We thought it was evolution, but an experiment with pencils shows that tips like teeth and thorns may owe their rounded shape to mechanical wear.

High-order Landau modes offer immense potential for large-capacity information processing. However, exploiting the high-order Landau modes and controlling their spatial distributions have remained elusive. Now, a collaborative team from Beijing Institute of Technology, The University of Hong Kong, Tsinghua University, and Tongji University, writing in the Science Bulletin, proposes a physical mechanism to reshape high-order Landau modes. By constructing pseudo-magnetic fields, pseudo-electric fields, and imaginary momentum, the researchers provide a versatile framework to tailor the spatial profiles of Landau modes to meet diverse requirements, such as spectral selection, mode localization, broadening. These findings can advance the applications in large-capacity information processing, frequency multiplexing, and wave packet reshaping.

As Earth’s climate systems change, polar sea ice is becoming more granular in structure. University of Utah-led research reveals this type of ice is much less permeable than columnar sea ice, with important implications for geophysical processes. This is because water, heat and nutrients move less readily through granular ice than the ice it is replacing.

The use of a quantum-inspired algorithm to calculate the unworkably vast potential properties of quantum materials is an early example of how quantum technology can be used to improve itself.

Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have developed a new approach to secure optical communication that hides information in the physical structure of light, making it difficult for unauthorized parties to intercept or decode.