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Scientists use cutting-edge techniques to study rare atomic systems called hypernuclei shedding light on subatomic forces and neutron stars.

Scientists have made an important discovery in the world of particle physics by exploring hypernuclei — rare, short-lived atomic systems that include mysterious particles known as hyperons. Unlike protons and neutrons composed of “up” and “down” quarks, which make up the nuclei of ordinary atoms, hyperons contain at least one “strange” quark. These unusual particles could help unravel mysteries not only about the interactions between subatomic particles but also about the extreme conditions inside neutron stars.

“It is extremely important to understand what happens when a nucleus becomes a hypernucleus, which means when one nucleon is replaced by a hyperon,” Jean-Marc Richard, a professor at the University of Lyon, who was not involved in the study, said in an email.

Students learning quantum mechanics are taught the Schrodinger equation and how to solve it to obtain a wave function. But a crucial step is skipped because it has puzzled scientists since the earliest days—how does the real, classical world emerge from, often, a large number of solutions for the wave functions?

Each of these wave functions has its individual shape and associated energy level, but how does the wave function “collapse” into what we see as the classical world—atoms, cats and the pool noodles floating in the tepid swimming pool of a seedy hotel in Las Vegas hosting a convention of hungover businessmen trying to sell the world a better mousetrap?

At a high level, this is handled by the “Born rule”—the postulate that the probability density for finding an object at a particular location is proportional to the square of the wave function at that position.

An international team of scientists, led by Dr. Lukas Bruder, a junior research group leader at the University of Freiburg’s Institute of Physics, has successfully created and controlled hybrid electron-photon quantum states in helium atoms.

The team accomplished this by generating specially designed, highly intense extreme ultraviolet light pulses using the FERMI free electron laser in Trieste, Italy. By employing an innovative laser pulse-shaping technique, they were able to precisely control these hybrid quantum states. The groundbreaking findings have been published in Nature.

Long gone are the days where all our data could fit on a two-megabyte floppy disk. In today’s information-based society, the increasing volume of information being handled demands that we switch to memory options with the lowest power consumption and highest capacity possible.

Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM) is part of the next generation of storage devices expected to meet these needs. Researchers at the Advanced Institute for Materials Research (WPI-AIMR) investigated a cobalt-manganese-iron alloy thin film that demonstrates a high perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA)—key aspects for fabricating MRAM devices using spintronics.

The findings were published in Science and Technology of Advanced Materials on November 13, 2024.

A team of researchers at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom has made a significant breakthrough in physics by visualizing the shape of a single photon for the first time. This achievement was facilitated by an innovative computer model that simplifies the complex interaction between light and matter, a major challenge in the fields of physics and quantum mechanics.

Photons, the particles of light, have long captivated scientists. Since their discovery, it has been proven that light behaves both as a wave and a particle, a phenomenon known as wave-particle duality. This concept, which took centuries to be accepted, has been pivotal for the advancement of quantum mechanics, the branch of physics that studies subatomic interactions.

Photons are central to many phenomena, including lighting, telecommunications, and even touchscreen technology. However, despite their significance, the precise nature of their shape remained unknown until this team of researchers discovered a new way to visualize them.

Researchers at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider explore subtle energy signals to search for new physics beyond the Standard Model.

The mystery of dark matter could be solved in as little as 10 seconds.

When the next nearby supernova goes off, any gamma-ray telescope pointing in the right direction might be treated to more than a light show – it could quickly confirm the existence of one of the most promising dark matter candidates.

Astrophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley predict that within the first 10 seconds of a supernova, enough hypothetical particles called axions could be emitted to prove they exist in a relative blink.

Researchers found that the fungus Parengyodontium album degrades UV-exposed polyethylene in the ocean, suggesting that similar fungi might also break down plastics in deeper waters.

Researchers, including those from NIOZ, have discovered that a marine fungus can decompose the plastic polyethylene after it has been exposed to UV radiation from sunlight. Their findings, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, suggest that numerous other fungi capable of degrading plastic likely reside in the deeper regions of the ocean.

The fungus Parengyodontium album lives together with other marine microbes in thin layers on plastic litter in the ocean. Marine microbiologists from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) discovered that the fungus is capable of breaking down particles of the plastic polyethylene (PE), the most abundant of all plastics that have ended up in the ocean. The NIOZ researchers cooperated with colleagues from Utrecht University, the Ocean Cleanup Foundation and research institutes in Paris, Copenhagen, and St Gallen, Switzerland. The finding allows the fungus to join a very short list of plastic-degrading marine fungi: only four species have been found to date. A larger number of bacteria were already known to be able to degrade plastic.

Dark matter, antimatter, W bosons and neutron lifetimes all feature in our top 10 stories.