Physicists found that small particles suspended in a thick liquid can remember both the direction and strength of stirring, although one memory can erase the other.
Category: particle physics – Page 8
CarbonationEmpowered Offshore Deep Cement Mixing Enables Undredged Land
A new study in Communications Engineering reports a construction strategy that could change how offshore reclaimed land is stabilized—using carbonation to strengthen deep cement mixing from microscopic reactions to full in-situ performance.
Conventional deep cement mixing relies on mechanically blending cement and soil, but its long-term durability in waterlogged, newly dredged environments remains a challenge. The researchers propose mixing: a process that uses carbon dioxide to drive mineral formation within the cemented soil matrix, improving both strength and stability.
At the micro-scale, carbonation converts reactive components in the cement into carbonate minerals. This reaction can refine the pore structure, reduce permeability, and bind loose particles more effectively than ordinary curing alone. In practical terms, the cement-soil composite becomes less vulnerable to water ingress and chemical attack.
AI extracts hidden material rules from microscopic data to predict large-scale behavior
Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed artificial intelligence (AI) methods that learn the large-scale behavior of complex materials from microscopic data. By automatically identifying a small number of hidden variables that capture the collective behavior of a system, the methods can predict how materials evolve over time while reducing the need for costly simulations.
Understanding the behavior of materials at the macroscopic scale is essential for designing new technologies, from energy-efficient electronics to advanced alloys. However, material properties emerge from the interactions of vast numbers of atoms, and simulating every atom over long periods is often computationally impossible, even on modern supercomputers.
A major challenge in materials science is connecting these microscopic processes, such as atomic motion, to observable material properties. Existing approaches often require large-scale simulations that are prohibitively expensive.
Physicists say quantum mechanics may not need imaginary numbers after all
Physicists from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) have examined a fundamental property of quantum mechanics in collaboration with the German Aerospace Center (DLR). In the scientific journal Physical Review Letters, they show that this theory does not necessarily need to be formulated with imaginary numbers – real numbers can in fact also be used.
Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics that explains how matter and energy behave at the atomic and subatomic scale. Developed in the early 1900s by pioneers including Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger, it has become one of the most successful scientific theories ever created.
The theory accurately describes a wide range of microscopic phenomena. These include the famous double slit experiment, in which particles also display wave like behavior, and quantum tunneling, where particles have a probability of passing through a barrier even when they do not have enough energy to overcome it in the classical sense. Other key quantum effects, such as entanglement and coherence, now form the foundation of emerging technologies including quantum computing and quantum communication.
When It Comes to Fusion, Materials Matter
In the experiment, researchers used two different methods to pack deuterium, a heavy form of hydrogen atoms that is often used in fusion, into thin foils of palladium and titanium. They then fired a beam of deuterium ions at the foils at different energies and measured how often fusion happened. Then they compared the rates from the different materials and methods with the “bare” fusion reaction (not in a material).
The team found that fusion rates depended on how the deuterium was loaded into the metal foils. The biggest effect was at the lowest energies, below 2.5 kiloelectronvolts (keV), where theory predicts fusion rates drop off sharply. Instead, researchers found a surprising plateau: Some samples showed elevated fusion rates roughly a quintillion times higher than bare fusion reactions. (A quintillion is a 1 followed by 18 zeroes.)
Researchers are not exactly sure why that’s happening, though they have some ideas and ways to test them. The electrons and defects within the material might partially shield repulsive electrostatic forces between deuterium nuclei, making it easier for them to get close together and fuse. Tuning the electronic structure, defects, and composition of materials could help make nuclear reactions happen more readily.
Long-lived ytterbium states could sharpen quantum computing and atomic clocks
Researchers from the University of Amsterdam and the University of New South Wales have answered a question that has been around for decades: whether ions of the metal ytterbium can enter certain long-lived, nearly stable states and, if so, for how long. The measured long-lived states may find applications in quantum computers and atomic clocks.
Many modern atomic clocks and quantum computers have so-called trapped ions at their core. Ions, electrically charged atoms, can be in many different states, all with different amounts of energy. Because of their charge, these ions can be suspended in empty space and kept in place using electromagnetic fields. The operation of the clock or computer then relies on precisely controlling which energy state an ion occupies.
Researchers from the University of Amsterdam and the University of New South Wales have now discovered that the ytterbium ion (Yb⁺), a leading candidate for both technologies, can remain in previously unexplored states for surprisingly long periods.
Oxygen collisions at the LHC show new indications of extreme state of matter
All four main LHC experiments have found new signs that oxygen and neon collisions may create the extreme state of matter that existed during the first microseconds after the Big Bang.
One year after the first-ever collisions of oxygen at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the main LHC collaborations—ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb—have each reported signs of the state of matter known as quark–gluon plasma (QGP) produced in these collisions.
QGP is a state of matter that forms under intense pressure and at temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the center of the sun. Under these extreme conditions, composite particles break down into quarks and the gluons that ordinarily hold them together. Scientists believe this was the state of the universe in the first microseconds after the Big Bang. In the present-day universe, nearly 14 billion years later, they can recreate and study QGP with high-energy nuclear collisions at the LHC.
Physicists turn to the universe’s ‘piano notes’ to detect hidden particles
It’s been said that a finely tuned ear knows the size and shape of a piano by merely listening to the instrument’s notes. An international team of physicists has now devised an analogous approach to detect the universe’s hidden particles at high energies—opening a potential pathway for discovering new laws of physics.
The work, which will appear in the journal Physical Review Letters, outlines how effective field theory (EFT) coefficients, which quantify how new laws of physics would influence known particle interactions at low energies, can be transformed into information about the nature of these hidden particles. CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the scientists note, already searches for values of EFT coefficients through its measurement of particle collisions, thereby providing ready-to-use data for this approach.
“Like deducing the shape and mechanism of a piano from the sound of its notes, this breakthrough provides the means to use collider measurements to deduce the details of hidden particles at high energies,” explains Grant Remmen, the James Arthur Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University and one of the paper’s authors. “This solves a classic open problem in particle physics in an elegant and useful way, providing powerful and sharp mathematical tools that bridge high-energy theory and particle physics experiments.”
Co-designed transversal STAR architecture
Co-designed transversal STAR architecture, published in PRX Quantum, delivers up to 250× faster execution and roughly 2× fewer physical qubits than conventional fault-tolerant approaches for structured quantum simulation — bringing the megaquop era within reach significantly sooner.
BOSTON, MA — June 1, 2026 — QuEra Computing today announced the publication in PRX Quantum of a new co-designed quantum computing architecture, developed in collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory, that significantly reduces the physical resources required for early fault-tolerant quantum simulation. The architecture — called transversal STAR (Space-Time Efficient Analog Rotation) — is co-designed with neutral-atom hardware and is targeted at structured quantum simulation problems in materials science, condensed matter and non-equilibrium dynamics.