Matter waves constitute a crucial feature of quantum mechanics, in which particles have wave properties in addition to particle characteristics. This wave-particle duality was postulated in 1924 by the French physicist Louis de Broglie. The existence of the wave property of matter has been successfully demonstrated in a number of experiments with electrons and neutrons, as well as with more complex matter, up to large molecules.

The April 15 fire that devastated the roof of the 850-year-old Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral left many people around the globe wondering whether it's possible to rebuild it in a way that can recreate the cultural icon's complex signature acoustics.

Magnetic skyrmions are tiny entities, manifesting in magnetic materials that consist of localized twists in the magnetization direction of the medium. Each skyrmion is highly stable because eliminating it requires untwisting the magnetization direction of the material, just as a knot on a string can only be untied by pulling the rest of the string out of the knot.

Physicists have developed a method based on the principles of holograms to capture 3D images of objects beyond the reach of light.

Graphene is an extraordinary material consisting of pure carbon just a single atomic layer thick. It is extremely stable, strong and conductive. In electronics, however, graphene has crucial disadvantages. It cannot be used as a semiconductor, since it has no bandgap. Now researchers have produced an ''atomic scale movie'' showing how hydrogen atoms can chemically bind to graphene to produce a bandgap in one of the fastest reactions ever studied.

A photodetector converts light into an electrical signal, causing the light to be lost. Researchers have now built a quantum sensor that can measure light particles non-destructively. It can be used to further investigate the quantum properties of light.

When exposed to intense laser pulses, the magnetization of a material can be manipulated very fast. Fundamentally, magnetization is connected to the angular momentum of the electrons in the material. A team of researchers led by scientists from the Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy (MBI) has now been able to follow the flow of angular momentum during ultrafast optical demagnetization in a ferrimagnetic iron-gadolinium alloy in great detail, in order to understand the fundamental processes and their speed limits.

Currently, information on a computer is encoded by magnetic fields, a process that requires substantial energy and generates waste heat. Researchers have confirmed that bismuth ferrite could store information cheaply and with less wasted energy.

Shock wave studies allow researchers to achieve the warm dense matter that's found only in the extreme conditions around stars and created in the laboratory for inertial confinement fusion research, and researchers recently set out to understand the relation, if any, between the evolution of a shock wave and the expansion of the exploding wire.

Researchers at the University of Bristol have successfully demonstrated the high thermal conductivity of a new material, paving the way for safer and more efficient electronic devices – including mobile phones, radars and even electric cars.