Physicists have successfully played a mind-bending “quantum game” using a real-world quantum computer, in which lasers shuffle around ions on a chip to explore the strange behavior of qubits. By creating a special, knotted structure of entangled particles, the team demonstrated that today’s quant
Neutrino energy offers 24/7 power without sun, wind, or fuel. Learn how this silent force may soon charge your phone and power entire homes wirelessly.
Scientists have discovered a new four-body quasi-particle, the quadruplon, in a 2D semiconductor. Using laser experiments and advanced theory, they identified unique spectral features unexplained by existing models, confirming the quadruplon’s existence. A central goal of physics is to understand
A new quantum radio device may detect axions—potential dark matter particles—marking a breakthrough in the hunt for the universe’s missing 85% mass.
Spintronics researchers discovered a new mechanism to generate strong spin currents that could bring us a step closer to low-power, high-performance memory and processors.
Why matter dominates over antimatter in our universe has long been a major cosmic mystery to physicists. A new finding by the world’s largest particle collider has revealed a clue.
“In solid matter, heat is transferred both by mobile charge carriers and by vibrations of the atoms in the crystal lattice,” Garmroudi says, emphasizing that researchers have devised advanced techniques to engineer thermoelectric materials with exceptionally low thermal conductivity over the past few decades.
“In thermoelectric materials, we mainly try to suppress heat transport through the lattice vibrations, as they do not contribute to energy conversion,” he adds.
Garmroudi recalls developing the novel hybrid materials during his research stay in Tsukuba, Japan, supported by the Lions Award and carried out at the National Institute for Materials Science as part of his work at TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology).
Quantum gravity is one of the biggest unresolved and challenging problems in physics, as it seeks to reconcile quantum mechanics, which governs the microscopic world, and general relativity, which describes the macroscopic world of gravity and space-time.
Efforts to understand quantum gravity have been focused almost entirely at the theoretical level, but Monika Schleier-Smith at Stanford University has been exploring a novel experimental approach — trying to create quantum gravity from scratch. Using laser-cooled clouds of atoms, she is testing the idea that gravity might be an emergent phenomenon arising from quantum entanglement.
In this episode of The Joy of Why podcast, Schleier-Smith discusses the thinking behind what she admits is a high-risk, high-reward approach, and how her experiments could provide important insights about entanglement and quantum mechanical systems even if the end goal of simulating quantum gravity is never achieved.
The CMS collaboration at CERN has observed an unexpected feature in data produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which could point to the existence of the smallest composite particle yet observed. The result, reported at the Rencontres de Moriond conference in the Italian Alps this week, suggests that top quarks – the heaviest and shortest lived of all the elementary particles – can momentarily pair up with their antimatter counterparts to produce an object called toponium. Other explanations cannot be ruled out, however, as the existence of toponium was thought too difficult to verify at the LHC, and the result will need to be further scrutinised by CMS’s sister experiment, ATLAS.
High-energy collisions between protons at the LHC routinely produce top quark–antiquark pairs (tt-bar). Measuring the probability, or cross section, of tt-bar production is both an important test of the Standard Model of particle physics and a powerful way to search for the existence of new particles that are not described by the 50-year-old theory. Many of the open questions in particle physics, such as the nature of dark matter, motivate the search for new particles that may be too heavy to have been produced in experiments so far.
CMS researchers were analysing a large sample of tt-bar production data collected in 2016–2018 to search for new types of Higgs bosons when they spotted something unusual. Additional Higgs-like particles are predicted in many extensions of the Standard Model. If they exist, such particles are expected to interact most strongly with the singularly massive top quark, which weighs in at 184 times the mass of the proton. And if they are massive enough to decay into a top quark–antiquark pair, this should dominate the way they decay inside detectors, with the two massive quarks splintering into “jets” of particles.
Traditionally, magnetic materials have been divided into two main categories: ferromagnets and antiferromagnets. Over the past few years, however, physicists have uncovered the existence of altermagnets, a new type of magnetic material that exhibits features of both antiferromagnets and ferromagnets.
Altermagnets are magnetic materials that have no net magnetization (i.e., their atomic magnetic moments cancel each other out), like antiferromagnets. Yet they also break spin degeneracy (i.e., the usual energy equality between spin-up and spin-down electrons), similarly to ferromagnets.
Researchers at Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory, Southern University of Science and Technology, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and other institutes in China recently set out to realize a layered altermagnet that can generate non-collinear spin current. The room-temperature metallic altermagnet they unveiled was outlined in a paper published in Nature Physics.
