Rayleigh-Bénard convection is the flow in a closed box heated from below and cooled from above. The ultimate regime of Rayleigh-Bénard turbulence occurs when the dimensionless temperature difference between the bottom and top plates is large.

Conny Aerts is a Full Professor at the Institute of Astronomy, KU Leuven and received her Ph.D. from KU Leuven in 1993.

Marie-Catherine Vozenin explains why an interdisciplinary approach is key to taking a promising experimental radiotherapy cancer treatment from the lab to the clinic.

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Marie-Catherine Vozenin et al.
Rev. Mod. Phys. 96, 035002 (2024)

Treating cancer with ionizing radiation has been pursued for nearly a century. A key challenge has been finding the right balance between providing enough dose to kill the cancer cells while minimizing the damage to normal ones. The discovery of the so-called FLASH effect, where short radiation bursts allow for higher lethal doses to be delivered to cancer cells while sparing healthy tissue, opens up the therapeutic window and ushers in a new era for radiation therapy. In this review multidisciplinary aspects are discussed of dose delivery, the chemistry and biology behind the effect, and readiness for clinical deployment.

The 2023 Nobel Prize for Physics was shared by Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L’Huillier. These papers are the text of the addresses given in conjunction with the award.

Nobel Lecture: Genesis and applications of attosecond pulse trains

Nobel Lecture: Sub-atomic motions

Nobel Lecture: The route to attosecond pulses

The numerical treatment of quantum systems often requires large amounts of computing power and time. As a result, performing calculations repeatedly for different values of the input parameters is often not feasible. One remedy is using eigenvectors describing the system that are analytic functions that vary smoothly for real values of the input parameters. This allows one to replace computationally expensive calculations with emulators that project onto a reduced-basis set. This Colloquium explores a particular class of reduced-basis methods known as eigenvector continuation and its applications, with emphasis on nuclear physics.

Vivien Zapf is a condensed matter experimentalist at the National High Magnetic Field Lab at Los Alamos National Lab where she has worked since 2004. She studies magnetic materials, in particular quantum magnetism and magnetoelectric coupling and specializes in thermodynamic and magnetoelectric measurements at low and high magnetic fields.

Rayleigh-Bénard convection is the flow in a closed box heated from below and cooled from above. The ultimate regime of Rayleigh-Bénard turbulence occurs when the dimensionless temperature difference between the bottom and top plates is large. This review gives a comprehensive overview of the theoretical approaches to the ultimate regime and of the experimental and numerical results on the transition to this regime. These are reconciled by realizing that the transition is of non-normal–nonlinear nature, as typical for the laminar to turbulent transition in shear flow. The review also suggests experimental and numerical approaches to further understand the transition to the ultimate regime.

The policy requires authors to explain where research data can be found starting Sept. 4.

Storage of energy in quantum devices is of practical relevance for applications in quantum technologies. The topic attracts attention also of a more foundational character due to the possibility that the charging power and work extraction can benefit from quantum coherence and collective effects. This Colloquium reviews theoretical concepts and experimental implementations of energy storage in quantum batteries drawing on work in quantum thermodynamics and quantum information science.

When determining the authorship list for your next paper, be generous yet disciplined.

APS has selected 156 Outstanding Referees for 2024 who have demonstrated exceptional work in the assessment of manuscripts published in the Physical Review journals. A full list of the Outstanding Referees is available online.

While the first law of thermodynamics is a well-established principle underlying all models of Earth’s climate system, applications of the second law in climate science are active areas of research. This review summarizes how the relationships between Earth’s entropy export and internal entropy production provide insights into Earth’s climate. These applications include heat-engine analogs for atmospheric convection, tropical cyclones, and large-scale atmospheric heat transport. Open issues addressed include the ongoing debate on whether the climate system maximizes entropy production.

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Lead Editor, Randall D. Kamien and new Colloquium Editor, Dietrich Belitz, discuss the role of Colloquia in Reviews of Modern Physics.