For 25 years, physicists have been puzzled by an apparent one-part-in-a-million problem. Their expectations of the way that certain particles should wobble in a magnetic field were clashing with what they saw in experiments. The discrepancy was an electrifying hint … Read more
Every time you check the time on your phone, make an online transaction, or use a navigation app, you are depending on the precision of atomic clocks. An atomic clock keeps time by relying on the “ticks” of atoms as … Read more
The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) may not glitter quite like the night sky, plunked as it is between Michigan State University’s chemistry department and the performing arts center. Inside, though, the lab is teeming with substances that are … Read more
The study, published in Scientific Reports, explored how a quantum system – the world of the sub-atomic – interacts with its environment, known as an ‘open quantum system’. Researchers investigated why we perceive time as moving in one direction, and … Read more
Sunlight melts snowflakes. Fire turns logs into soot and smoke. A hot oven will make a magnet lose its pull. Physicists know from countless examples that if you crank the temperature high enough, structures and patterns break down. Now, though, … Read more
Explore In 2011, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, and Adam Riess for discovering that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. They came to this conclusion by observing faraway exploding stars. These distant … Read more
MIT physicists have created a new and long-lasting magnetic state in a material, using only light. In a study appearing today in Nature, the researchers report using a terahertz laser — a light source that oscillates more than a trillion … Read more
Scientists have made a satisfying and intriguing physics discovery some 16 years after it was first predicted to be a possibility: a quasiparticle (a group of particles behaving as one) that only has an effective mass when moving in one … Read more
Jacklyn Gates at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory separating atoms of livermorium Marilyn Sargent/Berkeley Lab 2024 The Regents of the University of California The third-heaviest element in the universe has been made in a way that offers a route for synthesising … Read more
Ever since we first recognized that the Universe was expanding, one question has dominated the minds of those who study it: how will it all end? Today, we recognize that our Universe began from a much smaller, denser, hotter, and … Read more