Researchers have devised a new way to analyze surveys of the Lyman-alpha forest. This thicket of absorption lines appears in the spectra of quasars and is caused by neutral hydrogen atoms in the huge filaments that constitute the cosmic web.
Protein folding ends with the surmounting of an energy barrier to reach the final folded state. Now researchers have used high-resolution single-molecule methods to measure crossing times for eight small proteins, illuminating how proteins fold.
Researchers have shown how the frequencies and bandwidths of individual photons can be tuned over a wide range inside a short length of standard optical fiber. They anticipate that their technique will be useful in future quantum computing and communications networks.
Researchers were given access to thousands of circular trips logged by the social network app Foursquare. From that trove, they built a simple model that could account for the distribution of trip lengths.
Thunderstorms can cause 100-meter-scale regions in the atmosphere to generate bursts of gamma rays via cascades of relativistic electrons. Now theorists have predicted that a similar mechanism could work in centimeter-scale regions in dielectric solids.
The Rubin Observatory has released its first set of identifications of transient events in the night sky. Compiled over a single day, the dataset contains 800,000 events.
The magnetic fields of the Milky Way and other mature galaxies are sustained by their disks’ rotation and turbulence. That dynamo takes too long to establish itself to account for the fields of young galaxies. Now researchers have found a new faster-acting dynamo powered by a galaxy’s formation.
Theorists expect Anderson localization to set in more readily in two dimensions than in three. Now researchers have demonstrated that tendency directly by progressively removing a crystal's atomic layers until only one remained.
Researchers have used neutron scattering to enrich our understanding of chiral phonons. Like regular phonons, chiral phonons convey sound and heat, but they are also magnetic, thanks to the twirling motions they acquire from the symmetries of their host lattice.
Two physicists tell Physics Magazine about their plan to build a 30-qubit trapped-ion quantum computer. Once complete, the computer and its software will be freely available to anyone.
Groups of self-propelled microscopic swimmers can sometimes spontaneously form dense clumps, leaving dilute regions between them. Now researchers have shown that the clumping is more difficult when swimmers interact with one another through flows in the fluid.
A rogue planet whose mass is close to Saturn's has been discovered through gravitational lensing. It was likely kicked out of its host system via an orbital instability.
Despite the practical success of neural networks, how they learn remains poorly understood. New research in statistical physics is exploring central questions in machine-learning theory, clarifying how learning depends on NN architecture and on the statistics of training data.
Researchers have discovered a new navigation strategy used by certain green algae. The microorganisms swim in wide circles when illuminated and switch from counterclockwise (CCW) to clockwise (CW) swimming when the light intensity exceeds a threshold.
Listen to science journalist Paul Adepoju recount how astronomers discovered that one of the largest structures in the universe—a cosmic filament—is spinning on its axis.
Smoke from summer wildfires rises into the stratosphere and coalesces into swirling blobs, which rotate, puzzlingly, in only one direction. Researchers now explain why, using a model that includes heating effects and wind shear.
Last year, two teams reported values of an important cosmological parameter that exceeded previous estimates, disfavoring several popular inflation models. Now researchers have shown that the discrepancy is mainly caused by differences in the underlying datasets.
For some applications of atomic clocks—in satellite navigation systems, for example—the answer must be prompt as well as precise. Researchers have now demonstrated a way to use quantum entanglement to halve the measurement time of an ion-based optical clock without compromising its precision.
Researchers have simulated ion transport under strong electric fields in an ionic liquid known as [BMIM][TFSI]. Their findings could help to improve water-electrolysis propulsion systems, which are used as thrusters to maneuver CubeSats.
Twisted bilayer graphene exhibits a rich array of electronic phenomena, which arise mostly from the material’s flat energy bands. Now researchers have studied how higher-energy bands influence those phenomena and introduce new ones.
The standoff between quantum mechanics and general relativity has persisted for many decades, prompting some physicists to propose that quantum mechanics needs to be superseded. New experiments could point the way forward.
The nuclear transitions that underlie nuclear clocks are difficult to drive controllably using existing laser technology. Now researchers have tested a new intense single-frequency ultraviolet laser that can achieve such driving for thorium-229 nuclei.
The microphysics of contact charging is an active area of research, as is the quest to understand the phenomenon as it plays out on larger scales in processing plants. Now researchers have developed a contact-charging model that can cope with particles and walls made of different materials.
To incorporate turbulence at scales shorter than the resolution of their models, climate scientists resort to so-called closure models. A new AI-based closure model not only improves performance. It also illustrates that AI-generated models need not be black boxes.
Cosmic filaments are typically regarded as rigid. But new observations of 14 galaxies in the same filament indicate that the entire filament is rotating about its axis. If similar rotation is detected in other structures, it could serve as a test of cosmological models.
With the help of scramblon theory, researchers have successfully separated genuine quantum chaos from the imperfections of time reversal in a macroscopic solid-state sample manipulated with NMR.
Solitons have primarily been observed in settings where the underlying physics is 1D, such as narrow water channels. Now researchers have used a structured light beam to become the first to produce a lump soliton, a mathematically exact soliton in 2D.
How did an aspiring Hollywood screenwriter become a novelist who sets her murder mysteries in the world of physics?
Most superconductors have more than one energy band where electrons can pair up to flow without resistance. Scattering off crystal defects enables electrons to jump between bands, frustrating the study of multi-band superconductivity—until now.
