Browse Physics

Vertical shaking of a liquid-filled container can generate a standing wave pattern of stars and polygons.

A statistical model favors an unexpected mechanism for avoiding duplicated genetic material in certain viruses.

Water dimers have been detected in room-temperature water vapor, a key step toward understanding their effect on solar absorption and chemistry in the atmosphere.

Atom interferometry in free fall demonstrates fundamental quantum physics and a new level of technology readiness for future experiments in space.

A new technique allows improved acoustic imaging of oil deposits and other underground structures and may also work for medical imaging.

By measuring the inertial forces that act on a laser system, researchers have been able to increase the stability of frequency emission by an order of magnitude over previous methods.

Entanglement of two atoms is achieved by the detection of a single photon.

The particle thought to be the Higgs boson seems likely to pass an important identity check.

A new experiment reveals the different dynamics of particles and holes in ultracold fermionic gases in an optical lattice, opening the way to investigate condensed matter transport phenomena such as photoconductivity via quantum optical systems.

Laboratory-scale experiments reveal a profound statistical similarity between the fracture of heterogeneous materials and earthquakes.

Experiments show that blood plasma has elastic properties that could influence the way blood flows through small vessels.

Quantum information lost after a measurement can be recovered using quantum error correction methods.

Microparticles suspended in an optical cavity may be a new way to detect gravity waves.

Surface spectroscopy shows that a material long known as a Kondo insulator also exhibits the metallic surface states of a topological insulator.

Plasmons on a patterned surface can enhance the production of bright electron beams.

Breaking time-reversal symmetry in a thermoelectric device affects its efficiency in unexpected ways.

According to new calculations, thin films of transition-metal oxides could be promising materials for high-efficiency solar cells.

The 1965 discovery of the isolated waves known as solitons—which appear in many physical systems—was a direct result of the new computer technology available for numerical simulations.

A solid’s surface tension is usually difficult to separate from its bulk elasticity, but a new technique determines this property by measuring the contact angle of small droplets on a soft surface.

Complex networks of disk bearings rotating in unison have an easier time maintaining this synchronization when the mass and radius of each bearing obeys a simple relationship.