When you beam intense pulses of light into a thin circle, strange things will happen, according to new research based on the optical equivalent of a whispering gallery.  Inside tiny loops of transparent fibre, waves of light can be forced to break step and change the orientation of their wiggle in odd ways, bending the

Some of the Universe’s deepest secrets are locked up so tight, a whole new kind of subatomic cataclysm is needed to tear them free. To unleash those kinds of forces, European physicists want to build a particle accelerator to rival anything we’ve seen, one that will make the famous 27 kilometre (16.7 mile) Large Hadron

When experiments are run at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator, it’s a tremendous event. The world’s largest machine has been responsible for discovering numerous new subatomic particles, including the ultra-elusive Higgs boson.  And lately, its data has been hinting tantalisingly at new physics beyond the Standard Model – the best set of equations we

Physicists have come up with a bold new idea to explain the enduring mystery of our expanding Universe – we might actually be living in a ‘bubble’ between other five-dimensional spaces. If that makes your brain hurt, don’t worry, it’s supposed to. But we can break this down. Our Universe as we know it has

Dan Shechtman has the rare honour of possessing a Nobel Prize for ‘nonsense’. It’s been nearly four decades since he set out to convince the chemist community of a discovery most considered impossible – a material called a quasicrystal. Now we have just observed a brand new variety of these once ‘impossible’ materials for the

Volcanic eruptions, as history has proven, can be very dangerous. And there’s something that can make them even more so. When lava comes into contact with water, it can dramatically explode, like it did with Hawaii’s Kīlauea and Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull – but this doesn’t always happen. The problem is, we don’t really know why these

At the very centre of the image above is something incredible – a single, positively-charged strontium atom, suspended in motion by electric fields. Not only is this an incredibly rare sight, it’s also difficult to wrap your head around the fact that this tiny point of blue light is a building block of matter. Tiny

Like divorced parents during the festive season, physics is made of two beloved authorities who just can’t get on – general relativity and quantum mechanics. For decades, many researchers have pinned their hopes of unification on something called string theory. On the up side it points to a curious connection between gravity and the behaviour

The concept of time travel has always captured the imagination of physicists and laypersons alike. But is it really possible? Of course it is. We’re doing it right now, aren’t we? We are all traveling into the future one second at a time. But that was not what you were thinking. Can we travel much

Scientists in Germany say they have hit a new superconductivity milestone. According to their paper, they achieved resistance-free electrical current at the highest temperature yet: just 250 Kelvin, or -23 degrees Celsius (-9.4 degrees Fahrenheit). Although the team’s superconducting material has yet to be verified, the claim has merit – the work was led by

You probably don’t stop to think about this often, but right after the birth of the Universe, matter was not in the form we recognise today. Instead, scientists think it was very much in a state of soup, ‘quark soup’ to be precise – a state also known as quark-gluon plasma. Now, researchers say they’ve managed

We know that even a grain of dust or tiny droplet can damage a tough metal surface if the particle gathers up a high-enough speed when it smashes into it. But until now there’s been a problem figuring out how or why that damage happens. That’s because the speed has to be really freaking high,

Atomic clocks, based on the minute oscillations of atoms, are the most precise timekeeping devices humans have created. Every year, scientists make adjustments that improve the precision of these devices. Now, they’ve achieved new performance records, making two atomic clocks so precise they could detect gravitational waves, those faint ripples in the fabric of space-time.

Well, general relativity is still holding firm. According to a new test of Einstein’s venerable theory, our Universe’s gravity isn’t leaking into other dimensions. We are all very relieved to hear that our gravity isn’t going to disappear into some weird dimension we can’t even comprehend, obviously – after all, there are a slew of

Humanity just made a weighty decision. On Friday, representatives of more than 60 nations, gathered in Versailles, France, approved a new definition for the kilogram. Since the 19th century, scientists have based their definition of the fundamental unit of mass on a physical object — a shining platinum iridium cylinder stored in a locked vault

Finally, 130 years after it was established, the kilogram as we know it is about to be retired. But it’s not the end: a new definition will be put in place – one that’s far more accurate than anything we’ve had until now. Tomorrow, on 16 November, the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM)

The image you see above is something theoretical physicists have described as groundbreaking: a type of fractal called a Sierpinski triangle, created out of electrons on the quantum scale. It’s unbelievably small – and it could reveal new and strange things about electrons. Electrons are a fundamental subatomic particle found in all atoms. They help

Scientists are now closer than ever to being able to use graphene as a superconductor – to conduct electricity with zero resistance – making it useful for developing energy efficient gadgets, improving medical research, upgrading power grids, and much more besides. The key to the new approach is heating a silicon carbide (SiC) crystal, itself a

“If one made a research grant application to work on time travel it would be dismissed immediately,” writes the physicist Stephen Hawking in his posthumous book Brief Answers to the Big Questions. He was right. But he was also right that asking whether time travel is possible is a “very serious question” that can still

There was a huge amount of excitement when the Higgs boson was first spotted back in 2012 – a discovery that bagged the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2013. The particle completed the so-called standard model, our current best theory of understanding nature at the level of particles. Now scientists at the Large Hadron Collider