Quasiparticles & collective excitations as a research area investigates emergent, effective degrees of freedom in many-body systems, where interactions among underlying microscopic constituents give rise to particle-like or mode-like entities such as phonons, magnons, polarons, excitons, and plasmons. This field focuses on formulating and analyzing low-energy effective theories, dispersion relations, lifetimes, and interaction vertices of these excitations using frameworks such as many-body perturbation theory, Green’s functions, field-theoretic methods, and numerical many-body techniques. It plays a central role in understanding transport, superconductivity, topological phases, and nonequilibrium dynamics in condensed matter, ultracold atomic systems, and related quantum materials.
The race to build reliable quantum computers is fraught with obstacles, and one of the most difficult to overcome is related to the promising but elusive Majorana qubits. Now, an international team has read the information ...
Condensed Matter
Feb 11, 2026
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85
A team of US researchers has unveiled a device that can conduct electricity along its fractionally charged edges without losing energy to heat. Described in Nature Physics, the work, led by Xiaodong Xu at the University of ...
When we think about heat traveling through a material, we typically picture diffusive transport, a process that transfers heat from high-temperature to low-temperature as particles and molecules bump into each other, losing ...
General Physics
Feb 10, 2026
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49
Invisible light beyond the range of human vision plays a vital role in communication technologies, medical diagnostics, and optical sensing. Ultraviolet and near-infrared wavelengths are routinely used in these fields, yet ...
Optics & Photonics
Feb 6, 2026
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107
That low-frequency fuzz that can bedevil cellphone calls has to do with how electrons move through and interact in materials at the smallest scale. The electronic flicker noise is often caused by interruptions in the flow ...
Condensed Matter
Feb 4, 2026
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86
You can tell a lot about a material based on the type of light shining at it: Optical light illuminates a material's surface, while X-rays reveal its internal structures and infrared captures a material's radiating heat. ...
Optics & Photonics
Feb 4, 2026
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258
Physicists have long categorized every elementary particle in our three-dimensional universe as being either a boson or a fermion—the former category mostly capturing force carriers like photons, the latter including the ...
General Physics
Feb 3, 2026
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187
Researchers at the Institute for Molecular Science (NINS, Japan) and SOKENDAI have demonstrated a more than 2000% voltage-induced enhancement of near-field nonlinear optical responses. To achieve this giant modulation, they ...
Optics & Photonics
Feb 3, 2026
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20
Ordinary matter, when cooled, transitions from a gas into a liquid. Cool it further still, and it freezes into a solid. Quantum matter, however, can behave very differently. In the early 20th century, researchers discovered ...
Soft Matter
Jan 28, 2026
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501
Scientists analyzing data from heavy ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—the world's most powerful particle collider, located at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research—have new evidence that a ...
General Physics
Jan 22, 2026
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