A team of physicists and computer scientists led by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) approach that learns on its own to separate important high-energy particle jet signals from the enormous background of particles recorded in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, where two beams of heavy ions collide at near the speed of light.
Researchers at National Taiwan University (NTU) have reported the first experimental evidence of heat-current-driven transverse accumulation of electrons' orbital angular momentum, a phenomenon known as the orbital Nernst effect. The study was recently published in Nature Communications.
Researchers from the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed an optical system that focuses light from several subfields onto a single small-format detector. By analyzing field-dependent spot shapes, the system identifies which subfield an isolated infrared target comes from. In sequence-level tests, it identified the correct field in about 89% of cases. The study is published in Optics and Laser Technology.
A mysterious force driving the expansion of the Universe may have undergone a dramatic reversal billions of years ago. Scientists exploring an overlooked branch of an alternative gravity theory discovered that dark energy could have switched from negative to positive roughly 9.5 billion years ago, potentially changing how we understand cosmic history.
An international research team led by Nobuhiro Yanai from the University of Tokyo and Michael R. Wasielewski from Northwestern University has created polarized radical pairs, molecules with unpaired electrons whose spins align, in metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), porous materials consisting of metal ions linked by organic molecules.
Scientists have discovered a faster way to identify diamond-based materials that could power quantum computers and sensors at room temperature. The breakthrough has already revealed promising new quantum building blocks that could help unlock computing capabilities far beyond those of today's supercomputers.
Quantum computers have the potential to perform calculations more quickly than supercomputers, but they could be even faster and more energy-efficient if they were built with photons as their basic units, called qubits.
Researchers at Brown University have overcome a major obstacle to creating ultra-low-power computer chips that could help slash the energy demands of AI. Their breakthrough eliminates a long-standing "dead layer" problem that causes promising materials to stop working when made extremely thin. Remarkably, the new technique not only preserves the materials' electrical and magnetic properties at nearly atomic thicknesses but also gives them enhanced magnetic capabilities
Researchers from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have developed a unified framework for establishing symmetry criteria and classifying unconventional magnets.
A groundbreaking new supercomputer simulation is revealing how the universe escaped its cosmic dark age and transformed into a cosmos filled with stars and galaxies. Called Lumina, it recreates 2 billion years of early cosmic history across a region 1.6 billion light-years wide, capturing extraordinary details that previous simulations could not.
Clogging is a phenomenon in which moving particles get stuck, slowing or blocking the flow, but how this transition occurs has remained experimentally unproven. Researchers from Science Tokyo studied superconducting vortices to demonstrate that clogging is a nonequilibrium phase transition. Using a two-step measurement protocol, they distinguished clogging from conventional pinning and revealed that both transitions share a critical point, offering new insights into predicting and controlling cl
A new study published in Nature Materials reports that researchers have developed an aluminum gallium nitride device that combines light detection, memory and basic processing by controlling charge at polarization interfaces. The device can detect light at the nanowatt-per-square-centimeter level and operate stably at temperatures up to 300°C.
For more than 50 years, engineers have described light in optical fiber using a convenient shortcut, one that works so well it is rarely questioned. Engineers at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University) in Johannesburg, South Africa, have now shown that this shortcut hides a small but real effect. A magnet placed beside a multimode fiber, rather than along it, can change the light traveling inside.
In a study published in Optics Communications, a research group led by Yu Tao from the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics (CIOMP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences proposed a new analytical phase readout algorithm for deep frequency modulation interferometry (DFMI).
A shoebox-sized color detection device could enable precise measurements at record resolution, according to new research led by Adelaide University. An international team exploited an integrating sphere—a highly reflective hollow cavity that causes light to bounce around inside many times before exiting—to demonstrate a device that can measure the color (wavelength) composition of light with extreme precision at a resolution of just 6 femtometers.
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Ames National Laboratory have discovered a way to control the handedness of magnons, tiny magnetic waves that can carry information through materials. By changing the material's magnetic state with an external magnetic field, they were able to switch magnon behavior, a finding with potential applications in quantum information and quantum computing technologies. Their findings are published in Physical Review Letters.
Global fossil fuel emissions are projected to fall in 2026 as renewable energy and electric vehicles gain ground, but rising emissions from deforestation threaten to push total CO2 emissions to a new record. Scientists warn that the world's remaining carbon budget for limiting warming to 1.5°C could be exhausted in less than four years, even as a lasting decline in emissions appears increasingly within reach.
Researchers at the UVSOR Synchrotron Facility (Institute for Molecular Science, Japan) and partner institutions have observed the decay of a xenon 4d core hole, an inner-shell vacancy, directly in the time domain. They used pairs of phase-coherent extreme ultraviolet pulses from a synchrotron to make the photoelectron wave packets they released interfere. The contrast of the interference fringes decreased over a few femtoseconds as the delay between the pulses increased. A model using literature
A KAIST-led research team has characterized how light propagates through and is absorbed by barium titanate (BTO), a promising material for next-generation optical communication devices. By clarifying optical properties that had been difficult to determine because of the material's complex internal structure, the study provides a foundation for designing these devices.
CERN scientists have finally found evidence of a particle decay so rare that it happens only once in roughly 10 billion decays, ending a search spanning more than 40 years. The breakthrough could help physicists uncover hidden particles and forces that lie beyond the reach of today's most powerful accelerators.