The force we experience most intimately remains the most mysterious. Physicists understand how vast migrations of particles called photons light up our homes, and how swarms of “gluon” particles hold ...

Despite its simplicity, the model is foundational. It is often the first non-trivial system for which students solve the Schrödinger equation exactly, and it beautifully illustrates core quantum ideas ...

The universe’s first moments after the Big Bang were strange beyond imagination. Now physicists have discovered they may have been even weirder than we thought, dominated by enormous, twisted knots of ...

Researchers at CERN may be on the verge of explaining the universe’s missing gamma rays and hidden magnetic fields, after creating the first-ever plasma fireballs within the facility’s Super Proton ...

How did the universe come into being? There are a multitude of theories on this subject. In a Physical Review Letters paper, three scientists formulate a new model: according to this, inflation, the ...

For various, typically historical reasons, even the best physicists claim things that sound egregious to modern observers. That doesn’t necessarily mean these ideas are completely useless—if anything, ...

Researchers may have identified what could be a compelling clue in the ongoing hunt to prove the existence of dark matter. A mysterious diffuse glow of gamma rays near the center of the Milky Way has ...

Dark matter sits in the background of the universe, shaping galaxies while refusing to reveal itself. Many searches have chased neutral particles and come up empty. A different idea is now on the ...

Physicists are eyeing charged gravitinos—ultra-heavy, stable particles from supergravity theory—as possible Dark Matter candidates. Unlike axions or WIMPs, these particles carry electric charge but ...

Physicists have devised a new model to account for the discomfort that airline passengers know all too well. By Alexander Nazaryan Bjorn Birnir dreads an airplane seatmate asking what he does for a ...

At the foot of the thickly forested Dashi Hill, in southern China’s Guangdong province, pre-approved visitors can take a ride aboard a unique yellow train. Rather than winding through the serene ...

The universe's matter-antimatter asymmetry, where matter significantly outweighs antimatter despite their theoretically equal creation at the Big Bang, remains a major unsolved problem in physics.