Two independent teams have built operating nuclear clocks—devices that might one day rival the best atomic clocks and offer new ways to probe fundamental physics. Photograph of the thorium-229-doped ...

Researchers observe atoms trapped in an optical lattice mimicking particles created in a strong electric field. In physics, you can get something from nothing. In a strong electric field, electrons ...

A pattern of surface waves bestowed with fivefold symmetry hosts topological structures. Soon after quasicrystals made their debut in 1984, physicists realized that the ordered, nonrepeating ...

The new JWST observatory is revealing far more bright galaxies in the early Universe than anyone predicted, and astrophysicists have more than one explanation for the puzzle. With the JWST observatory ...

The creation of modern quantum mechanics was a messy business in which many of the participants did not grasp the significance of their own discoveries. The wave nature of electrons is revealed in ...

A new analysis of more than a decade’s worth of observations extends the spectrum of cosmic-ray electrons to unprecedented high energies. Cosmic-ray electrons are high-energy particles that lose ...

Figure 1: Will two objects fall at the same rate in a vacuum? Galileo was the first to test this equivalence principle, and he was followed by many others, including the Apollo astronauts. Now, the ...

Particle physicists are faced with a growing list of “anomalies”—experimental results that conflict with the standard model but fail to overturn it for lack of sufficient evidence. For their study of ...

The formation of a black hole from light alone is permitted by general relativity, but a new study says quantum physics rules it out. When light goes dark. According to general relativity, it should ...

New experiments suggest that superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene depends on an unconventional electron-pairing mechanism. Figure 1: Two twisted bilayer graphene (TBG) layers stacked one on ...

Time crystals realized in the so-called quasiperiodic regime hold promise for future applications in quantum computing and sensing. In ordinary crystals, atoms or molecules form a repeating pattern in ...

A new state of matter involving twisting magnetic moments has been observed for the first time, possibly opening up novel applications in information technology. Theory had anticipated that chiral ...