Physics
SPHEREx Reads 37 Brown Dwarfs From Hot L Types to Cold Y Types
NASA's SPHEREx telescope recorded infrared spectra of 37 nearby brown dwarfs, revealing water, methane, CO and CO2 and exposing where atmosphere models…
What Makes Transmon Qubit Performance Vary Between Identical Chips
A blinded Fermilab-led study of 22 superconducting qubits links up to twofold swings in transmon qubit performance to oxide, trenches and sidewalls.
Ten Minutes After the Flash: Einstein Probe Finds an X-ray Tail on a Neutron Star Merger
The Einstein Probe caught a short gamma-ray burst followed by roughly 560 seconds of soft X-rays. What EP250704a says about magnetar remnants…
Claim Check: Did Quantinuum’s Anyons Just Make Topological Quantum Computing Universal?
A Nature paper reports universal gates from braided anyons on Quantinuum's H2. Here is what it shows, what the headlines overstate, and…
Bethe Strings Found in Cold Cesium Gas: A 1931 Prediction Meets a One-Dimensional Experiment
Innsbruck physicists probed Bethe strings, bound states predicted in 1931, in a one-dimensional cesium gas. How the experiment worked, with the binding…
A Levitated Diamond Moved by Electron Spin Force
OIST physicists used NV-center electron spin to shake a 128 mg levitated diamond resonator by over 100 nm. The numbers, and what…
Quark Wakes in the Quark-Gluon Plasma: How CMS Used Z Bosons as a Clean Reference
CMS tagged Z bosons in lead-lead collisions to look for the wake a fast quark leaves in quark-gluon plasma. How the measurement…
The Ghost Particle Hunter: How a Cute Idea Buried in Antarctic Ice Won the 2026 Physics Nobel
Francis Halzen won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for IceCube, a detector buried in Antarctic ice. Here is how a cute…
Octupolar Magnetism and the Phonon Splitting Proposed to Reveal It
A Toronto theory paper proposes that octupolar magnetism splits a Raman-active phonon by about 1.5 meV. What the prediction says and what…
How Cosmic-Ray Muons Measure Ocean Tides From Inside a Tunnel
A Korean team used cosmic-ray muons to follow the tide above an undersea tunnel, resolving about a meter of seawater. How it…