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 used laser cooling and strong magnetic fields to push an ultracold neutral plasma into territory no model covers, where free electrons, loosely bound atoms and deeply bound atoms all coexist and interact in ways nobody predicted.
The BESIII collaboration in Beijing reported that a particle called X(2370) is dominated by a pseudoscalar glueball, a knot of gluons with no quarks in it at all, closing in on one of quantum chromodynamics' oldest unconfirmed predictions.
Writing in Nature, researchers report a two-qubit gate that operates in 500 nanoseconds and converts roughly 0.5% of its operations into flagged, detectable errors while leaving hidden errors below 0.1%.
A Japanese team used the cavity between Earth's surface and its ionosphere as a natural resonator, then searched a decade of magnetic-field recordings from a Scottish observatory for the signature of axions.
Niobium diselenide is a promising two-dimensional superconductor that starts corroding the instant it meets oxygen. Researchers solved it by growing the crystal inside a gap less than a nanometer wide — under the protective layer instead of beneath it.
The MAIUS-B apparatus cooled rubidium and potassium into the fifth state of matter simultaneously under microgravity, at record particle flux. The enabling trick was a miniaturized laser system that doubled the optics without growing the payload.
The Einstein Probe caught the faintest X-ray shock breakout ever seen from this class of supernova. Two independent teams found no jet, no burst, and a 20-solar-mass Wolf-Rayet star that should have made both.
The Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii imaged plasma vortices just 20 kilometers across, curling at the edges of granules like breaking ocean waves. They may be how the Sun twists its magnetic field.
The Double Chooz experiment logged about 100 antineutrinos during 17 days when both reactors next door were shut down — the first measurement of its kind, and a possible new tool for catching cheating on nuclear treaties.
A Hiroshima University team used a preheated wire and a laser to lay down tungsten carbide-cobalt harder than 1400 HV without the cracks that have blocked 3D printing of the material for years.
Light passing through rubidium gas emerged earlier than it entered, by a measurable amount. A second, completely independent measurement of the atoms themselves gave the same negative number.
Conventional gas turbines burn about half their own output driving an air compressor. Karlsruhe engineers deleted the compressor and used detonation waves to raise the pressure instead — beating NASA's runtime record by 53 seconds.
Astronomers using adaptive optics on two of the world's largest telescopes found a shape no model of asteroid formation predicts, and a faint companion nobody had seen.
A team in Darmstadt cut the energy of accelerator-produced ions by a factor of 10,000, caught them in a 387-millimeter trap, and watched electron cooling work on highly charged ions for the first time.
A Flatiron Institute simulation of the galaxy’s entire history finds that about 91% of stellar-mass black holes drift alone, and roughly 3% were kicked out of the galaxy altogether.
Prabhanjan Ananth and Amit Sahai encode a single bit across many quantum states. An eavesdropper who divides the intercepted data between accomplices leaves each of them guessing at 50/50, even after they get the key.
Fudan University physicists mapped acceleration inside quark-gluon plasma for the first time and found it peaks at several hundred MeV along the fireball's edge — enough, through the Unruh effect, to mimic the temperature at which matter changes state.
Manufacturers routinely bake moisture out of sodium vanadium oxide. A University of Surrey team skipped that step and got a cathode that stores twice the charge, survives 400 cycles — and pulls salt out of seawater while it runs.
Pulses lasting a few hundred attoseconds produced stronger signals and less destruction than pulses 50 times longer, because a competing quantum process pushed electrons back where they started.
Two spacecraft — NASA's MAVEN and China's Tianwen-1 — watched at the same time and caught Kelvin-Helmholtz waves dumping bulk plasma into space.
The Jellyfish Nebula turns out to have a sibling. A Stanford-led team used 16 years of gamma-ray data to show the two remnants came from a single binary system — a pairing never seen before.
A new analysis finds that if dark matter particles attract each other through a hidden force, they clump more efficiently but also get lighter as the universe expands — and the net effect slows the growth of cosmic structure rather than speeding it up.
Astronomers have confirmed LHAASO J1912+1014u as a proton PeVatron, the kind of natural accelerator that has been hunted for decades as the source of the galaxy's highest-energy cosmic rays.
A Purdue team built cobalt-aluminum out of vapor instead of casting it, packing in atomic defects and soft glassy boundaries. The result hit 6 gigapascals of yield strength and still deformed instead of shattering.
Researchers at 25 institutions showed the mysterious 'low-energy enhancement' comes from magnetic transitions inside the nucleus — a result that changes how fast stars are calculated to build heavy elements.
Observations of Swift J1727.8−1613 with the Very Large Telescope caught powerful outflows still running after the system had dimmed to a hundredth of its peak brightness.
A French-German team modulated a gold-and-semiconductor metamaterial so fast that its optical properties change on the same timescale as light's own oscillations — cutting photon losses roughly in half. The result ran in Nature on July 30.
A team from IBM and the University of Chicago used 70 error-protected logical qubits to run a sampling problem that leading classical methods cannot practically reproduce, then supplied statistical proof that the machine's output was accurate. Verification has been the missing piece in every prior quantum-advantage claim.
Twistronics has been stuck at flake-sized samples of graphene-like materials. NC State's method chemically bonds sodium niobate membranes at a chosen angle, across areas big enough for real devices.
Atoms cooled to near absolute zero collided harder and harder, and the resistance simply stopped rising. The team calls the limit 'lattice unitarity.'