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 at TU Darmstadt recalculated the masses of 70 exotic nuclei and found the traffic jam that builds heavy elements in neutron star collisions lasts longer than every previous model assumed.
A University of Tokyo team built nanoscale optics from the aperiodic monotile that solved a decades-old math puzzle in 2023 — and found diffraction patterns no quasicrystal has ever produced.
Physicists at UC Riverside found that photographing the detector's mirrors with a commercial infrared camera solves a heat-warping problem that has quietly capped its sensitivity for years.
A Manchester researcher dug into archived ALMA data and searched millimeter frequencies almost nobody has checked for alien signals. No technosignatures — but far more stars surveyed than anyone counted.
A beam that both spins and corkscrews as it travels shatters mirror-image versions of the same molecule at measurably different rates — a cheaper, stronger signal than the optical methods the drug industry relies on now.
At the European XFEL, physicists tracked light turning into motion inside a single ring-shaped molecule — and found that different atoms in the same molecule tell completely different stories about what happened.
Physicists in China mapped the 167-year-old math problem onto how a quantum system changes over time — and the signal collapsed exactly at the first five zeros of the zeta function.
Sodium-rubidium molecules destroy each other when they collide. A Hong Kong team built an invisible repulsive wall around them and got the first NaRb Bose-Einstein condensate — plus a self-bound quantum droplet.
The flash astronomers named TDE 2025abcr came from 30,000 light-years off-center in a galaxy 750 million light-years away — the first quiet, wandering giant ever caught this far from home.
A faint point of light 8.8 astronomical units from the red supergiant turned out to be a young star of roughly three solar masses — bright enough to see only because it is heavier than anyone predicted.
Two colors of laser light interfere inside a semiconductor and squirt electrons in a chosen direction. Rotate the light's polarization and the electron beam sweeps like a lighthouse lamp.
Richard Feynman made the puzzle famous after his own experiments failed. A team at the Courant Institute built looping, curved sprinklers, ran them forward and backward, and found the answer in the angular momentum of the water itself.
By combining Event Horizon Telescope and Global Millimeter VLBI Array images at two wavelengths, a Shanghai-led team produced the first spatially resolved spectral map of a black hole's shadow.
A Swedish team rebuilt the physics of how silver atoms absorb sunlight and closed a stubborn gap between our star and the oldest rocks in the solar system.
The silicon nitride circuit uses two tunable loop couplers to reprogram how fast a light pulse travels — something previous optical chips locked in at the factory.
Chinese researchers found that a proton shuttling between two halves of a molecule opens a quantum tunneling route for energy — at room temperature.
Sifting through two decades of Hubble images, a University of Utah team spotted a star being tugged by an invisible companion — the first of thousands of black holes thought to be hiding in the giant cluster.
Cambridge scientists find the planets circling our closest single-star neighbor are smaller than Earth, larger than Mars, laced with a rare deep-mantle mineral, and locked so close to their star that any atmosphere would be stripped away.
Using tensor networks to compress the state of hundreds of entangled qubits, researchers cracked a quantum-dynamics calculation on ordinary hardware — matching a quantum computer's results and shaking up claims of 'quantum advantage.'
A UC Irvine–led team detected a planet about twice the size of Earth orbiting a nearby red dwarf, receiving almost exactly as much starlight as Earth gets from the sun.
A Caltech astrophysicist calculates that lopsided eruptions from bloated, dying sun-like stars act like thousands of tiny rocket thrusts, nudging the stars to speeds of about a kilometer per second.
Using a ground-based telescope in Chile, scientists spotted helium streaming off the exoplanet LHS 1140 b, the first time an atmosphere has been confirmed around a rocky world in the life-friendly zone of another star.
A Swiss team's detector, called PLATON, could replace millions of tiny sensor components with a single block of light-producing material, using a light-field camera and AI to reconstruct particle tracks.
In crystals a few atoms thick, researchers found that light-generated excitons don't just sit on top of the magnetism — they can sense the spin order and, under the right conditions, help control it.
A gold film thinner than a hair, carved with hundreds of microscopic slits, acts as a statistical filter on quantum states of light — no cryogenic refrigeration required.
Astronomers at Warwick and Colorado used Hubble's ultraviolet vision to pull four dead stars out of the glare of brighter companions — one just 25 light-years away, now the ninth-closest white dwarf to the Sun.
The newly identified world, Beta Pictoris d, makes the young nearby system only the second ever found to host at least three directly imaged planets.
A model proposing that dark matter is made of at least two kinds of particles — a heavier one that sinks toward galactic centers and a lighter one that drifts outward — could resolve puzzles that have frustrated cosmologists for years.
Tulane researchers found that atoms on certain gold surfaces shift into a protective 'herringbone' pattern that leaves oxygen molecules no room to split apart — suppressing the reactions that corrode ordinary metals by up to a trillion times.
A Penn State team led by Abhay Ashtekar has devised a new entropy measure that extends the laws of black hole thermodynamics to objects that grow, merge and evaporate — not just idealized, static ones.