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 ...

Pairing superconducting qubits with microwave cavities could reduce the hardware requirements for quantum simulations of fundamental physics. Performing simulations of quantum systems on an ordinary ...

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 new technique for generating solid fibers from a liquid jet is easier to model—and thus easier to control—than past methods. Transformed by light. These seven photos show a liquid streaming downward ...

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 ...

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 geometric patterns on dry, salty lake beds are generated by convection of high- and low-salinity water underground, according to simulations and observations. Patterns in nature. The polygons in ...

A laser-fusion scheme has achieved ignition—an important step on the road to energy production. Figure 1: Artist’s rendering of NIF’s laser beams entering through openings on either end of a hohlraum ...

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 ...

In 1935, Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen (EPR) wrote a now famous paper questioning the completeness of the formalism of quantum mechanics. Rejecting the idea that a measurement on ...

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 ...

A ring of optical fiber can be made to host phenomena that originated in the realm of high-energy physics. Yang and his colleagues achieved their feat using a platform based on fiber ring resonators, ...