fermions tagged posts

Universe’s coldest fermions open portal to high-symmetry quantum realm. Japanese and U.S. physicists have used atoms about 3 billion times colder than interstellar space to open a portal to an unexplored realm of quantum magnetism.

“Unless an alien civilization is doing experiments like these right now, anytime this experiment is running at Kyoto University it is making the coldest fermions in the universe,” said Rice University’s Kaden Hazzard, corresponding theory author of a studypublished today in Nature Physics. “Fermions are not rare particles. They include things like electrons and are one of two types of particles that all matter is made of.”

A Kyoto team led by study author Yoshiro Takahashi used lasers to cool its fermions, atoms of ytterbium, within about one-billiont...

A new discovery could help scientists to understand ‘strange metals,’ a class of materials that are related to high-temperature superconductors and share fundamental quantum attributes with black holes.

Scientists understand quite well how temperature affects electrical conductance in most everyday metals like copper or silver. But in recent years, researchers have turned their attention to a class of materials that do not seem to follow the traditional electrical rules. Understanding these so-called “strange metals” could provide fundamental insights into the quantum world, and potentially help scientists understand strange phenomena like high-temperature superconductivity.

Now, a research team co-led by a Brown University physicist has added a new discovery to the strange meta...

Nearly a century after Italian physicist Ettore Majorana laid the groundwork for the discovery that electrons could be divided into halves, researchers predict that split photons may also exist, according to a study from Dartmouth and SUNY Polytechnic Institute researchers.

The finding that the building blocks of light can exist in a previously-unimaginable split form advances the fundamental understanding of light and how it behaves.

The theoretical discovery of the split photon — known as a “Majorana boson” — was published in Physical Review Letters.

“This is a major paradigm change of how we understand light in a way that was not believed to be possib...

This is an X-ray image of the Perseus galaxy cluster, approximately 240 million light-years away from Earth. The x-ray radiation emitted by galaxies and galaxy clusters still poses numerous puzzles to astrophysicists. In particular, it may provide clues to the nature of the mysterious dark matter. Credit: NASA

Physicists propose a new theory of dark matter based on the detection of unusual x-ray radiation from galaxies. It implies that dark matter particles may be very different from what is normally assumed. In particular, their theory involves dark matter particles which are extremely light – almost 100X lighter than electrons, in stark contrast to many conventional models that involve very heavy dark matter particles instead.

According to common theory, dark matter must exist because ot...