Physics

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 23rd, 2025 - Scientists have achieved a major milestone in the quest to understand high-temperature superconductivity in hydrogen-rich materials. Using electron tunneling spectroscopy under high pressure, the international research team led by the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry has measured the superconducting gap of H 3 S—the material that set the high-pressure superconductivity record in 2015 and serves as the parent compound for subsequent high-temperature superconducting hydrides. The ... [Read More]

Apr 21st, 2025 - Superradiant Smith-Purcell radiation (S-SPR) is a kind of free electron radiation with a train of free electron bunches passing over a periodic grating. In theory, the ultra-narrow spectral linewidth of S-SPR could be realized, which would be greatly beneficial to various applications such as imaging, sensing and communication. However, in the free electron accelerators, customized setups and orotrons, the instability of electron kinetic energy , coulomb effect and the finite number of electron ... [Read More]

Apr 21st, 2025 - Quantum computing company Alice & Bob has improved the reliability of its cat qubits , which could make tomorrow's quantum computers far more accurate. Fault tolerance is a major challenge in quantum computing. This is because the qubits in quantum computers are "noisy" and susceptible to decoherence — the loss of quantum information due to interference from the external environment. Improving qubits' reliability by implementing fault-tolerant technologies has therefore been a key ... [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 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]

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 - 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]

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]