This month we celebrate Nature Physics' twentieth birthday, consider the flexoelectricity of water ice, and feature a Perspective on chiral phonons. Have a look at go.nature.com/NPoct25

Controlling quantum chaos requires using measurement and feedback that survive noise and decoherence. Such control is now achieved in a superconducting quantum processor and reveals a critical transition between quantum and classical dynamics. nature.com/articles/s41567-0…

In bulk materials, excitonic condensation is hard to separate from charge-density-wave formation. Now short-range excitonic correlations are revealed above the transition temperature in 1T-TiSe₂ via few-femtosecond extreme-ultraviolet spectroscopy. nature.com/articles/s41567-0…

Graph states entangle many photons in a special structure that is useful for several quantum protocols. Making graph states is often probabilistic and inefficient, but now a deterministic approach using superconducting qubits has been demonstrated. nature.com/articles/s41567-0…

The continuous energy injection in active fluids leads to active turbulence. Now, geometric and mechanical analyses reveal a phase transition that leads to fully developed active turbulence. nature.com/articles/s41567-0…

The trajectories of embedded particles provide a route for probing fluid flow dynamics. An X-ray scatter microscopy approach that enables precise monitoring of non-sphericalnanoparticles now reveals multiscale dynamics in complex fluids. nature.com/articles/s41567-0…

The application of ideas from topological band theory to reaction pathways in molecular systems with strong electronic interactions is challenging. Now, a many-body framework based on Green’s functions is introduced to solve this problem. nature.com/articles/s41567-0…

Decoherence and decay of quantum systems arise from interactions with their environment that can be highly complex. Despite this complexity, bounds on the decay rate are found that are asymptotically tight in several important cases. nature.com/articles/s41567-0…

Many physical systems involve bosons, which are resource-intensive to simulate with a qubit-based quantum computer. Now a hybrid approach that combines qubits and bosons has been used to simulate a quantum field theory of fermions and bosons. nature.com/articles/s41567-0…

Vortex motion and heating prevent direct-current measurements from reaching the intrinsic depairing limit of type-II superconductors. Picosecond pulses bypass these effects and reveal a sharp threshold in NbN but gradual pair breaking in YBa₂Cu₃O₇. nature.com/articles/s41567-0…

The origin of the strange metal state is still not known. Now, numerical results suggest that it follows from the quantum statistics of charge carriers, not the temperature dependence of the processes that scatter them. nature.com/articles/s41567-0…

Regular and chaotic trajectories can coexist in classical systems, but identifying an equivalent in quantum many-body dynamics is difficult. A feedback protocol on a superconducting processor now reveals and stabilizes such mixed dynamics. nature.com/articles/s41567-0…

Studies of many-body physics have indicated that thermalization processes are bounded by a timescale determined by Planck’s constant. Such a bound has now been proved to apply in general using techniques from quantum information theory. nature.com/articles/s41567-0…

The study of string breaking in gauge theories involves the real-time evolution of charges, which is difficult to simulate. Spatiotemporal dynamics of string breaking in a one-dimensional gauge model have now been observed in a trapped-ion platform. nature.com/articles/s41567-0…

𝘔𝘺𝘹𝘰𝘤𝘰𝘤𝘤𝘶𝘴 𝘹𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘩𝘶𝘴 is a bacterial predator that can transition between swarming and rippling behaviours. It is now shown that this transition occurs owing to a combination of local cellular alignment and cell reversal. nature.com/articles/s41567-0…

When sliding along an insulating surface, liquid drops become charged. Experiments with self-ionizing and non-polar liquids on different substrates suggest the competition of at least two underlying mechanisms. nature.com/articles/s41567-0…

A high-intensity, superthermal beam is generated by extracting muonium from a thin layer of superfluid helium. This beam can be used for tests of gravity and laser spectroscopy. nature.com/articles/s41567-0…

Conformal field theories have a central role in statistical and high-energy theoretical physics. An algorithm to systematically generate critical lattice models described by different conformal field theories has now been identified. nature.com/articles/s41567-0…

Quantum simulations of field-theory scattering require preparing particles and following their collision dynamics. A digital quantum simulation now reveals the inelastic production of particles in one-dimensional Ising field theory. nature.com/articles/s41567-0…

Wave propagation in irregular cavities made from conventional isotropic media is typically chaotic. Now odd-shaped cavities made from hyperbolic metamaterials are shown to suppress chaotic wave dynamics and produce stable geometric wave patterns. nature.com/articles/s41567-0…

Lattice gauge theories are difficult to study using classical computational methods. A dynamic quantum simulation of a lattice gauge theory on a two-site loop has now been demonstrated using a hybrid qubit–oscillator trapped-ion quantum computer. nature.com/articles/s41567-0…