APS Open Science

In this editorial, Badreddine Assouar—chief editor of APS Open Science—introduces the inaugural papers from the American Physical Society’s newest open access, community driven journal for research at every step of discovery.

New simulations of spinor Bose-Einstein condensates reveal that spin interactions fundamentally alter how solitary waves interact, causing otherwise stable bound states to break apart. This escape dynamics is driven by continuous particle exchange between hyperfine states, a phenomenon successfully mapped by a newly proposed classical Lagrangian model.

In the study the authors use network analysis to reveal that artificial intelligence systems sustain significantly higher and longer-lasting strategic tension in chess compared to human grandmasters. This finding highlights a fundamental difference in competitive decision-making, where AI maintains dense tactical complexities while human players systematically simplify the board.

As quantum technologies advance toward miniaturization, understanding the energetic limits of quantum information processing becomes essential. This work establishes an operational characterization of the free energy of quantum processes, providing a unified framework to quantify the optimal work gain or expenditure for manipulating channels, states, and measurements.

Measuring fluid velocities in rapidly rotating, thermally driven flows is challenging because conventional particle-tracking methods can be impractical, especially in planetary fluid dynamics experiments involving curved boundaries. Researchers address this problem with a new thermal image velocimetry (TIV) formulation, which uses dense optical flow to track evolving free-surface temperature patterns instead of suspended particles. The approach provides accurate velocity measurements while circumventing many of the optical constraints of traditional visualization methods, thus, broadening the experimental toolkit for probing the complex dynamics of rotating convective turbulence.

Researchers have theoretically predicted the “asymmetric antibimeron” (AAB)—a novel topological spin texture composed of an antivortex and a crescent-shaped vortex found in in-plane magnetized chiral ferromagnets—offering a promising new platform for high-density spintronic memory and logic devices.

This study replicates hardware-focused Simulated Quantum Annealing (SQA) factorization benchmarks on standard CPUs, adding a rigorously tuned multi-start classical baseline (A-PSA) to ensure a fair comparison. The authors found that SQA’s advantage is highly situational; classical multi-start methods win out on less rugged landscapes, and SQA only proves superior when the problem’s complexity explicitly demands tunneling-like behavior.

By implementing a novel quad-tile partitioning strategy on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), researchers have drastically reduced the computational cost scaling of fundamental tensor network algorithms. This highly parallel, hardware-driven approach significantly outperforms traditional CPU computations, opening new pathways for efficient, large-scale simulations of quantum many-body systems.

Researchers have identified a novel three-dimensional topological phase known as an “anti-higher-order Weyl semimetal,” which uniquely reverses the conventional boundary hierarchy. By mathematically enforcing the systematic absence - rather than the presence - of localized states at specific hinge orientations, this discovery establishes anti-topology as a powerful dual counterpart to the traditional topological paradigm.

This study establishes superconducting-tip scanning tunneling spectroscopy as a probe of Majorana surface states. Using an s-wave superconducting tip, Andreev and shot-noise signals reveal signatures of Majorana surface states and help identify unconventional pairing symmetries, offering a guiding principle for future STM experiments on topological superconductors.

When individuals perceive an infection risk and adapt their behavior, it fundamentally alters higher-order contagion dynamics on networks. A new study reveals that risk-based adaptation neutralizes the effects of nonlinear group interactions that normally cause explosive, discontinuous epidemic phase transitions. This suppression effectively reverts the complex higher-order contagion back to a standard pairwise one, with a continuous transition.

New all-atom simulations reveal that as biomolecular condensates grow, they cross a distinct size threshold that triggers cooperative behaviors, which decreases their solubility and significantly slows their molecular exchange. This emergent complexity demonstrates that these cellular droplets behave less like simple Newtonian fluids and more like structured, viscoelastic networks with unique core-shell dynamics.

A new method verifies that a quantum state is entangled when only a limited or suboptimal set of measurements are experimentally accessible, providing an efficient way to verify entanglement in real-world scenarios.