Physics

If an astronaut were to suddenly become adrift in the void of interstellar space, they would be compelled to propel their body to safety, kicking and waving their limbs toward a sanctuary in the vacuum. Sadly for them, physics isn’t so forgiving, leaving them to float without hope for eternity. If only the Universe was

Two atoms inflated to an almost comical size and cooled to a fraction above absolute zero have been used to generate a robust, insanely fast two-qubit quantum gate that could help overcome some of quantum computing‘s persistent challenges. Since a two-qubit gate is the fundamental building block of efficient quantum computers, this breakthrough has huge

Is there a “fourth phase of water”? From time to time you might see people talking up the health benefits of so-called hexagonal water, or structured water, or exclusion-zone (EZ) water. A few weeks ago Kourtney Kardashian’s Poosh website was spruiking a US$2,500 “structured water filter”. Last weekend even Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald got in

Since being plunged into a global pandemic, we’re probably far more aware of being surrounded by microdroplets of water. In humid air or expelled by a cough, sneeze or talking, these droplets can carry tiny particles with them, from pollution to viruses like the flu. Back in 2019, the basic chemistry of these motes of environmental

Physicists have just caught light acting the part of ‘glue’ between atoms, in a kind of loosely bonded molecule. “We have succeeded for the first time in polarizing several atoms together in a controlled way, creating a measurable attractive force between them,” says University of Innsbruck physicist Matthias Sonnleitner. Atoms connect to form molecules in a

The motion of single atoms through liquid has been caught on camera for the first time. Using a sandwich of materials so thin they’re effectively two-dimensional, scientists trapped and observed platinum atoms ‘swimming’ along a surface under different pressures. The results will help us better understand how the presence of liquid alters the behavior of

Grab any physics textbook and you’ll find formula after formula describing how things wobble, fly, swerve and stop. The formulas describe actions we can observe, but behind each could be sets of factors that aren’t immediately obvious. Now, a new AI program developed by researchers at Columbia University has seemingly discovered its own alternative physics.

Peer long enough into the heavens, and the Universe starts to resemble a city at night. Galaxies take on characteristics of streetlamps cluttering up neighborhoods of dark matter, linked by highways of gas that run along the shores of intergalactic nothingness. This map of the Universe was preordained, laid out in the tiniest of shivers

At 5:29 am on the morning of 16 July 1945, in the state of New Mexico, a dreadful slice of history was made. The dawn calm was torn asunder as the United States Army detonated a plutonium implosion device known as the Gadget – the world’s very first test of a nuclear bomb, known as

A team of physicists has used a pair of vibrating rods to measure the gravitational constant to incredibly fine precision. While the new technique has relatively high uncertainty, they hope that future improvements will provide a new pathway to nailing down this elusive constant. The gravitational constant, denoted as G, is the fundamental building block

A new phase of matter has been observed in a quantum computer after physicists pulsed light on its qubits in a pattern inspired by the Fibonacci sequence. If you think that’s mind-boggling, this weird quirk of quantum mechanics behaves as though it has two time dimensions, instead of one; a trait that scientists say makes the qubits

If chemists built cars, they’d fill a factory with car parts, set it on fire, and sift from the ashes pieces that now looked vaguely car-like.  When you’re dealing with car-parts the size of atoms, this is a perfectly reasonable process. Yet chemists yearn for ways to reduce the waste and make reactions far more

Water gets boiled a lot – whether it’s a cup of tea brewing in a kitchen or a power plant generating electricity. Any improvements in the efficiency of this process will have a huge impact on the overall amount of energy used for it every day. One such improvement could come with a newly developed

Tiny gelatinous blobs spin perfect pirouettes in the water – their movement whipping up a force that attracts their neighbors. As enough of them gather together, this synchronized dance aligns them into precise six-sided, ordered, repeating patterns, just like carbon atoms in a graphene crystalline structure. But these aren’t atoms or any type of inanimate

Before quantum computers and quantum networks can fulfil their huge potential, scientists have got several difficult problems to overcome – but a new study outlines a potential solution to one of these problems. As we’ve seen in recent research, the silicon material that our existing classical computing components are made out of has shown potential for storing

For the first time, physicists have witnessed something incredibly exciting: electrons forming whirlpools just like a fluid. This behavior is one that scientists have long predicted, but never observed before. And it could be the key to developing more efficient and faster next-generation electronics. “Electron vortices are expected in theory, but there’s been no direct

Physicists say they’ve found evidence in data from Europe’s Large Hadron Collider for three never-before-seen combinations of quarks, just as the world’s largest particle-smasher is beginning a new round of high-energy experiments. The three exotic types of particles – which include two four-quark combinations, known as tetraquarks, plus a five-quark unit called a pentaquark – are totally

When disordered magnetic materials are cooled to just the right temperature, something interesting happens. The spins of their atoms ‘freeze’ and lock into place in a static pattern, exhibiting cooperative behavior not usually displayed. Now for the first time, physicists have seen the opposite. When fractionally heated, the naturally occurring magnetic element neodymium freezes, turning

Ten years after it discovered the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider is about to start smashing protons together at unprecedented energy levels in its quest to reveal more secrets about how the universe works. The world’s largest and most powerful particle collider started back up in April after a three-year break for upgrades in

Australian scientists have created the world’s first-ever quantum computer circuit – one that contains all the essential components found on a classical computer chip but at the quantum scale.  The landmark discovery, published in Nature today, was nine years in the making.  “This is the most exciting discovery of my career,” senior author and quantum

A few years ago, deep beneath the Apennine Mountains in Italy, a team of physicists hunted for flashes of light that just might suggest human consciousness is the product of gravitational forces. The fact they came up empty-handed doesn’t mean we’re all meat computers with no free will; it does make the quest for a suitable

A new breakthrough has allowed physicists to create a beam of atoms that behaves the same way as a laser, and that can theoretically stay on “forever”. This might finally mean the technology is on its way to practical application, although significant limitations still apply. Nevertheless, this is a huge step forward for what is

A strange gap between theoretical predictions and experimental results in a major neutrino research project could be a sign of the elusive ‘sterile’ neutrino – a particle so quiet, it can only be detected by the silence it leaves in its wake. It’s not the first time the anomaly has been seen, adding to previous

After previously studying the phenomena of two sound waves in quantum liquids, scientists have now observed sound moving at two different speeds in a quantum gas. If you were somehow immersed in the three-dimensional gas used for this study, you would hear every sound twice: each individual sound carried by two different sound waves moving

Sometimes the discovery of new physics demands insane levels of energy. Big machines. Fancy equipment. Countless hours of sifting through reams of data. And then sometimes the right combination of materials can open a doorway to invisible realms in a space little bigger than a tabletop. Take this new kind of relative to the Higgs

Scientists have figured out how to make platinum more affordable as a catalyst: turn it into a low-temperature liquid. It’s been known for centuries that noble metals like platinum, gold, ruthenium, and palladium make excellent catalysts for chemical reactions, because they help break the chemical bonds between atoms more efficiently than other metals. But noble

The idea of a mirror universe is a common trope in science fiction. A world similar to ours where we might find our evil doppelganger or a version of us who actually asked out our high school crush. But the concept of a mirror universe has been often studied in theoretical cosmology, and as a

Physicists have just taken an amazing step towards quantum devices that sound like something out of science fiction. For the first time, isolated groups of particles behaving like bizarre states of matter known as time crystals have been linked into a single, evolving system that could be incredibly useful in quantum computing. Following the first

There’s a revolution underway in astronomy. In fact, you might say there are several. In the past ten years, exoplanet studies have advanced considerably, gravitational wave astronomy has emerged as a new field, and the first images of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) have been captured. A related field, interferometry, has also advanced incredibly thanks to highly-sensitive

Somewhere out in the cosmos, there’s the physics equivalent of a unicorn. Catching even a glimpse of this oddity that looks like the isolated tip of a magnet would be like a beacon in the night, pointing the way to grand, unifying theories of absolutely everything. Yet aside from one tiny exception in the early 1980s,

Fast radio bursts are one of the biggest cosmic mysteries of our time. They’re extremely powerful but extremely brief explosions of electromagnetic radiation in radio wavelengths, discharging in milliseconds as much energy as 500 million Suns. For years, scientists puzzled over what could be causing these brief outbursts, detected in galaxies millions to billions of

As far as we know, it’s not possible for a person to move at twice the speed of light. In fact, it’s not possible for any object with the kind of mass you or I have to move faster than the speed of light. However, for certain strange particles, traveling at twice the speed of

A particle accelerator that slams electrons together here on Earth has achieved temperatures colder than those of outer space. Using the X-ray free-electron laser at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory  –  part of an upgrade project to the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), called LCLS II  – scientists chilled liquid helium to minus 456 degrees

There’s a key aspect of quantum computing you may not have thought about before. Called ‘quantum non-​demolition measurements’, they refer to observing certain quantum states without destroying them in the process. If we want to put together a functioning quantum computer, not having it break down every second while calculations are made would obviously be

Every time you take a step, space itself glows with a soft warmth. Called the Fulling–Davies–Unruh effect (or sometimes just Unruh effect if you’re pushed for time), this eerie glow of radiation emerging from the vacuum is akin to the mysterious Hawking radiation that’s thought to surround black holes. Only in this case, it’s the

We already have quantum computers of a sort, but at the moment they’re not practical or reliable or large-scale enough to fully realize the massive potential of the technology. To get closer to that end goal, scientists are working towards what they say could be the ideal building block for a quantum computer. These building

The definition of a second, the most fundamental unit of time in our current measurement system, hasn’t been updated in more than 70 years (give or take some billionths of a second). But in the next decade or so, that could change: Ultraprecise atomic optical clocks that rely on visible light are on track to set the

The world of particle physics has been on shaky ground lately. For years, researchers have been scrutinizing particles to make sure that the rules we use to explain the Universe hold up – with troublingly inconsistent results. To add to the endeavor, physicists using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have now measured the heaviest known

Europe’s Large Hadron Collider has started up its proton beams again at unprecedented energy levels after going through a three-year shutdown for maintenance and upgrades. It only took a couple of days of tweaking for the pilot streams of protons to reach a record energy level of 6.8 tera electronvolts, or TeV. That exceeds the

Have you ever made a mistake that you wish you could undo? Correcting past mistakes is one of the reasons we find the concept of time travel so fascinating. As often portrayed in science fiction, with a time machine, nothing is permanent anymore – you can always go back and change it. But is time

Does time exist? The answer to this question may seem obvious: Of course it does! Just look at a calendar or a clock. But developments in physics suggest the non-existence of time is an open possibility, and one that we should take seriously. How can that be, and what would it mean? It’ll take a

The world’s largest particle collider is getting ready to smash atoms harder than ever before. Following a three-year break of scheduled maintenance, upgrades, and pandemic delays, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is preparing to power up for its third, and most powerful yet, experimental period. If all initial tests and checks starting this month go well, scientists

Scientists are hopeful that solid-state thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cells with no moving parts can achieve higher efficiencies at higher temperatures when it comes to converting heat into electricity – and lead the way to power grids based entirely on renewables. One such TPV cell has now hit a new world record of 40 percent efficiency, researchers

One of the ways we can fully realize the potential of quantum computers is by basing them on both light and matter – this way, information can be stored and processed, but also travel at the speed of light. Scientists have just taken a step closer to this goal, by successfully producing the largest hybrid

After a decade of meticulous measurements, scientists announced Thursday that a fundamental particle – the W boson – has a significantly greater mass than theorized, shaking the foundations of our understanding of how the Universe works. Those foundations are grounded by the Standard Model of particle physics, which is the best theory scientists have to

Scientists at a laboratory in England have shattered the record for the amount of energy produced during a controlled, sustained fusion reaction. The production of 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds at the Joint European Torus – or JET – experiment in England has been called “a breakthrough” by some news outlets and caused

In the past 24 hours, people uploaded more than 720,000 hours’ worth of footage onto YouTube. According to calculations made a few years ago by University of Portsmouth physicist Melvin Vopson, this literal mass of visual imagery – along with half a billion tweets, countless texts, billions of WhatsApp messages, and every other bit and

Rare-earth elements are crucial components in all kinds of electronics, from smartphones and broadband cables to wind turbines and electric cars. But coming up with useful compounds that can expand our practical use of rare-earths is notoriously difficult, with unpredictable results. Now, scientists have come up with a clever way to help the search of new