Nature Reviews Physics (2019) https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-019-0058-y Published online 14 May 2019

This article was originally published with an error in the main text and the caption of Figure 1. The original sentence beginning, “The atomic vibrations have been described using the statistical distribution of out-of-plane velocities…”, should have read: “The atomic vibrations have been described using the statistical distribution of out-of-plane velocities, which is characterized by its mean-square width \(\bar{{v}_{z}^{2}}\)…”. In addition, in the caption of Figure 1, the original sentence beginning, “The distribution of out-of-plane velocities recorded for one carbon atom…”, should have read: “The distribution of out-of-plane velocities recorded for one carbon atom (indicated by the red circle in panel b) once per femtosecond during a finite temperature simulation over 5 ps follows a normal distribution (panel c), the standard deviation (s.d.) of which is equal to the root-mean-square velocity (\(\sqrt{\bar{{v}_{z}^{2}}}\)) of the atom.” This has now been corrected in the HTML and PDF version of the article.

We apologize to readers for this error.