physics

An international team built a terahertz metamaterial whose optical properties flip on picosecond timescales, the first all-optical photonic time crystal, published in Nature.

A Tulane University study finds gold surface atoms spontaneously reorganize into a denser pattern that blocks oxygen reactions by a billion to a trillion times.

University of Fribourg physicists used ultrafast laser pulses to briefly turn semiconducting tin telluride into a topological conductor, confirmed by time-resolved photoemission spectroscopy and published in Nature Physics.

Physicists built a photonic quantum heat engine that uses indefinite causal order to generate work and refrigeration simultaneously, reversing the everyday direction of heat flow.

The EPS honored Jairo Sinova, Libor Šmejkal, and Tomas Jungwirth for identifying altermagnetism, a third fundamental class of magnetism.

Penn State researchers found a viscous particle suspension can hold a memory of stirring direction and a memory of rocking amplitude at once, and the two compete.

Neutron-scattering measurements at ILL Grenoble found signs that at least nine particles are quantum-entangled at once inside a centimeter-sized strange-metal crystal, the deepest entanglement reported in any quantum material.

A PNAS study using custom-built 'silly sprinklers' confirms momentum flux drives reverse-sprinkler rotation, ruling out theories from Ernst Mach and Richard Feynman.

A machine-learning screening pipeline predicted two new superconductors, YRu3B2 and LuRu3B2, which Rice University then synthesized and confirmed.

Jyväskylä and Aalto researchers grew strained bilayer tin telluride on niobium diselenide, producing protected conducting edge states in a band gap over 0.2 eV.

Osaka Metropolitan University researchers built a magneto-optical, phase-change metagrating that decouples heat absorption from emission and retains its state without power.

Giovanni Barontini used 24,000 ultracold rubidium atoms to test whether time can be defined from a system's internal disorder rather than an external clock.