When you shine a flashlight into a glass of water, the beam bends. That simple observation, familiar since ancient times, hides one of the oldest puzzles in physics: what really happens to the momentum of light when it enters ...
The quantum many body problem has been at the heart of much of theoretical and experimental physics over the past few decades. Even though we have understood the fundamental laws that govern the behavior of elementary particles ...
The discovery of "hidden orders," organization patterns in materials that cannot be detected using conventional measurement tools, can yield valuable insight, which can in turn support the design of new materials with advantageous ...
Excitons, bound states between an electron (i.e., a negatively charged particle) and a hole (i.e., the absence of an electron) in materials, are a key focus of condensed matter physics studies. These bound states can give ...
Over the past decades, many research teams worldwide have been trying to detect dark matter, an elusive type of matter that does not emit, reflect or absorb light, using a variety of highly sensitive detectors. Ultimately, ...
A giant anomalous Hall effect (AHE) has been observed in a nonmagnetic material for the first time, as reported by researchers from Japan. This surprising result was achieved using high-quality Cd3As2 thin films, a Dirac ...
During 2024, onlookers observed a startling sight on China's Qiantang River: waves forming a grid-like pattern. Dubbed the "matrix tide," this complex wave pattern was caused by the river's famed tidal bores that surge upstream ...
Skyrmions are localized, particle-like excitations in materials that retain their structure due to topological constraints (i.e., restrictions arising from properties that remain unchanged under smooth deformations). These ...
Exploring the BTZ black hole in (2+1)-dimensional gravity took me down a fascinating rabbit hole, connecting ideas I never expected—like black holes and topological phases in quantum matter! When I swapped the roles of space ...
Prof. Michael Murrell's group (lead author Zachary Gao Sun, graduate student in physics) in collaboration with Prof. Garegin Papoian's group from the University of Maryland at College Park has found critical phenomena (self-organized ...
