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Scientists have discovered proof of a strange particle that strangely enough is also its own antiparticle. Even though it was initially postulated 80 years ago, it now seems that it just could be true.

Scientists from the University of California and Stanford University in California performed the research that was published in the journal Science. A particle might have its own antiparticle, according to a notion initially put out in 1937 by Italian scientist Ettore Majorana (who suddenly vanished in 1938). According to him, certain particles in the fermion class, which includes protons, electrons, and neutrons, ought to have unique antiparticles. These particles later came to be known as Majorana particles.

A particle with the same mass as a normal particle but the opposite electric or magnetic properties is said to be an antiparticle. The positron, for instance, is the antiparticle of the electron. If the two come into contact, they destroy one another.

face_with_colon_three circa 2017.

Strongly interacting bosons have been predicted to display a transition into a superfluid ground state, similar to Bose–Einstein condensation. This effect is now observed in a double bilayer graphene structure, with excitons as the bosonic particles.

Circa 2015 face_with_colon_three

MIT physicists have created a superfluid gas, the so-called Bose-Einstein condensate, for the first time in an extremely high magnetic field. The magnetic field is a synthetic magnetic field, generated using laser beams, and is 100 times stronger than that of the world’s strongest magnets. Within this magnetic field, the researchers could keep a gas superfluid for a tenth of a second—just long enough for the team to observe it. The researchers report their results this week in the journal Nature Physics.

A superfluid is a phase of matter that only certain liquids or gases can assume, if they are cooled to extremely low temperatures. At temperatures approaching absolute zero, atoms cease their individual, energetic trajectories, and start to move collectively as one wave.

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First insights into engineering crystal growth by atomically precise metal nanoclusters have been achieved in a study performed by researchers in Singapore, Saudi Arabia and Finland. The work was published in Nature Chemistry.

Ordinary solid matter consists of atoms organized in a crystal lattice. The chemical character of the atoms and lattice symmetry define the properties of the matter, for instance, whether it is a metal, a semiconductor or and electric insulator. The lattice symmetry may be changed by ambient conditions such as temperature or high pressure, which can induce structural transitions and transform even an electric insulator to an electric conductor, that is, a metal.

Larger identical entities such as nanoparticles or atomically precise metal nanoclusters can also organize into a crystal lattice, to form so called meta-materials. However, information on how to engineer the growth of such materials from their building blocks has been scarce since the crystal growth is a typical self-assembling process.

Quantum mechanics, the theory which rules the microworld of atoms and particles, certainly has the X factor.

Unlike many other areas of physics, it is bizarre and counter-intuitive, which makes it dazzling and intriguing.

When the 2022 Nobel prize in physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for research shedding light on quantum mechanics, it sparked excitement and discussion.

Some interpretations of quantum mechanics propose that our entire universe is described by a single universal wave function that constantly splits and multiplies, producing a new reality for every possible quantum interaction. That’s quite a bold statement. So how do we get there?

One of the earliest realizations in the history of quantum mechanics is that matter has a wave-like property. The first to propose this was French physicist Louis de Broglie, who argued that every subatomic particle has a wave associated with it, just like light can behave like both a particle and a wave.

Cosmological observations of the orbits of stars and galaxies enable clear conclusions to be drawn about the attractive gravitational forces that act between the celestial bodies.

The astonishing finding: Visible matter is far from sufficient for being able to explain the development or movements of galaxies. This suggests that there exists another, so far unknown, type of matter. Accordingly, in the year 1933, the Swiss physicist and astronomer Fritz Zwicky inferred the existence of what is known now as dark matter. Dark matter is a postulated form of matter which isn’t directly visible but interacts via gravity, and consists of approximately five times more mass than the matter with which we are familiar.

Recently, following a precision experiment developed at the Albert Einstein Center for Fundamental Physics (AEC) at the University of Bern, an international research team succeeded in significantly narrowing the scope for the existence of dark matter. With more than 100 members, the AEC is one of the leading international research organizations in the field of particle physics. The findings of the team, led by Bern, have now been published in Physical Review Letters.

Two different groups have tested a seemingly counter-intuitive property of the quantum world: That it’s possible to put a photon, a particle of light, in a superposition of states going forward and backward in time. This is not time travel and won’t lead to communicating with the past – but it is an intriguing demonstration of how time can be thought to work at a quantum level.

Unless you have a TARDIS or a DeLorean, time only flows in one direction (forward) for us. This annoying little fact that protects us from all sorts of paradoxes is called the arrow of time. It is believed to be related to the concept of entropy (which always increases in an isolated system like the universe) but it doesn’t seem to be as fundamental at the quantum level.

Instead, something that appears to be fundamental is the so-called CPT symmetry (charge, parity, and time reversal symmetry). This holds for all physical phenomena, and if a combination of two of them is violated (such as famously the CP violations) there ought to be a violation in time symmetry as well.

The IceCube observatory detected 80 of the elusive particles from the heart of spiral galaxy NGC 1,068, also called the Squid Galaxy.