Browse Physics

At high pressure, the simple metal sodium shows complex behavior, including directional transparency.

A new material with strong magnetism and spin-phonon coupling could show multiferroicity at technologically relevant temperatures.

X-ray studies reveal the nanocrystalline structure of the essential solid ‘glue’ in concrete.

Automatically generated potentials allow one to overlook electrons while accurately modeling the potential energy surface of atoms.

A ceramic surface with a “brush” of nanoscale pillars can tolerate a sudden change in temperature without cracking, which might be useful for high temperature industrial processes.

Diffraction techniques are making progress in tackling the difficult problem of solving the structures of nanoparticles and nanoscale materials.

A crack slices through Plexiglas in three very different ways, depending on its speed, according to experiments that reveal the complexities of crack propagation.

Behavior particular to quantum critical metals is, surprisingly, found in a class of insulators.

LaAlO3/SrTiO3 interfaces grown by different methods all show a metal-insulator transition, but the observed interfacial electric field strength is not consistent with a widely studied model.

Calculations reveal the effect of dimensionality in a prototypical charge-density-wave material.

The magnetic state of a multiferroic device can be controlled purely by an electric field—a property that could greatly reduce overheating in data storage devices.

Structurally soft materials—like shape memory alloys—are well suited to making epitaxial films.

When crystal formation is purely entropy driven, as is the case for superstructures of nanoparticles with hard-sphere interactions, new simulations that can run at finite temperature are needed.

Computational work illustrates how multi-walled carbon nanotubes can create diamond nanocrystals.

According to a new theory, the extreme hardness of new layered materials comes from the strength of chemical bonds that are oriented perpendicular to the deforming force, rather than parallel, as might be expected.

A semi-automated method that incorporates physically realistic assumptions from the start, dramatically improves the efficiency of first principles calculations for describing complex materials.

A fraction of the soot particles produced in a flame can have a more rod-like, rather than bush-like structure, contradicting the conventional theory, which is relevant for industrial products and the atmosphere.

CuO in thin-film form could be a prototype material for exploring magnetism that is similar to what is found in high-temperature superconductors.

Following diamond and silicon, germanium is the third elemental semiconductor to host superconductivity at ambient pressure.

The ability to hole-dope Bi2Se3 is an important step toward exploring the thermoelectric properties of this material.