Mind-Bending New Multiverse Scenario Could Explain a Strange Higgs Boson Feature

When researchers at the Large Hadron Collider discovered the elusive Higgs particle in 2012, it was a landmark for particle physics. It solved a very thorny problem, validating and allowing the Standard Model of particle physics to hold.   But, as is often the case with new discoveries, while some questions were neatly answered, others … Read more

Physicists Reveal The Weird Shapes Ice Takes as It Melts at Different Temperatures

Melting ice can take on different shapes depending on the temperature of the water around it, new research reveals, giving us new insights into the complex physics that underlie this deceptively complicated transition.   The team behind the research created ultra-pure ‘clear’ ice for their experiments, free from bubbles and impurities, then observed the ice … Read more

Physicists Detect Mysterious X Particles in ‘Primordial Soup’ For The First Time

A mysterious particle thought to have existed briefly just after the Big Bang has now been detected for the first time in the ‘primordial soup’. Specifically, in a medium called the quark-gluon plasma, generated in the Large Hadron Collider by colliding lead ions. There, amid the trillions of particles produced by these collisions, physicists managed … Read more

Physicists Just Smashed a Record by Keeping a Bubble Intact For Over a Year

When you think of the word “ephemeral”, many people will immediately conjure up the image of a soap bubble: delicate, gorgeous, and gone in a blink (or maybe a few). Now a team of physicists led by Aymeric Roux of the University of Lille in France has defied this cliché, creating a bubble that maintained … Read more

Physicists crack unsolvable three-body problem using drunkard’s walk

A physics problem that has plagued science since the days of Isaac Newton is closer to being solved, say a pair of Israeli researchers. The duo used “the drunkard’s walk” to calculate the outcome of a cosmic dance between three massive objects, or the so-called three-body problem. For physicists, predicting the motion of two massive … Read more

Physicists Observe Incredible ‘Quantum Tornados’ Formed From Ultra-Cold Atoms

Scientists have observed a stunning demonstration of classic physics giving way to quantum behavior, manipulating a fluid of ultra-cold sodium atoms into a distinct tornado-like formation.   Particles behave differently on the quantum level, in part because at this point their interactions with each other hold more power over them than the energy from their movement. … Read more

2021: a year physicists asked, ‘What lies beyond the Standard Model?’

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Aaron McGowan, Principal Lecturer in Physics and Astronomy, Rochester Institute of Technology If you ask a physicist like me to explain how the world works, my lazy answer might be: “It follows the Standard Model.” … Read more

Physicists Claim They’ve Quantum Entangled a Tardigrade With a Qubit. But Have They?

A team of physicists claims to have entangled a superconducting qubit and a tardigrade, moving the freezing, tiny, and well-controlled world of quantum into the “hot and wet” systems of life.   However, the results described in this preprint paper are not quite so cut and dried, and many quantum researchers are arguing that the … Read more

Physicists create new state of matter from quantum soup of magnetically weird particles

Scientists have spotted a long hypothesized, never-seen-before state of matter in the laboratory for the first time. By firing lasers at an ultracold lattice of rubidium atoms, scientists have prodded the atoms into a messy soup of quantum uncertainty known as a quantum spin liquid.  The atoms in this quantum magnetic soup quickly became connected, … Read more

In a First, Physicists Glimpse a Quantum Ghost

The wave function—an abstract concept used to predict the behavior of quantum particles—is the bedrock on which physicists have built their understanding of quantum mechanics. But this bedrock itself is not something physicists have a perfect grasp of, literally or philosophically. A wave function is not something one can hold in their hand or put … Read more