Research Highlights

50 years ago Roger Penrose described a set of aperiodic tilings, now named after him, that have fascinated artists, mathematicians and physicists ever since.

90 years after Eugene Wigner predicted the formation of an ordered electron state, direct observations of a lattice of electrons in bilayer graphene not only verify the existence of a Wigner crystal but find unexpected physics.

The ATLAS Collaboration at CERN used data from 13 TeV proton–proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider to observe for the first time entanglement between a pair of top quarks.

No sign of sterile neutrinos was found in the latest, and most extensive, analysis done on data taken by the STEREO experiment and yet, the case is not closed.

A paper in Physical Review Letters identifies topological features in the phonon spectrum of graphene.

A paper in Nature Photonics uses ambient air to deflect the path of high-power laser beams.

A paper in Physical Review X reports a new, faster, algorithm for Metropolis Monte Carlo simulations of systems with long-range interactions.

A paper in Nature Communications reports experiments and simulations of spherical particles that help show how finite numbers of spheres pack in practice.

Two recent studies report on progress in using 2D materials for photonic waveguides.

20 years ago, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to to Vitaly Ginzburg, Alexei Abrikosov and Anthony Leggett.

40 years ago the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and William Alfred Fowler.

60 years ago the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Eugene Wigner, J. Hans D. Jensen and Maria Goeppert Mayer.

80 years ago, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Otto Stern.

100 years ago, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Robert Millikan.

Papers in Science Advances and Science present strategies for autonomous control of robots.

Astroparticle physicists met for the 38th edition of the biennial series of the International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2023), which took place in late July in Nagoya, Japan.

A paper in Nature Communications shows that a hyperbolic map can still be useful for navigating a real-world network, even if the information about the network is incomplete.

Twenty-five years ago, Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz published ‘Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks’, a paper that helped kickstart the modern era of network science.

A paper in Physical Review E shows that in several real-world networks, the number of cliques grows faster than the number of links, and the number of big cliques grows even faster than the number of small cliques.

A paper in Science Advances puts forward a framework for quantifying the level of homophily in group interactions, and shows that simple-seeming definitions of group homophily are constrained by combinatorics in ways that are not immediately obvious.