APS Open Science

In this editorial, Badreddine Assouar—chief editor of APS Open Science—introduces the inaugural papers from the American Physical Society’s newest open access, community driven journal for research at every step of discovery.

Bohmian mechanics describes quantum motion as deterministic trajectories steered by the score — the gradient of the log-density. Here, a neural network learns that score on the very trajectories it drives, turning the Schrödinger equation into a self-consistent normalizing flow. This approach opens real-time quantum dynamics to modern generative modeling.

To help overcome the efficiency limits of 215 nm deep-ultraviolet emitters, researchers have mapped the exact non-radiative recombination channels in Ga0.2Al0.8N-AlN quantum wells. They reveal that structural defects, exciton dissociation, and carrier escape all play distinct, quantifiable roles in thermal quenching.

This study uncovers a missing link in the charge dynamics of carrier-doped Mott insulators by mapping collective charge excitations in electron-doped cuprates across a broad doping range. The findings establish a unified framework for lattice-plasmon hybridization, offering fresh insight into the correlated electronic landscape of high-temperature superconductors.

Extending magnetic quantum mechanics to polyhedral geometries, this work investigates both continuum particle dynamics and lattice Hofstadter physics on a cube enclosing a magnetic monopole. The authors uncover localized gap states near the cube’s corners alongside classic magnetic subband structures, highlighting the impact of vertex coordination.

If the 220 PeV KM3NeT neutrino is a two-body decay line from a long-lived dark-matter bound state, its energy fixes the relic mass, its flux the lifetime, and the lifetime the mass of the mediator that lets the relic decay: 10¹⁴ to 10¹⁶ GeV, the Majorana-mass window of unified models. Future events will test this reading against a flaring astrophysical source.

This paper demonstrates that a reciprocal one-dimensional lattice with conserved internal rotation supports an unbounded, integer-graded non-Hermitian skin effect. Rather than breaking reciprocity, the system’s angular momentum channels act as independent directional chains, with conjugate channels accumulating at opposite boundaries to balance the system globally.

Researchers have created non-diffracting free-electron wave packets that carry tunable skyrmion and meron spin textures encoded within individual electron wavefunctions. By engineering the electron’s spatiotemporal spectrum, these matter waves exhibit propagation-invariant topological structures, bridging structured light concepts with free-electron quantum optics.

New simulations of spinor Bose-Einstein condensates reveal that spin interactions fundamentally alter how solitary waves interact, causing otherwise stable bound states to break apart. This escape dynamics is driven by continuous particle exchange between hyperfine states, a phenomenon successfully mapped by a newly proposed classical Lagrangian model.

In the study the authors use network analysis to reveal that artificial intelligence systems sustain significantly higher and longer-lasting strategic tension in chess compared to human grandmasters. This finding highlights a fundamental difference in competitive decision-making, where AI maintains dense tactical complexities while human players systematically simplify the board.

As quantum technologies advance toward miniaturization, understanding the energetic limits of quantum information processing becomes essential. This work establishes an operational characterization of the free energy of quantum processes, providing a unified framework to quantify the optimal work gain or expenditure for manipulating channels, states, and measurements.

Measuring fluid velocities in rapidly rotating, thermally driven flows is challenging because conventional particle-tracking methods can be impractical, especially in planetary fluid dynamics experiments involving curved boundaries. Researchers address this problem with a new thermal image velocimetry (TIV) formulation, which uses dense optical flow to track evolving free-surface temperature patterns instead of suspended particles. The approach provides accurate velocity measurements while circumventing many of the optical constraints of traditional visualization methods, thus, broadening the experimental toolkit for probing the complex dynamics of rotating convective turbulence.