ALT Artist’s conceptualization of the acousto-mechanical interaction within the acoustic drumstick device. A blue translucent cylinder represents a piezoelectric layer. High-frequency bulk acoustic waves are excited through this layer, shown by multicolored chevrons, creating ripples, which are converted into photons, that strike a micro-drumhead membrane suspended below. The acoustic wave acts as a nanoscale "drumstick" striking the mechanical membrane, creating large ripples, illustrating the energy transfer between sound and motion.

ALT A 3D rendering of strong-field ionization with bright squeezed vacuum. On the left is a thick, salmon-colored beam intersected with a transparent disc and two white squares. Towards the right, the salmon beam becomes a thinner orange beam intersected with a diagonally oriented transparent square with a black knob. The orange beam then gets reflected and focused by a metallic cylindrical shape onto a separate, light blue rod with dark blue spheres attached to it, representing the jet of xenon atoms. The light blue rod has a blue coil hanging off of it that touches a metallic disc with a black outline lying flat below.

ALT A line-art portrait illustration of Francis Halzen with gold accents, created by Niklas Elmehed. Below the illustration, a dark red banner displays his name, "Francis Halzen," along with the award citation: "for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin". At the bottom, text attributes the award to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

ALT Front cover of the journal Physical Review Letters, Volume 111, Number 2, published July 12, 2013 by the American Physical Society. The top portion features green geometric stripes framing the issue number "111" and the journal title. The center displays a scientific visualization composed of vertical wave-like patterns made of colorful, semi-transparent spheres and spindle-like columns in shades of green, yellow, orange, and blue set against a light cream background.

ALT General relativistic particle-in-cell simulation of a collisionless plasma — represented by blue, purple, and orange — accreting onto a central spinning black hole in the center.

ALT A graph plotting the solidification to collection distance ratio (x-axis) versus the solidification to breakup distance ratio (y-axis). The top and bottom halves of the plot are divided into orange-shaded (top) and blue-shaded (bottom) regions, corresponding to liquid drops and liquid jet, respectively. The graph contains data points corresponding to uniform fiber (light blue circles), beaded fiber (brown triangles), or beads (orange squares).

ALT The longitudinal resistivity versus magnetic field at different source powers, represented by different colors. Each resistivity oscillation starts at a different magnetic field and wiggles downward, eventually decaying to zero. Each curve has one pronounced oscillation that occurs near the same resistivity.

ALT Nine images of droplet-encapsulated gels form a three square grid and are arranged by liquid fraction horizontally and elastocapillary number vertically. The gels — which appear as elongated capsule-like structures — range from elongated capsule-like outlines with inner gel cores to rounded droplets and a pinched figure-eight structure.

ALT Title slide reading "A Snapshot of PRL's Nobel Legacy" with a swirling blue and green particle image inside an oval frame, and "Swipe for discoveries through the years" below it with a forward-arrow icon. Two entries are shown: “2025, Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling,” illustrated with a schematic of an apparatus with a Pt-195 NMR thermometer, citing PRL 53 1260 (1984), PRL 55 1543 (1985), and PRL 55 1908 (1985); and “2023, Attosecond Pulses,” illustrated with a diagram of a wave packet and two green V-shaped curves, one straight and one tilted, with pink spheres above, citing PRL 42 1127 (1979), PRL 48 1814 (1982), PRL 73 2180 (1994), PRL 77 1234 (1996), and PRL 81 297 (1998).

ALT Four Nobel-linked discoveries: “2022, Quantum Nonlocality,” illustrated with a schematic of a photon entanglement experiment using polarizing beam splitters and detectors, citing PRL 23 880 (1969), PRL 28 938 (1972), PRL 47 460 (1981), PRL 49 91 & 1804 (1982), PRL 71 4287 (1993), PRL 80 3891 (1998), and PRL 81 1345 (1999). “2021, Complex Systems,” illustrated with a grid of green dots with arrows showing a disordered spin system, citing PRL 43 1754 (1979), PRL 50 1946 (1983), PRL 52 1156 (1984), PRL 109 205501 (2012), and PRL 127 038001 (2021). “2020, Black Hole Formation,” illustrated with an artist's rendering of warped spacetime around a glowing blue sphere, citing PRL 10 66 (1963) and PRL 14 57 (1965). “2019, Cosmology,” illustrated with a split image of a smooth sphere transitioning into a starry, clustered universe, citing PRL 16 410 (1966).

ALT Four Nobel-linked discoveries: “2018, Optical Tweezers,” illustrated with a laser beam trapping a chain of green spheres, citing PRL 24 156 (1970), PRL 40 729 (1978), and PRL 57 314 (1986). “2017, Gravitational Waves,” illustrated with an artist's rendering of two orbiting compact objects warping a grid of spacetime, citing PRL 116 061102 & 241103 (2016) and PRL 118 221101 (2017). “2016, Topological Phases of Matter,” illustrated with a thermometer-style diagram showing matter transitioning through plasma, gas, liquid, solid, and quantum condensate states, citing PRL 39 1201 (1977), PRL 49 405 (1982), PRL 50 1153 (1983), and PRL 61 2015 (1988). “2015, Neutrino Oscillations,” illustrated with a photo of workers inside a large spherical particle detector, citing PRL 81 1562 (1998), PRL 87 071301 (2001), and PRL 89 011301 (2002).

ALT Four Nobel-linked discoveries: “2014, Super Resolved Fluorescence Microscopy,” illustrated with a fluorescence microscopy image of a cell with red and green glowing branching structures, citing PRL 62 2535 (1989). “2013, Higgs Boson,” illustrated with a starburst labeled "Big Bang" connecting to a ball-in-a-bowl diagram labeled "10⁻¹¹ seconds," citing PRL 13 321 & 508 (1964). “2012, Manipulation of Individual Quantum States,” illustrated with a Schrödinger's-cat-style silhouette of a black cat and its shadow, citing PRL 76 1796 & 1800 (1996). “2011, Quasicrystals,” illustrated with a geometric tiling pattern of interlocking pentagons and rhombi, citing PRL 53 1951 (1984).

ALT A visualization of the quantum anomalous Hall effect at an even filling factor (v = 2) in a rhombohedral octalayer graphene/hBN device, along with its intense competition with other surrounding correlated insulating states. In the middle is a 3D rendering of the device structure. A moiré superlattice, consisting of eight stacked layers of hot pink spheres, is sandwiched between two thick, inner light pink and light blue hBn dielectric layers and two thin outer light purple graphite top and bottom gates. A curtain-shaped color contour map, which represents anti-symmetrized Hall resistance (Rxy) as a function of v and displacement field, frames the 3D rendering with thick symmetric blue and red curved lines under marbled patterns of red, white, and blue.

ALT Two scientific schematics that depict false vacuum decay and implementation of target U(1) quantum link model, abbreviated QLM. On the top is a schematic of the mapping between the Bose-Hubbard model, abbreviated BHM, and QLM. BHM parameters U, J, δ and ∆ denote on-site interaction, hopping amplitude, staggered energy offset, and linear tilt, respectively. Legends indicate the mapped gauge links, shown as arrows, and matter fields, shown as circles. The BHM hopping |..20..⟩ ↔ |..11..⟩ drives the QLM matter-gauge coupling. Tuning δ ̸= 0 breaks the Z2 vacuum degeneracy, effectively introducing a background electric field h. Below is an illustration of false vacuum decay. A particle pair forms virtually from the false vacuum, energy cost 2m−h, and expands. The initial state eventually decays into a resonant bubble of true vacuum between the pair whose energy matches that of the initial state.

ALT A micrograph of metamaterial architecture (purple) with repeating cross-shaped elements and circular nodes, and the connecting arms fabricated by through-wafer deep reactive ion etching, with a scale bar showing 1.8mm.

ALT A schematic showing nanoconfined water, illustrating enhanced in-plane proton transport and the dependence of the parallel and perpendicular dielectric responses on channel height.

ALT An illustration with five gray circles each filled with smaller orange or green circles intersected by black arrows. The two orange-filled gray circles are on the top and the three green-filled gray circles are on the bottom. An icon of a butterfly and its flight path divide the two halves of the image. The illustration depicts how two rounds of forward and backward evolution show increasing deviation from the initial state as errors are amplified by the quantum butterfly effect.

ALT A series of four molecular diagrams (a-d) displaying the structure of FeGe in the AFM state. The structure is portrayed as lattices and arrays of various atoms represented as colored circles of varying sizes: Fe (orange), Ge1 (teal), Ge2 (purple), and Ge1d (green). Red arrows depict magnetic moments, while dotted lines depict the resulting kagome lattices. Small black arrows next to the atoms indicate the Ge dimerization direction. Panels a and b depict the FeGe structure above TCDW, and panels c and d depict the FeGe structure below TCDW.

ALT Scientific illustration of the signature of the fractal Hofstadter butterfly in the measured electrical conductance of a graphene-hexagonal boron nitride heterostructure.

ALT A schematic of the experimental setup for trapping cesium and verifying its entanglement with a photon. It consists of an electron multiplying charged-couple device, two lenses with a magneto-optical trap between them, and either a beamsplitter for measuring the single-photon character of the source, or a polarizing beamsplitter in the case of atom-photon entanglement.

ALT A view of the ATLAS calorimeter as of Nov. 4, 2005. It looks like looking down a tunnel of electronics, with a round calorimeter at the end resembling an eye and eight cylinders — toroid magnets — coming out from the calorimeter toward the viewer. On either side of the image are six flights of stairs, and a person stands toward the bottom of the image for scale, appearing very small.

ALT A color gradient contour plot illustrating a singular basin with a singular funnel. On the right, a large region shaded with an orange-yellow color gradient represents the basin of attraction. It contains a thick black vertical curve labeled ɣc (periodic rotation). This region narrows in the lower half, passing a point on the left edge labeled e2 (saddle equilibrium). In the upper half, the region curves around a white space that contains a black point labeled e1 (stable equilibrium). To the left of this region, five very narrow, deep orange vertical strips extend across white space.

ALT A chain of BoNO molecules, formed in a shape reminiscent of the image on Duncan Haldane's Nobel prize diploma, with a complete temperature-magnetic field phase diagram in the background.