For centuries, human fascination with the living world motivated the development of tools for visualizing life’s events at the spatiotemporal scales beyond our visual range. While all optical microscopes use light to probe the object of interest, fluorescence microscopes can discern between the object and background at the molecular scale. At this scale, the stochastic properties of light are fundamental to interpreting fluorescence microscopy data. Accordingly quantitative methods that enable such interpretation necessitate stochastic perspective and the use of statistical concepts. The physical-optical principles governing the formation of fluorescent images and modeling tools interpreting these images while accounting for the stochasticity of light and measurements are reviewed.

When determining the authorship list for your next paper, be generous yet disciplined.

Vivien Zapf is a condensed matter experimentalist at the National High Magnetic Field Lab at Los Alamos National Lab where she has worked since 2004. She studies magnetic materials, in particular quantum magnetism and magnetoelectric coupling and specializes in thermodynamic and magnetoelectric measurements at low and high magnetic fields.

For centuries, human fascination with the living world motivated the development of tools for visualizing life’s events at the spatiotemporal scales beyond our visual range. While all optical microscopes use light to probe the object of interest, fluorescence microscopes can discern between the object and background at the molecular scale. At this scale, the stochastic properties of light are fundamental to interpreting fluorescence microscopy data. Accordingly quantitative methods that enable such interpretation necessitate stochastic perspective and the use of statistical concepts. The physical-optical principles governing the formation of fluorescent images and modeling tools interpreting these images while accounting for the stochasticity of light and measurements are reviewed.

In many solids, the spin-orbit interaction is only a small effect. However, in certain materials it leads to new phenomena. This Colloquium reviews the role of spin-orbit interaction in superconducting hybrid structures, where it can lead to exotic states such as spin-triplet pairing, topological superconductivity, and the superconducting diode effect. These are fundamental interest and importance for applications, including spintronics and quantum computing.

The theory of unconventional superconductors continues to provide profound puzzles. The crossover between the weakly coupled Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) state and the strong-pairing Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) provides a useful perspective on how to address these questions. This paper describes a self-consistent framework for thinking about the crossover regime in between these two limits. The review discusses to what extent this BCS-BEC theory applies to a range of classes of superconducting materials including the cuprates, iron pnictides, twisted bilayer graphene, and interfacial superconductivity among others.

Nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond are sensitive to magnetic fields, and a single center permits detection of electron and nuclear spins and imaging of single molecules in its vicinity. This article reviews the achievements of advanced methods to obtain spectral and spatial resolution and it points to technical problems that remain to be solved for widespread and multidisciplinary adoption of single-molecule magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

APS has selected 156 Outstanding Referees for 2024 who have demonstrated exceptional work in the assessment of manuscripts published in the Physical Review journals. A full list of the Outstanding Referees is available online .

A parameterization scheme that links a drop’s size to its origin in the respiratory tract could help clinicians identify the most effective mitigation strategies for halting the spread of an infectious disease.

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Mira L. Pohlker et al.
Rev. Mod. Phys. 95 , 045001 (2023)

The 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics was shared by Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann, and Giorgio Parisi. These papers are the text of the address given in conjunction with the award.

Nobel Lecture: Multiple equilibria

Nobel Lecture: Physical modeling of Earth’s climate

Philip W. Phillips is a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a condensed matter theorist whose work focuses on transport and magnetic phenomena stemming from the breakdown of the quasiparticle concept in strongly correlated and topology quantum matter.

While the first law of thermodynamics is a well-established principle underlying all models of Earth’s climate system, applications of the second law in climate science are active areas of research. This review summarizes how the relationships between Earth’s entropy export and internal entropy production provide insights into Earth’s climate. These applications include heat-engine analogs for atmospheric convection, tropical cyclones, and large-scale atmospheric heat transport. Open issues addressed include the ongoing debate on whether the climate system maximizes entropy production.

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Lead Editor, Randall D. Kamien and new Colloquium Editor, Dietrich Belitz, discuss the role of Colloquia in Reviews of Modern Physics .