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23 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: September 15, 2026.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A startling accidental discovery in a Pennsylvania lab has upended centuries of assumptions about the boundary between liquid and solid behavior.
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.
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.