In our latest issue, we have a special collection of Reviews covering recent progress in the generation and study of cold and ultracold molecules for applications in quantum simulation, metrology and chemistry. (1/n)

A unified description of the dynamics of structurally disordered materials is challenging. Simulations of model systems now show that percolation theory provides a framework unifying two prominent relaxation processes in supercooled liquids and glasses.

It has been proposed that the equilibration time of many-body systems is limited by a timescale determined by Planck’s constant and temperature. A bound of this kind has now been identified for a universal definition of equilibration time.

We, along with colleagues from Nature Materials and Nature Reviews Materials are organising a conference. Yale, late March, and the topic is quantum materials. Early bird registration ends on Friday 7th.

Bubble formation is a signal of false vacuum decay, in which a system transitions from a local energy minimum to a true vacuum. Now, simulations on a quantum annealer show how interactions between bubbles drive the long-time dynamics of this process.

A liquid–liquid transition in supercooled water has long been predicted. State-of-the-art simulations now precisely confine the temperature and pressure ranges for this transition, which are found to be within experimental reach.

Coherent control of chemical reactions is a central theme in quantum chemistry. Now, a cold atom experiment demonstrates a method for steering the outcome of three-body recombination processes using a tunable Feshbach resonance.

Electron qubits in solid-state systems often couple to nuclear spins in the surrounding material, causing decoherence. Now, nuclear spins in silicon have been put into a dark state, which could improve qubit coherence for quantum applications.

The thousands of nuclear spins surrounding gallium arsenide quantum dots can interface with electron spin qubits and photons. With quantum engineering, this nuclear spin ensemble becomes a robust register for quantum information storage.

Quantum error correction is essential for reliable quantum computing, but no single code supports all required fault-tolerant gates. The demonstration of switching between two codes now enables universal quantum computation with reduced overhead.

Searches for metastable states with properties not found in thermal equilibrium have been restricted to either ultrafast or slow timescales. A metastable state in an intermediate time window has now been identified in a photo-doped Mott insulator.

First issue of 2025 out! This month, we discuss simulations of gauge theories with ultracold atoms, learn how to measure the quantum geometric tensor of a solid, and discover that spinners suspended in liquid can show flocking behaviour. Check it out:

Quantum simulations of chemistry and materials are challenging due to the complexity of correlated systems. A framework based on reconfigurable qubit architectures and digital–analogue simulations provides a hardware-efficient path forwards.

Periodic laser light can modify the electronic properties of solids and offers a path to create new material phases. In a topological antiferromagnet, periodic driving with opposite light helicities is now shown to produce distinct Dirac mass gaps.

Competition between different possible ground states of strongly correlated electron systems can lead to the emergence of mixed states called microemulsions. Now this phenomenon is reported at the melting transition of a Wigner crystal.

Long-range interactions have been predicted to enable a phase transition in one-dimensional systems. An experiment now validates this hypothesis in a trapped-ion quantum simulator by observing a finite-energy phase transition in one dimension.

The ALPHA Collaboration reports measurements of the hyperfine components of the 1S–2S transition in trapped antihydrogen. They interpret the results as a test of the invariance of charge–parity–time-reversal symmetry.

Thermal agitation of charge carriers, known as Johnson noise, is the dominant noise in electronic circuits. Now it has also been observed as a key noise source in integrated electro-optic photonic circuits, posing challenges for future applications.

An optical thermodynamic framework can describe the complex dynamics in highly multimodal systems. Now, the observation of all-optical Joule–Thompson expansion in an optical gas further validates this thermodynamic approach.

In classical hydrodynamics, Kelvin waves refer to helically vibrating normal modes. Experiments now show that quantum analogues of Kelvin waves can be excited in superfluid helium-4.

Gauge theories host important phenomena such as confinement that are difficult to study theoretically. Advances in quantum computers have now made it possible to perform digital quantum simulations of confinement dynamics in a gauge theory.