The physics desk
Physics from the quantum to the cosmos: particle physics, quantum computing, astrophysics, cosmology and the discoveries that change what is possible.
A fingernail-sized photonic chip sorted partially coherent light from two and then three lasers into separate, uncorrelated beams for the first time.
The LHCb experiment sees a beauty particle turn into two muons at 3.2 sigma, matching the Standard Model and ending a 40-year hunt's first chapter.
Models of dense, metal-poor clusters seen in two lensed galaxies suggest they could birth black holes of up to 4,000 Suns, a possible head start for supermassive ones.
First-year data from the paired satellites over Earth's polar cusp suggests the explosive solar-wind process moves through space rather than flickering in time.
Astronomers dated VVV CL001 using Hubble images and say that if it formed in place, it could be the oldest globular cluster in the galaxy's bulge.
Seen 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, the dusty giant has its stars spread wide instead of packed tight, and is unlikely to become a compact elliptical.
Columbia and Chilean researchers rewrote Einstein's equations in plasma-style variables and found gravitational field 'sheets' that can reconnect.
Screening 183,000 materials turned up a compound that exfoliates into a flat-band 2D lattice with electron density over 100 times that of twisted-graphene systems.
A Cornell-led team found the states by accident while chasing twisted graphene, in a device where two three-layer sheets relaxed into a rhombohedral stack.
The Science Advances experiment supports a 2008 model for how superconductivity meets a topological insulator's surface, though the key phase transition is still unconfirmed.
A German team's carbene molecule held its quantum spin for about 2.2 milliseconds and emitted light stable in frequency for more than an hour, a hurdle for solid-state qubits.
If the preprint holds up, EBG-1 would be an unusually efficient source of the radiation that cleared the early universe's fog, but it is one object and the estimate rests on model assumptions.
The Nature Physics result makes the uranium compound the leading candidate for a topological superconductor, a long-sought material for quantum computing.
A chip-scale experiment shows a topological pattern surviving after the photons' entanglement is destroyed, hinting at more resilient quantum networks.
SLAC-led physicists found a handedness signature in manganese telluride that conventional antiferromagnets lack, a result that could help build faster, lower-power electronics.
The links moved quantum states between chips with 99% average accuracy and survived three warm-and-cool cycles, a step toward building quantum computers out of modules.
A Nature Communications study breaks the 'ice rule' that has organized artificial spin-ice research for decades, using a magnetic field that spins in the plane of a microscopic lattice.
A Chinese team used rubidium atoms in an optical lattice to simulate the Schwinger effect, a decades-old prediction that no laboratory has directly observed.
Perimeter's Michael Borinsky says a pretzel-style simplification of quantum field theory could turn factorially growing calculations into polynomial ones.
A Chinese team built pentagon-and-heptagon nanoribbons predicted in 1996. One version is a true metal, a possible route to carbon quantum wires.
Spectroscopy of cryptochrome suggests a spin-filtering effect could raise its directional sensitivity from about 0.3% to 1.6%. The authors call it a theoretical prediction.
An analysis of about 100,000 quasars shows faster-moving black holes are redder and dustier, as general relativity's recoil prediction implies; the authors say it could mean about half the sample recently merged.
Stacking Planck satellite maps of 25 clusters reveals a lopsided hot-and-cold pattern at 3.6 sigma, evidence that gas inside the clusters is rotating or sloshing.
Physicists at TU Wien and UC San Diego used ultraviolet laser pulses to push past a textbook cutoff in X-ray generation, opening a new probe of electron correlations.
Spanish-led researchers pulled hidden magnetic information out of a material with no net magnetization and read it as an electrical signal, confirming a prediction made years ago.
The design swaps some superconducting loops for ones with no Josephson junctions, letting ultrasensitive magnetic detectors find true zero field without losing sensitivity.
Osaka researchers carved spiral springs into a silicon wafer, producing a self-supporting material whose response to terahertz light changes as it is pulled.
A theory paper in Physical Review Letters predicts that excitons in atomically thin semiconductors bind to anyons, shifting the light spectrum in a way that could locate them. Experiments have yet to test it.
Kyushu University researchers found that a 0.3-nanometer film, thinner than one continuous atomic layer, gave the strongest response. The finding could help devices that turn waste heat into electricity.
The machine-learning tool will analyze data from Fermilab's SBN program and the DUNE experiment, which is expected to start taking data in 2030.