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Physicists have discovered a transparent, massless, and neutral "demon" particle that could help scientists understand superconductors better, according to a new study by researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The study, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, focused on the search for a particle first theorized by physicist David Pines in 1956. In solids, electrons act erratically, combining into collective units. If enough energy is input, the electrons can form plasmons - waves that act somewhat like a particle (also known as a quasiparticle) - if enough energy is input, although usually, the mass of solids is too...

Subatomic particles paint pictures of inner worlds of pyramids, volcanoes and more illustration of muon particles raining down on the Great Pyramid of Giza - An invisible rain of the subatomic particles called muons pierces structures on Earth’s surface, including the Great Pyramid of Giza. Those muons can help map out the chambers within the pyramid and have even revealed an unexplained hidden void. Inside Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza lies a mysterious cavity, its void unseen by any living human, its surface untouched by modern hands. But luckily, scientists are no longer limited by human senses. To feel out...

Quantum mechanicsResearch updateWave–particle duality quantified for the first time 01 Sep 2021 Complementarity A new twist on the double-slit experiment. (Courtesy: Shutterstock/Andrey VP) One of the most counterintuitive concepts in physics – the idea that quantum objects are complementary, behaving like waves in some situations and like particles in others – just got a new and more quantitative foundation. In a twist on the classic double-slit experiment, scientists at Korea’s Institute for Basic Sciences (IBS) used precisely controlled photon sources to measure a photon’s degree of wave-ness and particle-ness. Their results, published in Science Advances, show that the properties of...

For the first time, researchers have performed a version of the famous double-slit experiment with antimatter particles.The double-slit experiment demonstrates one of the fundamental tenets of quantum physics: that pointlike particles are also waves. In the standard version of the experiment, particles travel through a pair of slits in a solid barrier. On a screen on the other side, an interference pattern typical of waves appears. Crests and troughs emerging from each slit reinforce each other or cancel each other out as they overlap, creating alternating bands of high and low particle density on the screen.This kind of experiment has...

May 8 (UPI) -- The study of a unique crystalline material, composed of aluminum and platinum atoms, has revealed a pair of electronic properties that have never been seen before. The atoms in the new materials are crystallized in a special pattern, with each row offset from the other. The pattern creates a spiral staircase of aluminum and platinum atoms. According to the new study, published this week in the journal Nature Physics, the material's unique crystalline structure produces Rarita-Schwinger fermions in its interior and extremely long quadruple topological Fermi arcs on its surface. Rarita-Schwinger fermions are a type of...

Scientists have produced the firmest evidence yet of so-called sterile neutrinos, mysterious particles that pass through matter without interacting with it at all. The first hints these elusive particles turned up decades ago. But after years of dedicated searches, scientists have been unable to find any other evidence for them, with many experiments contradicting those old results. These new results now leave scientists with two robust experiments that seem to demonstrate the existence of sterile neutrinos, even as other experiments continue to suggest sterile neutrinos don't exist at all. That means there's something strange happening in the universe that is...

'Delayed-choice' test, a first with spacefaring photons, affirms light can behave like a wave or a particle. Light is two-faced: Sometimes it behaves like a wave, sometimes like a particle. Now, scientists have shown that light’s shifty disposition persists even after trekking thousands of kilometers into space and back again, researchers report October 25 in Science Advances.Depending on how light is measured, it can either be particle-like, lighting up a camera pixel, for example, or wavelike, interfering with other waves like ripples on the surface of water. It’s one of the many oddities of quantum mechanics. Before light is measured,...

Since the Large Hadron Collider at CERN turned on, it’s brought with it an incredible slew of results. Large numbers of rare, exotic and unstable particles have been created, and their decays have been measured to unprecedented precision. The Higgs boson has been created and observed to have a mass of 126 GeV/c2, branching and decaying in exactly the ratios the Standard Model predicts. As it now stands, we’ve detected every particle and antiparticle predicted by the most successful particle physics theory of all time. Unless we get hit by a big physics surprise, the LHC will become renowned for...

Since the mid-1970s, modern physics has rested on the knowledge of four fundamental forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. Now scientists are on the verge of discovering a fifth force of nature, which could change the field of physics forever. According to a recent paper published by University of California physicists in the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review Letters, what physicists thought was a new particle of matter could be a new force altogether.

Scientists are ecstatic over the fact that they may have just discovered the fifth fundamental force of nature. The possible discovery of a previously-unknown subatomic particle looks set to finally bring the elusive dark matter into the mix. The discovery centers on a new type of boson that possesses characteristics previously unseen in particles. Furthermore, its existence casts doubt upon whether the known ‘sector’ of matter and particles exists alongside a ‘dark’ sector – both interacting with each other via another, unseen force.“If true, it's revolutionary,” said Jonathan Feng, professor of physics & astronomy at the University of California, Irvine,...

The gigantic accelerator in Europe has produced hints of an exotic particle that defies the known laws of physics. A little wiggle on a graph, representing just a handful of particles, has set the world of physics abuzz. Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, the largest particle accelerator on Earth, reported yesterday that their machine might have produced a brand new particle not included in the established laws of particle physics known as the Standard Model. Their results, based on the data collected from April to November after the LHC began colliding protons at nearly twice the...

Nucleons consist (left) of quarks (matter particles) and gluons (force particles). A glueball (right) is made up purely of gluons. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Scientists at TU Wien (Vienna) have calculated that the meson f0(1710) could be a very special particle – the long-sought-after glueball, a particle composed of pure force. For decades, scientists have been looking for so-called "glueballs". Now it seems they have been found at last. A glueball is an exotic particle, made up entirely of gluons – the "sticky" particles that keep nuclear particles together. Glueballs are unstable and can only be detected indirectly, by analysing their decay. This...

They can theoretically carry charge 1,000 times faster than ordinary electrons. After 85 years of searching, researchers have confirmed the existence of a massless particle called the Weyl fermion for the first time ever. With the unique ability to behave as both matter and anti-matter inside a crystal, this strange particle can create electrons that have no mass. The discovery is huge, not just because we finally have proof that these elusive particles exist, but because it paves the way for far more efficient electronics, and new types of quantum computing. "Weyl fermions could be used to solve the traffic...

The bizarre nature of reality as laid out by quantum theory has survived another test, with scientists performing a famous experiment and proving that reality does not exist until it is measured. Physicists at The Australian National University (ANU) have conducted John Wheeler's delayed-choice thought experiment, which involves a moving object that is given the choice to act like a particle or a wave. Wheeler's experiment then asks - at which point does the object decide? Common sense says the object is either wave-like or particle-like, independent of how we measure it. But quantum physics predicts that whether you observe...

The new Majorana particle showed up inside a superconductor, a material in which the free movement of electrons allows electricity to flow without resistance. The research team, led by Ali Yazdani of Princeton University, placed a long chain of iron atoms, which are magnetic, on top of a superconductor made of lead. Normally, magnetism disrupts superconductors, which depend on a lack of magnetic fields for their electrons to flow unimpeded. But in this case the magnetic chain turned into a special type of superconductor in which electrons next to one another in the chain coordinated their spins to simultaneously satisfy...

Light behaves both as a particle and as a wave. Since the days of Einstein, scientists have been trying to directly observe both of these aspects of light at the same time. Now, scientists at EPFL have succeeded in capturing the first-ever snapshot of this dual behavior. Quantum mechanics tells us that light can behave simultaneously as a particle or a wave. However, there has never been an experiment able to capture both natures of light at the same time; the closest we have come is seeing either wave or particle, but always at different times. Taking a radically different...

Here's a nice surprise: quantum physics is less complicated than we thought. An international team of researchers has proved that two peculiar features of the quantum world previously considered distinct are different manifestations of the same thing. The result is published 19 December in Nature Communications. Patrick Coles, Jedrzej Kaniewski, and Stephanie Wehner made the breakthrough while at the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore. They found that 'wave-particle duality' is simply the quantum 'uncertainty principle' in disguise, reducing two mysteries to one."The connection between uncertainty and wave-particle duality comes out very naturally when you...

Exotic particles called neutrinos have been caught in the act of shape-shifting, switching from one flavor to another, in a discovery that could help solve the mystery of antimatter. Neutrinos come in three flavors — electron, muon and tau — and have been known to change, or oscillate, between certain flavors. Now, for the first time, scientists can definitively say they've discovered muon neutrinos changing into electron neutrinos. The discovery was made at the T2K neutrino experiment in Japan, where scientists sent a beam of muon neutrinos from the J-PARC laboratory in Tokai Village on the eastern coast of Japan,...

He was the first Pakistani to win a Nobel prize in physics after he predicted the existence of the so-called 'God particle', but in his home country Abdus Salam's achievements have been written from the record books. Despite being a leading figure in Pakistan's space and nuclear program Salam was shunned by Muslim fundamentalists when they took control of the country in the 1970s. Although he was a Muslim, the physicist, who died in 1996, belonged to the Ahmadi sect, who believed Hadrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was their spiritual leader as opposed to the prophet Muhammad.

A progress report from the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator has declared that the Higgs boson, dubbed the “God particle,” has been found. The discovery of the new particle is a major step toward confirming the Standard Model used in modern physics. Professor John Womersley said, “They have discovered a particle consistent with the Higgs boson… That is confirmed...."