Statistical physics articles within Nature

Featured

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Heat flows through thin, crack-like geo-compartments are shown to purify previously mixed compounds and enhance their reactivity, providing a selective mechanism for separating molecules relevant to the chemical origins of life.

    • Thomas Matreux
    • , Paula Aikkila
    •  & Christof B. Mast

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Single-cycle terahertz pumps are used to impulsively trigger ionic hopping in battery solid electrolytes, probing ion transport at its fastest limit and demonstrating the connection between activated transport and the thermodynamics of information.

    • Andrey D. Poletayev
    • , Matthias C. Hoffmann
    •  & Aaron M. Lindenberg

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Behavioural and electrophysiological studies in simultaneously thirsty and hungry mice reveal a neural basis for resolving conflicts between needs, in which choices are guided by a persistent and distributed neural goal state that undergoes spontaneous transitions between goals.

    • Ethan B. Richman
    • , Nicole Ticea
    •  & Liqun Luo

  • Article |

    A quantum algorithm is introduced that performs Markov chain Monte Carlo to sample from the Boltzmann distribution of Ising models, demonstrating, through experiments and simulations, a polynomial speedup compared with classical alternatives.

    • David Layden
    • , Guglielmo Mazzola
    •  & Sarah Sheldon

  • Article |

    An experiment is described in which the conversion of a single photon in a multimode cavity into a shower of low-energy photons was attempted, but failed owing to many-body localization and violation of Fermi’s golden rule.

    • Nitish Mehta
    • , Roman Kuzmin
    •  & Vladimir E. Manucharyan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A study establishes a scalable approach to engineer and characterize a many-body-localized discrete time crystal phase on a superconducting quantum processor.

    • Xiao Mi
    • , Matteo Ippoliti
    •  & Pedram Roushan

  • Article |

    Using large-scale mobility data from diverse cities around the globe, a simple and robust scaling law that captures the temporal and spatial range of population movement is revealed.

    • Markus Schläpfer
    • , Lei Dong
    •  & Geoffrey B. West

  • Article |

    A model shows that human mobility is organized within hierarchical containers that coincide with familiar scales and that a power-law distribution emerges when movements between different containers are combined.

    • Laura Alessandretti
    • , Ulf Aslak
    •  & Sune Lehmann

  • Article |

    A theoretical model in the form of a stochastic differential equation is proposed that describes, more accurately than previous models, the population evolution of cities, revealing that rare but very large interurban migration is a dominant factor.

    • Vincent Verbavatz
    •  & Marc Barthelemy

  • Article |

    A colloidal system is used to demonstrate the Mpemba effect and obtain the parameters responsible for its anomalous relaxation dynamics, which are manipulated to achieve exponentially faster cooling than typical.

    • Avinash Kumar
    •  & John Bechhoefer

  • Article |

    A theoretical framework describing the hydrodynamic interactions between a passive particle and an active medium in out-of-equilibrium systems predicts long-range Lévy flights for the diffusing particle driven by the density of the active component.

    • Kiyoshi Kanazawa
    • , Tomohiko G. Sano
    •  & Adrian Baule

  • Letter |

    The thermal vibrations of a carbon nanotube are directly measured in real time with high displacement sensitivity and fine time resolution, revealing dynamics undetected by previous time-averaged measurements.

    • Arthur W. Barnard
    • , Mian Zhang
    •  & Paul L. McEuen

  • Letter |

    A fundamental electronic noise—beyond electronic thermal noise and voltage-activated shot noise—that is generated by temperature differences across nanoscale conductors is demonstrated, with possible implications for thermometry and electronics.

    • Ofir Shein Lumbroso
    • , Lena Simine
    •  & Oren Tal

  • Letter |

    Lattices of cubic building blocks that deform anisotropically and that are designed to fit together like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle are 3D printed to create aperiodic, frustration-free, mechanical metamaterials; these metamaterials act as programmable shape-shifters and are able to perform pattern analysis.

    • Corentin Coulais
    • , Eial Teomy
    •  & Martin van Hecke

  • Letter |

    An analytical method of determining the mean first-passage time (the time taken by a random walker in confinement to reach a target point) is presented for a Gaussian non-Markovian random walker, thus revealing the importance of memory effects in first-passage statistics.

    • T. Guérin
    • , N. Levernier
    •  & R. Voituriez

  • Letter |

    An ultracold gas of erbium atoms is shown to have many scattering resonances whose quantum fluctuations exhibit chaotic behaviour resulting from the anisotropy of the atoms’ interactions.

    • Albert Frisch
    • , Michael Mark
    •  & Svetlana Kotochigova

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