Nature PhysicsPub Date : 2025-06-19DOI: 10.1038/s41567-025-02939-0
Julien Madéo, Keshav M. Dani
{"title":"Floquet states in graphene revealed at last","authors":"Julien Madéo, Keshav M. Dani","doi":"10.1038/s41567-025-02939-0","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s41567-025-02939-0","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":19100,"journal":{"name":"Nature Physics","volume":"21 7","pages":"1040-1041"},"PeriodicalIF":18.4,"publicationDate":"2025-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144319359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"物理与天体物理","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nature PhysicsPub Date : 2025-06-19DOI: 10.1038/s41567-025-02922-9
Bin Gao, Félix Desrochers, David W. Tam, Diana M. Kirschbaum, Paul Steffens, Arno Hiess, Duy Ha Nguyen, Yixi Su, Sang-Wook Cheong, Silke Paschen, Yong Baek Kim, Pengcheng Dai
{"title":"Neutron scattering and thermodynamic evidence for emergent photons and fractionalization in a pyrochlore spin ice","authors":"Bin Gao, Félix Desrochers, David W. Tam, Diana M. Kirschbaum, Paul Steffens, Arno Hiess, Duy Ha Nguyen, Yixi Su, Sang-Wook Cheong, Silke Paschen, Yong Baek Kim, Pengcheng Dai","doi":"10.1038/s41567-025-02922-9","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s41567-025-02922-9","url":null,"abstract":"The three-dimensional pyrochlore lattice of corner-sharing tetrahedra can host a quantum spin ice, a quantum analogue of the classical spin ice found in other pyrochlore compounds. This state can manifest a quantum spin liquid, and indeed, these compounds are predicted to have emergent gauge fields that produce linearly dispersing collective magnetic excitations near zero energy, in addition to the presence of higher-energy spinon excitations. Here we use polarized neutron scattering experiments on single crystals of the Ce2Zr2O7 pyrochlore. We find evidence for magnetic excitations near zero energy, in addition to signatures of spinons at higher energies. Furthermore, we perform heat capacity measurements and find behaviour consistent with the cubic-in-temperature dependence expected for linearly dispersing gapless bosonic modes. Comparing the observed magnetic excitations with theoretical calculations, we argue that Ce2Zr2O7 is a strong candidate for a dipolar–octupolar quantum spin ice with dominant dipolar Ising interactions. 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.","PeriodicalId":19100,"journal":{"name":"Nature Physics","volume":"21 8","pages":"1203-1210"},"PeriodicalIF":18.4,"publicationDate":"2025-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144319425","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"物理与天体物理","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nature PhysicsPub Date : 2025-06-18DOI: 10.1038/s41567-025-02937-2
Yu Shi
{"title":"From actin to action","authors":"Yu Shi","doi":"10.1038/s41567-025-02937-2","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s41567-025-02937-2","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":19100,"journal":{"name":"Nature Physics","volume":"21 8","pages":"1183-1184"},"PeriodicalIF":18.4,"publicationDate":"2025-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144311801","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"物理与天体物理","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nature PhysicsPub Date : 2025-06-18DOI: 10.1038/s41567-025-02934-5
Claudia Politi
{"title":"Driven quantum fluids sound like supersolids","authors":"Claudia Politi","doi":"10.1038/s41567-025-02934-5","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s41567-025-02934-5","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":19100,"journal":{"name":"Nature Physics","volume":"21 7","pages":"1036-1037"},"PeriodicalIF":18.4,"publicationDate":"2025-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144311800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"物理与天体物理","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nature PhysicsPub Date : 2025-06-18DOI: 10.1038/s41567-025-02919-4
Zachary Gao Sun, Nathan Zimmerberg, Patrick Kelly, Carlos Floyd, Garegin Papoian, Michael Murrell
{"title":"Feedback between F-actin organization and active stress governs criticality and energy localization in the cell cytoskeleton","authors":"Zachary Gao Sun, Nathan Zimmerberg, Patrick Kelly, Carlos Floyd, Garegin Papoian, Michael Murrell","doi":"10.1038/s41567-025-02919-4","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s41567-025-02919-4","url":null,"abstract":"Self-organized criticality can occur in earthquakes, avalanches and biological processes, and is characterized by intermittent, scale-free energy dissipation. In living cells, the actin cytoskeleton undergoes dynamic structural reorganization, particularly during migration and division, where molecular motors generate mechanical stresses that drive large dissipative events. However, the mechanisms governing these critical transitions remain unclear. Here we show that cytoskeletal criticality emerges from the interplay between F-actin organization and active stress generation. Our study focuses on a minimal actomyosin system in vitro, which is composed of F-actin filaments, myosin II motors and nucleation-promoting factors. By systematically varying the actin connectivity and nematic order, we demonstrate that ordered and sparsely connected networks exhibit exponential stress dissipation, whereas disordered and highly connected networks show heavy-tailed distributions of energy release and the 1/f noise characteristic of self-organized criticality. Increased disorder leads to stress localization, shifting force propagation into stiffer mechanical modes, reminiscent of Anderson localization in condensed-matter systems. Furthermore, we show that network architecture directly regulates the myosin II filament size, establishing a chemical–mechanical feedback loop that modulates criticality. Our findings provide insights into the collective cytoskeletal dynamics, energy localization and cellular self-organization. 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.","PeriodicalId":19100,"journal":{"name":"Nature Physics","volume":"21 8","pages":"1290-1302"},"PeriodicalIF":18.4,"publicationDate":"2025-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144312211","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"物理与天体物理","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nature PhysicsPub Date : 2025-06-17DOI: 10.1038/s41567-025-02893-x
Carolina A. Marques, Luke C. Rhodes, Weronika Osmolska, Harry Lane, Izidor Benedičič, Masahiro Naritsuka, Siri A. Berge, Rosalba Fittipaldi, Mariateresa Lettieri, Antonio Vecchione, Peter Wahl
{"title":"Emergent exchange-driven giant magnetoelastic coupling in a correlated itinerant ferromagnet","authors":"Carolina A. Marques, Luke C. Rhodes, Weronika Osmolska, Harry Lane, Izidor Benedičič, Masahiro Naritsuka, Siri A. Berge, Rosalba Fittipaldi, Mariateresa Lettieri, Antonio Vecchione, Peter Wahl","doi":"10.1038/s41567-025-02893-x","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s41567-025-02893-x","url":null,"abstract":"The interaction between the electronic and structural degrees of freedom is central to several intriguing phenomena observed in condensed-matter physics. In magnetic materials, magnetic interactions couple to lattice degrees of freedom, resulting in magnetoelastic coupling, which is typically small and only detectable in macroscopic samples. Here we demonstrate a giant magnetoelastic coupling in the correlated itinerant ferromagnet Sr4Ru3O10. We establish an effective control of magnetism in the surface layer and utilize it to probe the impact of magnetism on its electronic and structural properties. By using scanning tunnelling microscopy, we reveal subtle changes in the electronic structure dependent on ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic alignment between the surface and subsurface layers. We further determine the consequences of the exchange force on the relaxation of the surface layer, which exhibits giant magnetostriction. Our results provide a direct measurement of the impact of exchange interactions and correlations on structural details in a quantum material, revealing how electronic correlations result in a strong electron–lattice coupling. 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.","PeriodicalId":19100,"journal":{"name":"Nature Physics","volume":"21 8","pages":"1243-1249"},"PeriodicalIF":18.4,"publicationDate":"2025-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.nature.comhttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-025-02893-x.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144304688","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"物理与天体物理","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nature PhysicsPub Date : 2025-06-16DOI: 10.1038/s41567-025-02931-8
Ramil Nigmatullin, Kévin Hémery, Khaldoon Ghanem, Steven Moses, Dan Gresh, Peter Siegfried, Michael Mills, Thomas Gatterman, Nathan Hewitt, Etienne Granet, Henrik Dreyer
{"title":"Experimental demonstration of breakeven for a compact fermionic encoding","authors":"Ramil Nigmatullin, Kévin Hémery, Khaldoon Ghanem, Steven Moses, Dan Gresh, Peter Siegfried, Michael Mills, Thomas Gatterman, Nathan Hewitt, Etienne Granet, Henrik Dreyer","doi":"10.1038/s41567-025-02931-8","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s41567-025-02931-8","url":null,"abstract":"Solving the Fermi–Hubbard model is a central task in the study of strongly correlated materials. Digital quantum computers can, in principle, be suitable for this purpose, but have so far been limited to quasi-one-dimensional models. This is because of exponential overheads caused by the interplay of noise and the non-locality of the mapping between fermions and qubits. Here we use a trapped-ion quantum computer to experimentally demonstrate that a recently developed local encoding can overcome this problem. In particular, we show that suitable reordering of terms and application of circuit identities—a scheme called corner hopping—substantially reduces the cost of simulating fermionic hopping. This enables the efficient preparation of the ground state of a 6 × 6 spinless Fermi–Hubbard model encoded in 48 physical qubits. We also develop two error mitigation schemes for systems with conserved quantities, based on local postselection and on extrapolation of local observables, respectively. Our results suggest that Fermi–Hubbard models beyond classical simulability can be addressed by digital quantum computers without large increases in gate fidelity. 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.","PeriodicalId":19100,"journal":{"name":"Nature Physics","volume":"21 8","pages":"1319-1325"},"PeriodicalIF":18.4,"publicationDate":"2025-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144296020","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"物理与天体物理","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nature PhysicsPub Date : 2025-06-13DOI: 10.1038/s41567-025-02932-7
W. Brian Lane
{"title":"Student interactions with generative AI","authors":"W. Brian Lane","doi":"10.1038/s41567-025-02932-7","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s41567-025-02932-7","url":null,"abstract":"Students are turning to generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT to support their physics learning. Here, I examine one student’s interactions with ChatGPT on an exam recuperation assignment and the student’s reflections on the process.","PeriodicalId":19100,"journal":{"name":"Nature Physics","volume":"21 6","pages":"866-867"},"PeriodicalIF":18.4,"publicationDate":"2025-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144278638","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"物理与天体物理","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nature PhysicsPub Date : 2025-06-13DOI: 10.1038/s41567-025-02897-7
Peter Brommer
{"title":"Scooping for ground states","authors":"Peter Brommer","doi":"10.1038/s41567-025-02897-7","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s41567-025-02897-7","url":null,"abstract":"More than a hundred quasicrystals have been found so far, but their thermodynamic stability has remained an open question. Extrapolating density functional theory calculations of ever larger clusters now show that two alloys are indeed ground states.","PeriodicalId":19100,"journal":{"name":"Nature Physics","volume":"21 6","pages":"874-875"},"PeriodicalIF":18.4,"publicationDate":"2025-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144278637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"物理与天体物理","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}