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We now have a new idea of what photons look like from a model that predicts how these particles of light interact with their environment.

In the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts. But fast forward 13.8 billion years to the present day, and the universe is made almost entirely of matter, so something must have happened to create this imbalance.

The Standard Model of particle physics predicts an asymmetry between matter and antimatter known as charge–parity (CP) violation. But the size of this asymmetry in the Standard Model is not large enough to account for the imbalance and the asymmetry has so far been observed only in certain decays of particles called mesons, which are made of a quark and an antiquark. It remains to be seen in other meson decays and in decays of other types of particles, such as three-quark particles called baryons.

In two new articles posted to the arXiv preprint server, the LHCb collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) reports seeing evidence of CP violation in decays of baryons and in decays of beauty hadrons into charmonium particles, shedding light on these two pieces of the matter–antimatter puzzle.

Semi-Dirac fermions, which are massless in one 2D direction but possess mass in the other, have so far eluded detection in solids. New experiments reveal their defining feature in the nodal-line metal ZrSiS.

33 kilometers: the new record for quantum entanglement between two atoms over fiber optics. Key Takeaways Researchers entangled two atoms across 33 kilometers of fiber […].

A team of physicists from Sofia University in Bulgaria has proposed a fascinating theory that wormholes, hypothetical tunnels linking different parts of the universe, could be hiding in plain sight. These wormholes may resemble black holes so closely that current technology cannot distinguish between the two, according to a new study reported by New Scientist.

Black holes have long been a source of mystery. They absorb everything, even light, leaving no trace of what falls into them. But where does the swallowed matter go? Some physicists have speculated that black holes might connect to “white holes,” which would spew out particles and radiation on the other end. Together, these phenomena could form a wormhole, or more specifically, an Einstein-Rosen bridge, connecting distant regions of space and time.

Scientists have made a satisfying and intriguing physics discovery some 16 years after it was first predicted to be a possibility: a quasiparticle (a group of particles behaving as one) that only has an effective mass when moving in one direction.

In physics, mass generally refers to a property of particles that relates to things like their energy and resistance to movement. Yet not all mass is built the same – some describes the energy of a particle at rest, for example, while mass may also take into account the energy of a particle’s motion.

In this case, the effective mass describes the quasiparticle’s response to forces, which varies depending on whether the movement through the material is up and down, or back and forth.

Ultra-sensitive detectors have observed neutrinos from the Sun, whose signals mimic those expected to be produced by elusive dark matter.

An international team of scientists led by Dr. Lukas Bruder, junior research group leader at the Institute of Physics, University of Freiburg, has succeeded in producing and directly controlling hybrid electron-photon quantum states in helium atoms.

To this end, they generated specially prepared, highly intense extreme ultraviolet light pulses using the FERMI free electron laser in Trieste, Italy. The researchers achieved control of the hybrid quantum states using a new laser pulse-shaping technique. Their results have been published in the journal Nature.

Non-reciprocal interactions can increase the order in an active system. This is the finding of a study by scientists from the department of Living Matter Physics at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS).

The researchers created a model to describe the emerging patterns depending on the amount of non-reciprocity in an active system. The work is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Living matter often shows characteristics that are absent in simpler physical systems. A typical example is the asymmetrical interaction between different particle species: one type of molecule might be attracted by the other, which in turn is repelled—just like a predator chases its prey which in turn tries to escape.