Physics

Apr 28th, 2025 - It would be difficult to understand the inner workings of a complex machine without ever opening it up, but this is the challenge scientists face when exploring quantum systems. Traditional methods of looking into these systems often require immense resources, making them impractical for large-scale applications. Researchers at UC San Diego, in collaboration with colleagues from IBM Quantum, Harvard and UC Berkeley, have developed a novel approach to this problem called "robust shallow ... [Read More]

Apr 27th, 2025 - Exceptional points (EPs) are unique types of energy-level degeneracies that occur in non-Hermitian systems. Since their existence was first proposed more than a century ago, physicists have only been able to experimentally observe two types of EPs, both of which were found to give rise to exotic phases of matter in various materials, including Dirac and Weyl semimetals. Building on recent theoretical studies, researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China recently set out to ... [Read More]

Apr 25th, 2025 - Charged surfaces in contact with liquids—such as biological cell walls or battery electrodes—attract oppositely charged ions from the liquid. This creates two distinct charged regions: the surface itself and a counter-charged region in the liquid: the so-called electrical double layer. While pivotal to energy storage devices, the speed of its formation has remained elusive. A team of researchers has now developed a light-based technique to observe this ultrafast process. The results ... [Read More]

Apr 24th, 2025 - To learn more about the nature of matter, energy, space, and time, physicists smash high-energy particles together in large accelerator machines, creating sprays of millions of particles per second of a variety of masses and speeds. The collisions may also produce entirely new particles not predicted by the standard model, the prevailing theory of fundamental particles and forces in our universe. Plans are underway to create more powerful particle accelerators, whose collisions will unleash ... [Read More]

Apr 14th, 2025 - The detection of longitudinally polarized W boson production at the Large Hadron Collider is an important step towards understanding how the primordial electroweak symmetry broke, giving rise to the masses of elementary particles. In 2012, the discovery of the Higgs boson by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN opened a new window on the innermost workings of the universe. It revealed the existence of a mysterious, ancient field with which elementary particles interact to acquire their ... [Read More]

Apr 14th, 2025 - The year of quantum is playing host to a vast number of new quantum research papers and slowly they are filling the void of what is known, and what might prove useful to our future. Physicists have for the first time seen entanglement of the "total angular momentum" of light particles in nanoscale structures. The discovery may have implications for next-generation quantum communication and computing components. Quantum entanglement is an effect where entangled particles can communicate and ... [Read More]

Apr 13th, 2025 - Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University (SBU) have shown that particles produced in collimated sprays called jets retain information about their origins in subatomic particle smashups. The study was recently as an Editor's Suggestion in the journal Physical Review Letters . "Despite extensive research, the connection between a jet's initial conditions and its final particle distribution has remained elusive," said Charles ... [Read More]

Apr 5th, 2025 - Physicists claim they may have found a long-awaited explanation for dark energy, the mysterious force that's driving the accelerated expansion of the universe, a new preprint study hints. Their calculations suggest that, at the smallest scales, space-time behaves in a profoundly quantum way, differing drastically from the smooth, continuous structure we experience in everyday life. According to their findings, the coordinates of space-time do not "commute" — meaning the order in which ... [Read More]

Mar 31st, 2025 - Physicists at the world's largest particle accelerator have made a first-of-its-kind discovery about antimatter that could help solve one of the universe's biggest mysteries. The discovery — made at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN , near Geneva — has revealed that a short-lived cousin of protons and neutrons, the beauty-lambda baryon, decays at a different rate than its antimatter counterpart. Called charge-parity (CP) violation, this effect refers to particles of opposite ... [Read More]

Mar 23rd, 2025 - A theoretical phenomenon proposed by famed physicist Stephen Hawking may have changed the shape of the universe, new research proposes. In the 1970s, Hawking introduced a groundbreaking concept: Black holes — traditionally viewed as cosmic entities that engulf everything in their vicinity — might emit radiation similar to the way a heated object does. This phenomenon, now known as Hawking radiation , remains theoretical due to the minimal emission power calculated for stellar and ... [Read More]

Mar 18th, 2025 - On the Swiss–French border, at the headquarters of the European laboratory CERN, a battle is under way for the future of particle physics. CERN's leaders want to build the biggest machine on the planet here: an enormous particle accelerator that would open in 2070 and would dwarf the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the lab's current flagship facility. Everything about the plan is unprecedented. The Future Circular Collider (FCC), as it's called, would sit in a tunnel 91 kilometres in ... [Read More]

Mar 6th, 2025 - A novel theory could finally bridge the gap between quantum physics and general relativity. Gravity is the most familiar of nature's forces. It keeps our feet planted on the ground and dictates the movements of planets and stars. Yet, even so, gravity remains one of the greatest mysteries in physics. In their quest to understand the fundamental forces of the universe, scientists have gotten stuck on gravity. While the other forces — electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak ... [Read More]

Mar 3rd, 2025 - DeMille is a pioneering physicist who has developed techniques to search for evidence of new particles and forces that could explain some of the universe's most enduring mysteries World-leading atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) physicist David DeMille is looking for new particles and forces that could answer fundamental questions about the universe and solve some of the greatest mysteries of cosmology. DeMille, who recently joined Johns Hopkins University as Bloomberg Distinguished Professor ... [Read More]

Feb 12th, 2025 - The future of computing might not be one giant quantum machine but many linked together. Physicists at the University of Oxford have taken a significant step toward solving one of the most daunting challenges in quantum computing: how to connect multiple quantum processors to work together seamlessly. Their breakthrough showcases a new method for distributing quantum computations across two separate modules linked by a photonic network. This achievement could be a crucial milestone in the quest ... [Read More]

Feb 12th, 2025 - Astronomers have detected the most powerful ghost particle ever found, and they're not sure where it came from. The particle, which momentarily flashed across a detector inside the Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT) at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, is a neutrino with an estimated energy of 220 quadrillion electron volts — making it more than 100 times more energetic than any previously detected . The particle's trajectory and energy mean it likely came from a cosmic ray ... [Read More]