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Category: particle physics – Page 17

Diamond clock combines two signals to cut temperature-driven drift

Despite all the advertisements for engagement rings and necklace gifts, natural diamonds are imperfect. Their carbon atoms are arranged in a cubic lattice, but they nonetheless contain several types of crystallographic defects due to impurities that occasionally replace a carbon atom. The most common types of impurities are nitrogen and boron; “Type I” diamonds contain nitrogen impurities, which can be isolated or clustered, at concentrations of up to 1%, and make up about 95% of all natural diamonds.

More specifically, some diamonds have a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) impurity. A nitrogen atom replaces one carbon atom, and adjacent to it is an empty lattice spot. One type of solid-state clock, a diamond clock, uses this feature to measure time, as the defect has optical and nuclear spin states that can be manipulated with microwaves and other light. But the NV energy levels are strongly modified by temperature.

Now a group of researchers from the U.S. and Germany has developed a way to overcome this limitation. Their work is published in the journal Physical Review Applied.

Scientists capture first molecular-level images of water reorganization during a reaction crucial for life

Some of nature’s most important chemical reactions rely on the coupled movement of negatively and positively charged particles. These processes play central roles in photosynthesis, catalysis and biological energy conversion yet remain difficult to observe.

Now, a research team led by the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in collaboration with colleagues at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and several academic labs, has captured snapshots of these events triggered when light strikes a molecule.

The findings, published in Nature Communications, could help researchers better understand and ultimately design better flow batteries, fuel cells and catalysts.

Light particles reveal critical scaling in a two-dimensional photon gas

A team of researchers from the University of Bonn, Heidelberg University and the National Autonomous University of Mexico has studied the critical behavior of light particles (photons) close to a phase transition. This critical scaling behavior, which sees thermodynamic quantities grow extremely large or diverge shortly prior to Bose-Einstein condensation, had never before been seen in photon gases until the researchers successfully secured precisely this proof.

In the research published in the journal Science Advances, the team measured the spatial correlations of a nearly non-interacting 2D photon gas trapped in a mirror box at the moment of condensation, determining the critical exponent—a quantity describing the rapid increase in the correlation length as the temperature changes near the phase transition.

ATLAS and CMS narrow in on twin Higgs production

Finding one Higgs boson was hard enough, but physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are hunting for something even more elusive: pairs of Higgs bosons. At the recent International Conference on High Energy Physics 2026, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations presented new constraints on the double-Higgs production rate, providing insight into how the Higgs boson interacts with itself.

The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 at the LHC marked the beginning of a new era in particle physics. Since then, researchers at the LHC have investigated and measured how the Higgs boson interacts with other particles, an important mechanism by which these particles get their mass.

However, physicists have yet to observe the Higgs boson interact with itself. Understanding this process would not only test the limits of the Standard Model, our current best working theory for particle physics, but also help shed light on whether the vacuum of our universe is stable.

Fast but error-prone AI assists in solving a decades-old fluid mechanics problem in five weeks

An AI assistant helped University of Colorado Boulder researchers solve a mathematical problem that had challenged their lab for a year and a half, though it made subtle errors along the way. The breakthrough could improve how scientists study nanoparticles—tiny particles about 1,000 times thinner than a human hair—but it reveals both the promise and limitations of AI as a scientific research partner.

The new study, published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, details the solution to a decades-old fluid mechanics problem and explains how researchers combined AI with human expertise to reach the answer.

The research was led by Ankur Gupta, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering, and his graduate student, Arkava Ganguly, who spent a year and a half working on the problem. With help from Anthropic’s Claude AI, they discovered that changing a nanoparticle’s shape, such as by stretching it from a circle to a football shape, changes how fast it moves in an electric field, while adding finer features, such as bumps or ripples, does not.

Two Opposing Quantum Particles Could Form a Bizarre New Kind of Matter

Researchers predict that strongly interacting bosons and fermions can form stable quantum droplets that may be testable with current experiments.

Two very different kinds of quantum particles may be able to join together in a stable form of matter that physicists once considered unlikely. Researchers at Monash University predict that ultracold bosons and fermions can combine under the right conditions to create self-bound “quantum droplets.”

Bosons and fermions follow fundamentally different quantum rules, yet the new theoretical work indicates that strongly interacting mixtures of the two can remain bound together. The result challenges the long-held expectation that stable droplets would be difficult to form in strongly interacting Bose-Fermi systems.

Going beyond simple models of neural networks: Extended mean-field theory offers a better approach

Physics is most readily applied to relatively simple systems: a pendulum, two electrons colliding or the structure of the solar system. But when systems become complicated—when many particles interact with one another, in condensed matter systems such as gases and fluids or in the cosmology of the early universe—simplifications can be made using a technique called classical or extended mean-field theory.

A research group from Princeton University, led by lead author Luca Di Carlo, has applied extended mean-field theory to networks of biological neurons. Their work is published in the journal Physical Review Letters. They found that the simplest versions of mean-field theory failed to accurately describe the activity of these networks, but an enhanced version was able to do so.

Observing the vibrations of neighboring atoms with an atomic-scale double slit

Efficiently controlling heat generation has become a major challenge as the semiconductors used in smartphones, computers and similar devices have become higher-performing and more miniaturized. The way heat is transmitted is determined by the vibration of the atoms that constitute a material, but it is not easy to directly examine, at the atomic scale, how neighboring atoms vibrate in coordination with one another.

A research group made up of Director and Professor Naoya Shibata, JSPS Research Fellow Koudai Tabata, Associate Professor Taketo Seki and Project Associate Professor Ryo Ishikawa, all of the Institute of Engineering Innovation, School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, has succeeded in an atomic-scale double-slit experiment that treats neighboring atoms as “two slits” and demonstrates that it is possible to read out the vibration of atoms from the fringe pattern formed by electrons. Their paper is published in the journal Nature.

The double-slit experiment makes use of a phenomenon in which waves passing through two narrow slits overlap and create a pattern of bright and dark fringes. Since the British physicist Thomas Young first performed it using light in the early 19th century, it (Young’s experiment) has been known as a fundamental experiment demonstrating the wave nature of light. If this experiment could be reduced to the atomic scale inside a material, it would allow direct investigation of the arrangement and motion of atoms at the level of a single atomic bond, but an atomic-scale double-slit experiment of this kind has never been realized.

Tiny atomic changes could lead to smarter wireless technology

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have shown that making extremely small changes to the structure of a material can dramatically improve its ability to respond to electrical signals. Published recently in Science Advances, the breakthrough could help create a new generation of wireless devices that can change frequency on demand, making communication systems more flexible and energy efficient.

The team focused on a ceramic material called strontium tantalate. By replacing a small number of atoms with slightly smaller calcium atoms, they created tiny distortions in the material’s structure. Although these changes occur at the atomic scale, they have a major effect on how the material behaves.