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 ...

Jungsang Kim is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Physics, and Computer Science at Duke University in North Carolina. He leads the Multifunctional Integrated Systems Technology group ...

Interest in developing batteries based on sodium has recently spiked because of concerns over the sustainability of lithium, which is found in most laptop and electric vehicle batteries. In the 1870 ...

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 ...

Collider experiments have set new direct limits on the existence of hypothetical heavy neutrinos, helping to constrain how ordinary neutrinos get their mass. Figure 1: In the seesaw mechanism, a ...

Which direction would an S-shaped lawn sprinkler rotate if it were submerged and the flow were reversed? Experiments now provide a definitive answer. A fluorescent dye traces out the flow pattern as ...

Figure 1: The shattering of glass is an archetypal fragmentation process. × When a solid object shatters or a liquid drop disintegrates, predicting the outcome seems at first hopelessly difficult. In ...

Figure 1: Laser cooling of atoms progressed from elements with one valence electron (top left) to two valence electrons (bottom left). Now with molecules, researchers are going from molecules with one ...

Gravitational waves emitted by the merger of two black holes have been detected, setting the course for a new era of observational astrophysics. Figure 1: Numerical simulations of the gravitational ...

For a wide range of complex fluids, the transition from solid-like at rest to liquid-like when pushed can be predicted from properties of the at-rest state. Slow flow. Slow flow. Yield stress fluids ...

Figure 1: (Left) Cross section of the spherical capsule used at NIF. The capsule is encased in a cavity (hohlraum) and ablated by x rays during a laser pulse. Its core consists of a gas of deuterium ...

Pairs of skyrmions—tiny whirlpools that emerge in some magnetic materials—might be able to self-propel, a behavior reminiscent of that of active-matter systems such as motile bacteria. Figure 1: ...