Tag: physics

Physicists Change the Nature of Matter With Light in Breakthrough That Blurs the Line Between Science and Magic

When physicists at the University of Konstanz shone a flash of light on a simple iron crystal, they weren’t expecting to watch the rules of matter change before their eyes. Yet that seems to be what happened.

In an experiment that reads like science fiction, the team discovered a way to use light—not heat or exotic materials—to alter a substance’s magnetic properties, effectively turning one material into another in a fraction of a trillionth of a second.

The results, published in Science Advances, show that the effect doesn’t require supercooling or specialized alloys: it happens at room temperature. The light responsible doesn’t melt, burn, or deform the crystal. Instead, it simply changes the way its atoms behave. This process opens a door to new physics that merges the quantum and the macroscopic. With this, light itself can rewrite the physical identity of matter.

The researchers describe their discovery as a way to “change the frequencies and properties of the material in a non-thermal way.” In other words, they have shown that light alone, “not temperature,” can alter a material’s magnetic behavior, offering a new route to control magnetism without heat.

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“Every solid has its own set of frequencies: electronic transitions, lattice vibrations, magnetic excitations,” lead author and physicist at the University of Konstanz, Dr. Davide Bossini, said in a statement. “Every material resonates in its own way. It changes the nature of the material, the ‘magnetic DNA of the material,’ so to speak, its ‘fingerprint.’ It has practically become a different material with new properties for the time being.”

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Researchers used laser pulses to excite pairs of “magnons”—quantum waves that represent collective spin oscillations in a magnetic material. These magnons act like tiny disturbances or waves in a sea of electron spins. By controlling them, researchers found they could change the material’s magnetic “fingerprint.”

“The result was a huge surprise for us,” Dr. Bossini said. “No theory has ever predicted it.”

In essence, when light strikes the hematite crystal, it excites pairs of magnons to vibrate in sync. Those vibrations cascade through the lattice, coupling with other magnetic modes—types of oscillations in the arrangement of atomic spins—and reshaping the entire magnetic spectrum.

That transformation lasts only as long as the excited states persist—mere trillionths of a second—but it’s long enough to prove that light can temporarily redefine the intrinsic behavior of matter itself.

To achieve the effect, researchers used haematite, a naturally occurring iron ore once used in medieval compasses. “Haematite is widespread. Centuries ago, it was already used for compasses in seafaring,” Dr. Bossini said.

Using ultrafast laser pulses, each less than a millionth of a billionth of a second, the researchers could excite high-momentum magnons—quantized packets of spin waves that carry magnetic energy—within the hematite, a type of iron oxide. When these tiny magnetic waves coupled with lower-energy modes (slower, less energetic oscillations), the material’s resonance pattern shifted. This wasn’t a thermal effect from heating; it was purely quantum mechanical.

In their paper, the researchers verified this by changing the laser’s pulse rate and intensity. Even when the overall heat input varied by a factor of four, the results were identical. The magnetic states had changed, but not because of temperature. “The effects are not caused by laser excitation. The cause is light, not temperature,” Dr. Bossini confirmed.

In traditional physics, to alter a material’s state—for example, turning metal into a magnet—you’d need to heat, cool, or chemically modify it. However, here, the transformation is instantaneous and reversible.

Once the light stops, the material returns to its normal state. But for those fleeting moments, its magnetic behavior, and potentially its quantum properties, become something entirely new.

The experiment demonstrates a fundamental ability to control quantum phenomena at room temperature, something that has long eluded researchers. Normally, the delicate interactions behind quantum behavior collapse at everyday temperatures. However, by exciting magnon pairs, researchers achieved effects previously observable only near absolute zero.

These findings could have big implications for quantum technology. In quantum tech, information is stored and processed using magnetic spins and waveforms, not electric charges. This technique offers a way to modulate those spins without heat or energy loss. Heat and energy loss are major hurdles for developing fast and efficient quantum devices.

This ability to control magnetism with light could one day enable faster data storage and transmission at terahertz rates—without the thermal slowdowns that limit current electronic systems.

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Breaking Physics? Scientists Defy Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in Landmark Experiment

An international team of physicists has found a way to “sidestep” the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which posits that it is impossible to measure a particle’s location and momentum simultaneously.

The team’s work has revealed a method to redistribute quantum uncertainty so that tiny changes in a particle’s position and momentum can be measured simultaneously with precision beyond the standard quantum limit—all without violating Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle.

The research team behind the landmark achievement suggests their findings could offer new avenues of research in ultra-precise sensing at previously unattainable levels, which could enable deep space navigation, medical imaging, and potential military applications like submarine navigation.

When German physicist Werner Heisenberg first postulated the uncertainty principle in 1927, the technology to test its validity was in the early stages. Since then, several experiments have confirmed the seeming impossibility of simultaneously sensing certain particle property pairs, such as momentum and location. The more closely one property is measured, the less certainty there is about the paired property.

Curious if they could find a way to sidestep Heisenberg to precisely measure a particle’s momentum and location, a team led by Dr. Tingrei Tan from the University of Sydney Nano Institute and School of Physics developed a dedicated experiment. According to a statement detailing the team’s work, the group built a system designed to monitor the tiny vibrational state of a trapped ion, a setup the researchers described as “the quantum equivalent of a pendulum.”

Next, the team tapped into Dr. Tan’s previous work on error-corrected quantum computing to prepare the ion in “grid states.” By fine-tuning the setup, the team successfully showed that the momentum and position of the ion could be measured with a level of precision they described as beyond the “standard quantum limit.” This limit is considered the best achievable precision using only classical (non-quantum) sensors.

“It’s a neat crossover from quantum computing to sensing,” said co-author Professor Nicolas Menicucci, a theorist from RMIT University. “Ideas first designed for robust quantum computers can be repurposed so that sensors pick up weaker signals without being drowned out by quantum noise.

Although exceeding the standard quantum limit may appear to directly violate Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Dr. Ben Baragiola, a study co-author from RMIT, said they haven’t actually broken any laws of physics; they have simply found a way around them.

“We haven’t broken Heisenberg’s principle,” he explained. “Our protocol works entirely within quantum mechanics.”

To explain the team’s sidestepping of Heisenberg, Dr. Tan said to think of uncertainty like the air inside a balloon.

“You can’t remove it without popping the balloon, but you can squeeze it around to shift it. That’s effectively what we’ve done. We push the unavoidable quantum uncertainty to places we don’t care about (big, coarse jumps in position and momentum) so the fine details we do care about can be measured more precisely.”

Another analogy offered by the research team involves a pair of clocks. Unlike a typical clock with two hands, one of the clocks has only a minute hand, and the other has only an hour hand. The hour hand clock provides a general indication of the hour, but the minute measurement is less precise. Conversely, the clock with only a minute hand gives a more precise yet less specific measurement, but the “larger context” of the lost. The team notes that this modular measurement ability “sacrifices some global information in exchange for much finer detail.”

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Scientists Say This “Strange Physics Mechanism” Could Enable Objects to Levitate on Sunlight

Designed for flight forty-five miles above the Earth’s surface, Harvard SEAS researchers have devised a nanofabricated lightweight structure capable of sunlight-driven propulsion through a process called photophoresis, capable of monitoring one of Earth’s most challenging locations to navigate.

Stretching between 30 and 60 miles above the Earth’s surface, the mesosphere has proven extremely difficult to study, as the altitude is too high for planes and balloons, yet too low for satellites. Achieving regular direct access to this long-out-of-reach portion of the atmosphere could be a major boon to improving weather forecasts and climate model accuracy.

Now, a new breakthrough technology could make it possible, by allowing lightweight structures to reach largely unexplored heights powered by sunlight alone.

Photophoresis

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), the University of Chicago, and other institutions worked on the project, which was revealed in a new paper published in Nature.

“We are studying this strange physics mechanism called photophoresis and its ability to levitate very lightweight objects when you shine light on them,” said lead author Ben Schafer, a former Harvard graduate student at SEAS, now a professor at the University of Chicago.

Photophoresis is a physical process where gas molecules bounce off of an object’s warmer side more forcefully than its cooler side in extremely low-pressure environments. One such environment is the difficult-to-reach mesosphere.

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“It Was Unclear to Scientists Why They Existed”: Breakthrough Study Reveals Why “Impossible” Quasicrystals Exist

Quasicrystals, an unusual atomic structural form that falls between crystal and glass, may be the most stable form of matter, despite the fact that this unusual arrangement of atoms was once considered impossible by scientists.

According to University of Michigan researchers in a new study, what makes these materials so unique is that the atoms are arranged in lattices similar to those found in crystals. Yet unlike crystals, these lattices do not repeat.

The new work relied on simulations that demonstrated how, despite quasicrystals featuring irregular patterns similar to those found in glass caused by rapid heating and cooling, these unique materials are fundamentally stable.

The Enigma of Quasicrystals

“We need to know how to arrange atoms into specific structures if we want to design materials with desired properties,” said co-author Wenhao Sun, the new study’s corresponding author and a University of Michigan Dow Early Career Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. “Quasicrystals have forced us to rethink how and why certain materials can form. Until our study, it was unclear to scientists why they existed.”

Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman was the first to describe quasicrystals in 1984, a discovery that seemed to defy known physics. He conceived of the arrangement when he observed that the structure of certain metals, such as aluminum and manganese, resembled a cluster of many 20-sided dice joined at their faces. From these metallic arrangements, Shechtman envisioned a five-fold symmetry, where a structure would be identical from five different views.

When Shechtman proposed the idea, scientists believed that crystal lattices must repeat in all directions, making the five-fold symmetry Shechtman suggested an impossibility. However, in the years following Shechtman’s description of quasicrystals, such materials were produced both synthetically in laboratories and discovered to occur naturally in billion-year-old meteorites. With his work validated, Shechtman was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011.

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AI reveals unexpected new physics in dusty plasma

Physicists have used a machine-learning method to identify surprising new twists on the non-reciprocal forces governing a many-body system.

The journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the findings by experimental and theoretical physicists at Emory University, based on a neural network model and data from laboratory experiments on dusty plasma—ionized gas containing suspended dust particles.

The work is one of the relatively few instances of using AI not as a data processing or predictive tool, but to discover new physical laws governing the natural world.

“We showed that we can use AI to discover new physics,” says Justin Burton, an Emory professor of experimental physics and senior co-author of the paper. “Our AI method is not a black box: we understand how and why it works. The framework it provides is also universal. It could potentially be applied to other many-body systems to open new routes to discovery.”

The PNAS paper provides the most detailed description yet for the physics of a dusty plasma, yielding precise approximations for non-reciprocal forces.

“We can describe these forces with an accuracy of more than 99%,” says Ilya Nemenman, an Emory professor of theoretical physics and co-senior author of the paper.

“What’s even more interesting is that we show that some common theoretical assumptions about these forces are not quite accurate. We’re able to correct these inaccuracies because we can now see what’s occurring in such exquisite detail.”

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Physics Demonstrates That Increasing Greenhouse Gases Cannot Cause Dangerous Warming, Extreme Weather or Any Harm

At the outset it is important to understand that carbon dioxide has two relevant properties, as a creator of food and oxygen, and as a greenhouse gas (GHG).

As to food and oxygen, carbon dioxide is essential to nearly all life on earth by creating food and oxygen by photosynthesis.  Further, it creates more food as its level in the atmosphere increases.  For example, doubling carbon dioxide from today’s approximately 420 ppm to 840 ppm would increase the amount of food available to people worldwide by roughly 40%, and doing so would have a negligible effect on temperature.

As to carbon dioxide as a GHG, the United States and countries worldwide are vigorously pursuing rules and subsidies under the Net Zero Theory that carbon dioxide  and other GHG emissions must be reduced to Net Zero and the use of fossil fuels must be eliminated by 2050 to avoid catastrophic global warming and more extreme weather.  A key premise stated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is  the “evidence is clear that carbon dioxide (CO2) is the main driver of climate change,” where “main driver means responsible for more than 50% of the change.”[1]

The Biden Administration adopted over 100 rules and Congress has provided enormous subsidies promoting alternatives to fossil fuel premised on the Net Zero Theory. The EPA Endangerment Finding, for example, asserts “elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may reasonably be anticipated to endanger the public health and to endanger the public welfare of current and future generations.”[2]

On April 9, 2025 President Trump issued a “Memorandum on Directing Repeal of Unlawful Rules” and Fact Sheet stating “agencies shall immediately take steps to effectuate the repeal of any [unlawful] regulation” under Supreme Court precedents, inter alia, where “the scientific and policy premises undergirding it had been shown to be wrong,” or “where the costs imposed are not justified by the public benefits.”[3]  We understand the Supreme Court has also ruled in the leading case State Farm[4] that an agency regulation is arbitrary, capricious and thus invalid where, inter alia:

  • “the agency has … entirely failed to consider an important aspect of the problem”
  • “the agency has relied on factors which Congress has not intended it to consider.”

We are career physicists with a special expertise in radiation physics, which describes how CO2  and GHGs affect heat flow in Earth’s atmosphere.  In our scientific opinion, contrary to most media reporting and many people’s understanding, the “scientific premises undergirding” the Net Zero Theory, all the Biden Net Zero Theory rules and congressional subsidies are scientifically false and “wrong,” and  violate these two State Farm mandates.

First, Scientific Evidence Ignored.  All the agency rules, publications and studies we have seen supporting the Endangerment Finding and other Biden Net Zero Theory rules ignored, as if it does not exist, the  robust and reliable scientific evidence that:

  • carbon dioxide, GHGs and fossil fuels will not cause catastrophic global warming and more extreme weather, detailed in Part III.
  • there will be disastrous consequences for the poor, people worldwide, future generations, Americans, America, and other countries if CO2, other GHGs are reduced to Net Zero and fossil fuels eliminated that will endanger public health and welfare, detailed in Part IV.

Second, Unscientific Evidence at the Foundation. Unscientific evidence is all we have seen underlying the Endangerment Finding and all the other Biden Net Zero rules, detailed in Part V.

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Physicists confirm the incredible existence of “time mirrors”

For decades, theoretical physicists tossed around the idea that time reflection, also known as “time mirrors,” might one day be demonstrated in a real-world experiment.

This idea seemed too big and wild, yet it kept popping up in serious discussions of quantum mechanics where equations hinted at surprising behavior.

A team led by Hady Moussa from the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) in New York City has now confirmed that these mysterious events actually exist.

They pulled off a successful test by changing the properties of a device in a quick, uniform way so that signals reversed direction in time.

Understanding time mirrors

This sort of time flip has been described as looking into a mirror and spotting your back instead of your face. It sounds like science fiction, but it has a basis in real physics.

Researchers had predicted for more than 50 years that sudden shifts in a wave’s environment could trigger such reversals.

Time reflections differ from everyday mirror views in one crucial way. Instead of light or sound bouncing back in space, the wave is forced to reverse its flow in time.

That shift causes the frequency of the wave to change, sparking a chain reaction of interesting phenomena in the system.

In normal reflections, you see an immediate image or hear an echo. A time reflection, on the other hand, makes part of the signal run backward.

There is no need for any speculation about time travel, though, since these effects involve a swift flip in the medium’s physical traits.

Time mirrors and metamaterials

To achieve this, the group used an engineered metamaterial designed to control electromagnetic wave behavior in unusual ways. Metamaterials allow scientists to manipulate waves far beyond ordinary mirrors or lenses.

By carefully adjusting electronic components on a strip of metal, they introduced a sudden jump that reversed the direction of incoming signals. They filled the strip with electronic switches hooked to capacitor banks.

That arrangement supplied the necessary burst of energy to force the wave to flip direction in time, an effect that used to be considered nearly impossible with accessible power.

The outcome was a time-reversed copy of the original wave, appearing just as predicted but never before seen with clarity.

Adjusting the system’s impedance at the right instant was key. Impedance is a measure of how much a structure resists electric current, and doubling it turned out to be the trick for flipping the wave in time.

By pulling this off in a lab setting, they proved that the energy hurdle can be overcome when conditions are precisely controlled.

Past attempts had failed because uniform shifts across the entire device were tough to generate, but the new approach surmounted that barrier.

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Medieval alchemy dream comes true: How physicists made gold from lead

In a breakthrough that would make medieval alchemists envious, scientists at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider have successfully transformed lead into gold, producing 89,000 atoms per second.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a giant particle accelerator that smashes atoms together at super-high speeds. Scientists there have found a way to knock three tiny particles called protons out of lead atoms, turning them into gold atoms.

The team behind this discovery, called the ALICE collaboration, used a unique way to create gold. Instead of crashing lead atoms head-on, they looked at what happens when the atoms just barely miss each other. Researchers explained that when this happens, powerful electromagnetic fields around the atoms can cause them to change into different elements.

“It’s impressive that our detectors can handle both major collisions that create thousands of particles and these smaller events that make just a few particles at a time,” Marco Van Leeuwen, who leads the ALICE project, said in a press release.

During one period of experiments from 2015 to 2018, the scientists created about 86 billion gold atoms. That sounds like a lot, but when you add up all that gold, scientists said it only weighs about 29 picograms, which is less than a trillionth of a gram. You’d need trillions of times more to make even a tiny piece of jewelry.

The machine can create about 89,000 gold atoms every second, but each atom only exists for a tiny fraction of a second before breaking apart. Recent upgrades to the machine have almost doubled the amount of gold it can make, but it’s still far from practical use.

According to Uliana Dmitrieva, a scientist for the ALICE collaboration, this is the first time scientists have been able to detect and study gold production at the LHC in this way.

“Thanks to the unique capabilities of the ALICE ZDCs, the present analysis is the first to systematically detect and analyse the signature of gold production at the LHC experimentally,” Dmitrieva said in the release.

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Curious Grad Student Accidentally Discovers Shape-Changing Liquid That Bends the Laws of Thermodynamics

University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers have discovered a surprising “shape-changing” liquid that seems to bend the laws of thermodynamics.

The strange compound—made of oil, water, and magnetic nickel particles—was first assembled by a graduate student who was merely curious to see what might happen. To his surprise, when the liquid was shaken, the magnetic particles quickly reformed into a shape resembling a Greek urn.

Emulsion and Thermodynamics

“Imagine your favorite Italian salad dressing,” says Thomas Russell, Silvio O. Conte Distinguished Professor of Polymer Science and Engineering at UMass Amherst and one of the paper’s senior authors. “It’s made up of oil, water and spices, and before you pour it onto your salad, you shake it up so that all the ingredients mix.”

While water and oil normally separate, they can combine through a process called emulsion, where small bits of a third material enter the mix, reducing surface tension between the two normally incompatible substances. The emulsion process works as described by the laws of thermodynamics.

Playing Around in the Lab

A wide range of technologies and applications make use of emulsification. While experimenting with emulsions in the lab, UMass Amherst graduate student Anthony Raykh mixed magnetized nickel with oil and water just to see what might happen.

“Because you can engineer all sorts of interesting materials with useful properties when a fluid contains magnetic particles,” says Raykh. “And, in a complete surprise, the mixture formed this beautiful, pristine urn-shape.”

Despite repeated, vigorous shaking, the mixture consistently returned to a shape resembling an urn. Even altering the size of the magnetic particles did not change the effect.

“I thought ‘what is this thing?’ So, I walked up and down the halls of the Polymer Science and Engineering Department, knocking on my professors’ doors, asking them if they knew what was going on,” Raykh continued.

None of the UMass Amherst researchers could immediately explain the phenomenon. Two of Raykh’s professors, David Hoagland and Thomas Russell, took an interest and joined the investigation.

Investigating a Perplexing Liquid

As the small team began conducting experiments, they expanded their collaboration to include researchers from Tufts and Syracuse universities for help with simulations. The growing team of experts across the Northeast ultimately concluded that strong magnetism was behind the liquid’s unusual behavior.

“When you look very closely at the individual nanoparticles of magnetized nickel that form the boundary between the water and oil,” says Hoagland, “you can get extremely detailed information on how different forms assemble. In this case, the particles are magnetized strongly enough that their assembly interferes with the process of emulsification, which the laws of thermodynamics describe.”

The liquid’s magnetic action reverses the normal emulsion process. Instead of decreasing the tension between oil and water, as normally occurs when introducing a third particle, the magnets increase the surface tension. As a result, the boundary separating the oil and water forms a curve.

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‘Impossible’ Device Physicists Said Wouldn’t Work Just Generated Electricity from the Earth’s Rotation

Scientists from Princeton University and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have invented a device that seemingly generates electricity from the Earth’s rotation.

Although generally accepted theories show that generating electricity from a uniform field like Earth’s magnetic field is impossible, the team believes they have found a “loophole” that allows their device to generate tiny but measurable amounts of electricity.

If independent reviews can confirm the team’s work, they say the next steps to building a practical energy-generating device would involve miniaturization and scaling efforts, as proposed in a new paper detailing their current efforts.

Device That Generates Electricity from the Earth’s Rotation Joins Alternative Energy Revolution

The research joins a list of promising new approaches to generating electricity, ranging from “extreme enzymes” or other living organisms to “smart” windows and triboelectric-driven “rain panels” that generate electricity from raindrops.

Other efforts include generating electricity from radio waves, sweat, advanced metamaterials, and ocean waves, including an effort to produce energy from waves at the grid scale. One particularly novel concept uses the classic “drinking bird” toy to generate power with each dip of its beak.

In an email to The Debrief, Princeton University Professor Christopher Chyba noted that his previous work with study co-author and co-inventor, JPL’s Dr. Kevin Hand, was designed to explore the possible electromagnetic heating of astrophysical objects. That theoretical work, Chyba explained, was not intended to have any practical application.

“Curiosity-driven basic research is often what later leads to practical applications,” the professor said. “A lot of basic research initially seems disconnected from our daily lives—but it’s a key component underlying American science and technology.”

However, Chyba explained that as those theoretical studies progressed, the work “led us to begin asking questions that we then realized could be investigated in the laboratory.”

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