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Nature Physics, Published online: 29 January 2024; doi:10.1038/s41567-023-02365-0

Understanding the three-dimensional nature of fracture formation and dynamics is challenging. Experiments now show that a fracture front, after originating at a particular locus in a material, propagates jump-wise and expands transversely at high speed.

Nature Physics, Published online: 26 January 2024; doi:10.1038/s41567-023-02382-z

Electronic transport measurements of the anomalous Hall effect can probe properties of a frustrated kagome spin ice that are hidden from conventional thermodynamic and magnetic probes.

Nature Physics, Published online: 26 January 2024; doi:10.1038/s41567-023-02366-z

Physical ageing in glassy materials can be described in a linear way through the concept of material time. Multispeckle dynamic light scattering is now shown to provide experimental access to the material time, in terms of which fluctuations become statistically reversible.

Nature Physics, Published online: 26 January 2024; doi:10.1038/s41567-023-02378-9

Most quantum simulations of spin models with trapped ions have been restricted to one dimension. Now, tunable simulations of Ising models with single-site detection have been demonstrated in two-dimensional ion crystals.

Nature Physics, Published online: 26 January 2024; doi:10.1038/s41567-023-02362-3

Observations of strong electron correlation effects have been mostly confined to compounds containing f orbital electrons. Now, the study of the 3d pyrochlore metal CuV2S4 reveals that similar effects can be induced by flat-band engineering.

Nature Physics, Published online: 25 January 2024; doi:10.1038/s41567-023-02375-y

Experiments with unprecedented energy and momentum resolution reveal the nature of the pairing symmetry in KFe2As2 and pave the way for a unified theoretical description of unconventional superconductivity in iron-based materials.

Nature Physics, Published online: 25 January 2024; doi:10.1038/s41567-023-02372-1

Cytoplasmic flows in the fruit fly oocyte can reorganize cellular components. These structured vortical flows arise through self-organizing dynamics of microtubules, molecular motors and cytoplasm.

Nature Physics, Published online: 25 January 2024; doi:10.1038/s41567-023-02358-z

Control over magnetic skyrmions at room temperature has important applications in technology. Now the observation of skyrmions with high topological charge widens the potential for them to be used in unconventional computing techniques.

Nature Physics, Published online: 25 January 2024; doi:10.1038/s41567-023-02377-w

Quantum gates require controlled interactions between different degrees of freedom. A tunable coupling has now been demonstrated between the phonon modes of a mechanical resonator designed for storing and manipulating quantum information.

Nature Physics, Published online: 25 January 2024; doi:10.1038/s41567-023-02360-5

Electrons in f orbitals can create localized states that interact strongly and drive strange metal and critical behaviour via the Kondo mechanism. Now a mechanism of geometric frustration enables similar phenomena with d electrons.

Nature Physics, Published online: 24 January 2024; doi:10.1038/s41567-023-02352-5

Studies of a biological active nematic fluid reveal a spontaneous self-constraint that arises between self-motile topological defects and mesoscale coherent flow structures. The defects follow specific contours of the flow field, on which vorticity and strain rate balance, and hence, contrary to expectation, they break mirror symmetry.

Nature Physics, Published online: 24 January 2024; doi:10.1038/s41567-023-02351-6

Time crystals spontaneously produce periodic oscillations that are robust to perturbations. A time crystal phase with a long coherence time has now been produced using the electron and nuclear spins of a semiconductor sample.

Nature Physics, Published online: 24 January 2024; doi:10.1038/s41567-023-02353-4

When applying sufficient strain, the flow of dense granular matter becomes critical. It is now shown that this state corresponds to random loose packing for spheres with different friction coefficients and that these packings can be mapped onto the frictionless hard-sphere system.

Nature Physics, Published online: 24 January 2024; doi:10.1038/s41567-023-02354-3

Dense suspensions are granular materials suspended in a liquid at high packing fractions, exhibiting high viscosity. The latter is now shown to be related to the formation of a network of rigid clusters at large shear stress.

CERN software to become central hub for EU research (Image: Zenodo)

What is the link between particle physics, the study of biodiversity and historical linguistics? The thirst for knowledge? Yes, but also the tool researchers are using to store all their findings and make them available to their peers: Zenodo. For more than ten years, this CERN-born data repository has been evolving to store scientific data for ever more research communities and to adapt to the needs of more scientific disciplines. Notably, it was a key player in the COVID-19 response, providing a platform for researchers to efficiently share results, data sets and software to help the international scientific community respond to the pandemic. Today, it is used by more than 8000 research organisations worldwide.

This success story is about to take an even more ambitious turn with a new project: HORIZON-ZEN. Since its inception in June 2023, it has become the latest in a series of projects funded by the European Union to make the data collected by European research more findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR). Since 2021, making research data as FAIR as possible has become a requirement for all projects funded by the European Commission.

What does it mean to make data FAIR in practice? Today, this is still difficult for researchers to navigate, because FAIR are generic principles rather than verifiable criteria. “With HORIZON-ZEN, we are striving to make being FAIR simpler and more streamlined for researchers, and we are working with scientific communities to tailor Zenodo for their specific domain,” explains Lars Holm Nielsen, Section Leader in Open Science Repositories in CERN’s IT department.

As part of the project, Zenodo will be updated with a bespoke “European Commission” user interface. (Image: CERN)

Zenodo was born out of the need for a simple, easy-to-use storage solution for all types of research output: papers, theses, presentations, protocols, images, videos, data sets, software, etc. Generally, Zenodo is the ideal tool for researchers without a dedicated research infrastructure, for communities with a large network of institutes or for small institutes that have the necessary knowledge but not the tools. “Zenodo is the brainchild of the EU's open science policy. The European Commission has high hopes for this service, which could eventually become one of the EU's main repositories for research data,” Nielsen continues.

To make this possible, Nielsen and his team are putting a special, community-driven effort into the user experience, making it is easy for communities to customise their space, curate their content and build their online domain. “We are taking advantage of the 10 000 communities and the 300 currently running European-funded projects using Zenodo to co-design our tools. We encourage scientific communities to get a tailor-made Zenodo experience by becoming early adopters.”

Zenodo owes its success to the scientific community’s confidence in CERN, to ten years of continuous support by the European Commission and to the remarkable services provided by the tool. Above all, it is the result of the hard work of a small team at CERN who are eager to maximise the impact of CERN technologies.

The HORIZON-ZEN project is funded by the European Union under Grant Agreement No. 101122956.

 

 

ndinmore Tue, 01/23/2024 - 09:49 Byline Antoine Le Gall Publication Date Tue, 01/23/2024 - 09:39

Nature Physics, Published online: 23 January 2024; doi:10.1038/s41567-023-02348-1

High-precision photoemission measurements determine that the superconducting pairing symmetry in KFe2As2 is the same as in other types of iron-based superconductors, despite having different features in the band structure.

Nature Physics, Published online: 23 January 2024; doi:10.1038/s41567-023-02350-7

Inducing coherent interactions between distinct magnon modes—collective excitations of magnetic order—has been challenging. A canted antiferromagnet has demonstrated coherent magnon upconversion induced by terahertz laser pulses.

Nature Physics, Published online: 23 January 2024; doi:10.1038/s41567-023-02349-0

The mechanism of charge density wave formation has been hard to explain due to accompanying structural distortions. Now low-dimensional HfTe2 is revealed to host a purely electronic exitonic charge density wave driven by reduced screening effects.

Nature Physics, Published online: 22 January 2024; doi:10.1038/s41567-023-02345-4

The transition from a metastable state to the ground state in classical many-body systems is mediated by bubble nucleation. This transition has now been experimentally observed in a quantum setting using coupled atomic superfluids.

Nature Physics, Published online: 22 January 2024; doi:10.1038/s41567-023-02346-3

Raman sideband cooling is a method used to prepare atoms and ions in their vibrational ground state. This technique has now been extended to molecules trapped in optical tweezer arrays.