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Light Versus Light: The Secret Physics Battle That Could Rewrite the Rules

In a fascinating dive into the strange world of quantum physics, scientists have shown that light can interact with itself in bizarre ways—creating ghost-like virtual particles that pop in and out of existence.

This “light-on-light scattering” isn’t just a theoretical curiosity; it could hold the key to solving long-standing mysteries in particle physics.

Quantum light: why lasers don’t clash like lightsabers.

How materials science could revolutionise technology — with Jess Wade

Jess Wade explains the concept of chirality, and how it might revolutionise technological innovation.

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Watch the Q&A here (exclusively for our Science Supporters): https://youtu.be/VlkHT-0zx9U

This lecture was recorded at the Ri on 14 June 2025.

Imagine if we could keep our mobile phones on full brightness all day, without worrying about draining our battery? Or if we could create a fuel cell that used sunlight to convert water into hydrogen and oxygen? Or if we could build a low-power sensor that could map out brain function?

Whether it’s optoelectronics, spintronics or quantum, the technologies of tomorrow are underpinned by advances in materials science and engineering. For example, chirality, a symmetry property of mirror-image systems that cannot be superimposed, can be used to control the spin of electrons and photons. Join functional materials scientist Jess Wade as she explores how advances in chemistry, physics and materials offer new opportunities in technological innovation.

Laser pulses and nanoscale changes yield stable skyrmion bags for advanced spintronics

A team of researchers at the Max Born Institute and collaborating institutions has developed a reliable method to create complex magnetic textures, known as skyrmion bags, in thin ferromagnetic films. Skyrmion bags are donut-like, topologically rich spin textures that go beyond the widely studied single skyrmions.

A company says it could turn mercury into gold using nuclear fusion. Can we take this claim seriously?

The alchemist’s dream is to make gold from common metals, but can this be done? The physics needed to explain how to change one element into another is well understood and has been used for decades in accelerators and colliders, which smash sub-atomic particles together.

Gold Does Something Unexpected When Superheated Past Its Melting Point

Gold remains perfectly solid when briefly heated beyond previously hypothesized limits, a new study reports, which may mean a complete reevaluation of how matter behaves under extreme conditions.

The international team of scientists behind the study used intense, super-short laser blasts to push thin fragments of gold past a limit known as the entropy catastrophe; the point at which a solid becomes too hot to resist melting. It’s like a melting point, but for edge cases where the physics isn’t conventional.

In a phenomenon called superheating, a solid can be heated too quickly for its atoms to have time enter a liquid state. Crystals can remain intact way past their standard melting point, albeit for a very, very brief amount of time.

Atomic Vision Achieved: New Microscope Sees Light at 1-Nanometer Precision

Scientists have built a microscope capable of visualizing optical responses at the scale of individual atoms, redefining the limits of optical imaging. Scientists have created a groundbreaking microscope capable of capturing how surfaces respond to light with an exceptional resolution of just one

Simulating the Hawking effect and other quantum field theory predictions with polariton fluids

Quantum field theory (QFT) is a physics framework that describes how particles and forces behave based on principles rooted in quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein’s special relativity theory. This framework predicts the emergence of various remarkable effects in curved spacetimes, including Hawking radiation.

Hawking radiation is the thermal radiation theorized to be emitted by close to the (i.e., the boundary around a black hole after which gravity becomes too strong for anything to escape). As ascertaining the existence of Hawking radiation and testing other QFT predictions in space is currently impossible, physicists have been trying to identify that could mimic aspects of curved spacetimes in experimental settings.

Researchers at Sorbonne University recently identified a new promising experimental platform for simulating QFT and testing its predictions. Their proposed QFT simulator, outlined in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, consists of a one-dimensional quantum fluid made of polaritons, quasiparticles that emerge from strong interactions between photons (i.e., light particles) and excitons (i.e., bound pairs of electrons and holes in semiconductors).

A strange quantum battery concept reveals the second law of entanglement

For more than a century, the laws of thermodynamics have helped us understand how energy moves, how engines work, and why time seems to flow in one direction. Now, researchers have made a similarly powerful discovery, but in the strange world of quantum physics.

Scientists have shown for the first time that entanglement, the mysterious link between quantum particles, can be reversibly manipulated just like heat or energy in a perfect thermodynamic cycle.

The researchers support their findings using a novel concept called an entanglement battery, which allows entanglement to flow in and out of quantum systems without being lost, much like a regular battery stores and supplies energy.

IceCube neutrino search sets first constraints on proton fraction of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays

Neutrinos are subatomic particles with no charge and very little mass that are known to weakly interact with other matter in the universe. Due to their weak interactions with other particles, these particles are notoriously difficult to detect.

A class of that has so far proved particularly elusive to detection methods are extremely-high-energy neutrinos, which have energies above 1016 electronvolts (eV). Physical theories suggest that these neutrinos would be produced from very energy-intensive astrophysical phenomena, such as interactions of ultrahigh-energy .

The IceCube Collaboration, a large group of researchers based at various research institutes worldwide, has been searching for extremely-high-energy neutrinos for over a decade. Their most recent findings, published in Physical Review Letters, set constraints on the proportion of protons in ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays, for the first time relying on data collected at the IceCube observatory, while also placing limits on the diffuse flux of extremely-high-energy neutrinos.

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