Two-dimensional topological insulators are hard to find. This theoretical paper by a group of physicists from Canada and US revives graphene as a viable candidate for engineering robust, accessible two-dimensional topological insulators.

A form of quantum electrodynamics emerges from interacting spins at low temperatures in the spin ice $Y{b}_{2}T{i}_2{O}_7$.

A Japanese team shows remarkable control of vortex dipoles in atomic Bose-Einstein condensates with laser beams.

Researchers from France and Belgium use two state-of-the-art magnetic imaging techniques to reveal the patterns, annihilations, and mobilities of the vortices and antivortices in a superconducting film that they generate and manipulate with a micromagnet array and an external magnetic field.

The search for efficient and more economical thermoelectric materials is still on and gaining even more urgency after fifty years. Scientists at Oak ridge National Lab show that nanostructured $B{i}_{2}S{e}_3$ holds significant promise.

Why does the price change of a stock go as the square root of the amount traded, and why are the dynamics of financial markets turbulent? A group of physicists working in a French investment company offer an explanation.

Counting and sizing particles necessary in many fields from metallurgy to biology is commonly done with solid sensing apertures that suffer seriously from clogging. Physicists at Duke University take a drastically different approach and build a clogging-free particle counter with liquid bridges or jets.

Bend a nanorod that is a short DNA molecule by its two ends, does it bend smoothly, or does it develop a sharp kink? Many molecular biologists and biophysicists love to know the answer. A biophysics group at UCLA devises and performs a clever experiment to find out.

Putting a light-emitting semiconductor quantum dot in an optical cavity leads to ways of generating and manipulating single photons. A Canadian team investigates theoretically if, and how, acoustic phonons in such dot-cavity systems affect their photoemission.

Strong-field ionization, the removal of electrons from a molecule with an intense laser field, has opened new ways of imaging molecular orbitals and tracking the ultrafast motion of both nuclei and electrons. Using both experimental and theoretical tools, a group at Stony Brook University dissects the complexity of field-induced electron removals from a large molecule.

Optomechanics uses light to generate, manipulate, and measure the quantum motion of a mechanical device that is compliant enough to move or vibrate upon the reflection of light. Michael R. Vanner from University of Vienna proposes a new optomechanical scheme to measure the displacement squared of a mechanical device in quantum motion.

Building a new physical concept into a high-throughput quantum-mechanical computational approach, researchers from Duke University and the Laboratory for Innovation in Technology for New Energy (LITEN) of CEA in France predict a large set of sintered inorganic compounds as good candidates for high-efficiency thermoelectric materials.

Supercooled glass-forming liquids are known to have complex and sluggish macroscopic dynamics. But, what are the atomic motions underlying such dynamics? Researchers from the US and Britain use state-of-the-art molecular-dynamics simulations to “visualize,” identify, and characterize the atomic motions.

The fractional quantum Hall states are known to occur in 2-dimensional electron gases. Can they exist in other material systems? Two physicists from France and the U.S. furnish the first unambiguous theoretical proof that they do in fractional Chern insulators.

Fractional quantum-Hall states can host anyons – elementary excitations that do not obey the quantum-mechanical rules followed by either fermions or bosons. That makes them fundamentally fascinating, but also technically challenging to tackle. Showing a new way to deal with anyons theoretically, two researchers from Washington University succeed in working out the rules so far unknown for the anyons in a notoriously difficult state.

Metamaterials and surface electromagnetic waves join force in an experimentally demonstrated new concept for modulating guided and lossless transmission of electromagnetic energy in the gigahertz and terahertz frequency range important to modern telecommunication.

Stars or small solar-sized black holes plunge into supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies thousands and millions light years from us. One important way to study these catastrophic events is by numerical simulations. A new computational technique for unbounded domains remarkably improves the efficiency and accuracy of such simulations.

Charge conjugation, complex conjugation, and time reversal of wave functions are theoretical concepts fundamental to quantum mechanics, but do not correspond to physical processes in the real world. Simulating them in a real physical setting seems then out of the question. A Spanish-Austrian team come up with a new toolbox for rendering the seemingly impossible possible.

Low-loss plasmonic materials are highly desired in plasmonics-based light emitting devices, optical sensors, and solar cells. A Dutch-Belgian team finds in periodic arrays of nanorods a new class of plasmonic resonant modes that have the lowest losses reported so far, and explains how they come about.

High-temperature superconductors are usually created by doping parent compounds. Understanding the electronic properties of the parents is key to understanding the superconductors themselves. A team from China uses angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) and other experimental techniques to identify and investigate the parent of a very recently discovered series of iron-based superconductors.

Given a group of people who are possibly linked to each other socially, how does one find out who is actually linked to whom? Inspired by the compressive-sensing technique in signal processing, a team of researchers from China, U.S. and U.K. shows the way. Reconstructions of structures of gene-regulation networks or digital communication networks by this method may be the next step.

When a quantum system is exposed to classical external noise, does the noise make it more difficult for precisions higher than the standard quantum limit to be achieved in measurements of the system’s physical quantities? Researchers from Singapore and U.K. theoretically demonstrate the opposite with a set of quantum-measurement strategies that incorporate quantum discord.

Using a table-top, plasma-based laser, a team of researchers from Colorado State University, Berkeley, and Oak Ridge National Lab succeeds in generating intense soft x-ray laser pulses of sub-9-nm wavelengths, picosecond durations, microjoule energies and high-repetition rates.

Laser heating of nanosized metallic particles in fluids has been explored and exploited in many applications in physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine, including cancer treatment. Surprisingly, a systematic theoretical analysis of the phenomenon has been lacking. A team from Russia, Germany, Australia, and Singapore provides the missing analysis and offers users of the laser-heating technique simple ways of quantitatively estimating the effects of heating.

Is the Keflavik airport in Reykjavik a node in the European or the North American air-traffic network, or in both? The answer should depend on the passenger flow through the airport, says one’s intuition. Using ideas from information theories, Viamontes Esquivel and Rosvall from Sweden turn this intuition into a method for identifying operational modules in a functional network and resolving their overlap.

A new particle is presented by a team from Belgium, France and Spain as a possible candidate for dark matter.