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Scientists trying to discover the elusive mass of neutrinos, tiny “ghost particles” that could solve some of the universe’s biggest mysteries, announced a new limit on Thursday for how much they could weigh, halving the previous estimate.

Since the existence of was proposed nearly a century ago, scientists around the world have struggled to learn much about them—particularly their mass.

This is important because the neutrino, as the most abundant particle in the universe, “weaves a thread that connects the infinitely small and the infinitely large,” Thierry Lasserre, a physicist at France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, told AFP.

During the latter part of the 20th century, string theory was put forward as a unifying theory of physics foundations. String theory has not, however, fulfilled expectations. That is why we are of the view that the scientific community needs to reconsider what comprises elementary forces and particles.

Since the early days of general relativity, leading physicists, like Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger, have tried to unify the theory of gravitation and electromagnetism. Many attempts were made during the 20th century, including by Hermann Weyl.

Finally, it seems that we have found a unified framework to accommodate the theory of electricity and magnetism within a purely geometric theory. This means that electromagnetic and are both manifestations of ripples and curvatures in .

A new study shows that electron spins—tiny magnetic properties of atoms that can store information—can be protected from decohering (losing their quantum state) much more effectively than previously thought, simply by applying low magnetic fields.

Normally, these spins quickly lose coherence when they interact with other particles or absorb certain types of light, which limits their usefulness in technologies like or atomic clocks. But the researchers discovered that even interactions that directly relax or disrupt the spin can be significantly suppressed using weak magnetic fields.

This finding expands our understanding of how to control and opens new possibilities for developing more stable and precise quantum devices.

In a groundbreaking experiment, physicists observed a classic liquid phenomenon—capillary instability—in a quantum gas for the first time. By cooling a mix of potassium and rubidium atoms near absolute zero, researchers created tiny self-bound droplets that behave like liquid despite remaining in

Scientists from the KATRIN experiment have achieved the most precise upper limit ever recorded for the mass of the mysterious neutrino – clocking in at less than 0.45 electron volts.

This breakthrough not only tightens the constraints on one of the universe’s most elusive particles but also challenges and extends the boundaries of the Standard Model of physics.

Breaking new ground in neutrino mass measurement.

A container of oil and water separated by a thin skin of magnetized particles has intrigued a team of chemical engineers by taking on an unexpected ‘Grecian urn’ shape upon agitation.

“I thought ‘what is this thing?’,” graduate student Anthony Raykh from the University of Massachusetts Amherst recalled, after doing what all chemistry students love to do, mixing materials with intriguing properties just to see what would happen.

“So, I walked up and down the halls of the Polymer Science and Engineering Department, knocking on my professors’ doors, asking them if they knew what was going on.”

Recent physics studies have discovered that quarks and gluons inside protons, which are subatomic positively charged particles, exhibit maximal quantum entanglement at high energies. Entanglement is a physical phenomenon that entails correlations between distant particles that cannot be explained by classical physics theories, resulting in the state of one particle influencing that of another.

Researchers at Stony Brook University and the Brookhaven National Laboratory recently set out to better understand what this recent finding could mean for hadronization, the process by which quarks and gluons form hadrons, which are particles that can be detected experimentally. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, introduces a new approach to probe and study hadronization by leveraging quantum entanglement.

“Our study originated from the intriguing observation that the internal structure of protons at high energies exhibits maximal quantum entanglement,” Charles Joseph Naim, corresponding author for the paper, told Phys.org.

Recently, a team of researchers from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) consecutively removed the innermost atom and the outermost electron of a gold nanoparticle—without disturbing its overall structure. This precise manipulation allowed them to probe how the magnetic spin of the material influences its catalytic activity.

The work, led by Prof. Wu Zhikun in collaboration with Prof. Yang from the Institute of Process Engineering, CAS and Prof. Tang from Chongqing University, was published in Science Advances.

Gold nanoclusters—tiny particles composed of from a few to hundreds of —are ideal models for studying how atomic structure affects . But tuning the structure of such clusters atom by atom, especially when they’re relatively large and complex, has long been a major challenge.

A research team has successfully fine-tuned the Rabi oscillation of polaritons, quantum composite particles, by leveraging changes in electrical properties induced by crystal structure transformation. Published in Advanced Science, this study demonstrates that the properties of quantum particles can be controlled without the need for complex external devices, which is expected to greatly enhance the feasibility of practical quantum technology. The team was led by Professor Chang-Hee Cho from the Department of Physics and Chemistry at DGIST.

Quantum technology enables much faster and more precise information processing than conventional electronic devices and is gaining attention as a key driver of future industries, including quantum computing, communications, and sensors. At the core of this technology lies the ability to accurately generate and control quantum states. In particular, recent research has been actively exploring light-based quantum devices, with polaritons at the center of this field.

Polaritons are composite quasiparticles formed through the hybridization of photons and excitons—bound states arising from the motion of electrons. These quasiparticles travel at the speed of light while retaining the ability to interact with other particles, much like electrons.

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Special thanks to Elliot Glazer, Thomas Gilton, Joel David Hamkins, Timothy Chow and Hugh Woodin for their consultation on this video.

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