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Tiny Magnets, Big Potential: How Spin Waves Let Particles “Talk” in 2D Materials

Physicists have discovered that electronic excitations in 2D magnets can interact through spin waves – ripples in a material’s magnetic structure.

This breakthrough allows excitons (electron-hole pairs) to influence one another indirectly, like objects disturbing water. The interaction, demonstrated in a magnetic semiconductor called CrSBr, can be toggled on and off with magnetic fields, opening doors to revolutionary technologies like optical modulators, logic gates, and especially quantum transducers for future quantum computers and communication systems.

Discovery Unlocks Spin-Wave Mediated Interactions.

Researchers discover a new type of quantum entanglement

A study from Technion unveils a newly discovered form of quantum entanglement in the total angular momentum of photons confined in nanoscale structures. This discovery could play a key role in the future miniaturization of quantum communication and computing components.

Quantum physics sometimes leads to very unconventional predictions. This is what happened when Albert Einstein and his colleagues, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen (who later founded the Faculty of Physics at Technion), found a scenario in which knowing the state of one particle immediately affects the state of the other particle, no matter how great the distance between them. Their historic 1935 paper was nicknamed EPR after its three authors (Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen).

The idea that knowing the state of one particle will affect another particle located at a huge distance from it, without physical interaction and information transfer, seemed absurd to Einstein, who called it “spooky action at a distance.”

New experiment halves weight limit of elusive neutrinos

Scientists trying to discover the elusive mass of neutrinos, tiny “ghost particles” that could solve some of the universe’s biggest mysteries, announced a new limit on Thursday for how much they could weigh, halving the previous estimate.

Since the existence of was proposed nearly a century ago, scientists around the world have struggled to learn much about them—particularly their mass.

This is important because the neutrino, as the most abundant particle in the universe, “weaves a thread that connects the infinitely small and the infinitely large,” Thierry Lasserre, a physicist at France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, told AFP.

Einstein’s dream of a unified field theory accomplished?

During the latter part of the 20th century, string theory was put forward as a unifying theory of physics foundations. String theory has not, however, fulfilled expectations. That is why we are of the view that the scientific community needs to reconsider what comprises elementary forces and particles.

Since the early days of general relativity, leading physicists, like Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger, have tried to unify the theory of gravitation and electromagnetism. Many attempts were made during the 20th century, including by Hermann Weyl.

Finally, it seems that we have found a unified framework to accommodate the theory of electricity and magnetism within a purely geometric theory. This means that electromagnetic and are both manifestations of ripples and curvatures in .

Scientists discover new way to keep quantum spins coherent longer

A new study shows that electron spins—tiny magnetic properties of atoms that can store information—can be protected from decohering (losing their quantum state) much more effectively than previously thought, simply by applying low magnetic fields.

Normally, these spins quickly lose coherence when they interact with other particles or absorb certain types of light, which limits their usefulness in technologies like or atomic clocks. But the researchers discovered that even interactions that directly relax or disrupt the spin can be significantly suppressed using weak magnetic fields.

This finding expands our understanding of how to control and opens new possibilities for developing more stable and precise quantum devices.

Quantum Rain Falls: Ultracold Atoms Unleash Liquid Secrets

In a groundbreaking experiment, physicists observed a classic liquid phenomenon—capillary instability—in a quantum gas for the first time. By cooling a mix of potassium and rubidium atoms near absolute zero, researchers created tiny self-bound droplets that behave like liquid despite remaining in

Pinning Down a Ghost Particle: Neutrino Mass Measured with Unprecedented Precision

Scientists from the KATRIN experiment have achieved the most precise upper limit ever recorded for the mass of the mysterious neutrino – clocking in at less than 0.45 electron volts.

This breakthrough not only tightens the constraints on one of the universe’s most elusive particles but also challenges and extends the boundaries of the Standard Model of physics.

Breaking new ground in neutrino mass measurement.

This Bizarre Shape-Shifting Liquid Bends The Laws of Thermodynamics

A container of oil and water separated by a thin skin of magnetized particles has intrigued a team of chemical engineers by taking on an unexpected ‘Grecian urn’ shape upon agitation.

“I thought ‘what is this thing?’,” graduate student Anthony Raykh from the University of Massachusetts Amherst recalled, after doing what all chemistry students love to do, mixing materials with intriguing properties just to see what would happen.

“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.”

A new approach to probe hadronization via quantum entanglement

Recent physics studies have discovered that quarks and gluons inside protons, which are subatomic positively charged particles, exhibit maximal quantum entanglement at high energies. Entanglement is a physical phenomenon that entails correlations between distant particles that cannot be explained by classical physics theories, resulting in the state of one particle influencing that of another.

Researchers at Stony Brook University and the Brookhaven National Laboratory recently set out to better understand what this recent finding could mean for hadronization, the process by which quarks and gluons form hadrons, which are particles that can be detected experimentally. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, introduces a new approach to probe and study hadronization by leveraging quantum entanglement.

“Our study originated from the intriguing observation that the internal structure of protons at high energies exhibits maximal quantum entanglement,” Charles Joseph Naim, corresponding author for the paper, told Phys.org.

Gold nanoclusters reveal magnetic spin’s potential role in catalytic efficiency

Recently, a team of researchers from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) consecutively removed the innermost atom and the outermost electron of a gold nanoparticle—without disturbing its overall structure. This precise manipulation allowed them to probe how the magnetic spin of the material influences its catalytic activity.

The work, led by Prof. Wu Zhikun in collaboration with Prof. Yang from the Institute of Process Engineering, CAS and Prof. Tang from Chongqing University, was published in Science Advances.

Gold nanoclusters—tiny particles composed of from a few to hundreds of —are ideal models for studying how atomic structure affects . But tuning the structure of such clusters atom by atom, especially when they’re relatively large and complex, has long been a major challenge.