Browse Physics

New functionalities might arise from rethinking the essential ingredients needed to build a heat-driven machine.

Researchers have found an exact solution to an equation describing growth of materials at interfaces.

The behavior of freezing transitions in glasses is related to the statistical properties of prime numbers.

The scale invariance that has been seen in flocks of birds is showing up in clusters of bacteria.

Weak localization of light is observed in a superdiffusive fractal system.

Bumblebee flight patterns reveal how the presence of spiders causes bees to modify their foraging strategies.

Calculations reveal the relationship between work and free energy for a quantum particle contained in a box with a moving wall.

Nanopatterned surfaces could, according to calculations, provide a way to sort tiny particles by size.

Under certain constraints, two lattice gases equilibrate when brought into contact.

A uniform city street plan may produce heavy traffic everywhere, whereas a random network of road connections leaves some roads open, according to a mathematical model.

A semiclassical approximation gives an accurate answer to a simply stated, but difficult to solve, quantum mechanical problem.

The principles of nonequilibrium thermodynamics simplify the statistical description of the flow of a rarefied gas.

Small systems with fluctuations appear to show that the second law of thermodynamics may be split into two contributions.

Sedimenting particles subjected to periodic shear are used to demonstrate a link between self-organized criticality and nonequilibrium phase transitions.

Statistical physicists have long known that brief reductions in entropy are possible. Now, entropy changes in two nonequilibrium systems have been calculated exactly.

In the theory of statistical information processing, what is the minimum amount of energy needed to make a measurement and then erase its memory?

How screening affects the Coulomb interaction has long been considered a solved problem, but an analysis indicates there is an error in the widely used analytical approach.

Cross-correlations in Monte Carlo simulation data can be used for numerical estimates of superior statistical quality.

Mathematical tools from the theory of magnets applied to seismic data reveal that the stronger an earthquake, the sooner the next one will occur, and it could be hundreds of miles away.

A new technique that cancels out Brownian motion improves researchers’ ability to hold and manipulate nanoscale particles.