The editors and experts briefly discuss three papers on graphene physics in this issue.

An ink drop in water spreads and does not go back to the drop form. This intuition about thermodynamic irreversibility in macroscopic systems has only very recently been known to not hold for microscopic systems. A demanding experiment on single-electron tunneling in double quantum dots provides an interesting example of what our new intuition should be.

Diodes based on metal-semiconductor interfaces are common place in semiconductor electronics. What happens when the normal metal is replaced by monolayer graphene? A group of physicists at University of Florida experimentally demonstrate that graphene-semiconductor interfaces make interesting diodes for a surprisingly wide variety of semiconductors.

Being a semimetal, pure monolayer graphene cannot be used directly in devices which rely on controlled and reliable transistor operations. Substitutional doping of graphene by nitrogen at macroscopic concentrations is predicted to create two monolayer compounds that are both stable and semiconducting with sizable band gaps.

Building a high-quality trilayer graphene sheet into a dual-gate field-effect transistor and measuring its electronic properties, three physicists from California Institute of Technology reveal a number of new findings about the trilayer graphene, which includes a sequence of quantum Hall plateaus seen for the first time.

Advances in a magneto-optical technique will allow researchers to better understand how to control spins in a metal with short optical pulses.

Semiconductor quantum dots connected by floating metallic gates point the way to a scalable quantum computer.

Vortices in type-II superconductors are tiny tornados of circulating electric current of a radius of tens of nanometers surrounding a normal-state core. They move, repel each other, and may get pinned by defects. One-dimensional “traffic jams” and intermittent jam-relieving “avalanches” of such vortices in a thin superconducting film with a multiterraced surface are revealed vividly by spatially resolved, real-time magneto-optical images, pointing to interesting new physics.

Stimulated Brillouin scattering in bulk materials and micron-scaled optical fibers has been exploited to realize coherent phonon generation and slow light as well as new light sources. What happens when the size of a light-interacting system is reduced to nanoscales? A qualitatively new, and several-orders-of-magnitude more powerful form of stimulated Brillouin scattering is shown to emerge.

Superconductivity and the Kondo effect play out their competition in a quantum-dot structure integrated into a superconducting quantum-interference device. With single-charge-level control and fine-tuned supercurrent measurements, physicists chart, and make sense of, the consequences of the competition.

Superconductivity arises from pairing of mobile electrons. The symmetry of the electron-pair wave function contains important clues about the mechanism underlying the pairing. A Chinese-Korean experimental collaboration carries out element-selective substitutional doping of BaFe${}_2$As${}_2$ and searches for the pairing symmetry of the resulting iron-based superconductors.

What is a simple liquid? It seems an entirely banal question to those working in statistical physics, chemical physics, and physical chemistry of liquids and soft matter. A group of Danish physicists show that asking this question can actually lead to new illuminating understanding of liquid physics.

Highly deft technical work by a group of three theoretical physicists leads to much needed fundamental understanding of the “area law” governing the entanglement entropy of a many-particle quantum system and shows that the leading form of the law survives the addition of particle-particle interactions.

Field-induced switching of magnetization in a magnetic material is central to magnetic data-storage technologies. A theoretical investigation of the microscopic dynamics of atomic spins in both antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic systems leads to fundamental insights into laser-induced magnetic switching.

A single light-emitting quantum dot placed in a photonic-crystal waveguide can work as a high-efficiency, broadband single-photon source for on-chip implementations of quantum photonics, as shown here by an international group.

How rogue waves in the ocean come about still is a scientific puzzle. But, for the first time, super rogue waves are not only generated in a water-wave tank, but are also understood.