To achieve the ultra-fast changes needed, they hit the metamaterial with powerful laser pulses. This violently accelerated the material’s free-floating electrons, dynamically altering their energy and making their “effective mass” shift by up to 80% of their rest mass in fractions of a trillionth of a second. This massive, rapid shift forced the material into a time-crystal state.
A plasmonic metamaterial driven at terahertz frequencies achieves strong, ultrafast temporal modulation and shows a transition to the photonic time crystal regime with reduced plasmonic losses.
A previously overlooked set of spin symmetries has revealed that magnetism does not fit neatly into just two categories.
For more than a century, physicists divided collinear magnets into two basic types. The discovery of altermagnetism has added a third, earning Professor Jairo Sinova of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), Dr. Libor Šmejkal and Professor Tomas Jungwirth the 2026 Europhysics Prize from the European Physical Society (EPS) Condensed Matter Division.
One of Europe’s leading honors in condensed matter physics, the prize recognizes their work establishing altermagnetism as a previously unknown fundamental form of magnetic order alongside ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism. The finding has challenged a long-accepted picture of magnetism and created a research field with potential consequences for quantum materials, condensed matter physics and future information technologies.
True thermal invisibility would require a barrier that would split the heat flow, guide it around an object, and reunite it on the other side. The object inside would be protected from the external temperature gradient, while an observer outside would see the pattern expected from an uninterrupted material. In thermal terms, there would be no obvious object-shaped disturbance to detect. This is the trick the UIUC-led team says its new structure, detailed in the journal Nature Communications, can perform.
This mechanism could also prove useful for heat management applications, especially in modern electronics, where processors, power components, batteries, optical devices, and temperature-sensitive sensors are often cramped into compact spaces.
Now, thermal cloaking itself is not new. Researchers have previously demonstrated flat, or effectively two-dimensional thermal cloaks, bilayer devices, and even an ultrathin “stealth sheet” that can hide and fake heat signatures. However, most earlier experimental devices worked with circular, spherical, or extruded shapes, or performed properly only when heat arrived along a prescribed axis.
Scientists can now twist large oxide crystals into new materials with potentially powerful electronic properties.
A carefully chosen twist can transform how a material behaves. Researchers have now found a way to apply that principle to large sheets of crystalline oxides, opening a potential route toward electronic materials with structures and properties that can be designed with unusual precision.
The approach gives scientists control over the angle between two stacked oxide layers while creating strong chemical bonds where they meet. Unlike many earlier twistronic materials, the resulting structures can also be produced across areas large enough to be more relevant for practical devices.
Nanoporous material-based separation technology is vital in many applications because it can precisely distinguish between and separate nearly identical chemical or biochemical molecules.
Previous research by Professor Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University’s Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (WPI-iCeMS) and colleagues, published in Nature, applied this technology to separate two very similar types of water molecules—regular water (H₂O) and heavy water (D₂O), which have similar overall properties but slightly different masses. But the underlying mechanisms of that separation were not well understood.
Now, a study led by Professor Shinji Saito of the Institute for Molecular Science (IMS) in Japan and published in Nature Communications in July has provided a theoretical explanation for that phenomenon, using H₂O and D₂O molecules to study nanopore behavior in a metal-organic framework.
A technique for determining the magnetic structure of materials gets a theoretical makeover that can cope with nonrandom, temporally correlated fluctuations.
Efficient heat management in solids is key to advancing the next generation of electronics. However, wave-like heat movement—known as phonon focusing—had been observed only at extremely low, or cryogenic, temperatures, limiting its study and practical use.
Now, researchers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering have demonstrated that phonons, atomic heat-carrying vibrations with quantum properties, can travel in focused, raylike paths at room temperature. Instead of spreading uniformly in all directions, heat can move along guided pathways defined by a material’s crystal structure, opening new possibilities for managing heat flow in future electronics and quantum technologies.
