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Scanning electron microscopy image of a nanopatterned YBa2Cu3O7−δ (YBCO) thin film. The 12-nm-thick nanopatterned YBCO thin film was fabricated by reactive ion etching through an anodic aluminium oxide (AAO) membrane directly placed atop the YBCO. By RIE, the anodized aluminium oxide pattern of a triangular array of holes with ~70-nm diameter and ~103-nm period was duplicated onto the YBCO film. Image credit: Yang et al., doi: 10.1038/s41586-021-04239-y.

Physicists Discover New Type of ‘Strange Metal’

Jan 14, 2022 by News Staff

A team of physicists from the United States and China has detected the unexpected signatures of strange metallicity in a material in which electrical charge...

An artist’s conception of the cross section of a super-Earth with the National Ignition Facility target chamber superimposed over the mantle, looking into the core. Image credit: John Jett / Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Rocky Exoplanets with Four to Six Times Earth’s Mass Have Longest Dynamos, Study Suggests

Jan 13, 2022 by News Staff

The pressure and temperature conditions at which iron melts are important for rocky planets because they determine the size of the liquid metal core, an...

Artist’s impression of a cloud of trapped antihydrogen atoms. Image credit: Chukman So.

Antimatter Responds to Gravity in Same Way as Regular Matter, New Experiments Suggest

Jan 6, 2022 by News Staff

The Standard Model of particle physics is both incredibly successful and glaringly incomplete. Among the questions left open is the striking imbalance...

An artist’s rendition of a giant star in orbit around a low-mass black hole. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

Black Holes are Giant Fuzzballs, Theoretical Physicists Say

Jan 5, 2022 by News Staff

In 1997, cosmologists Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne and John Preskill made a famous bet as to whether information that enters a black hole ceases to exist....

Visualization of the motion of particles expelled from the mouth of the mannequin with inclination angles of 60° (a) and (b) and 120° (c) and (d); panels (a) and (c) display the average intensity of particle fluorescence, and panels (b) and (d) show the instantaneous particle distribution at three times; the white arrows mark the ejection direction of the particles; the nondimensional time interval in these figures corresponds to a physical time interval of 0.1 s. Image credit: Wang et al., doi: 10.1063/5.0073880.

Study: Coughing Downward Can Reduce Spread of Cough-Generated Droplets

Jan 5, 2022 by News Staff

Dr. Hongping Wang and his colleagues from the State Key Laboratory of Nonlinear Mechanics at the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences...

Magnesium-18. Image credit: S.M. Wang / Fudan University & Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, Michigan State University.

Physicists Create New Isotope of Magnesium

Dec 24, 2021 by News Staff

Magnesium-18 (18Mg) is the lightest isotope of magnesium, which is element 12 on the periodic table. Magnesium-18. Image credit: S.M. Wang / Fudan University...

Parker Solar Probe has flown through the solar corona and sampled particles and magnetic fields there. Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Parker Solar Probe Enters Magnetized Atmosphere of the Sun

Dec 15, 2021 by News Staff

The high temperatures and strong magnetic fields of the Sun’s upper atmosphere — the corona — form streams of the solar wind that expand...

A Higgs boson candidate transforming into four muons (red lines). Image credit: CERN.

Higgs Boson Has Tiny Lifespan, New Research Confirms

Dec 6, 2021 by News Staff

The Higgs boson is peculiar in many respects. Like most other elementary particles, it is unstable and lives only for an extremely short time, 1.6*10-22...

Dimer model in Rydberg atoms arrays: (A) fluorescence image of 219 atoms arranged on the links of a kagome lattice; Rydberg atoms are marked with red dimers on the bonds of the kagome lattice; (B) a state consistent with the Rydberg blockade at maximal filling can then be viewed as a dimer covering of the kagome lattice, where each vertex is touched by exactly one dimer; (C) the quantum spin liquid state corresponds to a coherent superposition of exponentially many dimer coverings. Image credit: Semeghini et al., doi: 10.1126/science.abi8794.

Physicists Observe Quantum Spin Liquid for First Time

Dec 3, 2021 by News Staff

First theorized in 1973 by physicist Philip W. Anderson, quantum spin liquids are exotic phases of matter with topological order. They feature long-range...

Photons emitted near rotating black holes encode quantum information that can be measured by actual quantum information technology. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

Astrophysicists Search for Gravitational-Wave Signals from Ultralight Boson Clouds

Dec 1, 2021 by News Staff

Theories of beyond Standard Model physics allow for the production of ultralight bosons — hypothetical particles with masses less than a billionth...

FASERν event displays of two of the neutral vertices in the yz projection longitudinal to the beam direction (left) and in the view transverse to the beam direction (right). Image credit: FASER Collaboration.

CERN Physicists Detect Collider Neutrinos for First Time

Nov 26, 2021 by News Staff

Physicists from the Forward Search Experiment (FASER) Collaboration have observed six neutrino interactions during a pilot run of FASERν, a compact emulsion...

Graphical table of all gravitational wave events discovered from 2015 through the end of LIGO/Virgo’s third observing run. The table includes the gravitational event name, the type of binary component (black hole, neutron star, or uncertain), the masses of the primary and secondary, and the mass of the final merged object. Image credit: LIGO / Virgo / KAGRA / C. Knox / H. Middleton.

Astrophysicists Detect 35 New Gravitational-Wave Events

Nov 10, 2021 by News Staff

Astrophysicists from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration have detected a further 35 gravitational waves since the last catalog release in October 2020,...

An artist’s impression of the neutron and its internal structure. Image credit: Xiaorong Zhu / University for Science and Technology, China.

New Research Sheds More Light on Electromagnetic Structure of Neutron

Nov 9, 2021 by News Staff

The neutron is a bound system of three valence quarks and a neutral sea consisting of gluons and quark-antiquark pairs. Although the proton was discovered...

Tin monosulfide nanosheets possess high photon absorption coefficients, allowing them to be used in making ultrathin soft X-ray detectors with high sensitivity and a rapid response time. Image credit: Shabbir et al., doi: 10.1002/adfm.202105038.

World’s Thinnest X-ray Detector Created

Nov 9, 2021 by News Staff

The structural characteristics of biological specimens, such as wet proteins and living cells, can be conveniently probed in their host aqueous media using...

A proton-proton collision event with six muons (red lines) produced in the decays of three J/ψ particles. Image credit: CMS / CERN.

CERN Physicists Observe Triple J-psi Meson Production

Nov 4, 2021 by News Staff

Physicists from the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have observed three J/ψ particles emerging from...

The decay of a B0 meson into a K0 and an electron-positron pair in the LHCb detector, which is used for a sensitive test of lepton universality in the Standard Model. Image credit: CERN.

Novel Tests of Lepton Universality Boost Evidence for ‘New Physics’

Oct 21, 2021 by News Staff

Physicists from CERN’s LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty) Collaboration have carried out new tests of lepton universality, one of the basic principles...

An electrically conductive and durable yarn was sewn onto fabric and became a wearable heater (high temperatures indicated by yellows and reds) when a safe voltage was applied. Image credit: Pattanarat et al., doi: 10.1021/acsami.1c13329.

Researchers Develop Wearable Electric Heater

Oct 21, 2021 by News Staff

Scientists have created a textile-based wearable heater based on highly durable conductive yarns. An electrically conductive and durable yarn was sewn...

Ozkan-Aydin & Goldman showed through a series of experiments that a swarm of chainable legged robots is capable of locomoting on challenging environments and accomplishing complex tasks that are not achievable by individual robots. Image credit: University of Notre Dame.

Researchers Create Self-Reconfigurable Swarms of Multi-Legged Robots

Oct 19, 2021 by News Staff

A team of U.S. researchers has developed a reconfigurable swarm of identical low-cost four-legged robots — with directionally flexible legs and tail...

Gonzalez et al. report an improved measurement of the free neutron lifetime. Image credit: Tomislav Jakupec.

Physicists Measure Neutron Lifetime with Unprecedented Precision

Oct 14, 2021 by News Staff

Physicists have performed an improved measurement of the free neutron lifetime using the UCNτ apparatus at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center. Their...