Physics

The half-life of a process is the time after which half of the radioactive nuclei present in a sample have decayed away. Using the XENON1T dark-matter detector, a 1,300-kg vat of super-pure liquid xenon shielded from cosmic rays in a cryostat submerged in water deep 1.5 km beneath the Gran …

Gravitational (Rayleigh-Taylor, or R-T) instabilities are produced by the interactions of two fluids of different densities that do not mix — oil and water, for example — because the lighter fluid pushes aside the heavier one. Now, a team of researchers from Columbia University and ETH Zurich has observed an …

Harvard University physicist Daniel Jafferis and colleagues have shown that wormholes — theoretical portals through space-time that could create shortcuts for long journeys across the Universe — can exist. Wormholes are predicted by the theory of general relativity. Digital art by Les Bossinas, Cortez III Service Corp., 1998. “But don’t …

A team of nuclear physicists from the Washington University, St. Louis, Michigan State University, Western Michigan University and the University of Connecticut has created and characterized ‘featherweight’ oxygen — the lightest-ever version of the familiar oxygen, with only three neutrons to its eight protons. The results appear in the journal …

Physicists from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) Collaboration announced this week the discovery of a new pentaquark particle, Pc(4312)+, decaying to a proton and a J/ψ meson, a particle composed of a charm quark and a charm antiquark. Illustration of the possible layout of the quarks in a pentaquark …

Stimulation with ultrafast light pulses can realize and manipulate states of matter with emergent structural, electronic and magnetic phenomena. According to a new study, published in the journal Nature Materials, an ultrafast laser pulse plus ‘frustration’ resulted in a new state of matter — a ‘supercrystal.’ A 3D image of …

Physicists from the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) Collaboration at CERN have observed, for the first time, the matter-antimatter asymmetry known as charge-parity (CP) violation in the decays of a D0 meson, a subatomic particle made up of a charm quark and an up antiquark. The LHCb magnet. Image credit: …

Tunneling, a key feature of quantum mechanics, is when a particle that encounters a seemingly insurmountable barrier passes through it, ending up on the other side. A series of experiments carried out by physicists from Griffith University, Lanzhou University, the Australian National University, Drake University and Korea’s Institute for Basic …

Physicists from the AEgIS (Antihydrogen Experiment: Gravity, Interferometry, Spectroscopy) Collaboration at CERN have found a new way of making long-lived positronium atoms, which consist of an electron and a positron (antimatter counterpart of the electron), for antimatter gravity experiments. Positronium is a hydrogen-like atom consisting of a positron and an …

Physicists from the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) Collaboration at CERN have discovered a previously unknown particle that consists of a charm quark and its antimatter counterpart, the charm antiquark. The mass and other properties of the new particle, ψ3(1D), place it squarely in the charmonium family that includes the …