We have all seen something suddenly break: a phone screen cracks, a plastic object snaps or a piece of glass shatters. To our eyes, the failure seems to happen all at once. But what if the most important part of the break happens long before the final snap?

We have all seen something suddenly break: a phone screen cracks, a plastic object snaps or a piece of glass shatters. To our eyes, the failure seems to happen all at once. But what if the most important part of the break happens long before the final snap?

When one mentions "waves," we immediately think of a perturbation that propagates. This applies to waves on the shore, sound waves in the air or electromagnetic waves that we use to transmit information via optical fibers. The same idea of propagating perturbations applies to gravitational waves (GWs), which entered the mainstream media a decade ago after their first direct detection. These are perturbations of the elastic fabric that we are all embedded in, called spacetime.

For the first time, researchers have determined the shape of the actinide nucleus of fermium-255 and measured its structure with high precision and resolution.

For the first time, researchers have determined the shape of the actinide nucleus of fermium-255 and measured its structure with high precision and resolution.

In Goethe's ballad "Erlkönig," immortalized in Schubert's fevered 1815 setting, a dying boy riding through the night sees a spectral king beckoning from the darkness. His father calms him: "Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif"—my son, it is only a wisp of fog. In the poem, the father's reassurance proves tragically wrong. In the quantum world, however, his words acquire an uncanny new meaning.

In Goethe's ballad "Erlkönig," immortalized in Schubert's fevered 1815 setting, a dying boy riding through the night sees a spectral king beckoning from the darkness. His father calms him: "Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif"—my son, it is only a wisp of fog. In the poem, the father's reassurance proves tragically wrong. In the quantum world, however, his words acquire an uncanny new meaning.

Measuring faint magnetic fields is useful in a number of areas, including mapping brain activity, monitoring hearts and probing fundamental physics. Typically, picking up such weak signals requires expensive or bulky equipment, such as liquid-helium cooling tanks or specially shielded rooms that block out Earth's magnetic field.

Measuring faint magnetic fields is useful in a number of areas, including mapping brain activity, monitoring hearts and probing fundamental physics. Typically, picking up such weak signals requires expensive or bulky equipment, such as liquid-helium cooling tanks or specially shielded rooms that block out Earth's magnetic field.

Researchers at Technical University of Darmstadt and the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research have succeeded for the first time in decelerating highly charged ions from the GSI accelerator to low energies and subsequently storing them in a Penning trap. They were also successful in performing the first electron cooling of highly charged ions in such a trap. The results have been published in Physical Review X (PRX).

Researchers from the University of Amsterdam and the University of New South Wales have answered a question that has been around for decades: whether ions of the metal ytterbium can enter certain long-lived, nearly stable states and, if so, for how long. The measured long-lived states may find applications in quantum computers and atomic clocks.

A scientific team led by Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, or FRIB, has identified the origin of a mysterious excess of low-energy gamma rays emitted by the nucleus zinc-70. They found that the excess is caused by magnetic transitions within the nucleus. The study, "Magnetic Character of the Low-Energy Enhancement in 70Zn," published in Nature, sheds light on a long-standing puzzle in nuclear physics and has far-reaching implications for astrophysics.

All four main LHC experiments have found new signs that oxygen and neon collisions may create the extreme state of matter that existed during the first microseconds after the Big Bang.

It's been said that a finely tuned ear knows the size and shape of a piano by merely listening to the instrument's notes. An international team of physicists has now devised an analogous approach to detect the universe's hidden particles at high energies—opening a potential pathway for discovering new laws of physics.

Quantum computers, devices that process information by leveraging the laws of quantum mechanics, have been found to outperform classical computers in some advanced tasks. Instead of storing information in the form of classical binary bits (i.e., 0 or 1), quantum computers rely on quantum bits (i.e., qubits), which can also exist in combinations of 0 and 1 states.

A new study by Queen Mary University of London mathematician Professor Ginestra Bianconi proposes a new perspective on one of the deepest questions in modern physics: How can the universe become increasingly structured and complex while still obeying the second law of thermodynamics?

Theoretical physicists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have developed a new method of ordering Feynman integrals. This critical step in making theoretical predictions for high-energy precision measurements has posed a major computational bottleneck until now.

A research team led by the University of Osaka, working with the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), RIKEN and the Institute of Science Tokyo, has uncovered a fundamental mechanism behind superionic conduction, in which ions move rapidly through a solid while its crystalline framework remains intact.

Fabrics are made by repeatedly intertwining yarns into characteristic patterns. Many of their properties, such as stretchiness, arise not only from the material itself but also from how the yarns are arranged and entangled. Such properties illustrate how topology—the underlying patterns of connectivity and entanglement within a structure—can shape a material's overall behavior. Understanding these relationships could help researchers design materials with tailored properties through the design of their topology.