Physics

Modern physics is a little fuzzy on the very earliest moments of the universe, but our greatest thinkers hypothesize that the universe was equal parts matter and antimatter at the very beginning. We’re all matter, though, and no one is sure why antimatter is so rare now. As part of …

Physicists from the NA62 Collaboration at CERN reported today that they had observed a candidate event of an extremely rare charged kaon decay (K+ ? ?+??–). NA62 experiment in CERN’s North Area. Image credit: NA62 / CERN. What if the odds of an event occurring were about one in ten …

An international team of researchers, led by Arizona State University chemist C. Austen Angell and University of Amsterdam’s Dr. Sander Woutersen, has observed one of the more intriguing properties predicted by water theoreticians — that, on sufficient supercooling and under specific conditions it will suddenly change from one liquid to …

Surprisingly, the Schrödinger Equation — the fundamental equation of quantum mechanics — emerges while studying massive astronomical structures. Propagation of waves through an astrophysical disk can be understood using the Schrödinger Equation. Image credit: James Tuttle Keane, California Institute of Technology. Massive astronomical objects are frequently encircled by groups of …

An international team of physicists from Amherst College and Aalto University has created the Shankar skyrmion, a quasiparticle consisting of a knotted configuration of atomic magnetic moments, or spins. Theoretical physicists predicted the existence of the Shankar skyrmion more than four decades ago, but this is the first time such …

A team of physicists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and elsewhere has created a new kind of photonic matter that could enable quantum computing with particles of light. Liang et al demonstrated that photons can be made to interact. Image credit: Christine Daniloff / MIT. Bound states of …

After many years of experiments, physicists have observed that under extreme temperatures and pressures, water takes on a new form called superionic ice. The results appear in the journal Nature Physics. Visualization of molecular dynamics simulations showing the fast diffusion of hydrogen ions (pink trajectories) within the solid lattice of …

Physicists from the TOTEM experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have uncovered evidence of a subatomic quasiparticle dubbed an ‘odderon’ that — until now — had only been theorized to exist. The results will be published in two papers in the journal Physical Review D. View of the tunnel where …

An international team of physicists has created the first small-scale replica of gamma ray bursts in a laboratory, opening up a whole new way to investigate the properties of these mysterious flashes of intense high-energy radiation that appear from random directions in space. The results are published in the journal …

All the matter you’ve ever interacted with has mass, and as such it obeys the standard laws of motion as enunciated by Newton centuries ago. If you push something, it moves in the direction you push it. However, matter with negative mass would do the opposite. It sounds like wacky …