Physics News

CERN Physicists Discover Third and Final Member of Doubly Charmed Baryon Family

An artist’s impression of the doubly charmed Ωcc⁺ baryon. Image credit: Daniel Dominguez / CERN.
Jun 18, 2026 by News Staff

Physicists with LHCb Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have detected the elusive Ωcc⁺ baryon, a particle containing two charm quarks and one strange quark, completing a long-sought family of doubly charmed baryons first predicted over half a century ago. An artist’s impression of the doubly charmed Ωcc⁺ baryon. Image credit: Daniel Dominguez / CERN. “Quarks are basic building blocks of matter,” said Dr. Paula Collins,...

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Quantum mechanics defies classical intuition, most famously through Schrödinger’s cat, where systems exist in superpositions of opposing states. Such superpositions are central to quantum technologies. Quantum ‘cat’ states have been realized in harmonic oscillators, but implementations were largely limited to Fock, displaced, or Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill states. A different class of macroscopic superpositions, where an oscillator is squeezed along orthogonal axes so that its positional variance is simultaneously larger and smaller than the Heisenberg limit, was proposed previously but remained unrealized. Saner et al. introduce a trapped-ion hybrid spin-oscillator system enabling an experimental realization of these ‘siblings’ of Schrödinger’s cat. Image credit: Saner et al., doi: 10.1103/k1xk-yt42.

Schrödinger’s Cat Gets Stranger: Physicists Demonstrate Quantum States No One Has Seen Before

Jun 10, 2026 by News Staff

Physicists at the University of Oxford have engineered a new class of ‘cat states’ — quantum superpositions constructed not from ordinary wave...

This artist’s impression shows the evolution of the Universe beginning with the Big Bang on the left followed by the appearance of the Cosmic Microwave Background. The formation of the first stars ends the cosmic dark ages, followed by the formation of galaxies. Image credit: M. Weiss / Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Is Dark Energy Unnecessary? Mathematicians Challenge Standard Cosmological Model of Universe

May 28, 2026 by News Staff

Mathematicians from University College London and the University of California, Davis, have published a mathematical proof that the Universe’s accelerating...

Sigmops gracilis. Image credit: Wu Quancheng / Fisheries Research Institute, Council of Agriculture, Taiwan.

Bioluminescent Deep-Sea Fish Use Crystal ‘Prisms’ to Recycle Their Own Glow

May 27, 2026 by News Staff

A marine biologist studying the photophores of a bioluminescent fish species found needle-shaped guanine crystals that scatter and redirect light instead...

An artist’s impression of the Bc*+ meson. Image credit: Daniel Dominguez / CERN.

CERN Physicists Observe New Exotic Particle

May 25, 2026 by News Staff

Physicists with the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have observed the Bc*+ meson, an excited version of the Bc+ meson —...

Gravitational waves observed by Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) twin detectors were produced during the final fraction of a second of the merger of two black holes to produce a single, more massive spinning black hole. Image credit: T. Pyle / LIGO.

Gravitational Waves Could Become New Tool in Hunt for Dark Matter

May 13, 2026 by News Staff

Researchers have developed a new method to identify whether black hole mergers occurred inside dense clouds of dark matter, potentially opening a fresh...

Aggarwal et al. show that the energy released from dark matter decay could alter the chemistry of early galaxies enough to cause some of them to directly collapse into black holes rather than forming stars. Image credit: Aggarwal et al., doi: 10.1088/1475-7516/2026/04/034.

Dark Matter May Have Jump-Started Universe’s First Giant Black Holes

Apr 29, 2026 by News Staff

New research by astronomers from the University of California, Riverside, Sam Houston State University and the University of Oklahoma suggests decaying...

Scatterty et al. used a combination of self-report and biological measures to demonstrate that infrasound can have irritant, and aversive properties on humans. Similarly, infrasound appears to influence increases in negative affective evaluation.

Infrasound Can Subtly Raise Stress and Discomfort, New Study Finds

Apr 27, 2026 by News Staff

New research suggests that infrasound — very low-frequency sound below 20 Hz — can increase cortisol levels and irritability, offering a scientific...

A muon particle passing through lead in a cloud chamber. Image credit: Jino John 1996 / CC BY-SA 4.0.

Long-Standing Muon Mystery May Be Settled

Apr 23, 2026 by News Staff

A new high-precision calculation of a key component underpinning the magnetic moment of the muon, a heavier cousin of the electron, brings theory and experiment...

Gaztañaga proposes a new dark matter mechanism in which relic black holes originate from a pre-Big-Bounce collapse phase.

Black Holes from Before Big Bang Could Still Exist Today as ‘Cosmic Fossils’

Apr 20, 2026 by News Staff

New research by Professor Enrique Gaztañaga from the University of Portsmouth and the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona suggests some black holes...

CMS candidate collision event for a W boson decaying into a muon (red line) and a neutrino that escapes detection (pink arrow). Image credit: CMS / CERN.

CERN Physicists Pin Down W Boson Mass with Unprecedented Precision

Apr 13, 2026 by News Staff

Using data from over one billion proton-colliding events collected at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), physicists have measured the mass of the W...

The POSS I red image on July 19, 1952 at 8:52 (UT) containing the triple transient just above center. Image credit: Solano et al., doi: 10.1093/mnras/stad3422.

Mysterious Flashes in 1950s Skies Linked to Nuclear Tests and UAP Sightings: Study

Apr 10, 2026 by Natali Anderson

A new statistical analysis of archival sky surveys from the early Cold War has found that mysterious, short-lived bursts of light in the night sky were...

Sekiya et al. found evidence for an exotic atomic nucleus state in an experiment at the GSI/FAIR research center in Germany. Image credit: J. Hosan, GSI/FAIR.

Physicists Detect Elusive Nuclear State

Apr 10, 2026 by News Staff

An experiment in Germany offers the first evidence of a long-predicted pairing between a nucleus of carbon-11 and η’ meson (eta prime meson), shedding...

Illustration of the predicted hexagonal carbon hydride compound under Neptune-like interior conditions. In this structure, carbon forms the outer spiral chains (yellow) and hydrogen forms the inner spiral chains (blue), consistent with the quasi-one-dimensional superionic behavior identified in first-principles simulations. Image credit: Cong Liu.

New Form of Matter May Lurk Deep Inside Uranus and Neptune

Apr 6, 2026 by News Staff

New computational simulations suggest ice-giant planets like Uranus and Neptune harbor a quasi-one-dimensional superionic state of carbon hydride that...

You et al. studied supercooled water at timescales before ice formation by heating high- and low-density amorphous ices using infrared ultrafast laser pulses, followed by X-ray scattering; they observed a rapid increase in the heat capacity indicating a critical divergence at 210 K coincident with enhanced density fluctuations. Image credit: POSTECH University.

Physicists Find First Experimental Evidence of Elusive Critical Point in Supercooled Water

Mar 30, 2026 by News Staff

By probing supercooled water with ultrafast lasers before it crystallizes, physicists at Stockholm University observed telltale signs of a long-theorized...

Morrell et al. observed a new type of time crystal -- one whose particles levitate on a cushion of sound while interacting with each other by exchanging sound waves. Image credit: David Song / NYU.

Physicists Create Levitating Form of Time Crystal

Mar 24, 2026 by News Staff

A team of scientists at New York University has created a version of the exotic phase of matter in which particles levitate acoustically and interact by...

An artist’s impression of the doubly charmed baryon Ξcc⁺, which contains two charm quarks and one down quark. Image credit: CERN.

CERN Physicists Discover Heavier Cousin of Proton

Mar 23, 2026 by News Staff

Physicists from the LHCb experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have discovered a new kind of heavy proton-like particle. Known as Ξcc⁺,...

Schematic of the expansion of the Universe from the Big Bang to the present day. Image credit: NASA / EFBrazil.

Astrophysicists Propose New Method to Measure Hubble Constant

Feb 25, 2026 by Enrico de Lazaro

Astrophysicists from the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago have developed an innovative method to measure the Hubble constant —...

The KM3NeT experiment has recently observed a neutrino with an energy around 100 PeV, and IceCube has detected five neutrinos with energies above 1 PeV; while there are no known astrophysical sources, exploding primordial black holes could have produced these high-energy neutrinos. Image credit: Gemini AI.

Ultra-High-Energy Neutrino May Signal First Glimpse of Primordial Black Hole Explosion

Feb 4, 2026 by News Staff

Physicists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst argue that an ultra-high-energy neutrino detected by the KM3NeT experiment could be the signature...

Hun Rho et al. introduce plasmonic colloidal supraballs -- solution-processable assemblies of gold nanospheres -- as a robust and versatile platform for broadband solar energy harvesting. Image credit: Hun Rho et al., doi: 10.1021/acsami.5c23149.

New Nanomaterial Design Could Help Solar Tech Harness More Sunlight

Feb 2, 2026 by News Staff

By using gold nanospheres engineered to capture light across the solar spectrum, researchers at Korea University took a step toward lowering barriers to...

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