Physics
Physicists Get Light and Sound to Strongly Couple in Ordinary Optical Fiber for First Time
A German team saw the signature gap of strong coupling in a single pass of light through fiber cooled to 4 kelvin, with no cavity needed.
The physics desk
Physics Page 5
Physics from the quantum to the cosmos: particle physics, quantum computing, astrophysics, cosmology and the discoveries that change what is possible.
PhysicsNew Locking Scheme Using Infrared Light Clears Path for Sharper LIGO Gravitational Wave Mirrors
Australian physicists showed an infrared handover method that works with crystalline mirror coatings that absorb the green light current detectors rely on.
PhysicsGlasgow-Led Team Reads Electron Spins in a Porous Crystal With Light, a Step Toward a 'Quantum Nose'
Researchers in Scotland and Japan optically detected spin resonance in a metal-organic framework for the first time, opening a route to molecular-scale sensors.
PhysicsBerlin-Led Review Shows Tailored Pulses Flip Nuclear Spins 10 Times Faster Than Standard Ones
A Science Advances review marking a century of spin physics says optimal control now reaches from MRI scanners to chiral molecules, and may need machine learning next.
PhysicsIllinois Physicists Store Light on a Chip for Over a Microsecond, and Hold Several Photons at Once
Erbium atoms in thin-film lithium niobate act as a photon memory that could be manufactured at scale, researchers at Urbana-Champaign report in Nano Letters.
PhysicsCERN Experiments Find Rare Particle Decays Drifting Slightly From Standard Model Predictions
CMS and LHCb both see small, consistent differences in a decay that happens about once in 10 million beauty-particle decays, though neither result is conclusive.
PhysicsThree Quantum-Inspired Black Hole Cores Would Ring at Different Pitches, Math Shows
Khalifa University researchers computed how Planck stars, Bonanno-Reuter and Hayward black holes would sound compared with Einstein's, though today's detectors cannot hear the difference.
PhysicsMaxwell's Demon Squeezes Work From Hidden Information With Two Measurements, Study Shows
Konstanz and Max Planck physicists report in Nature Physics that a particle in a gooey liquid can yield extra energy when measured twice.
PhysicsOverlooked Branch of Gravity Theory Lets Dark Energy Flip From Negative to Positive
Istanbul Technical University physicists say a teleparallel f(T) model produces a sign change about 9.5 billion years ago with no extra free parameters, matching the hints in DESI data.
PhysicsNeural Network Plus Orbital Physics Predicts Satellite Falls to Within About 13 Minutes
A BRIN-led team tested the method on a Soviet Venus lander, a NASA telescope and a Chinese rocket stage, with all three reported fall times landing inside the predicted window.
PhysicsNew Calculation Closes the 20% Gallium Neutrino Gap Without Inventing a New Particle
Italian physicists say treating the electron and the nucleus together, instead of separately, makes a 30-year-old anomaly disappear. The work appears in Physical Review Letters.
PhysicsSilicon Qubits Hit 99.99% Accuracy While Three Run at Once, RIKEN Team Reports in Nature Physics
Researchers traced the main source of errors in parallel control to a microwave side effect and fixed it with a calibration scheme that scales.
PhysicsSuperfluid Helium Gyroscope Could Measure Earth Dragging Spacetime in a Lab, Physicists Propose
A Berkeley, Vienna and Caltech team says a chilled loop of helium-4 could rival space-based measurements of frame-dragging, on the ground.
PhysicsPhysicists Derive Einstein's Gravity Equations From Quantum Information Theory, Without Analogies
A Physical Review Letters paper shows that a measure of how distinguishable quantum states are, evaluated at a horizon, yields the semiclassical Einstein equations.
PhysicsChip-Sized Laser Gyroscope Senses Rotation Nearly 2,000 Times More Faintly, Approaching Earth's Spin
A Caltech and UC Santa Barbara team built a Brillouin ring-laser gyroscope that measures rotation as slow as 37 degrees per hour, using only milliwatts of optical power.
PhysicsOne Crystal, Three Jobs: Korean Team Chemically Turns a Single 2D Layer Into a Working Transistor
Published in Science, the method converts selected layers of tungsten diselenide into the semiconductor, insulator and metal-like contacts a transistor needs, with control near 0.7 nanometers.
PhysicsUltraviolet Laser Pulses Create New Diamond Defects While Leaving Quantum Qubit Centers Intact
Ultraviolet nanosecond pulses added fresh light-emitting flaws in a diamond crystal without disturbing the nitrogen-vacancy centers used in quantum sensors.
PhysicsIllinois Physicists Build a Stability Test That Sorts Quantum Phases an Older Method Lumps Together
A new framework in Physical Review X classifies phases of matter in open, noisy systems, where the usual energy-gap approach fails.
PhysicsChip-Sized Frequency Comb Matches Tabletop Systems, Raising Hopes for Portable Atomic Clocks
Researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute and partners lock a chip-based comb into a single clean set of 'tick marks' using light solitons, a Nature paper reports.
PhysicsLinking GPS-Style Satellites to Moon Orbiters Could Cut Navigation Drift 20-Fold, Chinese Simulation Finds
Without ground stations, a 60-day simulation of 24 BeiDou satellites drifted 7.85 meters. Adding four lunar orbiters cut that to 0.35 meters.
PhysicsOxford Physicists Use a Hybrid Quantum Computer to Watch the Aharonov-Bohm Effect Freeze a Particle
Qubits stood in for a magnetic field and ion vibrations for matter, in a Nature Physics experiment that simulates lattice gauge theory, the framework used in particle physics.
PhysicsAstronomers Confirm the Most Powerful Radio Galaxy Ever Found, Seen 12.5 Billion Years in the Past
The source, TXS 2354+015, sits at redshift 4.946, when the universe was under 1.2 billion years old, and its radio output beats the previous record from a 2008 census.
PhysicsWebb Studies 21 'Extreme Debris Disks' Where Planetary Embryos Smash Together
About one-third of the disks carry silica-rich debris from Mars-sized collisions, while the rest point to smaller grazing impacts, a Webb-led team reports in The Astrophysical Journal.
PhysicsChandra Gives Cleanest X-Ray Map Yet of the Supernova Remnant Next to Sgr A*
By separating three overlapping sources of X-rays, astronomers isolated Sagittarius A East for the first time and mapped its iron, sulfur, argon and calcium.
PhysicsAstronomers Record a Gamma-Ray Burst Whose Engine Kept Firing for 27 Days, a New Record
GRB 220706A kept flaring in X-rays for about 51 days after detection, and its central engine stayed active roughly 20 days longer than any burst on record. No single explanation fits every detail.
PhysicsIllinois Team Stores Multiple Photons on a Chip for Over a Microsecond Using Erbium Atoms
The Nano Letters demonstration on thin-film lithium niobate is a step toward chip-scale quantum memories that could be manufactured at scale.
PhysicsTwo Nature Studies Show Topology Can Survive Where the Energy Gap Closes
Acoustic-metamaterial experiments in Singapore and China confirm a long-theorized idea that robust topological states can coexist with a quantum critical point.
PhysicsPhysicists Find Ytterbium Compound's Spins Behave Like a Liquid Crystal, Explaining a Long-Standing Puzzle
Neutron scattering at Rice University shows manganese spins in YbMnBi2 line up in a preferred direction without forming magnetism, a 'spin nematic' state that appears near room temperature.
PhysicsPhysicists Spot Majorana Zero Modes Inside Magnetic Vortices of an Iron-Based Superconductor, Tangled With Charge Stripes
Tsinghua-led scanning-tunneling images show electronic stripes growing stronger at vortex cores, with one of two vortex types hosting the exotic particle that is its own antiparticle.
PhysicsPhysicists See Heavy Electrons Form at the Edge of a Single Atom-Thick Layer for the First Time
A University of Osaka team grew a one-atom-thick ytterbium-copper film on copper and saw two heavy-fermion states, a step toward designing exotic superconductors.