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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,...

McCulloch et al. created ‘rivers’ of regular diamond and lonsdaleite, named after the crystallographer Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, the first woman elected as a Fellow to the Royal Society. Lonsdaleite has a different crystal structure to regular diamond, and is predicted to be 58% harder. Image credit: McCulloch et al., doi: 10.1002/smll.202004695.

Researchers Create Two Types of Diamond at Room Temperature

Nov 19, 2020 by News Staff

A team of scientists from Australia and the United States has created two types of diamond — regular diamond and a diamond-like phase called lonsdaleite,...

Experimental configuration and principles of optical vortex beam for discharge control and guidance: at first, microparticles are prepared and placed in an enclosed container with vertically aligned electrodes (left); an applied electric field through the container lifts the particles by electrostatic forces; some of the lifted particles cross the hollow core doughnut-shaped CW laser beam and get trapped in it; the vortex laser beam is guides particles in the mid-air: particles from a container are transported into a parallel plate chamber through a hole in one of the electrodes; in addition, particles are heated by the same laser beam thus creating a thermal channel between the electrodes that results in a subthreshold electrical breakdown; the inset shows a photograph of the experimental setup with particles trapped in the beam. Image credit: Shvedov et al., doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-19183-0.

‘Tractor’ Laser Beam Has Potential to Control Path, Direction of Lightning

Nov 17, 2020 by News Staff

An international team of researchers has proposed and demonstrated an efficient approach for triggering, trapping and guiding electrical discharges in...

CMS candidate event for a top quark and antitop quark producing an electron, a muon and jets originating from bottom (b) quarks. Image credit: CERN.

CERN Physicists Find First Evidence for Production of Top Quarks in Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions

Nov 16, 2020 by News Staff

New results from the CMS Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider demonstrate for the first time that top quarks are produced in nucleus-nucleus...

Schematic layout of the KEK Isotope Separation System. Image credit: Wako Nuclear Science Centre, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization.

Physicists Produce World’s First Beam of Neutron-Rich, Radioactive Tantalum Ions

Nov 11, 2020 by News Staff

Using a new mass-separator of radioactive isotopes, called the KEK Isotope Separation System (KISS), which is developed and operated by the Wako Nuclear...

Anomalies in nuclear physics experiments may show signs of a new force. Image credit: Jw210913.

Physicists Propose New Theory on Origin of Dark Matter

Oct 21, 2020 by News Staff

In a paper published this month in the journal Physical Review Letters, an international team of physicists described a new mechanism of dark matter production. Baker...

In the experiment by Li et al., atoms of rubidium-87 are first pre-cooled and then transported to the main test area, which is a custom-made vacuum chamber; there they are cooled to temperatures of just a few microkelvins. Image credit: Li et al., doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.150501.

Physicists Demonstrate Controlled Transport of Stored Light

Oct 19, 2020 by News Staff

Controlled manipulation, storage, and retrieval of quantum information are essential for quantum communication and computing. Quantum memories for light,...

This image shows the sample chamber inside of a diamond anvil cell, looking axially through the top diamond. The sample originally exists of carbon and sulfur, shown as a black powder, sitting inside a hydrogen-rich environment. The sample is at 4 GPa and is illuminated by 10 mW of 532 nm of laser light to initiate and take to completion the photochemical reaction to produce a Van der Waals solid. Image credit: Snider et al., doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-2801-z.

Scientists Create First Room-Temperature Superconductor

Oct 15, 2020 by News Staff

A team of physicists and materials scientists from the University of Rochester, the University of Nevada Las Vegas and Intel Corporation has created material...