Physics

May 13th, 2025 - By An artist's rendition of a black hole surrounded by a glowing accretion disc of material, the light from which is warped by the strong gravity. In principle, energy could be harvested from a spinning black hole—and lab-based demonstrations are beginning to show physicists how this could occur. A bomb from a black hole would probably be the most destructive weapon in the universe. Hypothetically, it could be created by wrapping one of these cosmic monsters in mirrors and waiting for it ... [Read More]

May 13th, 2025 - A new study suggests life may compute far faster — and deeper — than we ever imagined. Eighty years ago, physicist Erwin Schrödinger asked a deceptively simple question: What is life? In a series of lectures in Dublin, later published as a short book, he proposed that the principles of quantum mechanics might underlie the complex organization of living things. Now, in a provocative new research befitting the 2025 International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, another ... [Read More]

May 12th, 2025 - An international team of researchers has successfully controlled the flow of energy in a molecule with the help of its pH value. The results of the study, led by Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), could contribute to the development of new sensors for medical diagnostics, for example. The findings are also of interest for building more efficient solar cells and for use in quantum computing . The results have been in the journal Nature Communications . A process ... [Read More]

May 12th, 2025 - In the rapidly evolving field of quantum computing, silicon spin qubits are emerging as a leading candidate for building scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computers. A new review titled "Single-Electron Spin Qubits in Silicon for Quantum," in Intelligent Computing , highlights the latest advances, challenges and future prospects of silicon spin qubits for quantum computing. Silicon spin qubits are compatible with existing semiconductor industry manufacturing processes, making them promising for ... [Read More]

May 12th, 2025 - Lead becomes gold for split second during LHC experiments Several centuries ago, a branch of alchemy called chrysopoeia is said to have explored the possibilities of transforming widely available base metals into precious metals. Early practitioners never managed to pull it off, but it appears that in studying the conditions that emerged just after the Big Bang using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scientists have turned lead into gold – for just fractions of a second. Before you get too ... [Read More]

May 9th, 2025 - The move from two to three dimensions can have a significant impact on how a system behaves, whether it is folding a sheet of paper into a paper airplane or twisting a wire into a helical spring. At the nanoscale, 1,000 times smaller than a human hair, one approaches the fundamental length scales of, for example, quantum materials. At these length scales, the patterning of nanogeometries can lead to changes in the material properties itself—and when one moves to three dimensions, there ... [Read More]

May 5th, 2025 - The new quantum microscope shows particles behaving exactly as predicted by theory. Physicists at the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms have pulled off a feat once confined to the blackboards of theorists: they've taken the first direct images of atoms freely interacting in space. The researchers produced striking images of bosons and fermions — the two major families of quantum particles. Here they were caught in the act of clustering and pairing, as predicted by quantum mechanics ... [Read More]

May 5th, 2025 - Scientists have discovered how to use a quantum material to tap into the power of magnetism to store quantum information — thanks to its capacity to support magnetic switching (when the magnetic polarization switches direction). They say it can lead to more viable quantum computing and sensing, thanks to much longer-lasting quantum states. Chromium sulfide bromide is an unusual material that has been likened to filo pastry (thin, folded layers of pastry) thanks to its structure of just a ... [Read More]

Apr 29th, 2025 - A strange particle traveled across the universe and slammed into the deep sea. In the dark silence three kilometers beneath the Mediterranean Sea, a scientific machine called KM3NeT was slowly awakening. It had been built to capture ghostly messengers from deep space — particles so elusive that most would slip through the entire planet without a trace. But on February 13, 2023, something remarkable happened. A particle slammed into the water near the still-growing KM3NeT detector, ... [Read More]

Apr 28th, 2025 - Our universe is filled with particles, such as electrons and protons, which make up all the stuff on our planet and beyond: animals, plants, people, planets, asteroids, stars, gas clouds, and galaxies. Antimatter was first discovered in 1928 by physicist Paul Dirac, but it wasn't through any experiment. Instead, he was working to blend the theories of quantum mechanics with special relativity. When he finally discovered a relativistic version of quantum theory, he found that it naturally ... [Read More]

Apr 19th, 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]

Apr 17th, 2025 - Laser-plasma accelerators can accelerate particles over distances that are up to 1,000 times shorter than those required by conventional accelerators. The technology promises compact systems that have enormous potential to open up new applications for accelerators, for example in medicine or industry. However, the current prototypes have one drawback: most can only accelerate a few particle bunches per second—not enough for practical applications. DESY's new flagship laser, KALDERA, has ... [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 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 - Today (April 14) marks 2025's World Quantum Day, an international celebration held to promote public understanding of quantum science. The date, 4/14, was chosen because 4.14 represents the first three digits of Planck's constant (4.135667696 x 10 -15 electron volts per hertz, rounded to 4.14 x 10 -15 ) — an important number in quantum physics. Quantum physics is the branch of science that deals with the tiniest particles in the universe, such as atoms, electrons, photons (light ... [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]