Physics TOP news

On Nov. 10, 2013, Europe's GOCE satellite fell to Earth after four years in orbit mapping the planet's gravitational field. Here's why it mattered.

An international collaboration demonstrates that classical nonlinear dynamics can drive single- and two-photon states to thermalize, opening new avenues for simulating complex quantum many-body systems within accessible optical architectures.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Ames National Laboratory have discovered a way to control the handedness of magnons, tiny magnetic waves that can carry information through materials. By changing the material's magnetic state with an external magnetic field, they were able to switch magnon behavior, a finding with potential applications in quantum information and quantum computing technologies. Their findings are published in Physical Review Letters.

When the most massive stars in the universe die, they often detonate in fiery supernovae, dramatically blasting most of their matter into space. The remaining stellar cores collapse into neutron stars and, sometimes, black holes. However, theories suggest that some massive stars might die without a bang, instead directly collapsing inward to become neutron stars or black holes.

M. John Harrison has won the 2026 Booker Prize for The End of Everything, a post-apocalyptic novel about uncertainty, adaptation and preserving ordinary life after catastrophe.

A fresh look at Einstein's equations suggests that gravity can sometimes snap and reconnect, similar to magnetic field lines on the sun. The findings hint at a new way that gravity and matter can trade energy.

An international collaboration of physicists has presented its first results in its search for hypothetical particles that could help to explain the vast disparity between the strength of gravity and the three fundamental forces described by the Standard Model. Following three years of data collection at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)'s FASER experiment, the FASER Collaboration found no evidence for these heavy, slow-moving "quirks."

Black hole jet ejections are powerful outbursts of high-energy photons and particles that provide insights into extreme astrophysical processes. However, predicting when they will occur remains difficult. In a study, researchers from Japan analyzed observations of four black hole binary systems, identifying decreases in the accretion disk's inner radius and changes in emitted X-ray variability as possible predictors for jet ejection. Their findings could help astronomers forecast these phenomena more accurately and coordinate timely observations.

Magnons are quasiparticles that represent quantized spin waves in magnetic materials. They can carry information without moving electric charge, making them promising for future information technologies that could use less energy than conventional electronics. The frequency, stability and propagation distance of these waves are all important for their potential applications.

Quantum computers could curb the vast energy demands of artificial intelligence data centers with their ability to run complex calculations, one of the tech's pioneers told AFP.

NASA's twin ESCAPADE spacecraft are wrapping up a year-long voyage to Mars, and are now ready to make a beeline to the Red Planet.

M. John Harrison wins the Booker Prize 2026 for The End of Everything, becoming its oldest winner four years after serving as a judge.

Researchers at the UVSOR Synchrotron Facility (Institute for Molecular Science, Japan) and partner institutions have observed the decay of a xenon 4d core hole, an inner-shell vacancy, directly in the time domain. They used pairs of phase-coherent extreme ultraviolet pulses from a synchrotron to make the photoelectron wave packets they released interfere. The contrast of the interference fringes decreased over a few femtoseconds as the delay between the pulses increased. A model using literature core-hole lifetimes of about 6 femtoseconds reproduced this rapid decay of the fringe contrast. The study is published in the journal Physical Review A.

Author(s): Davis ThuillierMeasurements on micrometer-scale cadmium samples provide definitive evidence of an unusual charge-transport regime in a 3D metal. [Physics 19, 148] Published Mon Nov 09, 2026

Building an accurate model of how atoms interact is a complicated process. Researchers must choose new calculations, test successive models and track the mechanisms behind each interaction. But a newly developed AI agent called MLP Copilot has made this process much easier by bridging computational tools and scientific evidence with human supervision.

CERN scientists have finally found evidence of a particle decay so rare that it happens only once in roughly 10 billion decays, ending a search spanning more than 40 years. The breakthrough could help physicists uncover hidden particles and forces that lie beyond the reach of today's most powerful accelerators.

Energy can be carried in a number of ways: by electrons, the particles that underpin all modern electronics, as well as by quasiparticles, the results of different particles interacting with one another at the quantum level. Columbia chemist Milan Delor has been watching these different forms of energy flow with an instrument called stroboSCAT, a unique microscope that uses strobe-like light pulses to capture particles and quasiparticles as they move through different materials.

A research team led by Lu Haipeng, a professor in the Department of Chemistry at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), has achieved a breakthrough in preserving spin information for optoelectronic technologies. The team has developed a perovskite chiral multiple quantum-well system that maintains spin polarization approximately 300 times longer at room temperature. The study opens new possibilities for future quantum technologies and next-generation spin-based applications. The study was published in the journal Nature Photonics.

Mid-infrared observations with the Subaru Telescope have revealed the shape and surface temperature of the nucleus of Comet 2P/Encke. By analyzing how the nucleus's thermal emission changed as it rotated, the researchers found that the nucleus is elongated, with a long axis of about 7 kilometers and a short axis of about 3 kilometers. They also determined that the surface temperature at the time of observation was 328 ± 7 Kelvin (about 55°C).

New research suggests that Little Red Dots, which have puzzled astronomers since the JWST began discovering them, could host primordial black holes born during the Big Bang.

The tiny atomic defects so important for future quantum technologies can be difficult to spot. Fortunately, they leave behind some clues. The defects can alter how a material responds to light, producing a distinctive optical fingerprint that scientists can measure. The challenge is figuring out which fingerprints belong to which defects.

How can something remain intact when it should naturally break apart? This question has been addressed by researchers at RPTU. Their work has led to the experimental observation of an unusual quantum state in which two atoms remain bound together even though they possess enough energy to separate. The results have been published in the journal Nature Physics.

NASA has officially launched the Moon Base Student Challenge, asking students to help build humanity's future on the moon. And there is $1 million in prizes for the best ideas.

The first trailer for Other World: A Stranger Things Adventure doesn't show much, but there are enough clues for fans to figure out what it's about here.

Scientists from Tokyo Metropolitan University have discovered that charged states made of two electrons and a positively charged hole (or vice versa) on atomically thin rolls of carbon atoms have a structure-derived "handedness" in how they interact with light. While electron-hole pairs, or "excitons," were known to keep the chirality of the underlying nanotube, the team showed that adding a charge to create "trions" does not change this property.

Scientists have observed a bizarre quantum state of matter that combines the structure of a crystal with the frictionless flow of a liquid, all at room temperature. The breakthrough overturns a major practical limitation of exotic quantum experiments and could help bring powerful new light-based computing and sensing technologies closer to reality.

Typically, after a physical system is disturbed, it can gradually return toward a state of thermal equilibrium by exchanging heat with its surroundings. Thermal equilibrium is a state in which there is no net transfer of heat between the system and its surroundings.

Next-generation experiments like DUNE and Hyper-Kamiokande aren’t optimized for identifying matter-antimatter asymmetry, say theorists The post Quantum information reveals limits of neutrino flavour measurements appeared first on Physics World.

More than a century after Einstein revolutionized our understanding of gravity, scientists have uncovered a surprising new phenomenon hidden within his equations. Researchers at Columbia University and Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez have identified a theoretical process called "gravitational reconnection," in which structures within gravitational fields can break apart and reconnect, transferring energy into matter.

DonQuenick Joppy's appeals battle with former employer HCA-HealthOne has ended, following a ruling that reduced her discrimination award and preserved liability findings after dismissed manslaughter charges.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a team of astronomers identified 104 magnified stellar events in a galaxy known as the Dragon, located around 6.5 billion light-years away. This discovery more than doubles the previous record of 44 such detections in the same galaxy. Because these kinds of events reveal some of the most luminous stars and likely the presence of dark matter, this study offers a rare look at the galaxy's stellar population along with a possible hint at the nature of dark matter.

Primordial black holes are hypothetical objects that could have formed directly from dense clumps of matter in the very early universe. If they exist, their dramatic origins would set them apart from the black holes we see today, which form when massive stars collapse. Some theories suggest that "stupendously large" primordial black holes could account for a significant share of the universe's elusive dark matter.

Some quantum systems are so complex that even the most powerful supercomputers struggle to simulate their behavior. One

In a new Nature Physics study, researchers demonstrated the Aharonov-Bohm effect in a quantum simulation of a lattice gauge theory using a hybrid trapped-ion quantum computer.

We typically think of the moon as a static, floating object that has remained the same for basically its entire lifetime, with an occasional asteroid impact serving as an exception. That understanding is grounded in physics—the moon should have cooled rapidly after forming when a huge protoplanet hit the early Earth around 4.5 billion years ago. But some lunar material returned from the Chang'e-5 mission was notably formed only around 2 billion years ago, yet appeared to be volcanic in origin.

An alternative model in which the universe is 26.7 billion years old and needs neither dark matter nor dark energy has held up against several major cosmology tests, according to a new University of Ottawa study. The research, titled "A Big Bang Nucleosynthesis Consistency Test of the CCC+TL Cosmology," is published in the journal Universe.

Fusion energy has the potential to provide abundant, clean power. Now, the race is on to develop the world’s first commercial plant.

For the first time, an international team of researchers from Germany, Thailand, India, China and the United States has created a three-component Hubbard system with tunable interactions in the laboratory. In doing so, the team used a quantum gas microscope to make the individual atoms visible. The study, published in Science, provides an important foundation for future quantum simulations of nuclear physics and materials science.

Optical cavities are pairs of light-trapping mirrors and underpin the operation of lasers, atomic clocks and many types of precision sensors. If the distance between the mirrors is changed rapidly enough, some theories predict that the waves inside them should bunch together into short, intense pulses. So far, however, this prediction has never been tested directly.

Penn State researchers have refined an atom-scale model of how silicon carbide changes from a solid into vapor during crystal growth, work that could help manufacturers produce higher-quality material for advanced electronics while reducing costly trial-and-error experiments.

Astronomers have filtered out starlight from James Webb Space Telescope observations to see a giant exoplanet emerge in the darkness.

Matter starts to behave differently at extremely low temperatures, creating conditions ideal for studying quantum physics and new states of matter. Now, researchers from China have achieved a new low-temperature record aboard their Tiangong space station. Their research, recently published in Science, might lead to a new generation of experiments in quantum physics and precision measurements in space.

Albert Einstein fought to save our everyday notion of reality from the strangeness of quantum mechanics. But those who set out to aid him keep poking holes in his argument. The post A Strange Quantum Theorem Has Killed Einstein’s Reality first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Skin is remarkably good at keeping things out of the body. Typically, that's a positive. It becomes an issue when medicine needs to get in. Swallow a pill to treat a skin condition, and the medicine enters your stomach, moves into your bloodstream and travels throughout your body—all to reach a problem in your skin.

We typically think of the Moon as a static, floating object that has remained the same for basically its entire lifetime, with an occasional asteroid impact serving as an exception. That understanding is grounded in physics - the Moon should have cooled rapidly after forming when a huge protoplanet hit the early Earth around 4.5 billion years ago. But, some lunar material returned from the Chang’e-5 mission was notably formed only around two billion years ago, yet appeared to be volcanic in origin. So how did a world that was supposed to have settled down without volcanism remain hot enough to create these materials more than two billion years after its violent birth? A new paper from Miao Chen of the Chengdu University of Technology and his colleagues, and recently published in the journal Planet, offers an explanation - tidal heating.

Levitating trains, ultra-efficient energy storage, and quantum computers: superconductivity could unlock a wealth of possibilities for the future. New research led by scientists from Utrecht, Leiden, and Munich has now shed light on one of the key requirements for achieving superconductivity at room temperature. Their findings, published in Science, bring scientists a step closer to understanding how this might be achieved.

Colloidal quantum dots are prized for their size-tunable optical properties and solution processability, making them attractive for next-generation displays and lighting.

Author(s): Rachel BerkowitzRandom tangles of vortex lines have been observed untangling in an ultracold gas. [Physics 19, s137] Published Thu Nov 05, 2026

Researchers revealed an ultralow-barrier collective sliding mechanism mediated by domain walls, as well as defect-induced pinning of the sliding motion. They found that twisted bilayer MoS₂ moiré superlattices can undergo spontaneous long-range interlayer sliding at room temperature, while a sulfur-vacancy concentration of only about 0.1% can turn the motion into localized oscillations.

Wolfspeed has commercially introduced its proprietary silicon carbide (SiC) technology (TSiC), expanding the potential of silicon carbide to enable next-generation augmented reality (AR), quantum computing, and advanced optical applications, according to the company. SiC's high refractive index, low birefringence, hardness, and thermal conductivity make it a promising material for next-generation AR waveguides, supporting wider fields of view, improved image quality, and more compact wearable devices. Wolfspeed’s optical-grade TSiC substrates are engineered for exceptionally low optical absorption and superior wafer flatness, building on more than 35 years of SiC development for applications including LED technology. ...

In the first fraction of a second following the Big Bang, matter existed as a trillion-degree plasma of quarks and gluons—subatomic particles that zinged around at close to the speed of light. This roiling soup lasted for just a few microseconds before the particles coalesced into more stable protons and neutrons.

A new biomechanical study has uncovered how elite volleyball players control ball spin during jump serves, offering fresh scientific insight into one of the sport's most decisive offensive skills.

Researchers at Tohoku University and the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) have successfully controlled a unique quantum phenomenon—the quantum-geometric nonlinear Hall (QgNLH) state—using electric current for the first time. The breakthrough was achieved by revealing and exploiting the coupling between the spin structure and the QgNLH state in an electrically switchable chiral antiferromagnet.

Detecting a single photon is a challenge in itself. But what if you also want to know exactly how many photons arrive at a particular point at the same time? Physicist Erik Baalbergen is working on light detectors that can do just that. They form a key building block for the optical quantum computer of the future.

How do cells respond to drugs? A new microscopy technique could provide more precise answers to this question in the future. Researchers from Bielefeld University and the University of Vienna have developed a method as part of the European CHEM-SCAN project that makes the smallest cellular structures visible while also showing how their molecular environment changes.

Physicists at CERN report that they've detected evidence of a rare meson particle decay (B⁰→ µ⁺µ⁻) that occurs when the meson's beauty quark annihilates with a down-type quark. The pair decays into a muon and antimuon, which are particles similar to electrons. Because evidence for this decay helps test theoretical predictions from the Standard Model, physicists have been waiting for it since 1984, when it was first theorized.

Newton's theory of gravity has described the tides accurately for centuries. But could a tiny trace of Einstein's general relativity also be hidden in them? In a new study, a mathematician at Freie Universität Berlin has outlined how a targeted approach could be used to search for effects of this nature.

Around 4.5 billion years ago, a planet-sized object collided with the newly formed Earth, throwing out the debris that would later form the moon. The collision left Earth spinning extremely fast, with days lasting just two to five hours. Yet existing models of how Earth's first crust formed and evolved have largely overlooked how the planet's later slowdown might have affected it.

Johns Hopkins researchers searching the expanse of the universe for the existence of the first black holes are zeroing in on little red dots that may hold the key to the theoretical phenomenon.

Researchers have proposed a breakthrough technique for reading quantum information without destroying the delicate states that make quantum computers work. By detecting an electrical signal generated by the qubit itself, their method achieved up to 99.85% accuracy in simulations and could make future quantum computers simpler and more efficient.

Finding dim exoplanets hidden in the glare of their stars is an ongoing challenge in astronomy. Telescopes use coronagraphs to block out starlight, but even they have their limitations. Researchers have developed a new technique with the JWST that can find dim exoplanets more easily than ever.

A half-built neutrino telescope on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea searched for cracks in one of physics' most basic invariances. It came up empty, but its limits rival those of detectors many times its size.

Author(s): Susan CurtisUsing sheets of light to corral waves of ultracold atoms, researchers have created an experimental platform for studying the event horizons of black holes. [Physics 19, 149] Published Wed Nov 04, 2026

In the theoretical study of proton-nucleus collisions, the colliding projectiles can be described as streams of color charges moving along their respective trajectories. These color charges couple to gluons, which then produce the particles that are observed in the final state (gluons and quarks, which eventually produce hadrons).

University of Sydney researchers have made a breakthrough by directly observing hydrogen in the tiny spaces between the atoms in metal alloys. The world-first observation of hydrogen dissolving in these 'metal crystal lattices' offers fresh insights into why hydrogen can weaken metals and how more hydrogen-resistant materials might be developed.

The principle "Work smarter, not harder!" apparently also applies to controlling quantum materials with light. Many of their fascinating properties depend on how the atoms are arranged in the crystal. Ultrashort laser pulses can be used to alter these structures in a targeted way—the light first excites electrons, whose changed energy and dynamics exert forces on the atomic nuclei and can thereby set the atoms in motion. Such processes unfold within femtoseconds, a millionth of a billionth of a second.

By modeling the James Webb Space Telescope’s tiny movements, a new technique can reveal up to 15 times fainter alien worlds

SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, has named its finalists for the 2027 Prism Awards. The 21 products — selected in seven categories — will be honored during a Feb. 3, 2027 gala evening at Photonics West in San Francisco. The annual event, now in its 19th year, recognizes commercialized innovations in photonics, honoring companies bringing transformative products to market. The 2027 SPIE Prism Awards will honor companies for breakthrough photonics innovations. The awards, presented in a ceremony at Photonics West, will recognize awardees in seven categories. Courtesy of SPIE. Fast-moving technology areas like biophotonic imaging, optical components, metaoptics design software, metrology tools, and...

So far, observations by instruments including the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed the presence of surprisingly massive black holes in the early universe. Even less than a billion years after the Big Bang, some of these bodies already weighed billions of times the mass of the sun, and to date, astronomers are unclear as to how they could have grown so large so quickly.

Condensed natter: Physics World editors give their compressed verdicts on top new books The post The physics of weather, a literary look at gravity, plus philosophical takes on uncertainty and space exploration: micro reviews of recent books appeared first on Physics World.

Even the world's most powerful telescopes have their blind spots. Although NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can peer billions of years into the past, it still struggles to photograph planets orbiting nearby stars. Stars shine with such extraordinary brightness that their glare overwhelms nearby planets' faint glow.

Researchers have observed unusual fractional quantum Hall states in very thin gallium arsenide quantum wells The post New fractional quantum Hall states appeared first on Physics World.

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 Mediterranean Sea.

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.

Chinese researchers have developed a new way to improve sodium–sulfur battery performance by changing the atomic structure of a catalyst. Led by professors Wang Hui and Zheng Fangcai from the High Magnetic Field Laboratory at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the study is published in Angewandte Chemie.

There have been decades of regulations to make vehicles greener and improve air quality in London and Beijing, as well as a popular shift toward less polluting road transport. Now, total emissions of harmful air pollutants from vehicle exhausts are lower than those from cooking in the centers of these two megacities, a study has found.

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 at the University of Regensburg and their international partners have found a way to significantly reduce errors in quantum bits. In an experiment, they demonstrated that a single additional measurement before a series of quantum operations can cut the error rate by more than half. The results have been published in Applied Physics Reviews.

With their mysterious glow and swirling veils of color, auroras enchant even experienced researchers. When a particularly intense solar storm reached Earth on the night of May 10, 2024, and relevant websites predicted auroras even for southern Lower Saxony, several researchers from the Technical University of Braunschweig, the Fraunhofer Institute for Surface Engineering and Thin Films IST, the University of Göttingen, and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) took to the outdoors.

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 forces of nature may be hiding.

Astrophysicists think that the supermassive black holes (SMBH) we see in the modern universe are the result of a long, drawn-out process. That process is referred to as the hierarchical black hole mergers framework. It explains how some SMBHs can reach such staggering masses. Some of the most massive appear to have billions of solar masses.

Nonlocal correlations draw heat from a bath The post Cool correlations: quantum steering can make cooling more efficient appeared first on Physics World.

Quantum Design's acquisition of Oxford Instruments NanoScience has created a global company with the engineering firepower to create innovative measurement solutions and large-scale cryogenic systems for quantum computing and physics research The post Technology companies join forces to boost scientific discovery and quantum scale-up appeared first on Physics World.

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.

Author(s): Yiqin Chen, Shi-Yi Zhao, Xingjiang Zhu, N. D. Ramesh Bhat, Jacob Cardinal Tremblay, Małgorzata Curyło, Valentina Di Marco, George Hobbs, Wenhua Ling, Rami F. Mandow, Richard N. Manchester, Saurav Mishra, Daniel J. Reardon, Sparrow Roch, Christopher J. Russell, Ryan M. Shannon, Jingbo Wang, Shuangqiang Wang, and Andrew Zic (PPTA Collaboration)Researchers have used radio observations of rapidly spinning neutron stars to search for signals from supermassive black hole pairs at the dawn of galaxy formation. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 191401] Published Mon Nov 02, 2026

Author(s): Sarah Burke-SpolaorResearchers have used radio observations of rapidly spinning neutron stars to search for signals from supermassive black hole pairs at the dawn of galaxy formation. [Physics 19, 146] Published Mon Nov 02, 2026

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.

Ruthenium (Ru) is a valuable metal used in catalysts to speed up chemical reactions in many industrial processes. It can help improve efficiency and reduce the energy needed for chemical production. However, because it is rare and expensive, scientists are looking for ways to make better use of it.

Astrophysicists think that black holes grow through a hierarchical merger framework. But the elusive Intermediate Mass Black Holes are the missing link between stellar mass black holes, and the gargantuan supermassive black holes like the one at the center of the Milky Way. The JWST may have found the ancient sources of IMBH heavy seeds: young massive clusters in the high-redshift Universe.

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.

The findings are another clue towards understanding the origins of 3I/ATLAS and the planet-forming conditions around other stars.