Physical Review Letters

@physrevlett.aps.org

The world’s most-cited journal in multidisciplinary physics.

@physrevlett.aps.org Oct 10, 2026, 1:00 PM

Helicon waves can provide supplemental currents to tokamaks to sustain the high performances required for fusion power plants. New work provides the first demonstration of this current, a step toward steady-state tokamak operation.

Read the paper: https://go.aps.org/4AVWLPN

Photograph of the helicon traveling wave antenna used in the experiment. The device is mounted on a wall with gray metallic panels, protruding slightly. The center of the device contains multiple columns of thin, rounded bars stacked in a slightly off horizontal orientation.

@physrevlett.aps.org Oct 9, 2026, 8:15 PM

#OnTheCover of this week’s issue: Snapshot of a general relativistic particle-in-cell simulation of a collisionless plasma accreting onto a central spinning black hole, showing number density on the right and out-of-plane magnetic field on the left: https://go.aps.org/4rVDM3C

A simulation of plasma accreting onto a central spinning black hole. The black hole appears as a black circle at center; the right side shows particle number density, while the left shows the out-of-plane magnetic field.

@physrevlett.aps.org Oct 9, 2026, 4:27 PM

Scientists have reconstructed planar extensional viscosity properties of an unknown material using only steady shear measurements — a finding that tackles longstanding experimental challenges in fluid mechanics and rheology.

Read more: https://go.aps.org/3TqVNKI

A graph plotting the transient shear and planar extensional viscosity for the linear PTT model as a function of accumulated strain. The graph plots two functions, visualized as a series of connected black diamonds and red circles, respectively. Black dashed lines plot the predictions of the UCM model.

@physrevlett.aps.org Oct 9, 2026, 12:55 PM

Researchers discovered ultrafast magnetoelectric coupling in rare-earth iron garnets — a finding that may enable sub-100-nm THz magneto-optical readout for faster magnetic data storage and information processing.

Read the Letter: https://go.aps.org/4jdLtQy

A figure displaying two models of the atomic and magnetic structure of HoIG under scenarios of above TM (left) and below TM (right). The structures consist of lattices and fields of various molecules, including Ho3+ (purple spheres), Fe3+tet (pink spheres), Fe3+oct (yellow spheres), and O2- (red dots). The left model displays the molecules arranged within a black outline of a cube, and includes several pink, purple, and yellow tetrahedrons in the middle. The right model displays the same molecules in a more compressed rectangular sphere, with dark and light purple arrows indicating canting angles from the ⟨111⟩-axis.

@physrevlett.aps.org Oct 7, 2026, 6:25 PM

An “acoustic drumstick” experiment generates acoustic modes in HBARs and couples them with a silicon nitride membrane. The energy dissipation is nonlinear and 20 times stronger than dispersive interactions, offering unprecedented sound control.

🔗 https://go.aps.org/4AOiid7

Artist’s conceptualization of the acousto-mechanical interaction within the acoustic drumstick device. A blue translucent cylinder represents a piezoelectric layer. High-frequency bulk acoustic waves are excited through this layer, shown by multicolored chevrons, creating ripples, which are converted into photons, that strike a micro-drumhead membrane suspended below. The acoustic wave acts as a nanoscale "drumstick" striking the mechanical membrane, creating large ripples, illustrating the energy transfer between sound and motion.

@physrevlett.aps.org Oct 7, 2026, 3:49 PM

Researchers used a bright squeezed vacuum to drive strong-field ionization and showed that the light’s photon-number fluctuations can be imprinted onto electrons emitted by atoms. The results offer a new way to probe ultrafast electron dynamics.

📄 https://go.aps.org/4j5tGek

A 3D rendering of strong-field ionization with bright squeezed vacuum. On the left is a thick, salmon-colored beam intersected with a transparent disc and two white squares. Towards the right, the salmon beam becomes a thinner orange beam intersected with a diagonally oriented transparent square with a black knob. The orange beam then gets reflected and focused by a metallic cylindrical shape onto a separate, light blue rod with dark blue spheres attached to it, representing the jet of xenon atoms. The light blue rod has a blue coil hanging off of it that touches a metallic disc with a black outline lying flat below.

@physrevlett.aps.org Oct 6, 2026, 12:50 PM

Congratulations to @nobelprize.org in #Physics winner Francis Halzen “for decisive contributions to @icecubeneutrino.bsky.social and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin." See the prize-winning research from our journal:
https://go.aps.org/4yuL693
https://go.aps.org/4yFFKIk

A line-art portrait illustration of Francis Halzen with gold accents, created by Niklas Elmehed. Below the illustration, a dark red banner displays his name, "Francis Halzen," along with the award citation: "for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin". At the bottom, text attributes the award to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Front cover of the journal Physical Review Letters, Volume 111, Number 2, published July 12, 2013 by the American Physical Society. The top portion features green geometric stripes framing the issue number "111" and the journal title. The center displays a scientific visualization composed of vertical wave-like patterns made of colorful, semi-transparent spheres and spindle-like columns in shades of green, yellow, orange, and blue set against a light cream background.

@physrevlett.aps.org Oct 5, 2026, 5:49 PM

Materials falling into black holes are collisionless plasmas. Researchers modeled black hole accretion using plasma simulations for the first time, enabling new discoveries — like the role of pair discharge in black hole jets.

Read the Letter: https://go.aps.org/4rKAb8A

General relativistic particle-in-cell simulation of a collisionless plasma — represented by blue, purple, and orange — accreting onto a central spinning black hole in the center.

@physrevlett.aps.org Oct 5, 2026, 12:59 PM

Scientists studied a porcine mitral valve and a conical shell model and found that flow fluctuations triggered buckling and sealing. High-speed imaging and a stochastic model captured the transition.

Read the Letter: https://go.aps.org/4dnvyeO

@physrevlett.aps.org Oct 4, 2026, 2:00 PM

With a gravity-stretched liquid jet, researchers demystify spinning dynamics for liquid-to-solid transitions and gather insights about fast solidification kinetics and fiber radius that could inform predictive control.

Read the Letter: https://go.aps.org/4j2j9Az

A graph plotting the solidification to collection distance ratio (x-axis) versus the solidification to breakup distance ratio (y-axis). The top and bottom halves of the plot are divided into orange-shaded (top) and blue-shaded (bottom) regions, corresponding to liquid drops and liquid jet, respectively. The graph contains data points corresponding to uniform fiber (light blue circles), beaded fiber (brown triangles), or beads (orange squares).

@physrevlett.aps.org Oct 3, 2026, 1:44 PM

Radiowave-induced resistance oscillations are a newly discovered type of 2D electron gas oscillations that occur at frequencies much smaller than the cyclotron frequency, with wave properties that depend only on the radiation electric field.

Read more: https://go.aps.org/4zgI4oZ

The longitudinal resistivity versus magnetic field at different source powers, represented by different colors. Each resistivity oscillation starts at a different magnetic field and wiggles downward, eventually decaying to zero. Each curve has one pronounced oscillation that occurs near the same resistivity.

@physrevlett.aps.org Oct 2, 2026, 8:45 PM

#OnTheCover: Morphologies of droplet-encapsulated gels (DEGs) for different values of the liquid fraction (horizontal) and elastocapillary number (vertical).

🔗 https://go.aps.org/3U2zLy0

$Nine images of droplet-encapsulated gels form a three square grid and are arranged by liquid fraction horizontally and elastocapillary number vertically. The gels — which appear as elongated capsule-like structures — range from elongated capsule-like outlines with inner gel cores to rounded droplets and a pinched figure-eight structure.$

@physrevlett.aps.org Oct 2, 2026, 3:55 PM

Since 2000, around 30% of all research leading to the @nobelprize.org in Physics has been published in Physical Review Letters.

As we look to the 2026 award, swipe through the research published in our journal that helped pave the way to some of the most recent #NobelPrize wins.

Title slide reading "A Snapshot of PRL's Nobel Legacy" with a swirling blue and green particle image inside an oval frame, and "Swipe for discoveries through the years" below it with a forward-arrow icon. Two entries are shown: “2025, Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling,” illustrated with a schematic of an apparatus with a Pt-195 NMR thermometer, citing PRL 53 1260 (1984), PRL 55 1543 (1985), and PRL 55 1908 (1985); and “2023, Attosecond Pulses,” illustrated with a diagram of a wave packet and two green V-shaped curves, one straight and one tilted, with pink spheres above, citing PRL 42 1127 (1979), PRL 48 1814 (1982), PRL 73 2180 (1994), PRL 77 1234 (1996), and PRL 81 297 (1998).

Four Nobel-linked discoveries: “2022, Quantum Nonlocality,” illustrated with a schematic of a photon entanglement experiment using polarizing beam splitters and detectors, citing PRL 23 880 (1969), PRL 28 938 (1972), PRL 47 460 (1981), PRL 49 91 & 1804 (1982), PRL 71 4287 (1993), PRL 80 3891 (1998), and PRL 81 1345 (1999). “2021, Complex Systems,” illustrated with a grid of green dots with arrows showing a disordered spin system, citing PRL 43 1754 (1979), PRL 50 1946 (1983), PRL 52 1156 (1984), PRL 109 205501 (2012), and PRL 127 038001 (2021). “2020, Black Hole Formation,” illustrated with an artist's rendering of warped spacetime around a glowing blue sphere, citing PRL 10 66 (1963) and PRL 14 57 (1965). “2019, Cosmology,” illustrated with a split image of a smooth sphere transitioning into a starry, clustered universe, citing PRL 16 410 (1966).

Four Nobel-linked discoveries: “2018, Optical Tweezers,” illustrated with a laser beam trapping a chain of green spheres, citing PRL 24 156 (1970), PRL 40 729 (1978), and PRL 57 314 (1986). “2017, Gravitational Waves,” illustrated with an artist's rendering of two orbiting compact objects warping a grid of spacetime, citing PRL 116 061102 & 241103 (2016) and PRL 118 221101 (2017). “2016, Topological Phases of Matter,” illustrated with a thermometer-style diagram showing matter transitioning through plasma, gas, liquid, solid, and quantum condensate states, citing PRL 39 1201 (1977), PRL 49 405 (1982), PRL 50 1153 (1983), and PRL 61 2015 (1988). “2015, Neutrino Oscillations,” illustrated with a photo of workers inside a large spherical particle detector, citing PRL 81 1562 (1998), PRL 87 071301 (2001), and PRL 89 011301 (2002).

Four Nobel-linked discoveries: “2014, Super Resolved Fluorescence Microscopy,” illustrated with a fluorescence microscopy image of a cell with red and green glowing branching structures, citing PRL 62 2535 (1989). “2013, Higgs Boson,” illustrated with a starburst labeled "Big Bang" connecting to a ball-in-a-bowl diagram labeled "10⁻¹¹ seconds," citing PRL 13 321 & 508 (1964). “2012, Manipulation of Individual Quantum States,” illustrated with a Schrödinger's-cat-style silhouette of a black cat and its shadow, citing PRL 76 1796 & 1800 (1996). “2011, Quasicrystals,” illustrated with a geometric tiling pattern of interlocking pentagons and rhombi, citing PRL 53 1951 (1984).

@physrevlett.aps.org Oct 2, 2026, 1:52 PM

Researchers observed a robust Chern insulating state at an even filling level in a rhombohedral octalayer graphene moiré superlattice with electric field-tunable chirality, offering a new potential route to zero-loss electronics.

Learn more: https://go.aps.org/471UswX

A visualization of the quantum anomalous Hall effect at an even filling factor (v = 2) in a rhombohedral octalayer graphene/hBN device, along with its intense competition with other surrounding correlated insulating states. In the middle is a 3D rendering of the
device structure. A moiré superlattice, consisting of eight stacked layers of hot pink spheres, is sandwiched between two thick, inner light pink and light blue hBn dielectric layers and two thin outer light purple graphite top and bottom gates. A curtain-shaped color contour map, which represents anti-symmetrized Hall resistance (Rxy) as a function of v and displacement field, frames the 3D rendering with thick symmetric blue and red curved lines under marbled patterns of red, white, and blue.

@physrevlett.aps.org Oct 1, 2026, 7:57 PM

Using a cold-atom quantum simulator with a tunable background field, researchers investigated false vacuum decay in a 1+1D U(1) lattice gauge theory and observed particle-antiparticle pair production.

More: https://go.aps.org/46QxiJU

Two scientific schematics that depict false vacuum decay and implementation of target U(1) quantum link model, abbreviated QLM. On the top is a schematic of the mapping between the Bose-Hubbard model, abbreviated BHM, and QLM. BHM parameters U, J, δ and ∆ denote on-site interaction, hopping amplitude, staggered energy offset, and linear tilt, respectively. Legends indicate the mapped gauge links, shown as arrows, and matter fields, shown as circles. The BHM hopping |..20..⟩ ↔ |..11..⟩ drives the QLM matter-gauge coupling. Tuning δ ̸= 0 breaks the Z2 vacuum degeneracy, effectively introducing a background electric field h. Below is an illustration of false vacuum decay. A particle pair forms virtually from the false vacuum, energy cost 2m−h, and expands. The initial state eventually decays into a resonant bubble of true vacuum between the pair whose energy matches that of the initial state.

@physrevlett.aps.org Oct 1, 2026, 5:46 PM

A topological insulator realized in a silicon phononic metamaterial shows impurity-induced ring states for the first time in the presence of strong local impurities, indicating its topology. The method is a powerful tool to characterize complex systems.

🔗 https://go.aps.org/4hzwfTt

A micrograph of metamaterial architecture (purple) with repeating cross-shaped elements and circular nodes, and the connecting arms fabricated by through-wafer deep reactive ion etching, with a scale bar showing 1.8mm.

@physrevlett.aps.org Oct 1, 2026, 3:29 PM

A unified microscopic theory reveals that the observed strong dielectric anisotropy and enhanced in-plane conductivity in nanoconfined water arise from strong in-plane polarization correlations in the hydrogen-bond network.

Learn more: https://go.aps.org/4AJFhWH

A schematic showing nanoconfined water, illustrating enhanced in-plane proton transport and the dependence of the parallel and perpendicular dielectric responses on channel height.

@physrevlett.aps.org Sep 29, 2026, 7:17 PM

Using scramblon theory, researchers find that errors in chaotic quantum systems accumulate with different scalings, with coherent errors accumulating faster than incoherent ones.

Read the Letter: https://go.aps.org/3TTlqDY

An illustration with five gray circles each filled with smaller orange or green circles intersected by black arrows. The two orange-filled gray circles are on the top and the three green-filled gray circles are on the bottom. An icon of a butterfly and its flight path divide the two halves of the image. The illustration depicts how two rounds of forward and backward evolution show increasing deviation from the initial state as errors are amplified by the quantum butterfly effect.

@physrevlett.aps.org Sep 29, 2026, 4:57 PM

An X-ray diffractions analysis shows the charge-density-wave in FeGe couples to a first-order structural phase transition — results that have implications for lattice-charge coupling in kagome systems.

Read the Letter: https://go.aps.org/4hrYxze

A series of four molecular diagrams (a-d) displaying the structure of FeGe in the AFM state. The structure is portrayed as lattices and arrays of various atoms represented as colored circles of varying sizes: Fe (orange), Ge1 (teal), Ge2 (purple), and Ge1d (green). Red arrows depict magnetic moments, while dotted lines depict the resulting kagome lattices. Small black arrows next to the atoms indicate the Ge dimerization direction. Panels a and b depict the FeGe structure above TCDW, and panels c and d depict the FeGe structure below TCDW.

@physrevlett.aps.org Sep 29, 2026, 2:54 PM

Using noise thermometry and a moiré heterostructure, scientists measure for the first time quantized heat transport in a Hofstadter butterfly, a finding that underscores the central role of topology in condensed matter.

Learn more: https://go.aps.org/4danNbY

$Scientific illustration of the signature of the fractal Hofstadter butterfly in the measured electrical conductance of a graphene-hexagonal boron nitride heterostructure.$

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