The physics desk
Physics from the quantum to the cosmos: particle physics, quantum computing, astrophysics, cosmology and the discoveries that change what is possible.
Illinois physicists found that vortices on a grid with wraparound edges act as hidden clocks, letting predictability emerge in a system machine learning could not forecast.
A neural network sifted a 5.6-trillion-pixel sky survey, and spectroscopy on the Very Large Telescope confirmed 70 of 76 candidates as true cosmic magnifying glasses.
Mid-circuit measurements cut the depth needed to prepare colliding particles, and a heavy particle appeared in the simulated energy density in a Nature Physics paper.
TU Wien physicists locked a laser to the thorium-229 nucleus, reaching about one second of error in 30 million years in a prototype with room to improve.
University of Florence physicists, writing in Science, entangled a levitated nanoparticle's motion with a light field without cooling the lab to near absolute zero.
The OIST experiment is the first time a quantum effect has directly moved an object massive enough to feel gravity, with an eye on testing whether gravity is quantum.
X-ray diffraction of six radioactive fragments shows their nuclear-fuel crystal structure is largely intact, suggesting they release radionuclides more slowly than assumed.
A new calculation says that once a black hole's horizon is temporarily distorted in one direction, its radiation cannot return to its original behavior with zero trace.
Four papers from an international team tie JWST's views of the earliest galaxies to the elements preserved in the Milky Way's oldest stars, and show simpler models underestimated how starlight shaped gas.
The 82-year-old Belgian-American physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is honored for realizing that Antarctic ice could reveal high-energy neutrinos streaming in from distant galaxies.
Institute of Science Tokyo researchers saw a bulk photovoltaic effect survive, and strengthen, in a crystal whose average structure should forbid it. The atoms' motion is doing the work.
Physicists at Tampere, Harvard and TU Dresden show a quantum particle in a chaotic space stays at least twice as likely to be found in its original state as in any comparable one, a rule that classical chaos forbids.
A rewrite of the 70-year-old Lawson criterion finds that raising temperature before density is cheaper, and that a trace of tungsten from reactor walls can roughly double the pressure required.
A laser-ionized column of air carried a 30 MHz VHF signal with no physical feed. The team says the antenna can be tuned and steered, though receiving signals is not yet demonstrated.
The SHOQ design uses charge-neutral superfluid helium to shrug off the electromagnetic noise that plagues today's superconducting qubits.
The signature of a recently recognized form of magnetism in Co₁/₄TaSe₂ could point toward faster, more efficient spintronic electronics.
Chinese researchers found gamma-iron inside impact glass from the Moon's far side, a nanoscale 'magnetic fossil' that may record the Moon's lost magnetic field.
India's GRAPES-3 telescope recorded 487 storms in nine years. A new study explains why it sees far more of them to the east.
Three-dimensional simulations of the early universe's plasma show a mild statistical preference for primordial magnetic fields that could ease the Hubble tension.
Three experiments, including laser pulses billions of times brighter than conventional lasers, found no sign of the 'photomolecular effect' that earlier work proposed.
Scanning tunneling microscopy of uranium ditelluride gives the first direct evidence of pair density waves that outlast superconductivity itself, physicists report in PNAS.
PSR J1856-0039 weighs about 2.49 suns combined and orbits in 2.36 hours. When its stars collide, the remnant is likely to be a neutron star rather than a black hole.
Muons implanted in ytterbium diantimonide crystals revealed spontaneous magnetic fields inside a superconductor that was thought incapable of producing them, hinting at exotic topological behavior.
A hybrid digital-optical processor uses light instead of heavy computing to score videos, and it held up at 94.8% on Google Veo 3 fakes it had barely seen.
A University of Arizona-led team found heavy elements being blown out of three early galaxies at up to 250 kilometers per second, showing the young universe was already far less pristine than astronomers assumed.
Max Planck researchers in Hamburg used trillionth-of-a-second electrical pulses to drive current past the usual limit, reaching the intrinsic threshold where the pairs of electrons that carry the current are torn apart.
University of Chicago physicists found millions of electrons moving together slowly yet coherently in Fe5GeTe2, a result that contradicts theory and persists up to 100 kelvin.
Oldenburg researchers overlapped two femtosecond laser pulses of different colors to build three-dimensional light fields, then used them to excite electrons in potassium atoms.
Osaka physicists made protons 'surf' a moving electric wave, and used a neural network with 99.2% precision to find the rare high-energy signals in millions of detector images.
The eight-pole magnetic order is invisible to standard probes, but it leaves a signature in how a crystal's atoms vibrate, which could lead to new kinds of computer memory.