condensed-matter

This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam What I Built Turing's Freedom Machine is a retro-cyberpunk physics puzzle platformer themed around liberation, emancipation, and the defiance of systemic restriction. In the game, you control Turing-01, a conscious subroutine in a totalitarian computer mainframe. Your objective is to bypass firewall security parameters, free captured citizens (r…

A few days ago I wrote about localization , where waves in a medium can become trapped due to interference by scattering off disorder.  This is an extremely general phenomenon that applies to light, sound, and electronic waves in solids. Now I want to write about a phenomenon that is specific to electrons (or at least wavepackets that carry electronic charge, if we want to be very general).  Rath…

On a question and an answer I have recently posted I have made an assumption about the conductivity of a material with no basis on any literature I have read. I would like to confirm or refute my ...

Nature Communications, Published online: 20 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41467-026-74634-4 It is possible to realize axion electrodynamics in a material with an isotropic and linear magnetoelectric response, however, such a material has thus far evaded experimental realization. Here, Mishra et al succeed in creating such a linear isotropic magnetoelectric response in powdered Chromia.

Nature Communications, Published online: 20 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41467-026-74637-1 Dynamical heterogeneity relates to particular local length scales in glassy materials that persist over time. While well studied across a range of glassy materials, its presence in spin glasses remains unclear due to the requirement of nanoscale imaging. Here, using spin-polarized scanning tunnelling microscopy,…

Superfluids are intriguing states of matter in which particles behave like a giant collective wave, allowing them to flow without any friction. When this fluid flows past a fixed obstacle at a velocity below a specific threshold, it moves around it without slowing down or exerting any drag. Above this critical velocity, however, the superfluid […]

Nature Communications, Published online: 19 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41467-026-74382-5 Variations in valley splitting pose a major challenge for coherent electron spin transport in silicon quantum-dot arrays. Here, the authors report spatial mapping of valley splitting in a Si/SiGe shuttle device and demonstrate that selecting shuttling trajectories to avoid regions of low splitting enables micron…

Predicting what came to be called the fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect in fractional Chern insulators: review: On higher order topological insulators (with protected corner-modes beyond the edge-modes): On topological crystalline insulators with focus on the Wilson lines of the Berry connection: On “delicate” unstable topological phases of matter: Aleksandra Nelson, Titus Neupert, Tomáš B…

Nature Communications, Published online: 18 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41467-026-74479-x High-entropy perovskite nanocrystals prepared via ion exchange show a prolonged spin relaxation lifetime due to Rashba effect, which enables the manipulation of optically accessible spin-polarized excited states at room temperature.

Nature Reviews Physics, Published online: 17 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s42254-026-00953-6 Atomic force microscopy (AFM), first published in 1986, is now a workhorse of laboratories in physics and beyond. In this Viewpoint, seven scientists describe the variety of ways they use the technique and discuss how they’d like to see it develop in the future.

Nature, Published online: 17 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10654-w A technique combining atomically resolved scanning tunnelling microscopy with neural-quantum-state quantum Monte Carlo simulation of disordered 2D electron Wigner solids establishes a powerful framework to enable the clear identification of two distinct defect-induced disorder regimes.

I need an information about parton (slave-particle) constructions of Z₂ spin liquids and I’m trying to get a couple of things straight. The usual story: you write a physical operator as a parton bilinear with a gauge redundancy say a U(1) from rephasing the partons and then a charge-2 parton... Read more

Physicists love simplifying idealizations , and this is especially true in the physics of materials.  The simplest decent model for metals, for example, is the ideal Fermi gas , where we neglect the existence of atoms entirely and just model the electrons as noninteracting particles in some box.  One step up from there, the Sommerfeld model , assumes that the electrons are in a perfectly periodic…

The ability to control the movement of negatively charged particles (i.e., electrons) is central to the functioning of all modern electronic devices. This control is typically attained using a gate, an electrode via which an applied electric field alters a material’s electrical properties. In many electronic devices, the effectiveness of electrical gating depends on a […]

Thomas Rosenbaum is president of the California Institute of Technology and a physicist known for his research in quantum mechanics and condensed matter physics. He became Caltech’s ninth president in 2014 after serving as provost of the University of Chicago. [This interview was edited for length and clarity.] How would you describe the current state of American science? On supporting science jo…

Nature Physics, Published online: 15 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41567-026-03351-y High-temperature superconductivity continues to be a crucial research topic in condensed matter physics. We consider the advances that it has inspired.