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Scientists discover new way to keep quantum spins coherent longer

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.

Quantum Rain Falls: Ultracold Atoms Unleash Liquid Secrets

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

Pinning Down a Ghost Particle: Neutrino Mass Measured with Unprecedented Precision

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.

This Bizarre Shape-Shifting Liquid Bends The Laws of Thermodynamics

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.”

A new approach to probe hadronization via quantum entanglement

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.

Gold nanoclusters reveal magnetic spin’s potential role in catalytic efficiency

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.

Controlling quantum particle states through structural phase transition of crystals

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.

The Continuum Hypothesis — The Problem that BROKE Mathematics

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Primordial Soup Was Full of Flavors

Top quarks and antiquarks have been detected in heavy-ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, showing that all six quark flavors were present in the Universe’s first moments.

Quarks, the fundamental building blocks of matter, are usually confined within hadrons, such as protons and neutrons, by the strong force. But in the first moments after the big bang, quarks and gluons moved freely in an extremely hot, dense state of matter called a quark–gluon plasma (QGP) [1]. This “primordial soup” was the Universe’s first form of matter, existing for roughly 10 microseconds after the big bang, until the Universe cooled sufficiently for quarks and gluons to combine [2]. Scientists recreate and study these early-Universe conditions by smashing together ultrarelativistic heavy nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland, and similar facilities.