Physical Review E

The DSNP Dissertation Award Selection Committee presents the 2025 Award sponsored by Physical Review E.

Despite many models proposed to explain charging behavior between insulating particles, the mechanisms underlying triboelectric charging have remained an open question in nonequilibrium physics. This manuscript presents a new experimental method to measure charge transfer during collisions between individual pairs of levitated particles, showing that charge evolution saturates as predicted by the condenser model.

#AdvancingField #TimelyTopic #TheoryExperiment

Ocean oxygen as a potential Earth tipping element has been largely overlooked in the literature. This Perspective argues that a dynamical systems approach complemented with a mathematical model accounting for the oxygen production by phytoplankton photosynthesis can provide a valuable insight into this issue.

Using molecular dynamics simulations, the authors explore gelation in colloids tied together by reversible linkers. They find that different connectivity measures govern ordinary percolation, rigidity percolation, and rheological gelation.

#AdvancingField #WellStructured #SoftMatterSpotlight

Shape-optimized microfluidic channels enable high-throughput characterization of microscopic soft matter, providing precise spatiotemporal stress fields to bridge bulk mechanical measurements and single-particle dynamics.

Pretransitional fluctuations show that flexoelectric coupling between polarization and molecular shape drives achiral fluids to spontaneously form chiral heliconical structures through polar biaxial ordering.

#ElegantVisuals #TheoryExperiment #SoftMatterSpotlight

A simple three-parameter analytical model uses a phenomenologically motivated ansatz to describe the peak, duration, and temporal evolution of a single epidemic wave.

#WellStructured #ClearMotivation

Interactions in a plasma between microparticles of two different diameters are investigated. In these experiments, the smaller microparticles form a layer above the larger microparticles in the plasma sheath, and three-dimensional trajectories are determined from videos. The authors deduce ion-wake forces and microparticle charges from the measured oscillation frequencies.

#WellStructured

In this Letter, the authors present an asymptotic theory that incorporates link extensibility into discrete models of single-chain polymer thermodynamics. The resulting approximation is first-order accurate in inverse link stiffness, with quadratically decreasing error, and recovers extensible behavior across all link stiffnesses from a single rigid-link reference calculation.

#SoftMatterSpotlight #TechnicalAdvancement

By adjusting internal parameters, both living organisms and synthetic materials can optimize their behavior to execute complex tasks. This Perspective explores the physical algorithms driving “tunable matter” to learn or perform tasks and also outlines open questions for researchers in this interdisciplinary field.

Large-scale Monte Carlo simulations of $p$-spin glass models show no evidence of replica symmetry breaking, suggesting that three-dimensional structural glasses lack a finite-temperature thermodynamic phase transition.

#OpenDebate #ClassicProblem #WellStructured

By embedding temporal data into quantum coherent states, researchers use system-time entanglement entropy to map dynamical regimes and quantify financial volatility.

#Interdisciplinary

Thermal convection brings fluid motion to every dimension of our planet, Through lab-scale experiments, numerical simulations, and physics-informed models, new perspectives on thermally convective fluid-structure interactions emerge.

Measuring entropy in nonequilibrium physical systems poses challenges that go far beyond conventional entropy estimation. Recent physics-informed approaches are overcoming these challenges and providing new ways to detect and understand nonequilibrium transitions in systems ranging from jammed packings to swarming bacteria.

Recent analyses have demonstrated that aging is associated with a loss of information within gene regulatory networks. In this article, a simple theoretical framework is developed for information transmission in gene regulatory networks and this framework is applied to gene expression data from muscle cells in young and old mice. The authors predict how much of the lost information is restored by “knocking in” (exogenously expressing) each gene and find that single knock-ins can restore network information by up to 10%.

#BiophysicsSpotlight #ClearMotivation

We are happy to share the winning entries of the Fifth Gallery of Soft Matter in this PRE Guest Editorial. They feature images and videos of avalanching photoelastic grains, swelling seeds that wrinkle as they raft on water, self-assembled networks of DNA and starch, and biodegradable yarns knitted from algae.

The leadership of the APS Division of Computational Physics presents its 2025 Rahman and Metropolis Awards.