Physics

Credit: Pixabay from Pexels Tiny solid particles—like pollutants, cloud droplets and medicine powders—form highly concentrated clusters in turbulent environments like smokestacks, clouds and pharmaceutical mixers. What causes these extreme clusters—which make it more difficult to predict everything from the spread of wildfire smoke to finding the right combination of ingredients for more effective drugs—has puzzled […]

Two pionless charged-current electron-neutrino interactions from the MicroBooNE ecperiment. Left: An electron shower with no proton. Right: An electron shower and a proton track. Credit: MicroBooNE Collaboration A recent Physical Review Letters publication presents a thorough analysis of MicroBooNE detector data, investigating the anomalous surplus of neutrino-like events detected by the preceding MiniBooNE experiment. In

Hall A, the area at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) where the MARATHON experiment was carried out, equipped with a state-of-the-art facility including high-resolution spectrometers and other detectors. Credit: Jefferson Lab Hall A Tritium Collaboration. Nucleons, which include protons and neutrons, are the composite particles that make up atomic nuclei. While these particles

What would Thomas Bayes think? In 1763, he proposed a new approach to calculate probabilities. An international team has now updated his ideas to deliver a quantum Bayes’ rule. Credit: Centre for Quantum Technologies How likely you think something is to happen depends on what you already believe about the circumstances. That is the simple

Chiara Maccani, doctoral student at CERN and Padova University, installing the TWOCRYST Fibre Tracker detector in the LHC tunnel. Credit: Sune Jakobsen Might two bent crystals pave the way to finding new physics? The Standard Model of particle physics describes our world at its smallest scales exceptionally well. However, it leaves some important questions unanswered,

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Summertime is beer time—even if the consumption of alcoholic beer is declining in Switzerland. And for beer lovers, there is nothing better than a head of foam topping the golden, sparkling barley juice. But with many beers, the dream is quickly shattered, and the foam collapses before you can take your

The glass beads used in the bulldozing experiments and mapped with X-rays. Credit: Andrés Felipe Escobar Rincón What looks like ordinary sand, rocks or snow flowing in one direction can actually hide swirling currents that move in multiple directions beneath the surface. When grains move in a landslide, most follow the steepest downhill path. This

Flexoelectricity in ice electrification events. Credit: Nature Physics (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-025-02995-6 A study co-led by ICN2 reveals that ice is a flexoelectric material, meaning it can produce electricity when unevenly deformed. Published in Nature Physics, this discovery could have major technological implications while also shedding light on natural phenomena such as lightning. Frozen water is

In viscous fluids like honey, where turbulence is absent, true mixing is challenging as it requires an interplay of external stirring and molecular-level noise. Credit: MPI-DS, LMP In turbulent fluids, mixing of the components happens easily. However, in more viscous fluids such as those enclosed within cellular compartments, the intermixing of particles and molecules is

The ISOLDE facility at CERN. Credit: CERN An experiment carried out at CERN’s ISOLDE facility has determined the western shore of a small island of atomic nuclei, where conventional nuclear rules break down. The atomic nucleus was discovered over a century ago, yet many questions remain about the force that keeps its constituent protons and