Physicists have finally watched positronium, a short‑lived atom made of an electron and its antimatter twin, behave like a rippling quantum wave instead of a tiny billiard ball. In a set of ...

At the smallest scales of nature, the rules of the world shift in ways that can feel unsettling and beautiful at the same ...

Scientists have demonstrated that atoms can exhibit wave-like behavior, challenging long-held assumptions that experiments of this nature were impossible and opening new doors in quantum physics. The ...

Scientists have observed “bending” atoms using a crystal grating—an experiment once believed impossible at the high energies required. The authors of a new, non-peer reviewed study detail how the a ...

When last we saw [xoreaxeax], he had built a lens-less optical microscope that deduced the structure of a sample by recording ...

I learned in October 2022’s Breakthrough that the spikes of stars in high-power photos are called diffraction spikes. Why do they appear as two crosses at 45 degrees to each other? The diffraction ...

Condensed-matter physics and materials science have a silo problem. Although researchers in these fields have access to vast amounts of data – from experimental records of crystal structures and ...