The physics desk
Physics from the quantum to the cosmos: particle physics, quantum computing, astrophysics, cosmology and the discoveries that change what is possible.
Physicists in Shanghai calculated that spin-orbit coupling — long treated as a fixed property of a material's atoms — weakens as temperature rises, closing the band inversion that makes topological states possible.
Nagoya University physicists found that hidden matter around a black hole shifts the frequency and the decay rate of its gravitational-wave ringdown by different amounts — a mismatch detectors could look for.
Okayama University physicists used nuclear magnetic resonance to find three distinct phases in potassium chromium arsenide, evidence that it is a spin-triplet superconductor — the type that could host particles useful for error-free quantum computing.
Davyne started as an unwanted byproduct in a University of Turku lab. It switches color in the near-infrared, invisible to the eye and readable only by a camera or a spectrometer.
Jianjun Dong and Yi Zeng replaced Fourier's 200-year-old law with a spatiotemporal kernel. In silicon at room temperature, where the heat came from mattered more than when.
Princeton physicists ran the framework in five experiments on the DIII-D tokamak in San Diego. Its full read-decide-act loop takes about 20 milliseconds — far faster than any human at the console.
The design injects charge through a central core but emits only from side branches thinner than the wavelength of the light itself, so total internal reflection has nothing to work with.
Above 21 gigapascals, copper phthalocyanine crystals rearranged into single-atom copper chains over 4,000 atoms long, each sealed inside its own carbon sheath. Previous attempts topped out below 10 atoms.
Researchers pulled 174,929 faint precursor signals out of 34 years of global seismic records — about 10 times every previous dataset combined — and connected scattered anomalies into continuous structures 1,800 miles down.
A 50-year-old idea says migrating birds sense Earth's field through entangled electron pairs in their eyes. An OIST team has produced the control theory an experimentalist would need to check it, and it gets within 1% of the theoretical optimum.
PSR J1637-4642 was quiet through ten years of monitoring at Australia's Murriyang telescope. Fifteen and a half years of data now show three sudden spin-ups, and the biggest of them jumped the star's rotation by 2.7 parts per million.
The levitated sensor can register a nudge one-hundredth the width of an atom. Over a month of quiet nights it saw nothing — and that silence rules out a swath of ultraheavy dark matter nine orders of magnitude wide.
A team aboard the China Space Station ran the first atom-interferometry test of Einstein's weak equivalence principle in permanent free fall, and matched the two isotopes' accelerations to five parts in 100 million.
Sandia National Laboratories stitched together 36 infrasound stations and put the New Glenn explosion at 0.131 kilotons of TNT — a few percent of the propellant's chemical energy.
Each holds about three million suns' worth of hydrogen inside a halo weighing 3.7 billion solar masses. If the interpretation holds, they are dark matter halos that never lit up.
A team working at Los Alamos pushed zirconium pentatelluride to 0.7 kelvin and found magnetoresistance oscillations that were not periodic and refused to die at the quantum limit.
Hawking radiation should evaporate anything that small in an instant. Three physicists calculated the point where dark matter falling in outruns the radiation leaking out.
A second graphene sheet less than a nanometer away drained the interactions between electrons. The superconducting transition fell by more than a factor of ten, which is not what phonon theory predicts.
RBH-1 left a trail of newborn stars 202,000 light-years long. A Santa Barbara team worked backward to the merger that threw it out, about 70 million years ago.
Ten thousand ultracold atoms in a mirrored cavity behaved like a spin glass, and the photons bouncing between them acted as synapses that rewired themselves.
Photons from neutral atoms spaced micrometers apart were routed into parallel channels of a 32-channel waveguide array with almost no crosstalk, a step toward linking quantum computers together.
The first detailed molecular gas map of the colliding galaxy group shows that the regions with the most violent gas motion form stars least efficiently, even where there is plenty of raw material.
Using an electron beam that takes snapshots on ultrafast timescales, a Stanford-led team found that light-generated charge carriers pile into dense local pockets — at densities far above what the calculations predicted.
A NIMS and University of Tokyo team coated yttrium iron garnet powder with platinum and pressed it into bulk, scattering nanoscale interfaces throughout the material. Thickness no longer caps the output.
The 'arm qubit' design uses a quarton coupler to keep storage and communication apart. In simulation it holds state as long as the best existing designs while operating faster.
The star's inner atmosphere has grown lopsided since 2015, and the newly confirmed companion star may be steering where the convection cells sit.
Confined inside phytantriol lipid layers, water skipped ice entirely down to minus 120 Celsius. Its molecular motion changed sharply between minus 35 and minus 20.
BESIII used quantum entanglement between 3 million particle-antiparticle pairs to reach the 10⁻¹⁹ e·cm level for the first time. A nonzero result would have pointed straight past the Standard Model.
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.