Kamihara and coworkers’ report of superconductivity at $T_c=26\mathrm{K}$ in fluorine-doped LaFeAsO inspired a worldwide effort to understand the nature of the superconductivity in this new class of compounds. These iron pnictide and chalcogenide (FePn/Ch) superconductors have Fe electrons at the Fermi surface, plus an unusual Fermiology that can change rapidly with doping, which lead to normal and superconducting state properties very different from those in standard electron-phonon coupled “conventional” superconductors. Clearly, superconductivity and magnetism or magnetic fluctuations are intimately related in the FePn/Ch, and even coexist in some. Open questions, including the superconducting nodal structure in a number of compounds, abound and are often dependent on improved sample quality for their solution. With $T_c$ values up to 56 K, the six distinct Fe-containing superconducting structures exhibit complex but often comparable behaviors. The search for correlations and explanations in this fascinating field of research would benefit from an organization of the large, seemingly disparate data set. This review provides an overview, using numerous references, with a focus on the materials and their superconductivity.

A novel method of studying $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ annihilation into hadrons using initial state radiation at $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ colliders is described. After a brief history of the method, its theoretical foundations are considered. Numerous experiments in which exclusive cross sections of $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ annihilation into hadrons below the center-of-mass energy of 5 GeV have been measured are presented. Some applications of the experimental results to fundamental tests of the standard model are listed.

The physics of one-dimensional interacting bosonic systems is reviewed. Beginning with results from exactly solvable models and computational approaches, the concept of bosonic Tomonaga-Luttinger liquids relevant for one-dimensional Bose fluids is introduced, and compared with Bose-Einstein condensates existing in dimensions higher than one. The effects of various perturbations on the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid state are discussed as well as extensions to multicomponent and out of equilibrium situations. Finally, the experimental systems that can be described in terms of models of interacting bosons in one dimension are discussed.

When a neutral atom moves in a properly designed laser field, its center-of-mass motion may mimic the dynamics of a charged particle in a magnetic field, with the emergence of a Lorentz-like force. In this Colloquium the physical principles at the basis of this artificial (synthetic) magnetism are presented. The corresponding Aharonov-Bohm phase is related to the Berry’s phase that emerges when the atom adiabatically follows one of the dressed states of the atom-laser interaction. Some manifestations of artificial magnetism for a cold quantum gas, in particular, in terms of vortex nucleation are discussed. The analysis is then generalized to the simulation of non-Abelian gauge potentials and some striking consequences are presented, such as the emergence of an effective spin-orbit coupling. Both the cases of bulk gases and discrete systems, where atoms are trapped in an optical lattice, are addressed.

Shape coexistence in nuclei appears to be unique in the realm of finite many-body quantum systems. It differs from the various geometrical arrangements that sometimes occur in a molecule in that in a molecule the various arrangements are of the widely separated atomic nuclei. In nuclei the various “arrangements” of nucleons involve (sets of) energy eigenstates with different electric quadrupole properties such as moments and transition rates, and different distributions of proton pairs and neutron pairs with respect to their Fermi energies. Sometimes two such structures will “invert” as a function of the nucleon number, resulting in a sudden and dramatic change in ground-state properties in neighboring isotopes and isotones. In the first part of this review the theoretical status of coexistence in nuclei is summarized. Two approaches, namely, microscopic shell-model descriptions and mean-field descriptions, are emphasized. The second part of this review presents systematic data, for both even- and odd-mass nuclei, selected to illustrate the various ways in which coexistence is observed in nuclei. The last part of this review looks to future developments and the issue of the universality of coexistence in nuclei. Surprises continue to be discovered. With the major advances in reaching to extremes of proton-neutron number, and the anticipated new “rare isotope beam” facilities, guidelines for search and discovery are discussed.

The dynamic properties of interfaces often play a crucial role in the macroscopic dynamics of multiphase soft condensed matter systems. These properties affect the dynamics of emulsions, of dispersions of vesicles, of biological fluids, of coatings, of free surface flows, of immiscible polymer blends, and of many other complex systems. The study of interfacial dynamic properties, surface rheology, is therefore a relevant discipline for many branches of physics, chemistry, engineering, and life sciences. In the past three to four decades a vast amount of literature has been produced dealing with the rheological properties of interfaces stabilized by low molecular weight surfactants, proteins, (bio)polymers, lipids, colloidal particles, and various mixtures of these surface active components. In this paper recent experiments are reviewed in the field of surface rheology, with particular emphasis on the models used to analyze surface rheological data. Most of the models currently used are straightforward generalizations of models developed for the analysis of rheological data of bulk phases. In general the limits on the validity of these generalizations are not discussed. Not much use is being made of recent advances in nonequilibrium thermodynamic formalisms for multiphase systems, to construct admissible models for the stress-deformation behavior of interfaces. These formalisms are ideally suited to construct thermodynamically admissible constitutive equations for rheological behavior that include the often relevant couplings to other fluxes in the interface (heat and mass), and couplings to the transfer of mass from the bulk phase to the interface. In this review recent advances in the application of classical irreversible thermodynamics, extended irreversible thermodynamics, rational thermodynamics, extended rational thermodynamics, and the general equation for the nonequilibrium reversible-irreversible coupling formalism to multiphase systems are also discussed, and shown how these formalisms can be used to generate a wide range of thermodynamically admissible constitutive models for the surface stress tensor. Some of the generalizations currently in use are shown to have only limited validity. The aim of this review is to stimulate new developments in the fields of experimental surface rheology and constitutive modeling of multiphase systems using nonequilibrium thermodynamic formalisms and to promote a closer integration of these disciplines.

Rotating-drum flows span a variety of research areas, ranging from physics of granular matter through hydrodynamics of suspensions to pure liquid coating flows. Recent years have seen an intensified scientific activity associated with this unique geometrical configuration, which has contributed to our understanding of related subjects such as avalanches in granules and segregation in suspensions. The existing literature related to rotating-drum flows is reviewed, highlighting similarities and differences between the various flow realizations. Scaling laws expressing the importance of different mechanisms underlying the observed phenomena have been focused on. An emphasis is placed on pattern formation phenomena. Rotating-drum flows exhibit stationary patterns as well as traveling and oscillating patterns; they exhibit reversible transitions as well as hysteresis. Apart from the predominant cylindrical configuration, this review covers recent work done with tumblers having other geometries, such as the sphere and the Hele-Shaw cell.

This Colloquium reviews the 25 year quest to understand the continuous (second-order), mean-field-like phase transition occurring at 17.5 K in ${\mathrm{URu}}_2{\mathrm{Si}}_2$. About ten years ago, the term “hidden order” (HO) was coined and has since been utilized to describe the unknown ordered state, whose origin cannot be disclosed by conventional solid-state probes, such as x rays, neutrons, or muons. The HO is able to support superconductivity at lower temperatures ($T_c\approx 1.5\mathrm{K}$), and when magnetism is developed with increasing pressure both the HO and the superconductivity are destroyed. Other ways of probing the HO are via Rh doping and large magnetic fields. During the last few years a variety of advanced techniques have been tested to probe the HO state and these attempts will be summarized. A digest of recent theoretical developments is also included. It is the objective of this Colloquium to shed additional light on the HO state and its associated phases in other materials.

The distribution and heritability of many traits depends on numerous loci in the genome. In general, the astronomical number of possible genotypes makes the system with large numbers of loci difficult to describe. Multilocus evolution, however, greatly simplifies in the limit of weak selection and frequent recombination. In this limit, populations rapidly reach quasilinkage equilibrium (QLE) in which the dynamics of the full genotype distribution, including correlations between alleles at different loci, can be parametrized by the allele frequencies. This review provides a simplified exposition of the concept and mathematics of QLE which is central to the statistical description of genotypes in sexual populations. Key results of quantitative genetics such as the generalized Fisher’s “fundamental theorem,” along with Wright’s adaptive landscape, are shown to emerge within QLE from the dynamics of the genotype distribution. This is followed by a discussion under what circumstances QLE is applicable, and what the breakdown of QLE implies for the population structure and the dynamics of selection. Understanding the fundamental aspects of multilocus evolution obtained through simplified models may be helpful in providing conceptual and computational tools to address the challenges arising in the studies of complex quantitative phenotypes of practical interest.

The health risks of space radiation are arguably the most serious challenge to space exploration, possibly preventing these missions due to safety concerns or increasing their costs to amounts beyond what would be acceptable. Radiation in space is substantially different from Earth: high-energy ($E$) and charge ($Z$) particles (HZE) provide the main contribution to the equivalent dose in deep space, whereas $\gamma$ rays and low-energy $\alpha$ particles are major contributors on Earth. This difference causes a high uncertainty on the estimated radiation health risk (including cancer and noncancer effects), and makes protection extremely difficult. In fact, shielding is very difficult in space: the very high energy of the cosmic rays and the severe mass constraints in spaceflight represent a serious hindrance to effective shielding. Here the physical basis of space radiation protection is described, including the most recent achievements in space radiation transport codes and shielding approaches. Although deterministic and Monte Carlo transport codes can now describe well the interaction of cosmic rays with matter, more accurate double-differential nuclear cross sections are needed to improve the codes. Energy deposition in biological molecules and related effects should also be developed to achieve accurate risk models for long-term exploratory missions. Passive shielding can be effective for solar particle events; however, it is limited for galactic cosmic rays (GCR). Active shielding would have to overcome challenging technical hurdles to protect against GCR. Thus, improved risk assessment and genetic and biomedical approaches are a more likely solution to GCR radiation protection issues.

The basic aspects of electrons in graphene (two-dimensional graphite) exposed to a strong perpendicular magnetic field are reviewed. One of its most salient features is the relativistic quantum Hall effect, the observation of which has been the experimental breakthrough in identifying pseudorelativistic massless charge carriers as the low-energy excitations in graphene. The effect may be understood in terms of Landau quantization for massless Dirac fermions, which is also the theoretical basis for the understanding of more involved phenomena due to electronic interactions. The role of electron-electron interactions both in the weak-coupling limit, where the electron-hole excitations are determined by collective modes, and in the strong-coupling regime of partially filled relativistic Landau levels are presented. In the latter limit, exotic ferromagnetic phases and incompressible quantum liquids are expected to be at the origin of recently observed (fractional) quantum Hall states. Furthermore, the electron-phonon coupling in a strong magnetic field is discussed. Although the present review has a dominant theoretical character, a close connection with available experimental observation is intended.

The decay of the free neutron into a proton, electron, and antineutrino is the prototype semileptonic weak decay and is the simplest example of nuclear beta decay. It played a key role in the early Universe as it determined the ratio of neutrons to protons during the era of primordial light element nucleosynthesis. Neutron decay is physically related to important processes in solar physics and neutrino detection. The mean neutron lifetime has been the subject of more than 20 major experiments done, using a variety of methods, between 1950 and the present. The most precise recent measurements have stated accuracies approaching 0.1%, but are not in good agreement as they differ by as much as $5\sigma$ using quoted uncertainties. The history of neutron lifetime measurements is reviewed and the different methods used are described, giving important examples of each. The discrepancies and some systematic issues in the experiments that may be responsible are discussed, and it is shown by means of global averages that the neutron lifetime is likely to lie in the range of 880–884 s. Plans and prospects for future experiments are considered that will address these systematic issues and improve our knowledge of the neutron lifetime.

Experiments with cold and ultracold neutrons have reached a level of precision such that problems far beyond the scale of the present standard model of particle physics become accessible to experimental investigation. Because of the close links between particle physics and cosmology, these studies also permit a deep look into the very first instances of our Universe. First addressed in this article, in both theory and experiment, is the problem of baryogenesis, the mechanism behind the evident dominance of matter over antimatter in the Universe. The question of how baryogenesis could have happened is open to experimental tests, and it turns out that this problem can be curbed by the very stringent limits on an electric dipole moment of the neutron, a quantity that also has deep implications for particle physics. Then the recent spectacular observation of neutron quantization in the Earth’s gravitational field and of resonance transitions between such gravitational energy states is discussed. These measurements, together with new evaluations of neutron scattering data, set new constraints on deviations from Newton’s gravitational law at the picometer scale. Such deviations are predicted in modern theories with extra dimensions that propose unification of the Planck scale with the scale of the standard model. These experiments start closing the remaining “axion window” on new spin-dependent forces in the submillimeter range. Another main topic is the weak-interaction parameters in various fields of physics and astrophysics that must all be derived from measured neutron-decay data. Up until now, about 10 different neutron-decay observables have been measured, much more than needed in the electroweak standard model. This allows various precise tests for new physics beyond the standard model, competing with or surpassing similar tests at high energy. The review ends with a discussion of neutron and nuclear data required in the synthesis of the elements during the “first three minutes” and later on in stellar nucleosynthesis.

Topological insulators are new states of quantum matter which cannot be adiabatically connected to conventional insulators and semiconductors. They are characterized by a full insulating gap in the bulk and gapless edge or surface states which are protected by time-reversal symmetry. These topological materials have been theoretically predicted and experimentally observed in a variety of systems, including HgTe quantum wells, BiSb alloys, and ${\mathrm{Bi}}_2{\mathrm{Te}}_3$ and ${\mathrm{Bi}}_2{\mathrm{Se}}_3$ crystals. Theoretical models, materials properties, and experimental results on two-dimensional and three-dimensional topological insulators are reviewed, and both the topological band theory and the topological field theory are discussed. Topological superconductors have a full pairing gap in the bulk and gapless surface states consisting of Majorana fermions. The theory of topological superconductors is reviewed, in close analogy to the theory of topological insulators.

The first $\gamma$-ray line originating from outside the Solar System that was ever detected is the 511 keV emission from positron annihilation in the Galaxy. Despite 30 years of intense theoretical and observational investigation, the main sources of positrons have not been identified up to now. Observations in the 1990s with OSSE/CGRO (Oriented Scintillation Spectrometer Experiment on GRO satellite/Compton Gamma Ray Observatory) showed that the emission is strongly concentrated toward the Galactic bulge. In the 2000s, the spectrometer SPI aboard the European Space Agency’s (ESA) International Gamma Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL) allowed scientists to measure that emission across the entire Galaxy, revealing that the bulge-to-disk luminosity ratio is larger than observed at any other wavelength. This mapping prompted a number of novel explanations, including rather “exotic” ones (e.g., dark matter annihilation). However, conventional astrophysical sources, such as type Ia supernovae, microquasars, or x-ray binaries, are still plausible candidates for a large fraction of the observed total 511 keV emission of the bulge. A closer study of the subject reveals new layers of complexity, since positrons may propagate far away from their production sites, making it difficult to infer the underlying source distribution from the observed map of 511 keV emission. However, in contrast to the rather well-understood propagation of high-energy ($>\mathrm{GeV}$) particles of Galactic cosmic rays, understanding the propagation of low-energy ($\sim \mathrm{MeV}$) positrons in the turbulent, magnetized interstellar medium still remains a formidable challenge. The spectral and imaging properties of the observed 511 keV emission are reviewed and candidate positron sources and models of positron propagation in the Galaxy are critically discussed.

Bayesian inference provides a consistent method for the extraction of information from physics experiments even in ill-conditioned circumstances. The approach provides a unified rationale for data analysis, which both justifies many of the commonly used analysis procedures and reveals some of the implicit underlying assumptions. This review summarizes the general ideas of the Bayesian probability theory with emphasis on the application to the evaluation of experimental data. As case studies for Bayesian parameter estimation techniques examples ranging from extra-solar planet detection to the deconvolution of the apparatus functions for improving the energy resolution and change point estimation in time series are discussed. Special attention is paid to the numerical techniques suited for Bayesian analysis, with a focus on recent developments of Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms for high-dimensional integration problems. Bayesian model comparison, the quantitative ranking of models for the explanation of a given data set, is illustrated with examples collected from cosmology, mass spectroscopy, and surface physics, covering problems such as background subtraction and automated outlier detection. Additionally the Bayesian inference techniques for the design and optimization of future experiments are introduced. Experiments, instead of being merely passive recording devices, can now be designed to adapt to measured data and to change the measurement strategy on the fly to maximize the information of an experiment. The applied key concepts and necessary numerical tools which provide the means of designing such inference chains and the crucial aspects of data fusion are summarized and some of the expected implications are highlighted.

This is a review of the most resent results from the investigation of the ultrahigh energy cosmic rays, particles of energy exceeding ${10}^{18}\mathrm{eV}$. After a general introduction to the topic and a brief review of the lower energy cosmic rays and the detection methods, the two most recent experiments, the High Resolution Fly’s Eye and the Southern Auger Observatory, are described. Results from these two experiments on the cosmic ray energy spectrum, the chemical composition of these cosmic rays, and searches for their sources are presented. An analysis of the controversies in these results and the projects in development and construction that can help solve the remaining problems with these particles is also presented.

The current understanding of some important nonlinear collective processes in quantum plasmas with degenerate electrons is presented. After reviewing the basic properties of quantum plasmas, model equations (e.g., the quantum hydrodynamic and effective nonlinear Schrödinger-Poisson equations) are presented that describe collective nonlinear phenomena at nanoscales. The effects of the electron degeneracy arise due to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Pauli’s exclusion principle for overlapping electron wave functions that result in tunneling of electrons and the electron degeneracy pressure. Since electrons are Fermions (spin-$1/2$ quantum particles), there also appears an electron spin current and a spin force acting on electrons due to the Bohr magnetization. The quantum effects produce new aspects of electrostatic (ES) and electromagnetic (EM) waves in a quantum plasma that are summarized in here. Furthermore, nonlinear features of ES ion waves and electron plasma oscillations are discussed, as well as the trapping of intense EM waves in quantum electron-density cavities. Specifically, simulation studies of the coupled nonlinear Schrödinger and Poisson equations reveal the formation and dynamics of localized ES structures at nanoscales in a quantum plasma. The effect of an external magnetic field on the plasma wave spectra and develop quantum magnetohydrodynamic equations are also discussed. The results are useful for understanding numerous collective phenomena in quantum plasmas, such as those in compact astrophysical objects (e.g., the cores of white dwarf stars and giant planets), as well as in plasma-assisted nanotechnology (e.g., quantum diodes, quantum free-electron lasers, nanophotonics and nanoplasmonics, metallic nanostructures, thin metal films, semiconductor quantum wells, and quantum dots, etc.), and in the next generation of intense laser-solid density plasma interaction experiments relevant for fast ignition in inertial confinement fusion schemes.

This Colloquium gives an overview of recent theoretical and experimental progress in the area of nonequilibrium dynamics of isolated quantum systems. There is particularly a focus on quantum quenches: the temporal evolution following a sudden or slow change of the coupling constants of the system Hamiltonian. Several aspects of the slow dynamics in driven systems are discussed and the universality of such dynamics in gapless systems with specific focus on dynamics near continuous quantum phase transitions is emphasized. Recent progress on understanding thermalization in closed systems through the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis is also reviewed and relaxation in integrable systems is discussed. Finally key experiments probing quantum dynamics in cold atom systems are overviewed and put into the context of our current theoretical understanding.