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A 3D image of a supercrystal from phase-field simulations. Image credit: L-Q Chen Group, Penn State.

Physicists Create Stable ‘Supercrystals’

Mar 26, 2019 by News Staff

Stimulation with ultrafast light pulses can realize and manipulate states of matter with emergent structural, electronic and magnetic phenomena. According...

Physicists Observe Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry in Charm Particle Decays

Mar 22, 2019 by News Staff

Physicists from the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) Collaboration at CERN have observed, for the first time, the matter-antimatter asymmetry known...

Satya Sainadh et al put an upper limit of 1.8 attoseconds on any tunneling delay, in agreement with theoretical findings and ruling out the interpretation of all commonly used ‘tunneling times’ as time spent by an electron under the potential barrier. Image credit: Griffith University.

Quantum Tunneling is Near Instantaneous, Experiments Show

Mar 21, 2019 by News Staff

Tunneling, a key feature of quantum mechanics, is when a particle that encounters a seemingly insurmountable barrier passes through it, ending up on the...

One of the first heavy-ion collisions with stable beams recorded by LHCb. Image credit: CERN.

New Charmonium Particle Discovered

Mar 11, 2019 by News Staff

Physicists from the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) Collaboration at CERN have discovered a previously unknown particle that consists of a charm quark...

Positronium is a hydrogen-like atom consisting of a positron and an electron revolving around each other. Image credit: Pete Linforth.

CERN Physicists Create Long-Lived Positronium

Mar 8, 2019 by News Staff

Physicists from the AEgIS (Antihydrogen Experiment: Gravity, Interferometry, Spectroscopy) Collaboration at CERN have found a new way of making long-lived...

Physicists Transform Liquid Metal into Dense Plasma

Mar 8, 2019 by News Staff

A team of physicists from the University of Rochester and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has found a way to turn liquid metallic deuterium...

Quantum scrambling is one suggestion for how information can fall into a black hole and come out as random-looking radiation. Perhaps, the argument goes, it is not random at all, and black holes are just excellent scramblers. Image credit: E. Edwards / Joint Quantum Institute.

Physicists Use Seven-Qubit Quantum Computer to Simulate Scrambling inside Black Holes

Mar 7, 2019 by News Staff

A team of physicists from the Joint Quantum Institute, the University of Maryland, the University of California Berkeley and Perimeter Institute for Theoretical...

An artist’s impression of record-cold quantum gas of potassium-rubidium molecules. Image credit: Steven Burrows / JILA.

Physicists Create Coldest Quantum Gas of Molecules

Feb 27, 2019 by News Staff

Physicists at JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado Boulder, have produced...

Schmookler et al develop a universal function that suggests that proton-neutron pairs in the nucleus, shown here, may be responsible for the EMC effect. Image credit: DOE’s Jefferson Lab.

Quarks Move Slower in Atoms with More Pairs of Protons and Neutrons, Physicists Find

Feb 26, 2019 by News Staff

The atomic nucleus is made of protons and neutrons, which are themselves composed of quarks and gluons. The latter two are far smaller and operate at much...

The two types of chiral surface excitons are on the right and left side of the image. They are generated by right- and left-handed light (photons in blue). The excitons consist of an electron (light blue) orbiting a ‘hole’ (black) in the same orientation as the light. The electron and hole are annihilated in less than a trillionth of a second, emitting light (photons in green) that could be harnessed for lighting, solar cells, lasers and electronic displays. Image credit: Hsiang-Hsi (Sean) Kung / Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

Scientists Discover Exotic Spiraling Electrons

Feb 19, 2019 by News Staff

Rutgers University’s Professor Girsh Blumberg and colleagues have discovered an exotic form of electrons that spin like planets. Named chiral surface...

In a normal magnetic material, dense magnetic moments try to align with their neighbors (left); by contrast, in a singlet-based material, unstable magnetic moments pop in and out of existence, and stick to one another in aligned clumps (right). Image credit: Lin Miao, New York University.

New Type of Magnet Discovered: Singlet-Based Magnet

Feb 11, 2019 by News Staff

In conventional magnets, small magnetic constituents align with one another to create a strong magnetic field. By contrast, the newly-discovered type of...

In conventional electronic devices, electricity requires the movement of electrons (blue spheres) and their positive counterparts, called holes (red spheres), which behave much like the gas molecules in our atmosphere. Although they move rapidly and collide infrequently in the gas phase, electrons and holes can condense into liquid droplets akin to liquid water in devices composed of ultrathin materials. Image credit: QMO Lab, University of California, Riverside.

‘Electron Liquid’ Created at Room Temperature

Feb 5, 2019 by News Staff

A team of physicists at the University of California, Riverside, has produced the first ‘electron-hole liquid’ at room temperature. In conventional...

Changala et al used frequency combs, or ‘rulers of light,’ to observe individual quantum energy transitions in buckminsterfullerene. Image credit: Steven Burrows / JILA.

Physicists Uncover Quantum Structure of Buckminsterfullerene

Jan 29, 2019 by News Staff

A team of physicists from the Joint Institute for Lab Astrophysics (JILA) and IMRA America Inc. has measured hundreds of individual quantum energy levels...

Due to the local terbium environment in TbInO3, a honeycomb lattice of terbium spins emerges in the crystal structure upon cooling. Image credit: Clark et al, doi: 10.1038/s41567-018-0407-2.

Signs of Exotic ‘Quantum Spin Liquid’ Observed in Unexpected Material

Jan 24, 2019 by News Staff

The perovskite-related metal oxide TbInO3 exhibits an exotic state of matter called quantum spin liquid, according to a team of researchers from the University...

Reconstruction of the Draupner wave. Image credit: McAllister et al, doi: 10.1017/jfm.2018.886.

Researchers Recreate Famous Draupner Freak Wave in Lab for First Time

Jan 23, 2019 by News Staff

Freak waves are so called because of their unexpectedly large size relative to the population of smaller waves in which they occur. The 84-foot- (25.6...

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

Spacetime Geometry near Rotating Black Holes Acts Like Quantum Computer, Physicist Says

Jan 15, 2019 by News Staff

According to a theoretical paper published in the Annals of Physics, by Dr. Ovidiu Racorean from the General Direction of Information Technology in Bucharest,...

Langin et al created the world’s first laser-cooled neutral plasma. Image credit: Brandon Martin / Rice University.

Physicists Create World’s First Laser-Cooled Neutral Plasma

Jan 7, 2019 by News Staff

Plasmas are naturally formed at high temperatures, such as those reached in the interiors of stars. Neutral plasmas consist of equal numbers of positive...

Banerjee et al propose a new model with dark energy and our Universe riding on an expanding bubble in an extra dimension. Image credit: Suvendu Giri.

Universe May Be Riding on Expanding Bubble in Extra Dimension

Dec 28, 2018 by News Staff

A team of theoretical physicists at Uppsala University, Sweden, has devised a new model for our Universe — one that may solve the mystery of dark...

Blyth et al analyzed the gamma rays emitted during the NPDGamma Experiment and found parity-violating asymmetry, which is a specific change in behavior in the force between a neutron and a proton. They measured a 30 parts per billion preference for gamma rays to be emitted antiparallel to the neutron spin when neutrons are captured by protons in liquid hydrogen. After observing that more gammas go down than up, the experiment resolved for the first time a mirror-asymmetric component or handedness of the weak force. Image credit: Andy Sproles / Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy.

Experimental Physicists Measure Weak Force between Protons and Neutrons in Atom’s Nucleus

Dec 27, 2018 by News Staff

Physicists from the NPDGamma Experiment at the DoE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have measured the weak interaction between protons and neutrons...