Physics News | Sci.News

Do Tachyons Exist as Particles?

Jul 11, 2024 by News Staff

Tachyons are hypothetical particles that always travel faster than light. Until recently, they were generally regarded as entities that did not fit into...

View of the LHCb detector. Image credit: CERN.

CERN Physicists Observe Rarest Hyperon Decay

Jul 1, 2024 by News Staff

A hyperon is a particle containing three quarks, like the proton and neutron, including one or more strange quarks. Physicists with the LHCb Collaboration...

An event display of a di-Higgs candidate event taken in 2017. Image credit: ATLAS Collaboration / CERN.

CERN Physicists Searching for Production of Elusive Higgs-Boson Pairs

Jun 25, 2024 by News Staff

Physicists from the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have released the most sensitive search for di-Higgs production and self-coupling...

Silvestri et al. demonstrated the largest and most precise quantum-optical Sagnac interferometer to date, exhibiting sufficient sensitivity to measure Earth’s rotation rate. Image credit: Marco Di Vita.

Physicists Measure Earth’s Rotation Using Quantum Entanglement

Jun 14, 2024 by News Staff

Physicists at the University of Vienna have experimentally measured the rotation rate of our planet using maximally path-entangled quantum states of light...

Conceptual art shows the rare earth element promethium in a vial surrounded by an organic ligand. Image credit: Jacqueline DeMink / Thomas Dyke / ORNL.

Scientists Determine Properties of Extremely Rare Element: Promethium

May 22, 2024 by News Staff

Promethium is extremely rare, with only about 0.5 kg naturally occurring in Earth’s crust at any given time. Conceptual art shows the rare earth element...

Casati et al. demonstrated experimentally the solar-trapping effect at temperatures as high as 1,050 degrees Celsius; by using quartz as the volumetric absorption medium, they performed stagnation experiments under concentrated thermal radiation and achieved steady-state temperature differences between the absorber and the outer surface of about 600 degrees Celsius. Image credit: Casati et al., doi: 10.1016/j.device.2024.100399.

Researchers Demonstrate Thermal Trapping of Solar Radiation at 1,922 Degrees Fahrenheit

May 15, 2024 by News Staff

With the world focusing on decarbonizing electricity and transportation, abating emissions from industrial process heat remain the elephant in the room....

An artist’s impression of true tauonium. Image credit: Fu et al., doi: 10.1016/j.scib.2024.04.003.

Physicists Searching for Heaviest and Smallest QED Atom: True Tauonium

May 15, 2024 by Enrico de Lazaro

Quantum electrodynamics (QED) atoms are composed of unstructured and point-like lepton pairs bound together by the electromagnetic force. An artist’s...

Decay scheme of potassium-40. Image credit: Stukel et al., doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.052503.

Physicists Observe Rare Nuclear Decay of Potassium Isotope

May 8, 2024 by News Staff

Physicists with the Potassium Decay (KDK) Collaboration have made the first direct observations of a very rare but critical decay path of potassium-40...

Kharintsev et al. found that photons can obtain substantial momentum, similar to that of electrons in solid materials, when confined to nanometer-scale spaces in silicon. Image credit: Kharintsev et al.

Scientists Discover New Property of Light

May 7, 2024 by News Staff

A team of physicists and chemists has discovered a previously unknown way in which light interacts with matter, a finding that could lead to improved solar...

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.

Researchers Focus on Potential ‘Cosmic Glitch’ in Gravity

May 1, 2024 by News Staff

In a paper published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, scientists examined the theoretical and observational cases for a ‘cosmic...

Dark photons are hypothetical dark sector particles proposed as a force carrier similar to the photon of electromagnetism but potentially connected to dark matter. Image credit: University of Adelaide.

New Computer Simulations Support Dark Matter Theory

Apr 30, 2024 by News Staff

New research led by the University of California, Irvine addresses a fundamental debate in astrophysics: Does invisible dark matter need to exist to explain...

Monopole pair production via the Schwinger mechanism. Image credit: MoEDAL Collaboration / CERN.

CERN Physicists Zero In On Hypothetical Magnetic Monopoles

Apr 29, 2024 by News Staff

American theoretical physicist Joseph Polchinski once said the existence of magnetic monopoles is ‘one of the safest bets that one can make about physics...

Preparation of goldene. Image credit: Kashiwaya et al., doi: 10.1038/s44160-024-00518-4.

Scientists Create Single-Atom-Thick Gold: Goldene

Apr 23, 2024 by News Staff

Goldene in the form of gold monolayer sheets has been prepared by etching away titanium carbide (Ti3C2) slabs from titanium gold carbide (Ti3AuC2). Preparation...

CMS event display of a candidate Higgs boson decaying into two photons, one of the two decay channels that were key to the discovery of the particle. Image credit: CERN.

CERN Physicists Release Higgs Boson Discovery Data

Apr 17, 2024 by News Staff

Physicists from the CMS Collaboration at CERN have just publicly released the combination of CMS measurements that contributed to establishing the discovery...

A portrait of the nucleon-antinucleon bound state. Image credit: BESIII Collaboration.

Physicists Find Evidence of New Subatomic Particle

Apr 11, 2024 by News Staff

Physicists with the BESIII Collaboration have observed an anomalous line shape around ppbar mass threshold in the J/ψ→γ3(π+π-) decay, which indicates...

View of an ATLAS collision event in which a candidate W boson decays into a muon and a neutrino; the reconstructed tracks of the charged particles in the inner part of the ATLAS detector are shown as orange lines; the energy deposits in the detector’s calorimeters are shown as yellow boxes; the identified muon is shown as a red line; the missing transverse momentum associated with the neutrino is shown as a green dashed line. Image credit: ATLAS / CERN.

CERN Physicists Measure Width of W Boson

Apr 11, 2024 by News Staff

Physicists from the ATLAS Collaboration have measured the width of the W boson — the electrically charged carrier of the weak force — at CERN’s...

An artist’s impression of LTT 1445Ab in the triple-star system LTT 1445. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

Scientists Discuss Physics and Mathematics behind ‘3 Body Problem’

Apr 10, 2024 by News Staff

Based on the book trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past by Chinese computer engineer Cixin Liu, Netflix’s sci-fi television series 3 Body Problem introduces...

Event displays identified by the FASER Collaboration as candidates for an νe (left) and a νμ (right) interacting in the detector; invisible here, the neutrinos arrive from the left and then interact to create multiple tracks spraying out to the right (colored lines), one of which is identified as a charged lepton. Image credit: FASER Collaboration.

CERN Physicists Measure High-Energy Neutrino Interaction Strength

Apr 8, 2024 by News Staff

The Forward Search Experiment (FASER) at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is designed to search for extremely weakly interacting particles. Such particles...

Tang et al. discovered neutronic molecules, in which neutrons can be made to cling to quantum dots, held just by the strong force: the red item represents a bound neutron, the sphere is a hydride nanoparticle, and the yellow field represents a neutron wavefunction. Image credit: Tang et al., doi: 10.1021/acsnano.3c12929.

Scientists Discover ‘Neutronic Molecules’

Apr 8, 2024 by News Staff

Neutrons are subatomic particles that have no electric charge, unlike protons and electrons. That means that while the electromagnetic force is responsible...