Physicists are now watching matter behave in a way that defies everyday intuition, with atoms and even light itself arranging into structures that are rigid like a crystal yet able to flow like a ...

Image: Phase diagram showing the destruction of superconductivity: 1) The yellow region represents the ordered phase in which all the electron pairs share the same phase (all arrows pointing up), 2) ...

Aboard the International Space Station, there's a compact lab about the size of a small refrigerator that makes some of the coldest stuff in the universe. It's called the Cold Atom Lab, and for some ...

Supersolid light, a newly discovered phase of matter, represents a groundbreaking leap in our understanding of physics. This phenomenon combines properties of both solids and superfluids, resulting in ...

The Beryllium capsule (yellow) is compressed, heated – and probed by an X-ray source (pink), the scattered photons (purple) are collected by a detector (black). The green orbitals represent the ...

At the edge of two exotic materials, scientists have discovered a new state of matter called a "quantum liquid crystal" that behaves unlike anything we've seen before. When a conductive Weyl semimetal ...

Liquid crystal is a state of matter that exhibits properties of both liquid and solid. It can flow like a liquid, while its constituent molecules are aligned as in a solid. Liquid crystal is widely ...

Physicists are preparing for the next generation of dark-matter experiments. Imagine all the matter in the universe is a set of billiard balls on a pool table, each awaiting the cue ball’s strike. If ...

A strange, glowing form of matter called dusty plasma turns out to be incredibly sensitive to magnetic fields. Researchers found that even weak fields can change how tiny particles grow, simply by ...

The neutrino “fog” is beginning to materialize. Lightweight subatomic particles called neutrinos have begun elbowing their way into the data of experiments not designed to spot them. Two experiments, ...