Volume 135, Issue 8

22 August 2025

Browse Issues:

On the Cover

Large-scale distribution of galaxies up to six billion parsecs from Earth measured by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. Each colored dot represents a galaxy. Selected for an Editors’ Suggestion.

From the article:

Positive Neutrino Masses with DESI DR2 via Matter Conversion to Dark Energy
S. P. Ahlen et al. (DESI Collaboration)
Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 081003 (2025)

EDITORIALS, ESSAYS, and ANNOUNCEMENTS

Essay: Photonic Crystals as a Platform to Explore New Physics

Che Ting Chan

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 080001 (2025) - Published 19 August, 2025

In this PRL Essay, Che Ting Chan offers a forward-looking overview of photonic crystals and how their design flexibility, symmetry properties, and experimental accessibility position them as powerful tools for both fundamental studies and applied photonic technologies to explore a wide range of contemporary physical phenomena.

HIGHLIGHTED ARTICLES

FEATURED IN PHYSICS

EDITORS' SUGGESTION

Search for an Anomalous Production of Charged-Current $ν_{e}$ Interactions without Visible Pions across Multiple Kinematic Observables in MicroBooNE

P. Abratenko et al. (MicroBooNE Collaboration)

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 081802 (2025) - Published 21 August, 2025

The MicroBooNE experiment’s five-year dataset has shown that an unpredicted neutrino-flavor oscillation is not the cause of anomalous results obtained by its predecessor.

FEATURED IN PHYSICS

EDITORS' SUGGESTION

Imaging Valence Electron Rearrangement in a Chemical Reaction Using Hard X-Ray Scattering

Ian Gabalski et al.

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 083001 (2025) - Published 20 August, 2025

Scientists have used ultrashort x-ray pulses to directly observe the motion of electrons driving a chemical reaction.

FEATURED IN PHYSICS

EDITORS' SUGGESTION

Quantum Delocalization of a Levitated Nanoparticle

M. Rossi, A. Militaru, N. Carlon Zambon, A. Riera-Campeny, O. Romero-Isart, M. Frimmer, and L. Novotny

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 083601 (2025) - Published 19 August, 2025

Researchers have expanded the quantum wave function of a levitated nanosphere, a step toward future tests of quantum physics.

FEATURED IN PHYSICS

EDITORS' SUGGESTION

Emergent Self-Propulsion of Skyrmionic Matter in Synthetic Antiferromagnets

Clécio C. de Souza Silva, Matheus V. Correia, and J. C. Piña Velásquez

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 086701 (2025) - Published 18 August, 2025

Pairs of skyrmions—tiny whirlpools that emerge in some magnetic materials—might be able to self-propel, a behavior reminiscent of that of active-matter systems such as motile bacteria.

FEATURED IN PHYSICS

EDITORS' SUGGESTION

On-Chip Emitter-Coupled Meta-Optics for Versatile Photon Sources

Sören im Sande, Yinhui Kan, Danylo Komisar, Cuo Wu, Shailesh Kumar, Sergey I. Bozhevolnyi, and Fei Ding

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 086902 (2025) - Published 22 August, 2025

A 10-µm-wide microchip can generate light with any desired direction, polarization, and intensity, which will be handy for future quantum technologies.

FEATURED IN PHYSICS

First Sub-MeV Dark Matter Search with the QROCODILE Experiment Using Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detectors

Laura Baudis, Alexander Bismark, Noah Brugger, Chiara Capelli, Ilya Charaev, Jose Cuenca García, Guy Daniel Hadas, Yonit Hochberg, Judith K. Hohmann, Alexander Kavner, Christian Koos, Artem Kuzmin, Benjamin V. Lehmann, Severin Nägeli, Titus Neupert, Bjoern Penning, Diego Ramírez García, and Andreas Schilling

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 081002 (2025) - Published 20 August, 2025

Superconducting sensors can detect single low-energy photons. Researchers have now used this capability in a dark matter experiment.

EDITORS' SUGGESTION

Positive Neutrino Masses with DESI DR2 via Matter Conversion to Dark Energy

S. P. Ahlen et al. (DESI Collaboration)

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 081003 (2025) - Published 21 August, 2025

An alternative to the standard cosmological model where matter is converted to dark energy during stellar collapse results in an accurate cosmological expansion history and a summed neutrino mass posterior distribution peaked at positive mass.

EDITORS' SUGGESTION

Two-Peak Heat Capacity Accounts for $R \ln (2)$ Entropy and Ground State Access in the Dipole-Octupole Pyrochlore ${Ce}_{2} {Hf}_{2} O_{7}$

E. M. Smith, A. Fitterman, R. Schäfer, B. Placke, A. Woods, S. Lee, S. H.-Y. Huang, J. Beare, S. Sharma, D. Chatterjee, C. Balz, M. B. Stone, A. I. Kolesnikov, A. R. Wildes, E. Kermarrec, G. M. Luke, O. Benton, R. Moessner, R. Movshovich, A. D. Bianchi, and B. D. Gaulin

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 086702 (2025) - Published 19 August, 2025

Specific heat measurements of Ce $_{2}$ Hf $_{2}$ O $_{7}$ down to 20 mK reveal a low-temperature peak consistent with a gapped ground state.

EDITORS' SUGGESTION

Strong Magnon-Phonon Coupling in the Kagome Antiferromagnets

A. S. Sukhanov, O. I. Utesov, A. N. Korshunov, N. D. Andriushin, M. S. Pavlovskii, S. E. Nikitin, A. A. Kulbakov, K. Manna, C. Felser, and M. C. Rahn

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 086703 (2025) - Published 21 August, 2025

Inelastic x-ray scattering, first-principles simulations, and analytical derivations combine to show how the exchange coupling between the kagome layers in a frustrated antiferromagnet drives unique zone-centered magnon polarons.

EDITORS' SUGGESTION

Terahertz and High-Harmonic Radiation from Ultrafast Light Subgap or Above-Gap Driving of Spin-Orbit Proximitized Antiferromagnetic Mott Insulator

Federico Garcia-Gaitan, Adrian E. Feiguin, and Branislav K. Nikolić

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 086704 (2025) - Published 22 August, 2025

Terahertz emission in the antiferromagnetic Mott insulator NiO is shown to be driven by nonclassical dynamics of the Néel and magnetization vectors.

EDITORS' SUGGESTION

Probing the Quantum Capacitance of Rydberg Transitions of Surface Electrons on Liquid Helium via Microwave Frequency Modulation

Asher Jennings, Ivan Grytsenko, Yiran Tian, Oleksiy Rybalko, Jun Wang, Itay Josef Barabash, and Erika Kawakami

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 087001 (2025) - Published 22 August, 2025

A frequency-modulated, microwave-based method is used to probe quantum capacitance induced by the Rydberg transition of surface electrons in liquid helium.

LETTERS

Quantum Information, Science, and Technology

Multipartite Entanglement Structure of Monitored Quantum Circuits

Arnau Lira-Solanilla, Xhek Turkeshi, and Silvia Pappalardi

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 080401 (2025) - Published 22 August, 2025

Surface-Morphology-Assisted Trapping of Strongly Coupled Electron-on-Neon Charge States

Kaiwen Zheng, Xingrui Song, and Kater W. Murch

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 080601 (2025) - Published 19 August, 2025

Exponential Quantum Speedup for Simulating Classical Lattice Dynamics

Xiantao Li

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 080602 (2025) - Published 21 August, 2025

Neural Quantum Embedding via Deterministic Quantum Computation with One Qubit

Hongfeng Liu, Tak Hur, Shitao Zhang, Liangyu Che, Xinyue Long, Xiangyu Wang, Keyi Huang, Yu-ang Fan, Yuxuan Zheng, Yufang Feng, Yu Zhou, Jack Ng, Xinfang Nie, Daniel K. Park, and Dawei Lu

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 080603 (2025) - Published 22 August, 2025

Photon-Interfaced Ten-Qubit Register of Trapped Ions

M. Canteri, Z. X. Koong, J. Bate, A. Winkler, V. Krutyanskiy, and B. P. Lanyon

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 080801 (2025) - Published 21 August, 2025

Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Gravitation

Assessing Cosmological Evidence for Nonminimal Coupling

William J. Wolf, Carlos García-García, Theodore Anton, and Pedro G. Ferreira

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 081001 (2025) - Published 19 August, 2025

FEATURED IN PHYSICS

First Sub-MeV Dark Matter Search with the QROCODILE Experiment Using Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detectors

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 081002 (2025) - Published 20 August, 2025

Superconducting sensors can detect single low-energy photons. Researchers have now used this capability in a dark matter experiment.

EDITORS' SUGGESTION

Positive Neutrino Masses with DESI DR2 via Matter Conversion to Dark Energy

S. P. Ahlen et al. (DESI Collaboration)

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 081003 (2025) - Published 21 August, 2025

Multimessenger Detection of Black Hole Binaries in Dark Matter Spikes

Fani Dosopoulou and Joseph Silk

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 081401 (2025) - Published 19 August, 2025

Interface Modes in Inspiralling Neutron Stars: A Gravitational-Wave Probe of First-Order Phase Transitions

A. R. Counsell, F. Gittins, N. Andersson, and I. Tews

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 081402 (2025) - Published 20 August, 2025

Particles and Fields

Resurgence of $T \bar{T}$ -Deformed Partition Function

Jie Gu, Yunfeng Jiang, and Huajia Wang

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 081601 (2025) - Published 21 August, 2025

Giant Graviton Correlators as Defect Systems

Junding Chen (陈俊定), Yunfeng Jiang (江云峰), and Xinan Zhou (周稀楠)

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 081602 (2025) - Published 22 August, 2025

Toward a Robust Confirmation or Refutation of the Sterile-Neutrino Explanation of Short-Baseline Anomalies

Ohana Benevides Rodrigues, Matheus Hostert, Kevin J. Kelly, Bryce Littlejohn, Pedro A. N. Machado, Ibrahim Safa, and Tao Zhou

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 081801 (2025) - Published 19 August, 2025

FEATURED IN PHYSICS

EDITORS' SUGGESTION

Search for an Anomalous Production of Charged-Current $ν_{e}$ Interactions without Visible Pions across Multiple Kinematic Observables in MicroBooNE

P. Abratenko et al. (MicroBooNE Collaboration)

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 081802 (2025) - Published 21 August, 2025

The MicroBooNE experiment’s five-year dataset has shown that an unpredicted neutrino-flavor oscillation is not the cause of anomalous results obtained by its predecessor.

Nuclear Physics

Half-Life and Precision Shape Measurement of the $2 ν β β$ Decay of ${}^{130}{Te}$

D. Q. Adams et al. (CUORE Collaboration)

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 082501 (2025) - Published 22 August, 2025

Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics

FEATURED IN PHYSICS

EDITORS' SUGGESTION

Imaging Valence Electron Rearrangement in a Chemical Reaction Using Hard X-Ray Scattering

Ian Gabalski et al.

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 083001 (2025) - Published 20 August, 2025

Scientists have used ultrashort x-ray pulses to directly observe the motion of electrons driving a chemical reaction.

FEATURED IN PHYSICS

EDITORS' SUGGESTION

Quantum Delocalization of a Levitated Nanoparticle

M. Rossi, A. Militaru, N. Carlon Zambon, A. Riera-Campeny, O. Romero-Isart, M. Frimmer, and L. Novotny

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 083601 (2025) - Published 19 August, 2025

Researchers have expanded the quantum wave function of a levitated nanosphere, a step toward future tests of quantum physics.

Space-Time Optical Hopfion Crystals

Wenbo Lin, Nilo Mata-Cervera, Yasutomo Ota, Yijie Shen, and Satoshi Iwamoto

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 083801 (2025) - Published 21 August, 2025

Multiple Exceptional Rings in One-Dimensional Perovskite Photonic Crystals

Zhi-Hang Na, Xu-Lin Zhang, and Jing Feng

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 083802 (2025) - Published 22 August, 2025

Far-Field Excitation of a Photonic Flat Band via a Tailored Anapole Mode

Peiwen Ren, Junrong Zheng, Zhuo Huang, Yan Liu, Long Zhang, Hua Zhang, Jingwen Ma, Zhanghai Chen, Jian-Feng Li, Jun Yi, and Zhilin Yang

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 083803 (2025) - Published 22 August, 2025

Programmable All-Optical Spin Simulator with Artificial Gauge Fields

Simon Mahler, Eran Bernstein, Sagie Gadasi, Geva Arwas, Asher A. Friesem, and Nir Davidson

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 083804 (2025) - Published 22 August, 2025

Physics of Fluids, Earth & Planetary Science, and Climate

Meniscus-Driven Modulation of Surface Wave Transmission across a Barrier

Zhengwu Wang, Guoqin Liu, and Likun Zhang

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 084001 (2025) - Published 21 August, 2025

Plasma and Solar Physics, Accelerators and Beams

Demonstration of a Novel Radiochemical Mix Diagnostic for Fusion Implosions at the National Ignition Facility

S. A. MacLaren, E. L. Dewald, D. A. Martinez, N. Gharibyan, K. Moody, C. Horwood, P. J. Bedrossian, R. D. Hoffman, G. B. Zimmerman, H. W. Xu, C. Kong, K. Sequoia, J. E. Pino, R. E. Tipton, D. D.-M. Ho, C. V. Young, J. D. Despotopulos, K. N. Kmak, D. A. Shaughnessy, S. Prisbrey, H. Huang, M. Ratledge, and N. Rice

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 085101 (2025) - Published 21 August, 2025

Condensed Matter and Materials

Spontaneous Lattice Distortion in the Spin-Triplet Superconductor ${Cu}_{x} {Bi}_{2} {Se}_{3}$

K. Matano, S. Takayanagi, K. Ito, S. Nita, M. Yokoyama, M. Mihaescu, H. Nakao, and Guo-qing Zheng

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 086001 (2025) - Published 22 August, 2025

Vortex Lattice States of Bilayer Electron-Hole Fluids in Quantizing Magnetic Fields

Bo Zou and A. H. MacDonald

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 086002 (2025) - Published 22 August, 2025

Co and CoPc Molecular Kondo Box on Gold Surface

Xiangyang Li, Liang Zhu, Aidi Zhao, Yi Luo, J. G. Hou, Bin Li, Bing Wang, and Jinlong Yang

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 086201 (2025) - Published 19 August, 2025

Universal Wilson Loop Bound of Quantum Geometry

Jiabin Yu, Jonah Herzog-Arbeitman, and B. Andrei Bernevig

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 086401 (2025) - Published 19 August, 2025

Multistate Ferroelectricity Enabled by Electrically Controlled Phase Transition of Two-Dimensional Ices

Junjie Fang, Wanlin Guo, and Hu Qiu

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 086402 (2025) - Published 19 August, 2025

Microscopic Mechanism of Coexisting Electron Spin Resonance and Kondo Resonance in a Single Iron Phthalocyanine Molecule

Qi Chen, Hongjian Du, Xinyong Meng, Jufeng Wang, Jingzun Liao, Bin Li, Wei Hu, Qitang Fan, Shijing Tan, Chuanxu Ma, Jinlong Yang, J. G. Hou, and Bing Wang

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 086403 (2025) - Published 21 August, 2025

Attosecond All-Optical Retrieval of Valley Polarization via Circular Dichroism in Transient Absorption

Wenqing Li, Xiaosong Zhu, Pengfei Lan, Liang Li, Kai Wang, Wanzhu He, Hannes Hübener, Umberto De Giovannini, and Peixiang Lu

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 086404 (2025) - Published 21 August, 2025

Extracting Topological Spins from Bulk Multipartite Entanglement

Yarden Sheffer, Ady Stern, and Erez Berg

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 086601 (2025) - Published 22 August, 2025

FEATURED IN PHYSICS

EDITORS' SUGGESTION

Emergent Self-Propulsion of Skyrmionic Matter in Synthetic Antiferromagnets

Clécio C. de Souza Silva, Matheus V. Correia, and J. C. Piña Velásquez

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 086701 (2025) - Published 18 August, 2025

Pairs of skyrmions—tiny whirlpools that emerge in some magnetic materials—might be able to self-propel, a behavior reminiscent of that of active-matter systems such as motile bacteria.

EDITORS' SUGGESTION

Two-Peak Heat Capacity Accounts for $R \ln (2)$ Entropy and Ground State Access in the Dipole-Octupole Pyrochlore ${Ce}_{2} {Hf}_{2} O_{7}$

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 086702 (2025) - Published 19 August, 2025

Specific heat measurements of Ce $_{2}$ Hf $_{2}$ O $_{7}$ down to 20 mK reveal a low-temperature peak consistent with a gapped ground state.

EDITORS' SUGGESTION

Strong Magnon-Phonon Coupling in the Kagome Antiferromagnets

A. S. Sukhanov, O. I. Utesov, A. N. Korshunov, N. D. Andriushin, M. S. Pavlovskii, S. E. Nikitin, A. A. Kulbakov, K. Manna, C. Felser, and M. C. Rahn

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 086703 (2025) - Published 21 August, 2025

EDITORS' SUGGESTION

Terahertz and High-Harmonic Radiation from Ultrafast Light Subgap or Above-Gap Driving of Spin-Orbit Proximitized Antiferromagnetic Mott Insulator

Federico Garcia-Gaitan, Adrian E. Feiguin, and Branislav K. Nikolić

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 086704 (2025) - Published 22 August, 2025

Terahertz emission in the antiferromagnetic Mott insulator NiO is shown to be driven by nonclassical dynamics of the Néel and magnetization vectors.

Unveiling Three Types of Fermions in a Nodal Ring Topological Semimetal through Magneto-Optical Transitions

Jiwon Jeon, Taehyeok Kim, Jiho Jang, Hoil Kim, Mykhaylo Ozerov, Jun Sung Kim, Hongki Min, and Eunjip Choi

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 086901 (2025) - Published 19 August, 2025

FEATURED IN PHYSICS

EDITORS' SUGGESTION

On-Chip Emitter-Coupled Meta-Optics for Versatile Photon Sources

Sören im Sande, Yinhui Kan, Danylo Komisar, Cuo Wu, Shailesh Kumar, Sergey I. Bozhevolnyi, and Fei Ding

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 086902 (2025) - Published 22 August, 2025

A 10-µm-wide microchip can generate light with any desired direction, polarization, and intensity, which will be handy for future quantum technologies.

EDITORS' SUGGESTION

Probing the Quantum Capacitance of Rydberg Transitions of Surface Electrons on Liquid Helium via Microwave Frequency Modulation

Asher Jennings, Ivan Grytsenko, Yiran Tian, Oleksiy Rybalko, Jun Wang, Itay Josef Barabash, and Erika Kawakami

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 087001 (2025) - Published 22 August, 2025

A frequency-modulated, microwave-based method is used to probe quantum capacitance induced by the Rydberg transition of surface electrons in liquid helium.

Statistical Physics; Classical, Nonlinear, and Complex Systems

Polymers, Chemical Physics, Soft Matter, and Biological Physics

ERRATA

Erratum: Nonrelativistic Holography from ${AdS}_{5} / {CFT}_{4}$ [Phys. Rev. Lett. 133, 151601 (2024)]

Andrea Fontanella and Juan Miguel Nieto García

Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 089901 (2025) - Published 19 August, 2025