Every time someone picks up a call, the phone does a quiet bit of translation. Incoming radio signals are converted into tiny sound waves that ripple across chips before being turned back into data.
MIT scientists have challenged two decades of conventional thinking by discovering that flexible molecular connections, rather than rigid ones, can unlock entirely new ways to arrange nanoparticles. The breakthrough could lead to a new generation of designer materials with unusual properties and applications in electronics, medicine, and energy.
For nearly 90 years, scientists believed magnetism fell into just two categories, but researchers have now confirmed a remarkable third type called altermagnetism. Using specialized X-rays, they uncovered a unique magnetic signature that proves these materials behave differently from conventional magnets. Altermagnets combine stability with the ability to efficiently carry information, potentially overcoming major limitations in today's electronics. The discovery could lead to faster comput
Are the laws of physics truly the same everywhere in the universe? This fundamental principle, known as Lorentz invariance, lies at the heart of Einstein's theory of relativity. Yet some theories that seek to reconcile gravity with quantum physics suggest that it might not always hold. To investigate this possibility, researchers from the international KM3NeT collaboration analyzed 5,828 atmospheric neutrino candidate events detected by KM3NeT/ORCA, a neutrino telescope located deep in the
Imagine shuffling a deck of cards where some of the cards are fading just because of the way they interact with the external environment as you shuffle them. Your job is to figure out the interplay between the shuffling, or "imposed randomness," due to the way you shuffle your cards and how that relates to the fading as cards are exposed to the external environment.
Researchers from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, the Military University of Technology (Poland), IBM Research Zurich and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) have observed a new quantum state of matter known as a supersolid in an exciton-polariton Bose-Einstein condensate. Remarkably, the phenomenon occurs not at temperatures close to absolute zero, but at room temperature. The results have been published in Science Advances.
Researchers from ICMAB-CSIC, the Politecnico di Milano and Université de Liège have adapted a direct laser writing technique that allows them to "draw" superconducting properties in a material. The result is a new way to locally program the behavior of a superconductor, tuning it from a fully superconducting state to an insulating one with extraordinary precision.
Physicists have found evidence of a particle decay so rare that it is expected to occur only around once in every 10 billion "beauty" particles. The result, from the upgraded LHCb experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), follows a search spanning more than 40 years and brings physicists closer to exploring the "Zeptoverse"—an unexplored world that exists at distances of a billionth of a trillionth of a meter, or a "zeptometer," where new particles and
Stanford engineers and colleagues designed a chip that can take a muddled mixture of light from multiple lasers and output clean beams of light. It's the first time researchers have demonstrated a device that can take in mixed, or partially coherent, light and sort its photons into a clear set of separate beams.
Scientists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider have uncovered compelling new evidence that even relatively small atomic collisions can recreate the extraordinary state of matter that filled the universe moments after the Big Bang. Known as quark-gluon plasma, this exotic substance forms at temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun, causing ordinary particles to break apart into their fundamental building blocks.
Scientists have discovered a possible loophole in the laws that normally prevent black holes from splitting apart, suggesting that extremely fast-spinning black holes might divide into two. The surprising finding raises the possibility of an entirely new black hole phenomenon that future telescopes could potentially detect.
A research team wanted to better understand how the forces between particles inside a material change. They discovered that by confining one-dimensional classical spin chains inside a mirror box cavity with light, they could force these magnetic particles to organize and undergo a phase transition. Their work provides the simplest exactly solvable examples showing that light can create new phase transitions with materials.
One approach to making information storage in quantum computing less prone to errors is known as topological quantum computing. It relies on special quantum states that are expected to be more resistant to local disturbances.
Quantum computers rely on qubits as their units of information. To connect them into a larger network across long distances, they need to transmit quantum information using light.
Mysterious particles called neutrinos constantly stream through our bodies, and scientists are now detecting incredibly powerful versions arriving from distant cosmic sources using a massive observatory buried in Antarctic ice. These elusive “ghost particles” could hold extraordinary clues about the Big Bang, extreme cosmic events, and some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.
How atoms are arranged inside materials can influence the behavior of electrons and the resulting electronic states. Kagome lattices, repeating arrangements of atoms forming triangles that share corners (with hexagonal spaces between them), have been linked with the emergence of unusual electronic states.
Scientists have built a groundbreaking molecular motor that spins in either direction using electricity, inspired by a machine invented more than 2,000 years ago. Even more remarkably, its rotation can boost electrical conductivity by up to 100 times, potentially transforming the future of molecular electronics.
In a recent Nature Communications study, researchers have reported the realization of an anti-spin ice, a system that does the opposite of conventional spin ices by breaking the ice rule that governs them.
A mysterious particle overlooked for decades may hold the key to why matter survived the Big Bang, allowing stars, planets, and life to exist. Scientists believe this forgotten neutrino reshaped the early universe and may have left detectable gravitational wave signals that could help unlock the cosmos’s deepest mysteries.
According to quantum electrodynamics, the theory describing interactions between light and electrically charged particles, a sufficiently strong electric field can, in principle, convert some of its energy into particles and their antimatter partners. A particle's antimatter partner has the same mass and, for electrically charged particles, the opposite electric charge.