Electronic order and frustration

The Impact of Ionic Frustration on Electronic Order
Leon Balents
Science 336, 547 (2012)

Frustrated ordering. Artist’s conception of a nanoscale region of honeycomb lattice of ionic and spin structure in Ba3CuSb2O9 studied by Nakatsuji et al. Copper-antimony (Cu-Sb) dumbbells are oriented vertically, with Cu atoms in red and Sb in blue.

Spin-Orbital Short-Range Order on a Honeycomb-Based Lattice.
S. Nakatsuji, et al.
Science 336, 559 (2012)

(A) Centrosymmetric P63/mmc high-T structure of Ba3CuSb2O9 indicating nanoscale Cu-Sb dumbbell ordering. (B) A characteristic vertex with spin-orbital degrees of freedom for the Cu-honeycomb lattice of Ba3CuSb2O9. A trigonal coverage of a Cu-hexagon by spin singlets (pair of blue or green arrows) based on a dx2−y2 ferro-orbital (green) state at two Cu sites (blue shaded) is shown.  (C) Superstructure peaks found in an (h k 10) slice extracted from a 3D volume of synchrotron x-ray diffraction data at 20 K for an orthorhombic single-crystalline sample (12).

Quantum simulation of magnetism using 2D ion crystal

Simulating Magnetism (N&V)
Chrsitian Roos
Nature 484, 461 (2012)

Vibrational modes of a two-dimensional ion crystal. a, Equilibrium positions of the ions in a two-dimensional crystal after laser cooling. b, Four of the many vibrational modes of the crystal. Colours indicate whether an ion is above or below its equilibrium position at the particular time that is represented

Engineered two-dimensional Ising interactions in a trapped-ion quantum simulator with hundreds of spins.
Joseph W. Britton, Brian C. Sawyer, Adam C. Keith, C.-C. JosephWang, James K. Freericks, Hermann Uys, Michael J. Biercuk & John J. Bollinger
Nature 484, 489 (2012)

Image recovery using nanomagnets

An ultrafast image recovery and recognition system implemented with nanomagnets possessing biaxial magnetocrystalline anisotropy.
Noel D'Souza, Jayasimha Atulasimha, and Supriyo Bandyopadhyay
ArXiv 1109.6932 (2011)

Recovering an image corrupted by noise by encoding in different magnetic states.

4.6 billion years old magnetite

Magnetite 3D Colloidal Crystals Formed in the Early Solar System 4.6 Billion Years Ago.
Jun Nozawa, Katsuo Tsukamoto, Willem van Enckevort, Tomoki Nakamura, Yuki Kimura, Hitoshi Miura, Hisao Satoh, Ken Nagashima, and Makoto Konoto
JACS 133, 8782 (2011)