Physics
Photon Experiment Shows a Qubit Farther From Equilibrium Can Settle Faster
A Southeast University team reports the first genuine quantum 'strong Mpemba effect' in a single qubit, and says removing coherence is what speeds relaxation.
Topic
Physical Review Letters
38 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: November 9, 2026.
Physics'Stupendously Large' Primordial Black Holes Ruled Out as Dark Matter by Mainz Physicists
A Physical Review Letters analysis finds black holes of at least 100 billion solar masses would leave patterns in the cosmic microwave background that astronomers do not see.
PhysicsHeavy Quarks in the Early Universe's Plasma Move Unlike Einstein Predicted
MIT and UC Santa Barbara theorists find that kicks in a fast quark's momentum are lopsided, hinting that quark-gluon plasma behaves more like a liquid than a gas.
PhysicsRadio Waves Drive Current Inside a Fusion Plasma, a First That Could Keep Reactors Running
General Atomics physicists showed 'helicon' waves can be absorbed deep in the DIII-D tokamak's plasma and push electrons, a goal pursued since the 1980s.
PhysicsYale Physicists Show a 2% Change in Iron Flips a Memory Material's Magnetic State
Photoemission measurements of iron-doped niobium disulfide explain why the material's resistance switches with low current, a property prized for low-power spintronic memory.
PhysicsQuantum 'Cat' States Stop Bouncing Back as Chinese Team Adds More Qubits
Fuzhou University physicists watched a microwave superposition recover its coherence with one qubit nearby, then lose it for good when the environment grew to eight.
PhysicsLab Detects Single Gas Atoms Kicking a Levitated Nanoparticle, One Collision at a Time
Researchers held a 100-nanometer glass sphere in a laser trap and registered the momentum from individual krypton, xenon and sulfur hexafluoride hits, particles 10 million times lighter than the sphere.
PhysicsFour-User Quantum Network Proves Its Entanglement Without Trusting Any Detector
Shandong University physicists verified entanglement on six links across 20 kilometers of fiber each, closing a loophole that tampered measurement equipment could exploit.
PhysicsLaser Flashes Line Up Tiny Electric Islands Inside a Crystal for a Trillionth of a Second
Auburn physicists used light to bring order to polar nanoregions in a quantum ferroelectric metal, settling a decades-old question about how the material organizes itself.
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.
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.
PhysicsToronto Physicists Detect Hidden 'Octupolar' Magnetism by Shining Rotating Light on Vibrating Atoms
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.
PhysicsPhysicists Prove Magnetic Order Survives Quantum Fluctuations in Gapless, Disordered Magnets
University of Colorado Boulder theorists adapted a classic statistical-mechanics argument to quantum systems, settling a long-standing conjecture about the random-bond Ising model.
PhysicsCMS Detects Jet Diffusion Wakes in Quark-Gluon Plasma, a 20-Year-Old Prediction
Physicists saw the wake a fast quark or gluon leaves behind in the primordial liquid of the early universe, using millions of lead-lead collisions at the LHC.
PhysicsPhysicists Finally See 'Kelvin-Wave Turbulence' Lord Kelvin Predicted in 1880, in a Tank of Water
A Paris team shook the top of a draining whirlpool and filmed its core with a high-speed camera. Energy cascaded from large ripples to ones 100 times smaller, exchanged six waves at a time, exactly as theory said.
PhysicsAtoms Normally Shine in Every Direction
Reported in Physical Review Letters, the trick is timing: match the speed of the atoms' motion to the length of the light pulse they emit together, and up to 89% of the light goes one direction. No mirrors, no lattice, no chiral structure required.
PhysicsEven a Perfect Qubit Loses Nearly Half the Photons It Is Sent
A photon emitted by a qubit is loud at first and fades like a struck bell, which is exactly the wrong shape for the next qubit to absorb. Engineering the waveguide's dispersion reverses the pulse and pushes the absorption probability to 100% in theory.
PhysicsThe LHC Smashed Oxygen Nuclei Into Protons to Recreate the First Instant of a Cosmic-Ray Air Shower
Cosmic-ray observatories in Utah and Argentina have to guess how the first collision in the upper atmosphere unfolds. For a few days in July 2025, CERN stopped guessing and photographed it.
PhysicsA Free-Electron Laser Normally Needs a 2-Kilometer Accelerator
The HZDR and Synchrotron SOLEIL team produced 272-nanometer ultraviolet flashes with the exponential power growth that defines a true FEL. Next target: extreme ultraviolet for inspecting computer chips.
PhysicsThree Odd Crystals Could Make Dark Matter Detectors 100 to 1,000 Times More Sensitive, and Two of Them Would Show the Signal Rising and Falling as Earth Turns
Titanium diselenide, strontium ruthenate and hole-doped diamond host low-energy electron waves called plasmons that amplify the faint kick a light dark matter particle would deliver, physicists report in Physical Review Letters. All three can be made today.
PhysicsCracks Don't Start as Cracks. They Start as Tiny 2D Patches That Creep for Most of the Break, Then Take Off at the Speed of Sound
Hebrew University physicists filmed fracture from its first appearance to explosive rupture and found the slow stage can take up 75% of the process. The same geometry may explain how earthquakes begin.
PhysicsPhysicists Looked Inside a Superconductor's 'Rivers of Charge' and Found the Pairs Are Made of Magnetic Defects Locked Like a Yin-Yang
Simulations of a single stripe in a cuprate model show electron pairing carried by 'spinon singlets.' Switch off the magnetism and the pairs vanish; switch it back and they return. The team predicts a two-lattice-site shift that microscopes can check.
PhysicsThey Squeezed Water to 2 Million Atmospheres and 1,800 Kelvin
French physicists at the CEA caught superionic ice, in which oxygen sits in a lattice while hydrogen flows like liquid, switching from a cubic to a hexagonal crystal above 200 gigapascals. The result is published in Physical Review Letters.
PhysicsA 300 TeV Photon Crossed 2 Billion Light-Years It Should Not Have Survived
The model combines axion-like particles with a violation of Lorentz invariance — and it predicts the photon arrived an hour late, which is what detectors saw.
PhysicsA Supermassive Black Hole Is Fleeing Its Galaxy at 1,000 Kilometers a Second
RBH-1 left a trail of newborn stars 202,000 light-years long. A Santa Barbara team worked backward to the merger that threw it out, about 70 million years ago.
PhysicsThey Went Hunting One Exotic Particle at Jefferson Lab and Came Back With Two Nobody Ordered
The GlueX experiment aimed a photon beam at protons to confirm a 20-year-old particle candidate. It missed that target and instead found evidence for two previously unseen structures, one of them at the five-sigma threshold physicists treat as a discovery.
PhysicsMIT Says the Neutrino Laser Is Dead. Either of Two Reasons Would Have Killed It Alone
Wolfgang Ketterle's group worked through a 2025 proposal to build a coherent neutrino beam from a Bose-Einstein condensate. The recoil alone ends it, and then there is the problem of neutrinos being fermions.
PhysicsPhysicists Found a Droplet That Holds Itself Together Using Nothing But the Pauli Exclusion Principle
A Monash team predicts a self-bound quantum liquid made of bosons and fermions, where the pressure that stops electrons from stacking up exactly cancels the attraction that should collapse it.
PhysicsRice Physicists Built a Temperature Dial for a Quantum Simulator by Cooling With Lasers and Heating With Radio
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.
PhysicsThe Universe Makes Gold More Slowly Than Anyone Calculated, New Nuclear Data Shows
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.
PhysicsPhysicists Show Quantum Mechanics Can Work Without Imaginary Numbers, Overturning a 2021 Verdict
Researchers in Germany found that the strange math at the heart of quantum theory can be rebuilt using only real numbers, contradicting a widely cited claim that imaginary numbers are truly indispensable.
PhysicsAfter 10 Years, NIST Physicist Stephan Schlamminger Opens His Sealed Envelope and Finds That His New Big G Measurement Disagrees With the French Result by 2.3 Parts in 10,000, Deepening a 225-Year-Old Mystery
The most precise American measurement of Newton’s universal gravitational constant, published Tuesday in Physical Review Letters at G = 6.67430 × 10⁻¹¹, again fails to bring big G into agreement with other modern experiments and may hint at unknown systematic errors or even new physics.
PhysicsPenn Engineers Coax Light Itself Into Talking to Light Using Exciton-Polaritons, Switching Signals With Just 4 Femtojoules in Step Toward Optical AI Chips
Bo Zhen's team at the University of Pennsylvania reports in Physical Review Letters that hybrid light-matter quasiparticles trapped in atomically thin semiconductors interact strongly enough to perform all-optical switching, the missing ingredient for photonic processors that could replace electrons in artificial-intelligence accelerators.
PhysicsGravitational Waves From the Big Bang May Have Created All of the Dark Matter in the Universe
A new paper in Physical Review Letters proposes that stochastic gravitational waves generated in the first moments after the Big Bang could have been converted into dark matter particles — a mechanism never before proposed that could solve one of physics' most fundamental mysteries.
PhysicsScientists Discover Simple Liquids Can Snap Apart Like Glass Under Extreme Stress — and It Makes an Audible Crack
Drexel University researchers found that ordinary liquids fracture at a 'critical stress' of about 2 megaPascals, breaking at speeds of up to 1,500 meters per second in a phenomenon governed by viscosity rather than elasticity.
PhysicsDrexel Scientists Discover Simple Liquids Can Snap Like Solids — a Finding That Defies Classical Physics
A startling accidental discovery in a Pennsylvania lab has upended centuries of assumptions about the boundary between liquid and solid behavior.
PhysicsLiquids Can Shatter Like Glass Under Stress, Drexel Discovery Overturns 300 Years of Physics
Researchers heard a loud snap during a routine experiment and found that certain liquids reach a "critical stress" point where they fracture like solids — challenging the most basic definition of a fluid.
PhysicsNYU Physicists Build Time Crystal Using Sound Waves That Appears to Break Newton's Third Law — And You Can Watch It With Your Eyes
Professor David Grier's team levitated tiny styrofoam beads in standing acoustic waves, producing a macroscopic time crystal through nonreciprocal particle interactions that carry momentum away via sound, defying the equal-and-opposite-reaction principle.