World's Most Sensitive Lab Search for Axions Finds Nothing and Narrows the Hunt
Germany's ALPS II experiment shot a laser through a wall of magnets to look for the hypothetical particle, and its first results set robust new limits.
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Physics
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PhysicsKAIST Pins Down Barium Titanate's True Optical Properties After Decades of Conflicting Values
Mueller-matrix ellipsometry on single crystals gives chip designers reliable numbers for a promising material used in optical modulators.
PhysicsLight Bouncing Inside Thin Films Can Fake Molecular Signals in Perovskite Solar Cells
A Japanese physicist says a sharp infrared signal long read as molecular change can come from optics alone, and proposes a dilution test to tell the two apart.
PhysicsMax Planck's Pressurized 'Submarine' Lets Physicists Study Turbulence Superstructures in the Lab
A 3.5-meter chamber filled with sulfur hexafluoride at up to 19 bar can produce several storm-like convection rolls at once, structures too complex to simulate even on supercomputers.
PhysicsTwo Atoms Stay Bound Despite Enough Energy to Break Apart, Quantum Study Shows
German physicists observed a long-predicted "bound state in the continuum" in ultracold lithium, where quantum interference blocks the molecule from decaying.
PhysicsLevitated Micromagnet Spins 2.3 Million Times a Second, a Record, in Dark Matter Search
A 30-micrometer magnet floating in a superconducting trap reached 138 million revolutions per minute and set preliminary limits on axion-like dark matter.
PhysicsPhoton Experiment Shows a Qubit Farther From Equilibrium Can Settle Faster
A Southeast University team reports the first genuine quantum 'strong Mpemba effect' in a single qubit, and says removing coherence is what speeds relaxation.
PhysicsColumbia Physicists Say Gravity's Fields Can Break and Reconnect Like Solar Flares
A reformulation of Einstein's equations that resembles plasma physics hints at a 'gravitational reconnection' that could release energy in black hole mergers, though it remains theory.
PhysicsLHCb Finds First Evidence of the Rarest Beauty-Particle Decay Yet Seen at the LHC
A B0 meson turning into two muons happens about once in ten billion decays; the signal sits at 3.2 sigma and agrees with the Standard Model.
Physics'Stupendously Large' Primordial Black Holes Ruled Out as Dark Matter by Mainz Physicists
A Physical Review Letters analysis finds black holes of at least 100 billion solar masses would leave patterns in the cosmic microwave background that astronomers do not see.
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Air Holes Etched in Silicon Make Flat Ultraviolet Mirrors That Focus Light to a Micron
Stuttgart physicists turned silicon's strong UV absorption into an advantage, building half-millimeter mirrors from tiny elliptical cavities in a single etching step.
PhysicsPhysicists Build First Tunable Three-Flavor Hubbard System and Image Every Atom
An international team used a quantum gas microscope on ultracold fermions with three internal states, opening a lab route to simulating quark-like physics and superconductivity.
PhysicsTrapped Ions Simulate Aharonov-Bohm Interference in a 2D Gauge Theory
Oxford researchers used strontium ions in a hybrid qubit-oscillator system to watch a particle's tunneling switch off completely when magnetic-like flux is present.
PhysicsHeavy Quarks in the Early Universe's Plasma Move Unlike Einstein Predicted
MIT and UC Santa Barbara theorists find that kicks in a fast quark's momentum are lopsided, hinting that quark-gluon plasma behaves more like a liquid than a gas.
PhysicsPhysicist Proposes Hunting for Gravitational Waves in the Moon's Tides
A Berlin mathematician adds a gravitational-wave term to lunar tidal models and lists the errors that must be controlled before any leftover signal could count as real.
PhysicsElectron Pairs Survive to Room Temperature in High-Temperature Superconductor, Science Study Finds
Utrecht, Leiden and Munich researchers say the pairing 'glue' is not the obstacle; getting the pairs to move in step is.
PhysicsMIT Physicists Extend Einstein's 1905 Brownian Motion Theory to Near-Light-Speed Particles
A new calculation predicts how heavy quarks are jostled inside quark-gluon plasma, the fluid that filled the universe moments after the Big Bang.
PhysicsMediterranean Neutrino Telescope Finds No Crack in Einstein's Relativity
KM3NeT/ORCA, running at a fraction of its planned size, analyzed 5,828 neutrinos and set the first direct limits on certain muon-tau effects.
PhysicsMeerKAT Detects How Cosmic Hydrogen Clumps on the Largest Scales, a 21-cm First
After a decade of work, the MeerKLASS team pulled a faint signal out of foregrounds 10,000 times stronger, showing hydrogen follows the cosmic web.
PhysicsAtoms on China's Space Station Hit 9.7 Picokelvin, a Fourfold Record Chill
A Peking University team cooled about 20,000 rubidium atoms to an equivalent temperature of 9.7 trillionths of a degree above absolute zero aboard Tiangong, beating the old 38 pK record.
PhysicsSpinning Black Holes Could Split in Two, Danish and French Physicists Calculate
A Physical Review D paper finds that near-maximal rotation might open a narrow loophole in the entropy rules that normally forbid a black hole from dividing. No splitting has ever been observed.
PhysicsPolish-Led Team Makes a Room-Temperature Supersolid From Light and Liquid Crystal
Polish, French and IBM researchers saw a frictionless fluid with crystal-like order in a liquid-crystal microcavity, without any cooling toward absolute zero.
