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This enormous image from Webb reveals never-before-seen details of the Stephan’s Quintet. Image credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI.

Parity Symmetry Violation in Orientation of Galactic Shapes Could Explain Abundance of Matter

May 23, 2023 by News Staff

Symmetry is a tidy and attractive idea that falls apart in our untidy Universe. Indeed, since the 1960s, some kind of broken symmetry has been required...

Espresso coffee is brewed by first grinding roasted coffee beans into grains. Hot water then forces its way through a bed of coffee grains at high pressure, and the soluble content of the coffee grains dissolves into the water (extraction) to produce espresso.

New Study Explains Why More Finely Ground Coffee Beans Brew Weaker Espresso

May 9, 2023 by Natali Anderson

A recent experiment showed that, contrary to theoretical predictions, beyond a cutoff point, grinding coffee more finely results in lower extraction. One...

Schouten et al. find links at the atomic level between photosynthesis and exciton condensates, a strange state of physics that allows energy to flow frictionlessly through a material. Image credit: Evgeni Tcherkasski.

New Study Finds Link between Photosynthesis and Exciton Condensates

May 3, 2023 by News Staff

Bose-Einstein condensation of excitons — in which excitons condense into a single coherent quantum state, known as an exciton condensate —...

The most recognizable feature of graphene’s electronic spectrum is its Dirac point, around which interesting phenomena tend to cluster. At low temperatures, the intrinsic behavior in this regime is often obscured by charge inhomogeneity, but thermal excitations can overcome the disorder at elevated temperatures and create an electron-hole plasma of Dirac fermions. The Dirac plasma has been found to exhibit unusual properties, including quantum-critical scattering and hydrodynamic flow. However, little is known about the plasma’s behavior in magnetic fields. Xin et al. report magnetotransport in this quantum-critical regime. Image credit: University of Manchester.

Physicists Discover Giant Magnetoresistance in Graphene

Apr 12, 2023 by News Staff

Record-high magnetoresistance appears in graphene under ambient conditions, according to new research led by the University of Manchester. The most recognizable...

An artist’s impression of defect centers in diamond nanostructures. They can be used as quantum bits. Via quantum entanglement, quantum information can be stored in emitted single photons and transmitted in optical fibers in the future quantum internet. Image credit: HU Berlin / AG Integrierte Quantenphotonik.

Scientists are One Step Closer to Quantum Internet

Apr 6, 2023 by News Staff

A team of researchers from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Ferdinand-Braun-Institut has succeeded in generating photons with stable frequencies...

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.

Astrophysicists Find New Evidence for Standard Model of Cosmology

Apr 4, 2023 by News Staff

Astrophysicists from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have measured the X-ray emission from galaxy clusters, which revealed...

The FASER Collaboration reports the first observation of collider neutrino events. Image credit: FASER Collaboration.

Physicists Detect Collider Neutrinos for First Time

Mar 24, 2023 by News Staff

Using the ForwArd Search ExpeRiment (FASER), a particle detector installed at CERN, particle physicists were able to detect very high energy neutrinos...

Shoshany et al. define and analyze a new model of time travel paradoxes, which is fully compatible with all known physics; the model consists of a wormhole time machine in 3+1 spacetime dimensions, which can be either permanent (existing eternally) or temporary (activated only for a short time). Image credit: Genty.

New Quantum Breakthrough Paves Way for ‘Local Wormholes’

Mar 13, 2023 by News Staff

A local wormhole is a physical system characterized by the no-cloning of information that mediates the action of an exchange-free quantum computer: locally...

Left: a fully assembled quantum system at Google Quantum AI; prominently displayed is the dilution refrigerator in which the computations occur, the quantum processor and quantum-limited amplifiers installed at the bottom stage of the refrigerator, various cables connecting bottom to top, and control electronics of quantum computer in the back. Right: two generations of Sycamore processors fabricated by Google Quantum AI; each processor features two chips that are bonded together: a chip containing the quantum bits (qubits), and a chip containing the wiring between the qubits and the outside world; the latest generation of the Sycamore processor on the right is notably larger than previous generations, but also has several modifications to the qubits resulting in improved performance. Image credit: Google Quantum AI.

Google Quantum AI Team Improves Error Correction in Quantum Computing

Feb 23, 2023 by News Staff

A new work from Google Quantum AI represents a step towards the development of scalable quantum error correction to enable quantum computers to reach sufficiently...

The surface of Europa looms large in this newly-reprocessed color view; image scale is 1.6 km per pixel; north on Europa is at right. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SETI Institute.

Planetary Scientists Create Two New Forms of Extraterrestrial Ice

Feb 21, 2023 by News Staff

University of Washington researcher Baptiste Journaux and colleagues believe the newly-created substances could form at the surface and bottom of deep...

The PEMFC domain generated by Wang et al.: (a) 2D and (b) 3D rendering of the segmented membrane electrode assembly with artificially overlayed flow channels; the gas channel and land contacting the microporous gas diffusion layer are labeled. Image credit: Wang et al., doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-35973-8.

Novel Algorithm Helps Produce High-Resolution Images of Hydrogen Fuel Cells

Feb 20, 2023 by News Staff

A team of scientists led by University of New South Wales researchers Ryan Armstrong, Chuan Zhao and Quentin Meyer has developed a new algorithm to improve...

Gharib et al. draw upon a fresh look at one of da Vinci’s notebooks to show that the famed polymath had devised experiments to demonstrate that gravity is a form of acceleration -- and that he further modeled the gravitational constant to around 97% accuracy. Image credit: Caltech.

Leonardo Da Vinci’s Understanding of Gravity was Centuries Ahead of His Time

Feb 14, 2023 by News Staff

Despite limited tools, Leonardo da Vinci displayed ingenious problemsolving. In their new paper, Caltech Professor Mory Gharib and colleagues examined...

A jar with the medium-density amorphous ice inside, with steel balls and liquid nitrogen. Image credit: Rosu-Finsen et al., doi: 10.1126/science.abq2105.

New Form of Ice Discovered: Medium-Density Amorphous Ice

Feb 3, 2023 by News Staff

Water ice has many crystalline phases, along with a few amorphous structures. The complex structural diagram is important to understand because of the...

Strongly driven systems of emitters offer an attractive source of light over broad spectral ranges up to the X-ray region. A key limitation of these systems is that the light they emit is mostly classical. Pizzi et al. overcome this constraint by building a quantum-optical theory of strongly driven many-body systems, showing that the presence of correlations among the emitters creates emission of non-classical many-photon states of light. Image credit: DeepAI / Sci.News.

Theoretical Physicists Devise New Path toward High-Energy ‘Quantum Light’

Feb 2, 2023 by News Staff

Physicists have developed a novel theory describing a new state of light, which has controllable quantum properties over a broad range of frequencies,...

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.

Physicists Reveal New Dark Matter Candidate: Highly Interactive Particle Relics

Jan 24, 2023 by News Staff

In the HighlY Interactive ParticlE Relics (HYPER) model, some time after the formation of dark matter in the early Universe, the strength of its interaction...

Computer simulation of neutron stars merging to form a black hole, with their accretion disks interacting to produce electromagnetic waves. Image credit: L. Rezolla, AEI / M. Koppitz, AEI & Zuse-Institut Berlin.

Gravitational Waves May Reveal Start of Time, Physicists Say

Jan 23, 2023 by News Staff

Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory physicists Deepen Garg and Ilya Dodin say they can better understand the state of the cosmos shortly after the Big...

The phi meson is made of a strange quark and strange antiquark held together by the exchange of gluons. Image credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Local Fluctuations in Nuclear Strong Force May Influence Spin Orientation of Particles

Jan 18, 2023 by News Staff

Physicists from the STAR Collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, an atom smasher at Brookhaven National Laboratory, have tracked pairs of...

The 124-m-high telecommunication tower of Säntis in Switzerland; also shown is the path of the laser recorded with its second harmonic at 515 nm. Image credit: Houard et al., doi: 10.1038/s41566-022-01139-z.

Firing Intense Laser Pulses at the Sky Can Divert Lightning

Jan 17, 2023 by News Staff

Scientists have demonstrated that laser-induced filaments — formed in the sky by short and intense laser pulses — can guide lightning discharges...

The STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) acts like a giant 3D digital camera to track particles emerging from particle collisions at the center of the detector. Image credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory.

New Method Lets Physicists ‘See’ Details inside Atomic Nuclei

Jan 4, 2023 by News Staff

The novel method, developed by nuclear physicists at the STAR detector of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), relies on particles of light that...