The shape of gold nanostructures changes depending on how they are imaged. This electron-microscope image shows a nanosized cube wrapped in a gold layer. The tiny package is the result of reactions ...

A pattern of surface waves bestowed with fivefold symmetry hosts topological structures. Soon after quasicrystals made their debut in 1984, physicists realized that the ordered, nonrepeating ...

A new technique for generating solid fibers from a liquid jet is easier to model—and thus easier to control—than past methods. Transformed by light. These seven photos show a liquid streaming downward ...

A decades-old neutrino mystery might be solved not by undiscovered physics but by improved calculations.

Ryotaro Arita is a Professor in the Department of Applied Physics at the University of Tokyo and a Team Leader at the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science. He obtained his Ph.D. from the ...

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 ...

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 ...

Experiments suggest that hydrogen bonding explains why a wet surface can have nearly twice as much friction as a dry surface. Record bonding. Experiments have probed the friction between a silicon ...

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 ...

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 ...

The demonstration that ions can be precisely manipulated in a trap containing integrated photonics paves the way for a large-scale trapped-ion quantum processor. Figure 1: Mordini and colleagues ...

Phonon lasing—coherent amplification of phonons by stimulated emission—has been achieved in a purely acoustic analog of a three-level laser scheme. What is the appeal of phonon lasers? One potential ...