Physics

Dec 20th, 2024 - In a breakthrough for human communication, scientists have achieved the impossible: quantum teleportation. But before you shout "Beam me up, Scotty," this new technology is not designed for teleporting people or things, but information. Specifically, scientists have worked out how to teleport information almost instantly and over any distance – without needing any future technology . Instead, they think they can make quantum teleportation possible through existing networks . "This is ... [Read More]

Dec 19th, 2024 - The world's most massive science experiment has done it again, detecting hints of the heaviest antimatter particle ever found. This means the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, has given scientists a glimpse into conditions that existed when the universe was less than a second old. The antimatter particle is the partner of a massive matter particle called hyperhelium-4, and its discovery could help scientists tackle the mystery of why regular matter ... [Read More]

Dec 18th, 2024 - Using a chemical reaction inspired by rocket fuel ignition, Cornell researchers have engineered a nanoporous carbon with the highest surface area ever reported, a breakthrough that is already proving beneficial for carbon-dioxide capture and energy storage technologies. Scientists are continually striving to enhance the porosity of carbon, which exposes more of the material's surface and optimizes its performance in applications such as adsorbing pollutants and storing electrical energy . A new ... [Read More]

Dec 17th, 2024 - X-rays are radiated by matter hotter than one million Kelvin, and high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy can tell us about the composition of the matter and how fast and in what direction it is moving. Quantum calorimeters are opening this new window on the universe. First promised four decades ago, the quantum-calorimeter era of X-ray astronomy has finally dawned. A quantum calorimeter is a device that makes precise measurements of energy quanta by measuring the temperature change that occurs when ... [Read More]

Dec 17th, 2024 - String theory, conceptualized more than 50 years ago as a framework to explain the formation of matter, remains elusive as a "provable" phenomenon. But a team of physicists has now taken a significant step forward in validating string theory by using an innovative mathematical method that points to its "inevitability." String theory posits that the most basic building blocks of nature are not particles, but, rather, one-dimensional vibrating strings that move at different frequencies in ... [Read More]

Dec 17th, 2024 - Researchers recently made a groundbreaking discovery on the nanoscale: a new type of quasiparticle found in all magnetic materials, no matter their strength or temperature. These new properties shake up what researchers previously knew about magnetism, showing it's not as static as once believed. "Emergent topological quasiparticle kinetics in constricted nanomagnets," was published in Physical Review Research . The researchers include Deepak Singh and Carsten Ullrich from the University of ... [Read More]

Dec 16th, 2024 - From nearly indestructible metals, like tungsten , to delicate clouds in the sky, atoms make up everything around us. But do these atoms ever touch each other? As with most topics in atomic physics, the answer is more complicated than you might expect. Before we can answer this question, it's important to define what we mean by "touch," said Christopher Baird , an associate professor of physics at West Texas A&M University. "On the human scale, what we usually mean when we say that two objects ... [Read More]

Dec 16th, 2024 - 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]

Dec 16th, 2024 - The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, in collaboration with the Australian National University, Canberra has demonstrated a novel way of steering a beam of relativistic electron pulses produced by an ultrahigh intensity, femtosecond laser. Their study is published in the journal Laser and Photonics Reviews . Beams of high energy electrons are crucial for fundamental science and myriad applications and technologies, such as imaging, semiconductor lithography, material science and ... [Read More]

Nov 25th, 2024 - The nature of dark matter has puzzled astronomers for 90 years since discovering that 85% of the universe's matter is invisible through our telescopes.  Currently, the most promising candidate for dark matter is the axion, a lightweight particle that scientists worldwide are fervently trying to detect. Astrophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley , now suggest that axions could be discovered within seconds of detecting gamma rays from a nearby supernova explosion .  If ... [Read More]

Nov 19th, 2024 - New work provides a good view of where the field currently stands. In September, Microsoft . It demonstrated progress with quantum error correction, something that will be needed for the technology to move much beyond the interesting demo phase, using hardware from a quantum computing startup called Quantinuum. At the same time, however, the company also announced that it was forming a partnership with a different startup, Atom Computing, which uses a different technology to make qubits ... [Read More]

Nov 15th, 2024 - Researchers at Università Cattolica, Brescia campus, have discovered that the transition from insulating to conductive behavior in certain materials is driven by topological defects in the structure. Specifically, a study published in Nature Communications shows that so-called "Mott materials"—a type of insulator fundamentally different from conventional insulators, capable of switching from an insulating to a conductive state (a process known as "resistive switching")—can ... [Read More]

Nov 6th, 2024 - Primordial black holes (PBHs), which are thought to have formed right after the Big Bang, may be heating up and exploding throughout the universe. These black hole explosions, powered by Hawking radiation — a quantum process where black holes generate particles from the vacuum due to their intense gravitational fields — could be detected by upcoming telescopes, physicists suggest in a new study. And, once spotted, these exotic explosions could reveal whether our universe contains ... [Read More]

Nov 6th, 2024 - NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab How did everything begin? It's a question that humans have pondered for thousands of years. Over the last century or so, science has homed in on an answer: the Big Bang . This describes how the Universe was born in a cataclysmic explosion almost 14 billion years ago. In a tiny fraction of a second , the observable universe grew by the equivalent of a bacterium expanding to the size of the Milky Way. The early universe was extraordinarily hot and ... [Read More]

Nov 3rd, 2024 - A decade after the discovery of the "amplituhedron," physicists have excavated more of the timeless geometry underlying the standard picture of how particles move. The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine . In the fall of 2022, a Princeton University graduate student named Carolina Figueiredo stumbled onto a massive coincidence. She calculated that collisions involving three different types of subatomic particles would all produce the same wreckage. It was like laying a ... [Read More]

Nov 1st, 2024 - Technology companies are pouring billions of dollars into quantum computing , despite the technology still being years away from practical applications. So what will future quantum computers be used for — and why are so many experts convinced they will be game-changing? Building a computer that harnesses the unusual properties of quantum mechanics is an idea that has been in contention since the 1980s . But in the last couple of decades, scientists have made significant strides in ... [Read More]