Browse Physics

A study reveals the optimal balance of forces needed to make the cleanest cuts in soft solids.

A phase transition controlled by noise determines how volatile rankings are.

The discovery of ferroelecticity in mammalian tissue makes researchers wonder what its purpose is and what it may be useful for.

How nodes connect to each other may explain why we don’t see certain classes of networks.

To better interpret the information in images, electron microscopists are looking more closely at how an electron beam scatters inside of a specimen.

Photons (bosons) confined in a hollow waveguide containing an atomic gas could show spin-charge separation, which is more commonly associated with one-dimensional fermions.

Light pulses injected into an array of waveguides form solitons in time and space.

A new analysis clears some of the remaining hurdles to a completely rigorous density-functional theory for calculating the properties of materials at finite temperature.

Magnetic resonance images of tetrahedral dice show a density of random close packing, in agreement with recent calculations.

Experiments now quantitatively confirm the standard model of electrokinetics, in which electric fields drive the flow of electrolytes, potentially leading to better sensors and biomedical diagnostic devices.

Two groups have made progress in building laserlike devices that emit phonons rather than photons.

The popularity of various chess openings follows a power law distribution, but the exponent depends on the depth of the opening sequence.

Small nonequilibrium systems behave quite unexpectedly when in contact with a thermal reservoir. However, all of them—from molecular machines to molecular magnets—are described by a single fluctuation theorem.

Stochastic resonance, in which a periodic signal applied to a nonlinear system can be amplified by adding noise, has been observed in a mechanical system and predicted to occur in a Bose-Einstein condensate.

Energetic particle jets created in relativistic heavy-ion collisions might create detectable shock waves as they travel through the quark-gluon plasma.