The physics desk
Physics from the quantum to the cosmos: particle physics, quantum computing, astrophysics, cosmology and the discoveries that change what is possible.
STAR experiment data from Brookhaven's final collider run set a new lower boundary for where the primordial soup can form. The LHC should see a stronger effect.
Jiaxuan Zhang traced the assumptions behind five attempts to derive the Born rule and found each depends on additivity. The work does not rule out a probability-free derivation.
UCLA-led researchers added arginine to a tantalum disulfide crystal and extended its charge density wave from about minus 93 C to about 57 C.
A Southampton and IIT Kanpur team argues a long-ignored 'decoupled' heavy neutrino could have briefly dominated the early universe and shaped the matter-antimatter imbalance.
X-ray data from the XRISM telescope show the 'Neupert effect,' first seen on the sun in 1968, near the black hole in galaxy NGC 3783.
Bristol-led team measured resistance in a thin film at the European Magnetic Field Laboratory and pinned the pairing on spin fluctuations, but says only half the puzzle is solved.
The 'one-positron quantum cyclotron,' cooled to 0.3 kelvin, sets up the most precise test yet of whether electrons and their antimatter twins truly mirror each other.
A Geneva physicist transcribed three handwritten pages sitting unpublished in Vienna for 80 years and found Schrödinger's model matched quantum predictions even through several light filters.
Researchers held a 100-nanometer glass sphere in a laser trap and registered the momentum from individual krypton, xenon and sulfur hexafluoride hits, particles 10 million times lighter than the sphere.
A strontium ion carries the link and a calcium ion stores it, stretching entanglement across a fiber-connected network from milliseconds to more than ten seconds.
Normally banned colors of light appear when the driving laser is in a squeezed quantum state, offering a new probe of quantum noise at attosecond speed.
Tiny flexible fibers in microchannels flip between two stable states, so a network of them keeps a memory of what has flowed through, with no electronics at all.
Shandong University physicists verified entanglement on six links across 20 kilometers of fiber each, closing a loophole that tampered measurement equipment could exploit.
Spanish researchers found that odd-length chains of triangular graphene fragments interact with a superconductor while even-length chains do not, as reported in Nature.
A Hong Kong and Tokyo team recast high-pressure ice as a magnet, resolving a long-running question and predicting a rare sharp transition in spin-3/2 materials.
Hebrew University researchers measured a single magnetic vortex flipping between two positions and found it needs only about 5 times Landauer's limit, a million times less than a modern computer.
University of Washington researchers built more than 600 nanophotonic cavities on diamond with 99.5% yield, a step toward quantum networks that can be manufactured at scale.
Indian Institute of Science physicists followed a magnetized star from birth to white dwarf and found it can far exceed the famous 1.4-solar-mass Chandrasekhar limit, with consequences for the supernovae used to measure the universe.
A Nature Physics paper turns a long-suspected 'Planckian' bound into a mathematical proof: no process, however much energy is pumped in, can settle a quantum system into a thermal state faster than temperature and two fundamental constants allow.
Auburn physicists used light to bring order to polar nanoregions in a quantum ferroelectric metal, settling a decades-old question about how the material organizes itself.
A University of Duisburg-Essen team's new simulation shows the clumpy structure of a stellar nursery shields parts of the cloud from ultraviolet light and reproduces the arcs and filaments seen by the James Webb Space Telescope.
Rutgers and IBM researchers measured and reset qubits in real time nearly 5,000 times and found a sharp switch from chaotic to controllable behavior at a 50-50 balance.
University of Chicago researchers grew bismuth telluride just two layers thick, thousands of times wider than earlier patches, though electrical tests remain to be done.
A Science paper shows magic state cultivation working on real superconducting hardware, reaching fidelity of about 99.99%.
The isolated cloud J1351+0039 holds about 130 million suns of mass and shows no stars in deep optical images.
The Nature Nanotechnology study finds the magnetic state persists after the voltage is removed, hinting at rewritable quantum materials.
The 7-billion-light-year-away collision is so massive for its age that some astronomers call it a challenge to the standard cosmological model. A new study finds dark matter that can be excited in collisions fits best, with a caveat.
The Large Binocular Telescope team's result lands within a hair of Planck's cosmic microwave background figure. About 90% of the helium around today was made in the first minutes, and about 10% came from stars.
New simulations show the Sun shedding its outer layers in bursts could destabilize Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune far sooner than the quintillion years once assumed.
A transient called AT 2026abck, in a galaxy at redshift 5.017, was caught four to 10 days after its blast without help from a gravitational lens, astronomers report.