Physics

From the ashes: Near Chernobyl, a war-torn town plans to relaunch nuclear research

A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 378, Issue 6624.Download PDF SLAVUTYCH, UKRAINE—In one of the last acts of camaraderie in a fractured nation, Soviet workers from the Baltics to the Caucasus converged on a pine forest in the late 1980s to build a Ukrainian city from scratch. Slavutych was a new home …

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Discovery of deep space: the Oddball gamma-ray burst forces a revision of the theoretical framework

Discovery of deep space: the Oddball gamma-ray burst forces a revision of the theoretical framework

Artist rendering. Credit: Anyu Lei and Jing Chen, Nanjing University School of Arts The mysteries of the cosmos continue to amaze astronomers, and each new sighting is a chance to deepen – or shake up – our understanding of the universe. In the December 7 issue of the journal Nature, an international team of astrophysicists …

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Where is the power of nuclear fusion?  We could be at a technological turning point

Where is the power of nuclear fusion? We could be at a technological turning point

Mega-amp spherical tokamak in Oxfordshire, UK. Credit: Courtesy of MAST, CC BY-SA Our society faces the great challenge of providing sustainable, safe and affordable means of generating energy, while trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by 2050. To date, fusion energy developments, which potentially tick all of these boxes, have been funded …

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Study explores possibility that dark photons could be a heat source for intergalactic gas

Study explores possibility that dark photons could be a heat source for intergalactic gas

(Top panel) Fit to Doppler parameter distribution and Lyman-alpha forest column density distribution function at z=0.1 assuming a maximum contribution of dark photon heating to linewidths. The contours show the projection of the 68% and 95% intervals for the mass and the mixing parameter of the dark photon. Colors correspond to different assumptions about the …

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Study explores possibility that dark photons could be a heat source for intergalactic gas

Study explores possibility that dark photons could be a heat source for intergalactic gas

(Top panel) Fit to Doppler parameter distribution and Lyman-alpha forest column density distribution function at z=0.1 assuming a maximum contribution of dark photon heating to linewidths. The contours show the projection of the 68% and 95% intervals for the mass and the mixing parameter of the dark photon. Colors correspond to different assumptions about the …

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'Quantum time flip' moves light forward and backward in time simultaneously

‘Quantum time flip’ moves light forward and backward in time simultaneously

For the first time, physicists have shown that light travels forwards and backwards simultaneously in time. The new technique could help scientists improve quantum computing and understand quantum gravity. By splitting a photon, or a packet of light, using a special optical crystal, two independent teams of physicists have achieved what they describe as a …

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Quantum Processor Reveals Photon Bound States Remain Strong Even Amid Chaos

Quantum Processor Reveals Photon Bound States Remain Strong Even Amid Chaos

A ring of superconducting qubits can host “bound states” of microwave photons, where photons tend to clump together on neighboring qubit sites. Credit: Google Quantum AI The researchers used a quantum processor to make the microwave photons unusually sticky. They coaxed them into clumping together into bound states, then discovered that these photon clusters survived …

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World's oldest DNA discovery breaks million-year record

World’s oldest DNA discovery breaks million-year record

Reconstruction of the Kap København formation two million years ago at a time when the temperature was significantly warmer than far northern Greenland today. 1 credit Two-million-year-old DNA has been identified for the first time, opening a new “game-changing” chapter in evolutionary history. Microscopic fragments of environmental DNA have been found in Ice Age sediments …

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