Moiré superlattice systems such as transition metal dichalcogenide heterobilayers have garnered significant recent interest due to their promising utility as tunable solid state simulators. Recent experiments on a WSe2/WS2 heterobilayer detected incompressible charge ordered states that one can view as generalized Wigner crystals. The tunability of the transition metal dichalcogenide heterobilayer Moiré system presents an opportunity to study the rich set of possible phases upon melting these charge-ordered states.

In its ground state, RuO2 was long thought to be an ordinary metallic paramagnet. Recent neutron and x-ray diffraction revealed that bulk RuO2 is an antiferromagnet with TN above 300 K. Furthermore, epitaxial strain induces superconductivity in thin films of RuO2 below 2 K. Here, we present a resonant elastic x-ray scattering study at the RuL2 edge of the strained RuO2 films exhibiting the strain-induced superconductivity. We observe an azimuthal modulation of the 100 Bragg peak consistent with bulk.

We present in situ calorimetry, thermal conductivity, and thermal diffusivity measurements of materials using temperature-sensing optical wireless integrated circuits (OWiCs). These microscopic and untethered optical sensors eliminate input wires and reduce parasitic effects. Each OWiC has a mass of ∼100 ng, a 100-μm-scale footprint, and a thermal response time of microseconds. We demonstrate that they can measure the thermal properties of nearly any material, from aerogels to metals, on samples as small as 100 ng and over thermal diffusivities covering four orders of magnitude.

The onset of rigidity in interacting liquids, as they undergo a transition to a disordered solid, is associated with a rearrangement of the low-frequency vibrational spectrum. In this Letter, we derive scaling forms for the singular dynamical response of disordered viscoelastic networks near both jamming and rigidity percolation. Using effective-medium theory, we extract critical exponents, invariant scaling combinations, and analytical formulas for universal scaling functions near these transitions.

Nanoscale spin textures, especially magnetic skyrmions, have attracted intense interest as candidate high-density and power-efficient information carriers for spintronic devices1,2. Facilitating a deeper understanding of sub-hundred-nanometre to atomic-scale spin textures requires more advanced magnetic imaging techniques3–5. Here we demonstrate a Lorentz electron ptychography method that can enable high-resolution, high-sensitivity magnetic field imaging for widely available electron microscopes.

We develop a theory for a continuous bandwidth-tuned transition at fixed fractional electron filling from a metal with a generic Fermi surface to a "Wigner-Mott"insulator that spontaneously breaks crystalline space-group symmetries. Across the quantum critical point, (i) the entire electronic Fermi surface disappears abruptly upon approaching from the metallic side, and (ii) the insulating charge gap and various order parameters associated with the spontaneously broken space-group symmetries vanish continuously upon approaching from the insulating side.

Models for nonunitary quantum dynamics, such as quantum circuits that include projective measurements, have recently been shown to exhibit rich quantum critical behavior. There are many complementary perspectives on this behavior. For example, there is a known correspondence between d-dimensional local nonunitary quantum circuits and tensor networks on a [D=(d+1)]-dimensional lattice.

Embryogenesis is guided by a limited set of signaling pathways dynamically expressed in different places. How a context-dependent signaling response is generated has been a central question of developmental biology, which can now be addressed with in vitro models of human embryos that are derived from embryonic stem cells (hESCs). Our previous work demonstrated that during early stages of hESC differentiation, cells chronicle signaling hierarchy.

Motivated by cold-atom experiments and a desire to understand far-from-equilibrium quantum transport, we analytically study the dynamics of spin helices in the one-dimensional XX model. We use a Jordan-Wigner transformation to map the spin chain onto a noninteracting Fermi gas with simple equations of motion. The resulting dynamics are nontrivial, however, as the spin-helix initial condition corresponds to a highly nonequilibrium distribution of the fermions. We find a separation of timescales between the in-plane and out-of-plane spin dynamics.

The observation of superconductivity and correlated insulating states in twisted bilayer graphene has motivated much theoretical progress at integer fillings. However, little attention has been given to fractional fillings. Here we show that the three-peak structure of Wannier orbitals, dictated by the symmetry and topology of flat bands, facilitates the emergence of a state we name a “fractional correlated insulator” at commensurate fractional filling of ν = n ± 1/3.