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 single atomic layer of tungsten diselenide, a few degrees above absolute zero, and a beam of light gave physicists their first read on the inner life of a Wigner crystal.
Physicists thought you needed lead — 200 times heavier than a proton — to melt matter into quark-gluon plasma. Oxygen and neon just did it, and ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb all saw it independently.
Physicists at TU Dortmund built self-oscillating spin systems inside a semiconductor chip and found that distant ones synchronize, holding the rhythm for hours.
By tuning gain and detuning on an integrated photonic chip, a team watched laser frequencies wind around each other into Hopf links and Solomon links, making an abstract piece of non-Hermitian topology directly visible.
LuCo6Ge6 conducts as if it were positive along one axis and negative along another, delivering 18.4 microvolts per kelvin of transverse thermopower at room temperature in zero magnetic field.
Aydogan Ozcan's group used a structured diffractive surface — not software — to overwrite whatever an unknown object looks like with one predetermined image.
Time-resolved X-ray microscopy at BESSY II caught antiferromagnetic skyrmions tracking an applied current exactly — and rebounding off each other when they collided.
Nearly every quantum material discovered so far needs cooling to near absolute zero. This one sorts photons by their quantum statistics at room temperature.
Pied flycatchers were more disoriented by pulsed radiofrequency fields than by continuous ones of the same strength, a result the leading quantum model of bird navigation cannot produce.
The technique deliberately fractures the bonds between neighboring quantum dots along a pattern, then lifts the pieces onto a display backplane — producing a full-color, cadmium-free 4-inch screen.
Nobody has ever detected a graviton. An NYU physicist found a way to hunt for them anyway — by treating million-light-year filaments of cosmic magnetic field as a detector.
Tokyo physicists put differently sized colloidal spheres in an electric field. The big ones pulled on the small ones harder than the small ones pulled back, and the whole suspension refused to settle.
The measurement used to require weeks at a synchrotron. A Göttingen team rebuilt the reconstruction algorithm from scratch and did it in a university lab, resolving detail finer than the gap between two carbon atoms.
A specially shaped mirror sweeps a laser's focal point down the beam axis at the vacuum speed of light, defeating the 'dephasing' ceiling that has capped plasma accelerators. Electrons hit 396 MeV where the limit predicted 185.
Tidal torque theory says a galaxy's rotation was set before the galaxy existed, by uneven gravity tugging on the clump of matter that became it. A Xiamen University team reconstructed the primordial density field and found the fingerprint intact.
A survey of 1,428 galaxies in James Webb Space Telescope spectra finds that cosmic reionization was driven by a minority of extreme 'leakers,' not by the crowd.
Researchers switched the chirality of phonons inside a ferroelectric crystal with an electric field, then watched the electron spins flip along with them — an electrical control knob for spin that spintronics has been missing.
XENONnT found nothing — and that nothing is the tightest limit yet on axion-like particles and dark photons. It is the first detector to reach the boundary where the sun's own neutrinos start masquerading as a signal.
Laser spectroscopy on fermium-255 shows a nucleus stretched like a rugby ball — and produced a magnetic moment that contradicts the published value.
The device hits 32 femtoteslas per root hertz at room temperature — no liquid helium, no shielded room. The trick was killing 70% of the thermal noise with a graphite plate.
NASA's IXPE telescope stared at the magnetar 1E 1547.0-5408 and found X-ray polarization nearly three times higher than any comparable source. The leading explanation is vacuum birefringence: the vacuum itself behaving like a lens.
Heat normally spreads in every direction at once. In boron arsenide, UCLA engineers watched it move in focused beams along the crystal's own axes — a result that could let chip designers route heat the way fiber optics route light.
Instead of racks of room-temperature electronics feeding signals down cables, HRL Laboratories built a CMOS controller that sits next to the qubits in the cold and executes error correction on its own. Control errors dropped tenfold.
Trapped-ion experiments have been stuck at either near absolute zero or uncontrolled heat. A two-knob system now sets the temperature and the energy-loss rate independently.
In a potassium-tantalate-niobate crystal, electric dipoles turned out to be interlacing over and under each other in three dimensions — a structure nobody had ever seen form spontaneously in a solid.
The trick was routing one half of an entangled pair through the lenses three times instead of once. Lihong Wang's group had been stuck at 1.8× since 2023.
A Fresnel lens, a cone-shaped concentrator and a millimeter of crystal produced photon pairs 94% faithful to a perfect entangled state — and they violated Bell's inequality.
The trick replaces a spliced chain of different fiber types with one fiber that compresses its own pulses. The output now spans 0.86 to 2.90 micrometers without getting noisy.
The link held entanglement for 92.8% of a full day on commercial above-ground cable, moving 1,500 entangled photons per second through heat, wind and traffic vibration — conditions lab experiments never face.
By punching deliberate atomic holes in silicon carbide and exciting the leftover spins with a laser, the team made a coherent microwave source that needs no cryogenics — and doubles as a magnetometer sensitive to 20 trillionths of a tesla.