The physics desk
Physics from the quantum to the cosmos: particle physics, quantum computing, astrophysics, cosmology and the discoveries that change what is possible.
When a supermassive black hole switches its jets off, the leftover lobes were thought to glow for a long, slow stretch. A survey with MeerKAT found the afterlife is short — and earlier searches were looking for the wrong thing.
A Nature paper from Mario Krenn's group shows algorithms designing setups for quantum optics, electron microscopy, gravitational-wave detectors and fusion machines that beat the human versions.
Physicists measured a Hall voltage with the magnetic field lying inside the plane of the material instead of perpendicular to it, breaking an assumption that has held since Edwin Hall's 1879 experiment. One device could now read magnetic fields along more than one axis.
The GlueX experiment aimed a photon beam at protons to confirm a 20-year-old particle candidate. It missed that target and instead found evidence for two previously unseen structures, one of them at the five-sigma threshold physicists treat as a discovery.
Two researchers at Harbin Institute of Technology worked out what relativity does to a laser-driven sail. Past a certain speed the photons bouncing off it stop helping and start braking.
GW231123 was reported as a 190-to-265-solar-mass collision. A Max Planck reanalysis published Thursday says gravitational lensing magnified the signal, and the real total is 100 to 180.
XENONnT pushed the direct detection threshold for neutrinos lower than anyone has managed before. The signal comes from the proton-proton fusion that powers the Sun.
No external magnets, no magnetic materials — just a germanium metasurface and a well-timed laser pulse that changes the rules while the light is still inside.
A Graz-led team used time-resolved photoemission orbital tomography to reconstruct an exciton's wave function frame by frame — the first instants of light turning into electricity inside an organic semiconductor.
LUX-ZEPLIN found a single high-energy interaction sitting exactly where dark matter should appear and where almost no background should. At 2.6 sigma, it is nowhere close to a discovery.
A team including Roger Penrose held one branch of a rubidium atom's wavefunction against gravity and dropped the other. The phase shift when they recombined matched the equivalence principle.
Wolfgang Ketterle's group worked through a 2025 proposal to build a coherent neutrino beam from a Bose-Einstein condensate. The recoil alone ends it, and then there is the problem of neutrinos being fermions.
SuperCDMS SNOLAB has begun taking its first science data. Its shielding includes lead salvaged from ancient ballast on the floor of the Mediterranean.
An Okayama University team adapted Mössbauer spectroscopy to use ultraviolet laser light instead of gamma rays, and mapped every seat the nucleus can take.
A Chinese-led team put niobium diselenide inside a terahertz 'dark' cavity and raised its critical temperature without touching it, driving it, or shining anything on it.
Yonsei University researchers say the June rebuttal to their work contains a methodological flaw that flattens the very effect it was measuring. Their corrected supernova results now line up with DESI.
A magnetar called 1E 1547.0-5408 produced X-rays polarized so strongly that researchers say it may be the first solid evidence of vacuum birefringence, an effect Heisenberg predicted almost 90 years ago.
Physicists thought only heavy nuclei like lead could produce quark-gluon plasma. The ALICE collaboration just made it with nuclei a fraction of the size, which means the recipe is not what anyone assumed.
Colgate physicists calculate that the remnants of hypothetical 'Dark Stars' from cosmic dawn could dominate the gravitational-wave background that pulsar timing arrays have been measuring.
A Monash team predicts a self-bound quantum liquid made of bosons and fermions, where the pressure that stops electrons from stacking up exactly cancels the attraction that should collapse it.
Reading two quantum signals at once cut thermal drift by roughly a factor of ten. Over 2.3 days, the prototype beat a standard rubidium clock by about 200-fold.
Livermore physicists shocked diamond above 1 trillion pascals and hotter than the surface of the Sun. The measurements finally match quantum simulations — and suggest a route to tripling fusion energy gain.
Penn researchers used the Atacama Cosmology Telescope to watch galaxy clusters pull on each other at the largest scale ever measured — and squeezed the room left for modified-gravity alternatives to dark matter.
CU Boulder researchers used Claude to crack a decades-old electrophoresis problem — and documented, step by step, how the model's errors got harder to catch as the work went on.
A University of Washington team found that a galaxy's own lumpy disk can carve the same gaps and kinks astronomers have been reading as fingerprints of dark matter.
Tsinghua researchers imaged individual Zhang-Rice singlets in a copper-oxide crystal, then watched them merge into larger structures as they added charge — the missing step between a single hole and superconductivity.
A Missouri team compared star clusters mapped by Gaia and found the mix of large and small stars differs from cluster to cluster — breaking a 50-year assumption and possibly explaining Webb's impossibly heavy early galaxies.
ALMA resolved a magnetic field coiled around the gas streaming off a protostar 960 light-years away. It is a few thousandths of a gauss — weaker than a fridge magnet, and strong enough to shape a star.
In Fe5GeTe2, a magnetic material only seven years old, electrons crawl collectively while staying quantum coherent up to 100 kelvin — behavior nobody predicted and which may be switchable with a laser.
A paradox physicists have argued about since the 1980s dissolves once you stop asking where the particle went and start asking what it turned into, a team from Ghent, Cambridge and Oxford reports in Nature Physics.