Plasmonic light focusing exploits metallic nanostructures to route, concentrate, and manipulate light at nanometer length scales. A combined experimental and theoretical study of surface plasmon-polaritons localized in large-scale nanorod and nanotube arrays reveals new fundamental insights that should change the conventional wisdom about plasmonic light focusing.

A proof-of-principle experiment based on multi-scale theoretical modeling demonstrates the promise of polarization-sensitive third-harmonic-generation microscopy for imaging molecular order in biological tissues in situ.

Theoretical calculations describe the behavior of a large quantum circuit by taking advantage of certain symmetrical relationships between superconducting elements.

What happens when an ultrashort high-intensity laser pulse heats up a silicon crystal? Accurate quantum-mechanical simulations of the motion of silicon atoms in the crystal reveal synchronous atomic oscillations between two distinct types of squeezed thermal-phonon modes.

Comparative experimental and theoretical studies of an iron-based superconductor and its cobalt-based nonsuperconducting cousin show that increased electronic band filling in the latter leads to much weakened electronic correlations, indicating the importance of the correlations to the superconductivity and a mechanism for tuning them.

Slicing continuous time into discrete segments is necessary in computer simulations, but inevitably introduces artifacts. Drawing on the recent development in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have learned a new way to systematically characterize and separate the artifacts in simulations of molecular dynamics.

A new method of increasing the spin-orbit interaction in graphene nanoribbons promises to turn them into viable spin filters in spintronics applications and may also help in the hunt for Majorana fermions.

A molecular rheology experiment on a biological enzyme leads to a proposal that a fundamental representation of the functional cycle of the enzyme is provided by its molecular strain-stress response.

Voltage-gated ion channels regulate the flows of sodium or potassium ions across nerve cell membranes. A new study of a model potassium channel reveals that behind the channel’s regulation of the ion flow lies a viscoelastic molecular structural behavior similar to that of Silly Putty.

Surface spectroscopy shows that a material long known as a Kondo insulator also exhibits the metallic surface states of a topological insulator.

The Kochen-Specker theorem, which excludes noncontextual hidden-variable explanations for the counterintuitive puzzles of quantum mechanics, has been realized for the first time in two different single-photon experiments.

Combining a technique that compresses information during measurement with standard detector arrays allows high-dimensional quantum entanglement to be efficiently characterized.

A combined theoretical and experimental study of a frustrated magnet (Ho${}_2$Ti${}_2$O${}_7$) indicates the presence of a low-temperature spin-liquid state in which the correlations in the spin fluctuations are topological in nature.

Spin fluxons created by inserting magnetic fluxes into 2D correlated topological insulators provide a simple and effective way to identify these remarkable states of matter.

Symmetry-protected topological states in systems where electronic interactions can be safely ignored have been theoretically predicted and experimentally confirmed. Theorists now investigate 3D systems of interacting bosons and find a new plethora of topological surface states with symmetry properties that are impossible to realize in a purely 2D electronic system.

State-of-the-art x-ray resonant photoemission spectroscopy combined with ab initio calculations maps out, for the first time, the actual shapes of the vibrational wave functions of highly excited nitrogen molecules.

Many interesting and important systems in natural science, such as that of a large protein molecule in water, show regions of different molecular activities and therefore of different interest to the investigator. A new method of molecular dynamics simulations now allows the simulator to zoom in and out of the region(s) of interest “on the fly” with computational ease and high efficiency and brings simulations of such systems into the realm of computational capability.

Spectroscopic studies of the relaxation dynamics of excited single “acceptor” impurities in silicon, such as boron or aluminum, show that these impurities both have the potential to work as “qubits” and can also enrich trapped-atom experiments in solids.

New experimental findings about the electronic structure of NaFe${}_{0.9825}$Co${}_{0.0175}$As explain the fundamentally intriguing and important puzzle of why magnetic order and superconductivity can coexist in such iron-based superconductors and reveal an intimate tie between the coexistence and the electron pairing underlying the superconductivity.

The LaAlO${}_3$/SrTiO${}_3$ interface is already known to have interesting properties such as superconductivity and magnetism. Now nanoscale charge-transport networks created at the interface show extraordinary evidences of violation of Ohm’s law.