The brain has been interpreted as an assembly of neural networks and the main target of neurophysiology has been synaptic interaction in the neural network. The other components of the brain such as blood vessels and glial networks, however, play an essential role in the logistics in the brain. Furthermore, the extracellular space in the brain is the main pathway of the dynamic fluid which plays an important role in the ion homeostasis and clearance of the metabolic waste and provides a microenvironment of the volume transmission of neuromodulators and electric fields produced by the surrounding neurons. It is necessary to understand the comprehensive communications in the brain including“non-synaptic interactions”between the neural networks and the other components to understand the higher-order function of the brain. Here we focus on the extracellular space and microenvironment to provide the new insight of the neuroscience for neurophysiology and biophysics of living brain tissue.

Cavity optomagnonics emerged as a route to enhance inherently weak interaction between light and solid-state magnons by using an optical cavity. In the early stage the light-magnon interaction was investigated using a ferrimagnetic sphere, exhibiting rich physical phenomena not only the enhanced light-magnon interaction but the ones such as nonreciprocal Brillouin scaterring. Here we review the progress of cavity optomagnonics from an experimental perspective.

We review recent progress on the experimental search for the QCD critical point in the beam-energy scan of relativistic heavy-ion collisions. Non-Gaussian fluctuations of conserved charges are believed to be promising observables for this purpose, and active experimental and theoretical studies on these observables have been performed over the last decade. We report on the latest experimental results having a nonmonotonic behavior expected from the criticality and future experimental plans.

We describe universal aspects of surface-growth dynamics in a one-dimensional quantum system. After reviewing the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation and fluctuating hydrodynamics in classical systems, we define a surface-height operator and its surface roughness in the Bose–Hubbard model. Our numerical calculation for the quantum model finds emergence of dynamical scaling for the roughness, which is originally known as the Family–Vicsek scaling in classical systems.

Thermodynamics has been a solid basis for controlling a state of matter in the field of electronic phase control. In other fields, however, people have been empirically created metastable states, such as hard steel and glass, which are not thermodynamically most stable but stable in practice. We have developed metastable electronic states hidden behind thermodynamic equilibrium with rapid cooling technique, and thus established a method to control electronic states beyond the framework of thermodynamics.