Browse Physics

Plasmas can be made transparent to electromagnetic waves with the application of external magnetic fields.

A waveguide’s dielectric properties could result in an effective gauge field for photons even though they have no charge.

A study of ancient and modern papers reveals how cellulose reacts with light to discolor documents and art over time.

White noise in a nanoscale junction tells us how nonelectronic factors affect conduction.

Hard spheres may favor one structural arrangement over others that are less mechanically stable during assembly.

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

Large numbers of neurons can, according to a computational model, distinguish the timing of aural cues more finely than individual cells.

Ultracold atoms could be used to simulate physical phenomena beyond three spatial dimensions.

The dominance of matter over antimatter is further extended with a balloon experiment ruling out the presence of antihelium in cosmic rays at the lowest level to date.

New calculations confront the notion that adding impurities to one-dimensional solids called Luttinger liquids necessarily makes them insulators.

Researchers have proved that extracting dynamical equations from data is in general a computationally hard problem.

Although perfect copies of a quantum state are prohibited, theory shows that recombining all imperfect clones recovers the original quantum state.

An updated proposal for a clock based on the excited states of a nucleus could keep time better than existing clocks that use electronic states.

A network model incorporates the way humans use a sense of orientation to make locally optimal decisions when they navigate city streets.

Scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy experiments show how missing carbon atoms affect graphene’s electronic and magnetic properties.

A protocol is proposed to map the local Berry curvature over the Brillouin zone of cold atoms in an optical lattice.

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

Electron scattering techniques could provide more accurate measures of the distribution of neutrons in heavy nuclei.

Using the orbiting network of GPS satellites, researchers have placed new limits on how much Planck’s constant varies with respect to relativistic changes.

Experimenters slow molecules by shining lasers at them.