Physics

Physicists have just set a new record confining a self-focused laser pulse to a cage of air, down the length of a 45 meter-long (148 foot-long) university corridor. With previous results falling well short of a meter, this newest experiment led by physicist Howard Milchberg of the University of Maryland (UMD) breaks new ground for

Tractor beams make intuitive sense. Matter and energy interact with each other in countless ways throughout the Universe. Magnetism and gravity are both natural forces that can draw objects together, so there’s sort of a precedent. But engineering an actual tractor beam is something different. A tractor beam is a device that can move an

Don’t try this at home, but beaming a laser into the sky could avert lightning strikes, according to a new study from a team of scientists who experimented with the lasers atop a Swiss mountain where a great big metal telecommunications tower stands. Physicist Aurélien Houard, from the French National Center for Scientific Research’s Applied

Silently churning away at the heart of every atom in the Universe is a swirling wind of particles that physics yearns to understand. No probe, no microscope, and no X-ray machine can hope to make sense of the chaotic blur of quantum cogs whirring inside an atom, leaving physicists to theorize the best they can

The ancient Romans were masters of building and engineering, perhaps most famously represented by the aqueducts. And those still functional marvels rely on a unique construction material: pozzolanic concrete, a spectacularly durable concrete that gave Roman structures their incredible strength. Even today, one of their structures – the infamous Pantheon, still intact and nearly 2,000

Italians are notoriously – and understandably – protective of their cuisine, as regular arguments about the correct toppings for pizza or the appropriate pasta to use with a Bolognese ragu will attest. So it was hardly surprising that, when a Nobel Prize-winning Italian physicist weighed in with advice about how to cook pasta perfectly which

Nothing can go faster than light. It’s a rule of physics woven into the very fabric of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. The faster something goes, the closer it gets to its perspective of time freezing to a standstill. Go faster still, and you run into issues of time reversing, messing with notions of causality.

When you stop and think about bubbles, you realize that they’re everywhere: in the dishwasher, on the top of your beer, on the crests of waves, in the saliva between your teeth, and, of course, in bubble gun toys. That means the physics of bubbles are important in all kinds of scenarios. With that in

Ordinarily, to measure an object we must interact with it in some way. Whether it’s by a prod or a poke, an echo of sound waves, or a shower of light, it’s near impossible to look without touching. In the world of quantum physics, there are some exceptions to this rule. Researchers from Aalto University

Fractal patterns can be found everywhere from snowflakes to lightning to the jagged edges of coastlines. Beautiful to behold, their repetitive nature can also inspire mathematical insights into the chaos of the physical landscape. A new example of these mathematical oddities has been uncovered in a type of magnetic substance known as spin ice, and

No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least to our knowledge – but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists. As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many others show, moving around in time creates

Scientists have made a “breakthrough” in their quest to harness nuclear fusion. The US Department of Energy officially announced the milestone in fusion energy research on Tuesday. For the first time, researchers created a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than they put into it. The experiment, conducted on December 5 at Lawrence Livermore

The US Department of Energy said Sunday it would announce a “major scientific breakthrough” this week after media reported a federal laboratory had recently achieved a major milestone in nuclear fusion research. The Financial Times reported Sunday that scientists in the California-based Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) had achieved a “net energy gain” from an

An alloy of chromium, cobalt, and nickel has just given us the highest fracture toughness ever measured in a material on Earth. It has exceptionally high strength and ductility, leading to what a team of scientists has called “outstanding damage tolerance”. Moreover – and counterintuitively – these properties increase as the material gets colder, suggesting

For the first time, scientists have created a quantum computing experiment for studying the dynamics of wormholes – that is, shortcuts through spacetime that could get around relativity’s cosmic speed limits. Wormholes are traditionally the stuff of science fiction, ranging from Jodie Foster’s wild ride in Contact to the time-bending plot twists in Interstellar. But

Physicists have long struggled to explain why the Universe started out with conditions suitable for life to evolve. Why do the physical laws and constants take the very specific values that allow stars, planets, and ultimately life to develop? The expansive force of the Universe, dark energy, for example, is much weaker than theory suggests

Say hello to ronnagrams and quettameters: International scientists gathered in France voted on Friday for new metric prefixes to express the world’s largest and smallest measurements, prompted by an ever-growing amount of data. It marks the first time in more than three decades that new prefixes have been added to the International System of Units

Scientists and government representatives meeting at a conference in France voted on Friday to scrap leap seconds by 2035, the organization responsible for global timekeeping said. Similar to leap years, leap seconds have been periodically added to clocks over the last half century to make up for the difference between exact atomic time and the

A new kind of black hole analog could tell us a thing or two about an elusive radiation theoretically emitted by the real thing. Using a chain of atoms in single-file to simulate the event horizon of a black hole, a team of physicists has observed the equivalent of what we call Hawking radiation –

Ice isn’t always ice all the way through. Even at temperatures well below freezing, its surface can be coated in a film of quasi-liquid atoms, with its thickness usually only a few nanometers. The process of its formation is known as premelting (or ‘surface melting’), and it’s why your ice cubes can stick together even

Everything in the Universe has gravity – and feels it too. Yet this most common of all fundamental forces is also the one that presents the biggest challenges to physicists. Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity has been remarkably successful in describing the gravity of stars and planets, but it doesn’t seem to apply perfectly

Quantum mechanics, the theory which rules the microworld of atoms and particles, certainly has the X factor. Unlike many other areas of physics, it is bizarre and counter-intuitive, which makes it dazzling and intriguing. When the 2022 Nobel prize in physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for research shedding light

The simple mention of the word “radiation” often evokes fear in people. For others, it’s fun to think a little exposure to radiation could turn you into the next superhero, just like the Hulk. But is it true basically everything around us is radioactive, even the food we eat? You may have heard bananas are

For the better part of a century, quantum physics and the general theory of relativity have been a marriage on the rocks. Each perfect in their own way, the two just can’t stand each other when in the same room. Now a mathematical proof on the quantum nature of black holes just might show us

Marking the passage of time in a world of ticking clocks and swinging pendulums is a simple case of counting the seconds between ‘then’ and ‘now’. Down at the quantum scale of buzzing electrons, however, ‘then’ can’t always be anticipated. Worse still, ‘now’ often blurs into a haze of uncertainty. A stopwatch simply isn’t going

Pure water is an almost perfect insulator. Yes, water found in nature conducts electricity – but that’s because of the impurities therein, which dissolve into free ions that allow an electric current to flow. Pure water only becomes “metallic” – electronically conductive – at extremely high pressures, beyond our current abilities to produce in a

Quantum entanglement is the binding together of two particles or objects, even though they may be far apart – their respective properties are linked in a way that’s not possible under the rules of classical physics. It’s a weird phenomenon that Einstein described as “spooky action at a distance“, but its weirdness is what makes

The question of how precisely protons move through water in an electric field has fascinated scientists for centuries. Now, more than 200 years after the last major insight into the phenomenon, scientists have some clarity. In 1806, Theodor Grotthuss put forward a hypothesis, which came to be known as the Grotthuss mechanism for ‘proton jumping’,

The 2022 Nobel prize for physics has been awarded to a trio of scientists for pioneering experiments in quantum mechanics, the theory covering the micro-world of atoms and particles. Alain Aspect from Université Paris-Saclay in France, John Clauser from J.F. Clauser & Associates in the US, and Anton Zeilinger from University of Vienna in Austria,

Built by the last of Spain’s Muslim rulers, the Alhambra is a regal palace that has shimmered over the city of Granada for 800 years. Throughout the day its colors seem to shift, standing out as a terracotta orange beacon under a midday Sun before giving way to red-pinkish hues in dusk’s fading light. On

Another record has been broken on the way to fully operational and capable quantum computers: the complete control of a 6-qubit quantum processor in silicon. Researchers are calling it “a major stepping stone” for the technology. Qubits (or quantum bits) are the quantum equivalents of classical computing bits, only they can potentially process much more

Electrons whizzing through a grid-like lattice don’t behave at all like pretty silver spheres in a pinball machine. They blur and bend in collective dances, following whims of a wave-like reality that are hard enough to imagine, let alone compute. And yet scientists have succeeded in doing just that, capturing the motion of electrons moving

The most powerful laser in the US right now is getting turned on to send its first pulses this week – enabling researchers to get a new level of insight into plasma physics and particle accelerators. Known as the Zetawatt-Equivalent Ultrashort pulse laser System (ZEUS), it produces an ultra-short, extremely powerful pulse of just 25

A core principle of Einstein’s general theory of relativity has just passed its most stringent test yet. Using a specially designed satellite, an international team of scientists measured the accelerations of pairs of free-falling objects in Earth’s orbit. Results based on five months’ worth of data indicated the accelerations didn’t differ by more than one

Few things in the Universe keep the beat as reliably as an atom’s pulse. Yet even the most advanced ‘atomic’ clocks based on variations of these quantum timekeepers lose count when pushed to their limits. Physicists have known for some time that entangling atoms can help tie particles down enough to squeeze a little more

Korea’s ‘artificial Sun’ reactor has made headlines this week by officially sustaining plasma at a temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius for more than 20 seconds. The team at the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) device reached an ion temperature of above 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit). According to New Scientist,

It could be raining diamonds on planets throughout the Universe, scientists suggested Friday, after using common plastic to recreate the strange precipitation believed to form deep inside Uranus and Neptune. ​Scientists had previously theorized that extremely high pressure and temperatures turn hydrogen and carbon into solid diamonds thousands of kilometers below the surface of the

With the right physics, it’s possible to blast a box of circuits clear across the Solar System with pinpoint accuracy to come within a whisker of distant worlds. But stir a splash of milk in your tea and the best physicists can do is hazard a guess at the kinds of patterns you’ll see swirling

Most of us grow up familiar with the prevailing law that limits how quickly information can travel through empty space: the speed of light, which tops out at 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) per second. While photons themselves are unlikely to ever break this speed limit, there are features of light which don’t play by the

A new method for entwining the fates of fragments of light has overcome some serious obstacles on the road to photon-based quantum computing. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany have successfully entangled 14 photons into a state considered optimal for qubits, more than doubling previous attempts – while also improving

Hydrogen fuel promises to be a clean and abundant source of energy in the future – as long as scientists can figure out ways to produce it practically and cheaply, and without fossil fuels. A new study provides us with another promising step in that direction. Scientists have described a relatively simple method involving aluminum

Getting atoms to do what you want isn’t easy – but it’s at the heart of a lot of groundbreaking research in physics. Creating and controlling the behavior of new forms of matter is of particular interest and an active area of research. Our new study, published in Physical Review Letters, has uncovered a brand

The dazzling beauty of a snowflake is testament to the amazing shapes water can form below freezing point. Placed under pressure, the elegant dance of the H2O molecule contorts into something bizarre at super chilly temperatures, virtually tying themselves in knots to avoid transforming into ice. Researchers from the University of Birmingham in the UK

Protons may have more “charm” than we thought, new research suggests. A proton is one of the subatomic particles that make up the nucleus of an atom. As small as protons are, they are composed of even tinier elementary particles known as quarks, which come in a variety of “flavors,” or types: up, down, strange,

The Met Office has issued several “yellow thunderstorm warnings” for the UK, highlighting the potential for frequent lightning. While your chance of getting struck by lightning is low, it’s important to know how to stay safe during a thunderstorm. Globally, about 24,000 people each year are killed by lightning and another 240,000 are injured. Most

Scientists have confirmed that last year, for the first time in the lab, they achieved a fusion reaction that self-perpetuates (instead of fizzling out) – bringing us closer to replicating the chemical reaction that powers the Sun. However, they aren’t exactly sure how to recreate the experiment. Nuclear fusion occurs when two atoms combine to

A hybrid magnet in China has just smashed the previous record for the most powerful stable magnetic field, scientists claim. At the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Steady High Magnetic Field Facility (SHMFF), a magnet years in development achieved a steady magnetic field of 45.22 tesla – tens of thousands of times more powerful than your

Climate change is a real problem. Human-caused outputs of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane are the main driver of an unprecedented rise in global average temperatures at a speed never before seen in the Earth’s geologic record. The problem is so bad that any attempts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions may be too