Scientists in Geneva took some antiprotons out for a spin—a very delicate one—in a truck, in a never-tried-before test drive that has been deemed a success.
If this so-called antimatter had come into contact with actual matter, even for a fraction of an instant, it would have been annihilated in a quick flash of energy. So experts at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, had to be extra careful when they took 92 antiprotons on the road for a short ride on Tuesday.
The antiprotons were suspended in a vacuum inside a specially designed box and held in place by supercooled magnets.
Scientists have found a clever way to supercharge ultra-thin semiconductors by reshaping the space beneath them rather than altering the material itself. By placing a single-atom-thick layer of tungsten disulfide over tiny air cavities carved into a crystal, they created miniature “light traps” that dramatically boost brightness and optical effects—up to 20 times stronger emission and 25 times stronger nonlinear signals. These hollow structures, called Mie voids, concentrate light exactly where the material sits, overcoming a major limitation of atomically thin devices.
A delicate interference experiment elucidates the collective behavior of quasiparticles that are neither bosons nor fermions, but something in between.
When you live in theory-land, as I do, anyons in fractional quantum Hall (FQH) systems are an emblem of elegance. They address a fundamental question in quantum mechanics—the classification of indistinguishable particles—by breaking the long-rooted dichotomy between fermions and bosons and replacing it with a continuum of possibilities. Their implications are far reaching. Anyons account for the “hierarchy” of FQH states and they inspire visions of topologically protected quantum computation [1]. In experiment-land, the most direct manifestation of anyons is the phase that the system’s wave function acquires when two anyons are interchanged or when one winds around another. This phase is at the heart of a new experiment performed by Noah Samuelson and Andrea Young of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and their collaborators [2].
A research team has discovered a new way to control tiny magnetic properties inside materials using electric current, which could possibly pave the way for new types of computing technologies. The work is based on spintronics, a field that uses not only the electric charge of electrons but also their “spin,” a quantum property that can be thought of as a tiny magnet.
Spintronics is already used in magnetic random access memory (MRAM), a type of memory that keeps data even when the power is turned off. This is different from conventional memory, which loses information without electricity.
In MRAM, data is stored depending on whether spins point “up” or “down.” These two stable states are separated by an energy barrier, which helps keep the data secure. However, this stability also makes it harder to switch between states, requiring strong electric currents.
Researchers have proposed that a newly identified class of magnetic materials could extend the zero-resistance currents of superconductors to electron spins. Publishing their calculations in Physical Review X, Kyle Monkman and colleagues at the University of British Columbia propose how “altermagnets” could enable persistent spin currents to flow without dissipation. If confirmed experimentally, the effect could provide a powerful new platform for spintronics, where information is encoded in spin rather than electric charge.
The ability to transport spins over long distances is a central challenge in spintronics. In conventional metals and semiconductors, spin currents decay rapidly due to effects that randomize electron spins. One promising workaround has been superconducting spintronics, where dissipationless charge transport is combined with magnetic materials. However, these hybrid systems often suffer from intrinsic drawbacks, including stray magnetic fields that can interfere with nearby components, suppressing superconductivity.
First confirmed in 2024, altermagnets offer a potential way around these problems. Like antiferromagnets (where a magnetic dipole’s spin is always opposite to those of its neighbors), they have zero net magnetization, avoiding unwanted magnetic fields.
The ALICE Collaboration takes a step further in addressing the question of whether a quark–gluon plasma can be formed in proton–proton and proton–nucleus collisions. In the first few microseconds after the Big Bang, the universe was in an extremely hot and dense state of matter known as quark–gluon plasma (QGP), which can be reproduced with high-energy collisions between heavy ions such as lead nuclei.
In a paper published in Nature Communications, the ALICE Collaboration reports observing a remarkable common pattern in proton–proton, proton–lead and lead–lead collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), shedding new light on possible QGP formation and evolution in small collision systems.
Physicists initially believed that colliding small systems, such as protons, could not generate the extreme temperatures and pressures needed to form QGP. But in recent years, signatures of QGP have been observed in proton–proton and proton–lead collisions at the LHC, indicating that the size of the collision system may not be a limiting factor in QGP creation.
“I like to say that physics is hard because physics is easy, by which I mean we actually think about physics as students.”
Up next, The Multiverse is real. Just not in the way you think it is. ► • The Multiverse is real. Just not in the wa…
Physics seems complicated, until you realize why it works so well, says physicist Sean Carroll, revealing the basis of the field’s greatest successes: Radical simplicity.
Carroll takes us from Newton’s clockwork universe to Laplace’s demon, to Einstein’s spacetime revolution, exploring the historical shockwaves each breakthrough caused. If you’ve wondered how stripping the world down to its simplest parts can reveal deeper truths, this is where that story begins.
00:00:00 Radical simplicity in physics. 00:00:55 Chapter 1: The physics of free will. 00:04:55 Laplace’s Demon. 00:06:27 The clockwork universe paradigm. 00:07:41 Determinism and compatibilism. 00:08:45 Chapter 2: The invention of spacetime. 00:17:30: Einstein’s general theory of relativity. 00:24:27 Chapter 3: The quantum revolution. 00:28:05 The 2 biggest ideas in physics. 00:32:27 Visualizing physics. 00:38:17 Quantum field theory. 00:46:51 The Higgs boson particle. 00:47:28 The standard model of particle physics. 00:52:53 The core theory of physics. 01:02:03 The measurement problem. 01:13:47 Chapter 4: The power of collective genius. 01:16:19 A timeline of the theories of physics.
We only ever experience three spatial dimensions, but quantum lab experiments suggest a whole new side to reality – weird particle apparitions included.
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Fermilab physicists really care about the mass of the W boson. They spent nearly a decade recording collisions in the Tevatron collider and another decade analysing the data. This culminated in the April 7 announcement that this obscure particle’s mass seems to be heavier than expected. So why do we care? Because understanding why this particle even has mass was one of the most important breakthroughs in our understanding of the subatomic world. And because measuring its precise mass either doubles down on our current understanding or reveals a path to an even deeper knowledge. The FermiLab discrepancy is a tantalizing hint of the latter.
Need Catch Up On Your Fundamental Forces? • The Fundamental Forces & The Standard Model.
