The 50 most-cited articles in Physics Today, 2016

Graphene is not the only atomically thin material of technological importance. Diverse families of newly harnessed monolayers have far-reaching implications for basic physics, materials science, and engineering.

By incorporating novel subwavelength structures into macroscopic materials, acousticians can create devices with exotic sound-altering properties.

To mitigate climate change at local, regional, and global scales, we must begin to think beyond greenhouse gases.

When a two-dimensional material abuts a three-dimensional one, a century-old electrical phenomenon finds new applicability.

By fabricating magnetic structures into nanoscale arrays, physicists can directly visualize how condensed-matter systems accommodate competing interactions among dipole moments and other degrees of freedom.

The search for the hypothetical state has been a 43-year-long slog, one whose end may now be in sight.

Deeply committed to the cause of Indian independence, Saha occasionally detoured from his physics to conduct a revolutionary mission or pen a populist manifesto.

Internet technologies are helping physics teachers provide their students with more lab time and expose them to a wider variety of experiments.

The discovery of the mysterious hypothetical particles would provide a tantalizing glimpse of new laws of nature beyond the standard model.

The fundamental questions of the future will be profound, sophisticated, and difficult to answer. And the great projects of the future will be grand indeed.

Because the production, behavior, and life span of seawater droplets are complex, measuring and modeling them require a wide range of interdisciplinary techniques.

With its construction just beginning, the Asteroid Belt Astronomical Telescope has already photographed an exoplanet with unrivaled clarity.

Laboratory experiments suggest that, on average, turbulent energy dissipation in whitecaps is the same for waves lapping on the beach and waves storming in the seas.

The twin laser interferometers nearly simultaneously received the call of two black holes in the violent final instants of their merger.

Many a child has enjoyed watching the gardens grow; many a physicist has puzzled over the transformation of self-organized, nonequilibrium patterns into permanent structures.

In the quarter century since the US last exploded a nuclear weapon, an extensive research enterprise has maintained the resources and know-how needed to preserve confidence in the country’s stockpile.

For several decades the character and culture of large-scale research at major facilities has been changing. Big Science isn’t what it used to be.

Just as physics is not a list of facts about the world, history is not a list of names and dates. It is a way of thinking that can be powerful and illuminating.

According to model simulations, a warming Arctic can shift the circulation patterns of the polar jet stream and bring frigid air southward. But has it?

The technique could be useful for imaging the interiors of bulk objects. The technique could be useful for imaging the interiors of bulk objects.

The element’s complex free-energy landscape allows such structural motifs as rings, cages, and channel-like holes to emerge in extreme or unusual conditions.

In many biological systems, structures all grow at the same rate. That phenomenon of proportionate growth has now been observed in a nonequilibrium physical system.

The electric vehicle’s history offers a lesson to the wise: Harvesting the fruits of basic science requires industrial foresight, investment, and a healthy dose of realpolitik.

To contend with the challenges of fueling modern society, the physics community must collaborate with other disciplines and remain broadly engaged in research and education on energy.

A combination of desalination, wastewater reuse, and efficient irrigation have produced water independence.

Though not yet widely implemented, the technique of monitoring the ocean’s warming via changes in the speed of sound through the water is a powerful complement to the more common tools available: free-floating thermometers and altimetry satellites.

Shooting out of the galaxy at speeds greater than the escape velocity, hypervelocity stars provide a window on black holes and the distribution of dark matter surrounding the glowing Milky Way.

Throughout our lives we all are under pressure to deliver on deadlines. Yet we often have a substantial time window in which to complete the given tasks—for example, term papers, book chapters, tax returns. When during such a window do we deliver? And to what extent do we procrastinate?Increasing pressure forces us to finalize tasks. The closer we are to the deadline, the higher the pressure. To quantify things a bit, we could assume that deadline pressure is inversely proportional to remaining time. Such scaling behavior is well known in physics; for example, it describes how the electrostatic potential energy of a point charge depends on distance from the charge, or how the gravitational potential energy of a system of masses scales with distance between the masses.The scales look like 1/r, where r can be distance, remaining time, or some other factor. The corresponding mathematical function is a hyperbola. To give an example of the scaling using arbitrary and dimensionless units, if a deadline is 100 days away, the pressure to meet it is just 0.01. But if the deadline is…

With an acoustic analogue of a Nobel Prize–winning optical technique, researchers can acquire detailed images quickly.

As temperatures rise, precipitation patterns change, and land- and sea-ice extents shrink, scientists are learning how the exchanges of carbon between Earth’s atmosphere, ocean, and land ecosystems respond to and feed back on climate change.

The largest basic scientific project ever attempted, the supercollider proved to be beyond the management capacity of the US high-energy physics community. A smaller proton collider would have been substantially more achievable.

Controlled experiments quantify just how fast you have to blow on a soap film to get a bubble to pop out.

Because of the way interpenetrating sheets deform, the harder you pull, the greater the friction force resisting separation.

A Virginia city that owes its livelihood to the sea is in danger of being engulfed by it.

Decades before the work of Samuel Morse, a young Englishman laid out his vision for a future world of telecommunication.

The laureates bucked conventional wisdom to redefine the meaning of phases and phase transitions in one- and two-dimensional materials.

The physicist who 35 years ago proposed the construction of “dumb holes” to search for the analog of Hawking radiation is impressed by the recent experiment that looked for entangled thermal radiation from a tabletop horizon.