2024 Impact factor 1.7
Condensed Matter and Complex Systems

News

EPJ C - New Theory Editors-in-Chief and Fermi Prize for Dieter Haidt

The publishers of The European Physical Journal C – Particles and Fields are pleased to announce the appointment of Professors Gino Isidori (Frascati) and Sergei Odintsov (Barcelona) as new theory Editors-in-Chief. This follows the splitting of the theory section into Theory I: Phenomenology of the Standard Model and Beyond, now led by Gino Isidori, and Theory II: Gravitation, Astroparticle Physics and Cosmology, General Aspects of Quantum Field Theories and Alternatives, now led by Sergei Odintsov.

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EPJ B - Can metals remember their shape at nanoscale, too?

How nickel-titanium nanometric-size particles change back to their memorised shape

University of Constance physicists Daniel Mutter and Peter Nielaba have visualised changes in shape memory materials down to the nanometric scale in an article published in EPJB.

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EPJ D - Not one, not two, not three, but four clones!

First quantum cloning machine to produce four copies

Xi-Jun Ren and Yang Xiang from Henan Universities in China, in collaboration with Heng Fan at the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, have produced a theory for a quantum cloning machine able to produce several copies of the state of a particle at atomic or sub-atomic scale, or quantum state, in an article published in EPJ D. This could have implications for quantum information processing methods used, for example, in message encryption systems.

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EPJ E - How biological capsules respond under stress

Innovative high-precision measuring tool to assess the bending elasticity of liposomes

Cosmetics and pharmaceutical drug delivery systems could be improved thanks to a new method developed to precisely measure the capability of capsule-like biological membranes to change shape under external stress. This work is outlined in a study published in EPJE by Philippe Méléard and Tanja Pott from the Rennes-based Institute of Chemical Sciences at the European University of Brittany and their colleagues from the Center for Biomembrane Physics at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense.

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EPJ E - How do protein binding sites stay dry in water?

In a report that has just been published in EPJE, researchers from the National University of the South in Bahía Blanca, Argentina studied the condition for model cavity and tunnel structures resembling the binding sites of proteins to stay dry without losing their ability to react, a prerequisite for proteins to establish stable interactions with other proteins in water.

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EPJ E - What makes tires grip the road on a rainy day?

Scientists examine the flow of liquid at the contact between randomly rough surfaces

A team of scientists from Italy and Germany has recently developed a model to predict the friction occurring when a rough surface in wet conditions (such as a road on a rainy day) is in sliding contact with a rubber material (such as a car tire tread block) in an article that has just been published in EPJE.

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EPJ A - The Similarity Renormalization Group for Three-Body Interactions in One Dimension

One important message that has emerged from developments of effective field theories and effective Hamiltonians for nuclear physics is that many-body forces are inevitable whenever degrees of freedom are eliminated. At the same time, first-principles calculations have shown that two-body forces alone are not able to give an accurate account of the energies of light nuclei and the saturation of nuclear matter. Three- (and possibly more-) body forces are thus essential in low-energy nuclear physics.

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EPJ C - No sign of supersymmetry

Most stringent limits ever set by ATLAS

"Supersymmetry - to be or not to be?" remains a still unanswered question - it is a traditionally difficult business to demonstrate a zero result in experimental physics - yet the ATLAS collaboration has just set new and very stringent limitations on the "viability space" of a class of new physics models incorporating gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking.

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EPJ D - Quantum teleportation analysed by mathematical separation tool

Scientists from the University of Vienna’s Faculty of Physics in Austria recently gave a theoretical description of teleportation phenomena in sub-atomic scale physical systems, in a publication in the European Physical Journal D.

For the first time, the Austrian team proved that mathematical tools give us the freedom to choose how to separate out the constituting matter of a complex physical system by selectively analysing its so-called quantum state. That is the state in which the system is found when performing measurement, which can either be entangled or not.

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EPJ E - New complex offers potentially safer alternative for gene therapy delivery

Spontaneous ordering of DNA fragments in a special matrix holds the key to creating non-toxic gene therapy delivery vectors, according to a study recently published in the European Physical Journal E.

Scientists from the CNRS Paul Pascal Research Centre, an institute of the University of Bordeaux, France, and colleagues from the Institute of Physics at the University of Sao Paolo, have created a complex system designed to hold DNA fragments in solution between the hydrophilic layers of a matrix of fatty substances (also known as lipids) combined with a surfactant (used to soften the layers’ rigidity). One possible application that has yet to be tested is gene therapy.

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Editors-in-Chief:
Reinhold Egger and Philipp Hövel
I am naturally indebted to you and the referees who contributed to this success with your time and constructive advice.

Hamid Assadi

ISSN (Print Edition): 1434-6028
ISSN (Electronic Edition): 1434-6036

© EDP Sciences, Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag