Thursday, August 1, 2013

Nature Physics August Issue

Nature Physics
TABLE OF CONTENTS

August 2013 Volume 9, Issue 8

Editorials
Commentary
Thesis
Books and Arts
Research Highlights
News and Views
Letters
Articles

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Editorials

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Strategic thinking   p447
doi:10.1038/nphys2728
Europe and the US, with their international partners, are planning their way ahead in particle physics.

Hurray for Hubble   p447
doi:10.1038/nphys2729
The remarkable space telescope reveals true colours — and a new moon.

Commentary

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Dig deeper   pp448 - 450
Paul Newman and Anna Stasto
doi:10.1038/nphys2718
Deep inelastic scattering — using a twenty-first-century electron-hadron collider of sufficient energy and intensity — could teach us much more about nuclear matter at the smallest resolvable scales, as well as add to our understanding of the Higgs boson and to the search for physics beyond the standard model.

Thesis

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'I think' doesn't mean 'I am'   p451
Mark Buchanan
doi:10.1038/nphys2716

Books and Arts

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Exhibition: The light through yonder window   p452
May Chiao
doi:10.1038/nphys2714

A meander through the Milky Way   pp452 - 453
Timothy C. Beers reviews The Milky Way: An Insider's Guide by William H. Waller
doi:10.1038/nphys2709

Symmetry on centre stage   p453
Mario Livio reviews The Universe in the Rearview Mirror: How Hidden Symmetries Shape Reality by Dave Goldberg
doi:10.1038/nphys2710

Research Highlights

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In the shadow of the Sun | Graphene smoothed out | No flash in the pan | Atomic quiver | Live long


News and Views

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Nanophotonics: Making light of tight corners   pp455 - 456
R. C. McPhedran
doi:10.1038/nphys2668
Transformation optics is an invaluable tool for designing metamaterials. The same idea, it is now shown, could also prove to be a boon for nanoplasmonics.

See also: Article by Pendry et al.

Solar physics: Flares caught in the act   pp456 - 457
Terry G. Forbes
doi:10.1038/nphys2703
Observations from NASA's Solar Dynamic Observatory provide compelling evidence for the central role of magnetic reconnection in solar flares.

See also: Letter by Su et al.

Condensed matter: On thin ice   p457
Bart Verberck
doi:10.1038/nphys2719

Heavy-fermion superconductivity: How the heaviest electrons pair up   pp458 - 459
Louis Taillefer
doi:10.1038/nphys2708
Scanning tunnelling spectroscopy in a heavy-fermion superconductor provides direct access to the anisotropy of the pairing gap, opening a window for investigating the nature of the pairing interaction.

See also: Letter by Allan et al. | Letter by Zhou et al.

Ultracold gases: Waves and wiggles   p459
Iulia Georgescu
doi:10.1038/nphys2720

Cell motility: Turning failure into function   pp460 - 461
Howard C. Berg
doi:10.1038/nphys2678
In their search for more favourable environments bacteria choose new directions to explore, usually at random. In a marine bacterium with a single polar flagellum it is now shown that this quest is enhanced by a buckling instability.

See also: Letter by Son et al.

Molecular physics: Ultracold ménage à trois   pp461 - 462
Stefan Willitsch
doi:10.1038/nphys2683
One of the fundamental problems in few-body physics is the formation of diatomic molecules in three-atom collisions. An experimental technique now explores the resulting distribution of molecular quantum states in an ultracold gas.

See also: Article by Harter et al.

Nanomechanical resonators: Spinning oscillators   pp462 - 463
Klemens Hammerer
doi:10.1038/nphys2674
Coupled nanomechanical oscillators can show similar dynamics to two-level systems, and may eventually be used as quantum bits.

See also: Letter by Faust et al. | Letter by Okamoto et al.

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Letters

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Self-organized criticality in X-ray flares of gamma-ray-burst afterglows   pp465 - 467
F. Y. Wang and Z. G. Dai
doi:10.1038/nphys2670
Gamma-ray bursts are the most energetic sources of radiation in the Universe, and half are followed by afterglows that include X-ray flares of mysterious origin. A statistical study of such X-ray flares reveals the same power-law behaviour as solar flares, which suggests a common underlying magnetic reconnection process.

Imaging Cooper pairing of heavy fermions in CeCoIn5   pp468 - 473
M. P. Allan, F. Massee, D. K. Morr, J. Van Dyke, A. W. Rost et al.
doi:10.1038/nphys2671
By pushing scanning tunnelling spectroscopy down to millikelvin temperatures, it is now possible to image a heavy fermion superconductor and measure the superconducting gap symmetry, with gap nodes in unexpected momentum-space locations.

See also: News and Views by Taillefer | Letter by Zhou et al.

Visualizing nodal heavy fermion superconductivity in CeCoIn5   pp474 - 479
Brian B. Zhou, Shashank Misra, Eduardo H. da Silva Neto, Pegor Aynajian, Ryan E. Baumbach et al.
doi:10.1038/nphys2672
By means of low-temperature scanning tunnelling spectroscopy, a heavy fermion material in its superconducting and mixed states can be imaged. Besides probing the superconducting gap symmetry, the measurements also reveal a pseudogap.

See also: News and Views by Taillefer | Letter by Allan et al.

Coherent phonon manipulation in coupled mechanical resonators   pp480 - 484
Hajime Okamoto, Adrien Gourgout, Chia-Yuan Chang, Koji Onomitsu, Imran Mahboob et al.
doi:10.1038/nphys2665
It is now shown that phonons can be coherently transferred between two nanomechanical resonators. The technique of controlling the coupling between nanoscale oscillators using a piezoelectric transducer is useful for manipulating classical oscillations, but if extended to the quantum regime it could also enable entanglement of macroscopic mechanical objects.

See also: News and Views by Hammerer | Letter by Faust et al.

Coherent control of a classical nanomechanical two-level system   pp485 - 488
T. Faust, J. Rieger, M. J. Seitner, J. P. Kotthaus and E. M. Weig
doi:10.1038/nphys2666
Coherent control of two flexural modes of a nanoscale oscillator using radiofrequency signals is now demonstrated. This oscillator is analogous to quantum two-level systems such as superconducting circuits and quantum dots, and therefore this technique raises the possibility of information processing using nanomechanical resonators.

See also: News and Views by Hammerer | Letter by Okamoto et al.

Imaging coronal magnetic-field reconnection in a solar flare   pp489 - 493
Yang Su, Astrid M. Veronig, Gordon D. Holman, Brian R. Dennis, Tongjiang Wang et al.
doi:10.1038/nphys2675
Extreme ultraviolet and X-ray imaging of a solar flare with unprecedented clarity now provide visual evidence that magnetic reconnection plays a fundamental role in generating solar flares. The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory is able to observe a 'cold' plasma moving into the reconnection point and the simultaneous acceleration of a hot-flare-heated plasma away from it.

See also: News and Views by Forbes

Bacteria can exploit a flagellar buckling instability to change direction   pp494 - 498
Kwangmin Son, Jeffrey S. Guasto and Roman Stocker
doi:10.1038/nphys2676
Buckling is often regarding as a form of mechanical failure to be avoided. High-speed video microscopy and mechanical stability theory now show, however, that bacteria use such processes to their advantage. Cells propelled with a single flagellum change direction with a flick-like motion that exploits a buckling instability.

See also: News and Views by Berg

Articles

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Mapping the orbital wavefunction of the surface states in three-dimensional topological insulators   pp499 - 504
Yue Cao, J. A. Waugh, X-W. Zhang, J-W. Luo, Q. Wang et al.
doi:10.1038/nphys2685
In topological insulators, studies have largely concentrated on the spin part of the wavefunction. But the spin-orbit coupling is strong, so the orbital components of the wavefunction need to be measured as well. Surprisingly, the orbital wavefunction turns out to be asymmetric about the Dirac point.

Domain wall trajectory determined by its fractional topological edge defects   pp505 - 511
Aakash Pushp, Timothy Phung, Charles Rettner, Brian P. Hughes, See-Hun Yang et al.
doi:10.1038/nphys2669
When a domain wall of a given chirality is injected into a magnetic nanowire, its trajectory through a branched network of Y-shaped nanowire junctions—such as a honeycomb lattice, for instance—can be pre-determined. This property has implications for data storage and processing.

Population distribution of product states following three-body recombination in an ultracold atomic gas   pp512 - 517
A. Härter, A. Krükow, M. Deiß, B. Drews, E. Tiemann et al.
doi:10.1038/nphys2661
Atom and ion trapping provides new tools for ultracold chemistry. Using these techniques it is possible to measure the population distribution of the product states of three-body recombination in an ultracold atomic gas.

See also: News and Views by Willitsch

Capturing photons with transformation optics   pp518 - 522
J. B. Pendry, A. I. Fernández-Domínguez, Yu Luo and Rongkuo Zhao
doi:10.1038/nphys2667
The modelling of plasmonic systems is complicated by the broad range of length scales involved: the physical dimensions of the structure might be as small as 1 nm, whereas the wavelength of the light involved can be a few hundred nanometres. It is now shown that transformation optics, a technique successfully used to design metamaterials, is also valuable for circumventing these problems.

See also: News and Views by McPhedran

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