Nature Physics, Published online: 10 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41567-025-03128-9
The shape of possibility
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Updated: daily
- The shape of possibility
- Love hertzNature Physics, Published online: 10 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41567-025-03127-w Despite being derived from the unit of time, the hertz is a unit in its own right. It has remained a much beloved unit since its establishment almost one hundred years ago, as Karen Mudryk recounts.
- Level the slopesNature Physics, Published online: 10 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41567-025-03147-6 Social connections can unlock opportunities that are advantageous to careers in physics. However, this resource is unevenly distributed, and its benefits can’t always overcome the negative effects of societal stereotypes and biases.
- The undervaluing of elite women in physicsNature Physics, Published online: 10 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41567-025-03114-1 Elite women in physics wait longer than men for recognition. Once elected to the US National Academy of Sciences, however, their prominence surges — evidence that their work was undervalued all along.
- A super-conducting diode with ultimate efficiency and noise resilience at 77 KNature Physics, Published online: 11 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41567-025-03118-x An electrical method is shown to reliably introduce nonreciprocal behaviour across a Josephson junction made of high-temperature cuprate superconductors, which then, under microwave irradiation, forms a ‘quantum superconducting diode’. The device is magnetic-field-free, works at a temperature of 77 K with a diode efficiency of 100%, and, owing to Shapiro steps that quantize the output voltage, has robust noise-filtering.
- Temporal anti-parity–time symmetry in diffusive transportNature Physics, Published online: 10 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41567-025-03129-8 Applying concepts from non-Hermitian physics to diffusive systems enables the static control of heat transport. Now, this notion is expanded to dynamic control, including a demonstration of programmed thermal transport in a metamaterial.
- Arbitrary control over multimode wave propagation for machine learningNature Physics, Published online: 08 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41567-025-03094-2 Photonic processors are limited by the bulkiness of discrete components and wiring complexity. An experiment now demonstrates a reprogrammable two-dimensional waveguide that performs neural network inference through multimode wave propagation.
- Hofstadter’s butterfly turns magneticNature Physics, Published online: 05 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41567-025-03126-x A fractal energy pattern known as the Hofstadter butterfly has now been observed separately for each spin in a two-dimensional semiconductor, revealing a cascade of magnetic transitions.
