Physics

Nov 17th, 2025 - The most explosive fuel in the universe could power humanity's first starship. In 1932, physicists glimpsed antimatter for the first time — a strange mirror image of regular matter with mind-bending potential. Nearly a century later, this ghostly substance could someday fuel a leap to the stars. Researchers Sawsan Ammar Omira and Abdel Hamid Mourad from the United Arab Emirates University argue that antimatter holds promise as the ultimate energy source for deep space propulsion. If ... [Read More]

Nov 17th, 2025 - This article is part of a package in collaboration with Forbes on time capsules, preserving information and communicating with the future. A round 38 percent of websites that were on the Internet in 2013 are gone now . Half of Wikipedia pages reference dead links. Information seems to be disappearing all around us, and that's nothing new. Over geological time , information loss is the norm, not the exception. Yet according to physics, information is never destroyed. In principle, a burned book ... [Read More]

Nov 17th, 2025 - Reading time 3 minutes Quantum technologies—devices that operate according to quantum mechanical principles—promise to bring users some groundbreaking innovations in whichever context they appear. Ironically, the same principles often create complications preventing these supposedly amazing devices from really taking off. A new study, published on November 14 in Physical Review Letters , further cements this problem by demonstrating another, somewhat unexpected obstacle—the ... [Read More]

Nov 16th, 2025 - Over the past several decades, researchers have been making rapid progress in harnessing light to enable all sorts of scientific and industrial applications. From creating stupendously accurate clocks to processing the petabytes of information zipping through data centers, the demand for turnkey technologies that can reliably generate and manipulate light has become a global market worth hundreds of billions of dollars. One challenge that has stymied scientists is the creation of a compact ... [Read More]

Nov 15th, 2025 - Image of two gold beams colliding at near the speed of light June 14, 2000. The collision took place at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) run by Brookhaven National Labratory in Brookhaven, NY. For the past quarter-century, scientists using a particle collider on Long Island have been smashing the nuclei of gold atoms together at nearly the speed of light to create the hottest matter ever made on Earth. The soup of particles born from the collision mimics the universe as it was just ... [Read More]

Nov 15th, 2025 - All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Gizmodo may earn an affiliate commission. Reading time 7 minutes Believe it or not, physicists want to keep it simple. That's why many scientists, including Albert Einstein , believe physics could eventually converge into a single, overarching paradigm that describes the universe—a theory of everything. Enter string theory. Very broadly speaking, string theory ... [Read More]

Nov 7th, 2025 - High-temperature superconductivity is still not fully understood. Now, an international research team at BESSY II has measured the energy of charge carrier pairs in undoped La₂CuO₄. Their findings revealed that the interaction energies within the potentially superconducting copper oxide layers are significantly lower than those in the insulating lanthanum oxide layers. These results contribute to a better understanding of high-temperature superconductivity and could also be relevant ... [Read More]

Nov 7th, 2025 - A team of researchers at the Max Born Institute have managed to fully characterize few-femtosecond-long light pulses tunable in the vacuum ultraviolet. These results unlock the possibility for studying valence electron dynamics of many materials in the VUV. The research is in the journal Nature Photonics . Few-femtosecond long pulses tunable across the ultraviolet (UV) are a holy grail of contemporary laser science. As most of the materials have electronic resonances in the deep- and vacuum-UV ... [Read More]

Nov 4th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google A team led by MIT used a simple molecule to peek inside a radium atom's nucleus. In a new study, they watched electrons in radium monofluoride pick up a tiny energy change that betrays what is happening deep in the core. The tests ran on a compact setup at CERN in Switzerland and not in a collider that stretches for miles. The result points to a practical way to map nuclear structure and to probe why the universe favors matter over antimatter. Radium monofluoride reveals ... [Read More]

Oct 30th, 2025 - Scientists have long sought to make semiconductors—vital components in computer chips and solar cells—that are also superconducting, thereby enhancing their speed and energy efficiency and enabling new quantum technologies. However, achieving superconductivity in semiconductor materials such as silicon and germanium has proved challenging due to difficulty in maintaining an optimal atomic structure with the desired conduction behavior. In a paper published in the journal Nature ... [Read More]

Oct 29th, 2025 - Carbynes, or long linear carbon chains (LLCCs), have received significant attention in recent years due to their predicted exceptional properties. However, experimentally, their properties have been hard to probe due to their low stability. To improve stability, it is necessary to encapsulate LLCCs in small diameter carbon nanotubes (CNTs). Now, researchers have developed a new method to synthesize small diameter single-walled carbon nanowires (SWCNWs), featuring high-density LLCCs encapsulated ... [Read More]

Oct 22nd, 2025 - The nature of gravity — and whether it can be reconciled with quantum mechanics — is one of the biggest mysteries in physics. Most researchers think that at a fundamental level, all phenomena follow the principles of quantum physics, but those principles do not seem to be compatible with the accepted theory of gravity. For years, researchers have been proposing experiments to show whether gravity could produce a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement. Now, two theoretical ... [Read More]

Oct 20th, 2025 - In the right combinations and conditions, two-dimensional materials can host intriguing and potentially valuable quantum phases, like superconductivity and unique forms of magnetism. Why they occur, and how they can be controlled, is of considerable interest among physicists and engineers. Research published in reveals a previously hidden feature that could explain how and why enigmatic quantum phases emerge. Using a new terahertz (THz) spectroscopic technique, the researchers revealed that ... [Read More]

Oct 18th, 2025 - The nature of dark matter remains one of the greatest mysteries in cosmology. Within the standard framework of non-collisional cold dark matter (CDM), various models are considered: WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, with masses of around 100 GeV/c 2 ), primordial black holes, and ultralight axion-like particles (mass of 10 -22 to 1 eV/c 2 ). In the latter case, dark matter behaves like a wave, described by a Schrödinger equation, rather than as a collection of point particles. ... [Read More]

Oct 11th, 2025 - , Phys.org Quantum networks, systems consisting of connected quantum computers, quantum sensors or other quantum devices, hold the potential of enabling faster and safer communications. The establishment of these networks relies on a quantum phenomenon known as entanglement, which entails a link between particles or systems, with the quantum state of one influencing the other even when they are far apart. The atom-based qubits used to establish quantum networks so far operate at visible or ... [Read More]

Oct 10th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Quantum computing is full of ideas that sound great until you try to build them. A new experiment now shows a way to move quantum data to exactly where it is needed. It reports 95.3 % success on that routing task in the lab, which is strong enough to take notice. Instead of treating memory as an afterthought, the team built a router that can direct a quantum signal based on a quantum address. That ability is central to designs for quantum random access memory ( QRAM ). It ... [Read More]