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When stacking apples on a market stall, fruit sellers "naturally" adopt a particular arrangement: a regular pyramid with a triangular base. A French-German team, which includes in particular the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, has demonstrated that this arrangement is favored for reasons of mechanical stability. This work, which is published on the Physical Review Letters (PRL) website, could contribute to the design of organized porous materials.

Ironing increases the humidity of a piece of cloth by injecting water vapor in the form of steam. But how does the vapor affect the fabric? Until now, it was thought that its only effect was to soften the fibers

By destabilizing superconductivity with a strong magnetic field, the electrons of a "high temperature" superconductor align into linear filaments. This phenomenon has been demonstrated by a team of researchers at the CNRS Laboratoire National des Champs Magnetiques Intenses. Published in Nature on the 8 September 2011, these results add a new piece to the puzzle that condensed-matter physicists have been trying to put together for nearly twenty-five years.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A constant stabilization experiment of a quantum state has been successfully carried out for the first time by a team from the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel headed by Serge Haroche. The researchers succeeded in maintaining a constant number of photons in a high-quality microwave cavity. The results of their study are published in the online journal Nature on September 1, 2011.

Light does not travel at the same speed in all directions under the effect of an electromagnetic field. Although predicted by theory, this counter-intuitive effect has for the first time been demonstrated experimentally in a gas by a French team from the Laboratoire 'Collisions Agregats Reactivite' at CNRS. The researchers measured with extreme precision, of around one billionth m/s, the difference between the light propagation speeds in one direction and in the opposite direction.