When you plug in an appliance or flip on a light switch, electricity seems to flow instantly through wires in the wall. But in fact, the electricity is carried by tiny particles called electrons that slowly drift through the...
Cornell researchers have become the first to control atomically thin magnets with an electric field, a breakthrough that provides a blueprint for producing exceptionally powerful and efficient data storage in computer chips, among other applications.
The research is detailed in...
When the Universe arose some 13.7 billion years ago, the Big Bang generated matter and antimatter particles in mirroring pairs. So the reigning physics theory goes.
Yet everything we can see in the Cosmos today, from the smallest insect on...
Physicists from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf have demonstrated that demixing occurs in systems made up of macroscopic particles rotating in opposite directions and that particles turning in either a clockwise or counter-clockwise direction form homogeneous groups. The...
DESY scientists have created a miniature particle accelerator for electrons that can perform four different functions at the push of a button. The experimental device is driven by a terahertz radiation source and can accelerate, compress, focus and analyse...
As we generate more and more data, the need for high-density data storage that remains stable over time is becoming critical. New nanoparticle-based films that are more than 80 times thinner than a human hair may help to fill...
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the fundamental impossibility of simultaneously measuring properties such as position and momentum, is at the heart of quantum theory. Physicists at ETH Zurich have now demonstrated an elegant way to relax this intrinsic incompatibility using a...
Physicists have identified a new state of matter whose structural order operates by rules more aligned with quantum mechanics than standard thermodynamic theory. In a classical material called artificial spin ice, which in certain phases appears disordered, the material...
The behavior of electrons in a material is typically difficult to predict. Novel insight comes now from experiments and simulations performed by a team led by ETH physicists who have studied electronic transport properties in a one-dimensional quantum wire...
For the first time, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have successfully 3-D-printed optical-quality glasses, on par with commercial glass products currently available on the market.
In a study published in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies, LLNL scientists and...
The modern-day theoretical physicist faces a taxing uphill climb. "As we learn more, reality becomes ever more subtle; the absolute becomes relative, the fixed becomes dynamical, the definite is laden with uncertainty," writes physicist Yasha Neiman.
A professor and head...
