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The trace of an α particle obtained by the nuclear physicist Wolfhart Willimczik with his spark chamber specially made for α particles.

Physicists Precisely Measure Charge Radius of Alpha Particle

Jan 28, 2021 by Enrico de Lazaro

Using a method called atomic spectroscopy, an international team of physicists has produced a new value for the charge radius of the α particle, the nucleus...

This image was produced by a simulation showing the evolution of dark matter in the Universe. Image credit: Milennium-II Simulation.

Physicists Narrow Range of Potential Masses for Dark Matter Candidate Particles

Jan 27, 2021 by News Staff

In a paper to be published in the journal Physics Letters B, a duo of theoretical physicists from the University of Sussex shows that quantum gravity leads...

Siraj & Loeb explore the possibility that accretion flares resulting from the tidal disruption of small Oort Cloud bodies by a putative primordial black hole could power an observable optical signal that could be searched for with the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Image credit: Sci-News.com / Zdeněk Bardon / ESO.

Extreme Black Holes Have Gravitational Hair that Can Be Measured, Physicists Say

Jan 27, 2021 by News Staff

Gravitational-wave detectors can be used to measure gravitational-field hair of extreme black holes, according to a paper published in the journal Physical...

An artist’s impression of a neutron star. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

Astrophysicists May Have Found Evidence of Long-Sought Axions

Jan 19, 2021 by News Staff

First theorized in the 1970s, axions are hypothetical particles that were proposed to preserve a time-reversal symmetry of the nuclear force. These particles...

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

Physicists Propose New Way to Extract Energy from Black Holes

Jan 19, 2021 by News Staff

Spinning black holes store rotational energy that can be extracted; when a black hole is immersed in an externally supplied magnetic field, reconnection...

Cartoon illustration of the device design, where a thin hBN layer (blue) with selectively etched areas is used to avoid contact of the Pd electrodes (yellow) with the edges of the monolayer WTe2. The stack of graphite (gray)/hBN (blue)/monolayer WTe2 (red), shown in the cross-sectional view, is further stacked onto the bottom part with the electrodes, as indicated by the arrow. Inset: an image of device 1; the dashed red line highlights the monolayer edges and the white squares denote the contact regions. Image credit: Wang et al., doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-03084-9.

Physicists Observe Unexpected Quantum Phenomenon in Two-Dimensional Insulator

Jan 12, 2021 by News Staff

A team of physicists from the United States and Japan has experimentally observed a phenomenon called quantum oscillation in a two-dimensional topological...

Chen et al. established the world’s first integrated quantum communication network, combining over 700 optical fibers on the ground with two ground-to-satellite links to achieve quantum key distribution over a total distance of 4,600 km for users across China. Image credit: University of Science and Technology of China.

Chinese Scientists Create Integrated Quantum Communication Network

Jan 7, 2021 by News Staff

A team of researchers in China has demonstrated an integrated space-to-ground quantum communication network that combines a large-scale fiber network of...

Scanning electron microscope image of the ellipsoidal colloids. Inset shows a confocal microscopy image, highlighting the core-shell structure. Scale bar - 5 μm. Image credit: Roller et al., doi: 10.1073/pnas.2018072118.

Researchers Discover New State of Matter: Liquid Glass

Jan 6, 2021 by News Staff

Using a technique called confocal microscopy, a team of scientists from Germany and the Netherlands has found that suspensions of ellipsoidal colloids...

Ilzhöfer et al. discovered a soft form of a supersolid. Image credit: Harald Ritsch / IQOQI Innsbruck.

Physicists Create ‘Soft’ Supersolid

Jan 5, 2021 by News Staff

An international team of experimental and theoretical physicists from Austria and Switzerland has investigated what happens when a dipolar supersolid is...

The first artist’s illustration shows a key part of the process that created this new black hole, as the two neutron stars spin around each other while merging. The purple material depicts debris from the merger. Image credit: NASA / CXC / M.Weiss.

Gravitational Waves May Help Find Universe’s Missing Components

Dec 31, 2020 by News Staff

Whenever two compact objects (black holes or neutron stars) collide elsewhere in the Universe, they create gravitational waves that travel across space,...

A schematic diagram of the quantum teleportation system consisting of Alice, Bob, Charlie, and the data acquisition (DAQ) subsystems. Image credit: Valivarthi et al., doi: 10.1103/PRXQuantum.1.020317.

Researchers Demonstrate High-Fidelity Quantum Teleportation

Dec 30, 2020 by News Staff

Quantum teleportation is essential for many quantum information technologies, including long-distance quantum networks. Using fiber-coupled devices, including...

‘Baby universes’ branching off of our Universe shortly after the Big Bang appear to us as black holes. Image credit: Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe.

Is All Dark Matter in Universe Made of Primordial Black Holes?

Dec 28, 2020 by News Staff

In a new paper in the journal Physical Review Letters, an international team of theoretical physicists described a scenario for the formation of primordial...

An artist’s impression of the interaction between Omega (Ω) hyperon (left) and a proton (right). Image credit: Daniel Dominguez.

CERN Physicists Study Strong Interaction between Omega Hyperons and Protons

Dec 24, 2020 by News Staff

Physicists from the ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have developed a new technique that opens...

A collision event recorded by CMS at the start of the data-taking run of 2018. CMS sifts through such collisions up to 40 million times per second looking for signs of leptoquarks. Image credit: Thomas McCauley / Tai Sakuma / CMS / CERN.

CERN Physicists Set Bounds on Mass of Hypothetical Leptoquarks

Dec 21, 2020 by News Staff

Physicists from the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) report the results of a new search for leptoquarks...

Mounaix et al. develop a new technique to demonstrate the time reversal of optical waves, which could transform the fields of advanced biomedical imaging and telecommunications. Imager credit: Mounaix et al.

Physicists Demonstrate Time Reversal of Optical Waves

Dec 14, 2020 by News Staff

An international team of experimental physicists from the University of Queensland and Nokia Bell Labs has generated time reversed optical waves with a...

As the CMB light (left image) travels through the Universe until observed on Earth (right image), the direction in which the electromagnetic wave oscillates (orange line) is rotated by the angle β; the rotation could be caused by dark matter or dark energy interacting with the CMB light, which changes the patterns of polarization (black lines inside the images); the red and blue regions in the images show hot and cold regions of the CMB, respectively. Image credit: Y. Minami / KEK.

Astrophysicists Find Hints of Beyond-Standard-Model Physics in Universe’s Oldest Light

Nov 30, 2020 by News Staff

Using the polarization data from ESA’s Planck satellite, a mission that have studied the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the oldest light in the Universe,...

On August 31, 2012, a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the Sun’s atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The CME traveled at over 900 miles per second. It did not travel directly toward Earth, but did connect with Earth’s magnetic environment, or magnetosphere, with a glancing blow, causing aurora to appear on the night of September 3. Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Physicists Detect Solar CNO Neutrinos for First Time

Nov 26, 2020 by News Staff

For most of their existence, stars are fuelled by the fusion of hydrogen into helium. Fusion proceeds via two processes that are well understood theoretically:...

Hus et al. created the smallest atom-memory unit yet. Image credit: Cockrell School of Engineering, University of Texas at Austin.

Researchers Create Smallest Memory Device Yet

Nov 24, 2020 by News Staff

An international team of scientist from the United States, the United Kingdom and Taiwan has developed the world’s smallest memristor. Their results...

The Unruh effect predicts a thermal response for an accelerated detector moving through the vacuum. Gooding et al. propose an interferometric scheme to observe an analogue of the circular Unruh effect using a localized laser coupled to a Bose-Einstein condensate. Image credit: University of Nottingham.

Physicists Propose New Method for Observing Hypothetical Unruh Effect

Nov 23, 2020 by News Staff

The Unruh effect was described by Stephen Fulling in 1973, Paul Davies in 1975, and William Unruh in 1976. Sometimes called the Fulling-Davies-Unruh effect,...