions and quantum statistics. An experiment now studies what happens to ultracold bosons when the dimensionality of the system changes continuously between one and two dimensions.
Spiral waves of cell density can form and propagate through bacterial biofilms. These waves are formed by a self-organization process that coordinates pulling forces between neighbouring cells.
The determination of the order parameter symmetry is a critical issue in the study of unconventional superconductors. Ultrasound measurements on UTe2, a candidate spin-triplet superconductor, now provide evidence for the single-component nature of its order parameter.
The nuclear pore complex of eukaryotic cells senses the mechanical directionality of translocating proteins, favouring the passage of those that have a leading mechanically labile region. Adding an unstructured, mechanically weak peptide tag to a translocating protein increases its rate of nuclear import and accumulation, suggesting a biotechnological strategy to enhance the delivery of molecular cargos into the cell nucleus.
Rotational symmetry is shown to protect the quadratic dispersion of out-of-plane flexural vibrations in graphene and other two-dimensional materials against phonon–phonon interactions, making the bending rigidity of these materials non-divergent. The quadratic dispersion is then consistent with the propagation of sound in the graphene plane.
The Q-value of electron capture in 163Ho has been determined with an uncertainty of 0.6 eV c–2 through a combination of high-precision Penning-trap mass spectrometry and precise atomic physics calculations. This high-precision measurement provides insight into systematic errors in neutrino mass measurements.
As counterparts to optical frequency combs, magnonic frequency combs could have broad applications if their initiation thresholds were low and the ‘teeth’ of the comb plentiful. Progress has now been made through exploiting so-called exceptional points to enhance the nonlinear coupling between magnons and produce wider magnonic frequency combs.
A practical and hardware-efficient blueprint for fault-tolerant quantum computing has been developed, using quantum low-density-parity-check codes and reconfigurable neutral-atom arrays. The scheme requires ten times fewer qubits and paves the way towards large-scale quantum computing using existing experimental technologies.