In a remarkable leap forward for science, researchers at CERN have successfully created and observed top quarks—one of nature’s most elusive and unstable particles—inside a lab for the very first time. This breakthrough, announced by the ATLAS team at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), promises to reshape our understanding of the early Universe and the fundamental makeup of matter.
Quantum critical points are thresholds that mark the transition of materials between different electronic phases at absolute zero temperatures, around which they often exhibit exotic physical properties.
One of these critical points is the so-called Kondo-breakdown quantum critical point, which marks the collapse of the Kondo effect (i.e., quantum phenomenon that entails the localization of magnetic moments in metals), followed by new emergent physics.
Researchers at Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, Rutgers University, and Seoul National University set out to further study the dynamical scaling associated with the Kondo-breakdown quantum critical point, utilizing a theoretical framework describing heavy fermion materials known as the periodic Anderson model.
Posted in particle physics, sustainability | Leave a Comment on Improving steel pipelines for safe transport of hydrogen: Synchrotron light captures 3D images of cracks formed inside
Hydrogen is increasingly gaining attention as a promising energy source for a cleaner, more sustainable future. Using hydrogen to meet the energy demands for large-scale applications such as utility infrastructure will require transporting large volumes via existing pipelines designed for natural gas.
But there’s a catch. Hydrogen can weaken the steel that these pipelines are made of. When hydrogen atoms enter the steel, they diffuse into its microstructure and can cause the metal to become brittle, making it more susceptible to cracking. Hydrogen can be introduced into the steel during manufacturing, or while the pipeline is in service transporting oil and gas.
To better understand this problem, researcher Tonye Jack used the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan (USask) to capture a 3D view of the cracks formed in steels. Researchers have previously relied on two-dimensional imaging techniques, which don’t provide the same rich detail made possible with synchrotron radiation.
A joint research team has successfully developed a next-generation soft robot based on liquid. The research was published in Science Advances.
Biological cells possess the ability to deform, freely divide, fuse, and capture foreign substances. Research efforts have long been dedicated to replicating these unique capabilities in artificial systems. However, traditional solid-based robots have faced limitations in effectively mimicking the flexibility and functionality of living cells.
To overcome these challenges, the joint research team successfully developed a particle-armored liquid robot, encased in unusually dense hydrophobic (water-repelling) particles.
One of the key takeaways from the experiment is that quantum mechanics does not conform to classical expectations. By creating a GHZ-type paradox in 37 dimensions, the researchers demonstrated a breakdown of local realism in ways previously unexplored.
In classical terms, the paradox suggests that an event could occur without a causative link—like a letter appearing in your mailbox without a postal worker delivering it. In quantum terms, the experiment showed that the relationship between entangled particles was so deeply nonlocal that their correlations could not be explained by any hidden variables.
The research team mathematically confirmed that their experiment achieved the strongest recorded manifestation of quantum nonlocality. By showing that the paradox holds true even under extreme conditions, they provided new evidence that classical models fail to explain the quantum world.
In late 2023, Wojciech Brylinski was analyzing data from the NA61/SHINE collaboration at CERN for his thesis when he noticed an unexpected anomaly—a strikingly large imbalance between charged and neutral kaons in argon–scandium collisions. He found that, instead of being produced in roughly equal numbers, charged kaons were produced 18.4% more often than neutral kaons.
This suggested that the so-called “isospin symmetry” between up and down quarks might be broken by more than expected due to the differences in their electric charges and masses—a discrepancy that existing theoretical models would struggle to explain. Known sources of isospin asymmetry only predict deviations of a few percent.
“When Wojciech got started, we thought it would be a trivial verification of the symmetry,” says Marek Gaździcki, who was spokesperson of NA61/SHINE at the time of the discovery. “We expected the symmetry to be closely obeyed—although we had previously measured these types of discrepancies at the NA49 experiment, they had large uncertainties and were not significant.”
Conventional curved lenses, which direct light by refraction in glass or plastic, are often bulky and heavy, offering only limited control of light waves. Metasurfaces, in contrast, are flat and consist of an array of tiny structures known as meta-atoms. Meta-atoms influence light at a subwavelength scale and thus allow for highly precise control of the phase, amplitude, and polarization of light.
“Using metasurfaces, we can influence the temporal shift, intensity, and direction of oscillation of light waves in a targeted way,” says Dr. Maryna Leonidivna Meretska, Group Leader at KIT’s Institute of Nanotechnology.
“Thanks to its multiplex control capabilities, i.e., the simultaneous and targeted influencing of various parameters, a single metasurface can replace multiple optical components. Thus, the size of the optical system can be reduced without affecting its performance.”
A revolutionary new spintronic device developed in China enables powerful, precise control of terahertz (THz) wave polarization, without the need for bulky external components. Using a clever microscale stripe design, the compact emitter manipulates the chirality of THz waves at the source, allow
After 25 years of smashing gold nuclei together at light speeds, Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is hanging up its boots—erm, superconducting magnets.
The collider’s final run—its 25th—kicked off this week on Long Island, in a swan song for the venerable collider that will be succeeded—in fact, transformed into—Brookhaven Lab’s Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). Over the course of 2025, RHIC physicists will complete data collection on quark-gluon plasma, the soup of particles that existed in the earliest days of the universe.
“The original idea behind RHIC was to create, for the first time on Earth, a state of matter that existed in the universe a few microseconds after the Big Bang: the quark-gluon plasma, and we did,” said James Dunlop, the associate department chair for nuclear physics at Brookhaven Lab, in a call with Gizmodo. “That’s one of the big legacies—that we actually created it—but the more interesting thing is that its properties were quite different from what we’d expected them to be.”
This Quantum Computer Simulates the Hidden Forces That Shape Our Universe
The study of elementary particles and forces is of central importance to our understanding of the universe. Now a team of physicists from the University of Innsbruck and the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo show how an unconventional type of quantum computer opens a new door to the world of elementary particles.
Credit: Kindea Labs
