Physics

A team of physicists from New York University, Wayne State University and the University at Buffalo has found experimental evidence for a transition between trivial and topological superconductivity in a quantum mechanical device called a Josephson junction. This breakthrough offers promise for increasing storage capabilities in electronic devices and enhancing …

Quantum computers will never fully replace “classical” ones like the device you’re reading this article on. They won’t run web browsers, help with your taxes, or stream the latest video from Netflix. What they will do — what’s long been hoped for, at least — will be to offer a …

A team of researchers at the at the University of Leeds, UK, has created gold nanosheets with a thickness of only 0.47 nm (two atomic layers thick) — the thinnest unsupported gold ever created. This 2D material could have wide-scale applications in the medical device and electronics industries, and also …

It’s not surprising that quantum physics has a reputation for being weird and counterintuitive. The world we’re living in sure doesn’t feel quantum mechanical. And until the 20th century, everyone assumed that the classical laws of physics devised by Isaac Newton and others — according to which objects have well-defined …

Dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up roughly a quarter of the Universe, may have its origin in pre-Big-Bang times, according to a new paper published in the Physical Review Letters. This artist’s impression shows the evolution of the Universe beginning with the Big Bang on the left followed …

A duo of researchers at Purdue University has modified a popular theorem — called Bell’s inequality — for identifying quantum entanglement and applied it to chemical reactions. In this illustration, one photon (purple) carries a million times the energy of another (yellow). Image credit: NASA / Sonoma State University / …

  You’re probably familiar with the way good sound design can bring a game or video to life. It can take huge teams of creators hour upon hour to make the audio just right, but almost no amount of time is enough to craft the perfect audio for a virtual …

  The sun is easy to spot in the sky, and it’s not very far away in astronomical terms. So, scientists have spent a great deal of time studying our local life-giving star. However, the sun is also a nuclear inferno that will eradicate any people and most robots that …

A quantum spin liquid is a state of matter where unpaired electrons’ spins, although entangled, do not show magnetic order even at the zero temperature. The realization of a quantum spin liquid is a long-sought goal in physics. In a paper published in the journal Nature Physics, physicists from Rice …

Physicists in the ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) Collaboration at CERN have announced the first measurements of an elliptic-shaped flow of upsilons, bottomonium particles consisting of a bottom quark and its antiquark. One of the first collisions of lead ions recorded by the ALICE detector. Image credit: ALICE Collaboration …