physics

A team of researchers has performed the most comprehensive coordinated comparison of optical clocks - a type of high-precision atomic clock - to date, running them simultaneously in six different countries. According to the authors, who publish the results in the journal Optica, the work “supports progress toward a redefinition of the second” and could serve to “develop entirely new applications and advance scientific projects that depend on time and frequency.”

An international team has successfully sent quantum messages 254 kilometres away using an existing telecommunications network in Germany. A quantum Internet would theoretically be faster and more secure, and this demonstration suggests that this type of communication can be achieved in real-world conditions. The results are published in the journal Nature.

Thousands of people congregate at the San Fermín festival in Pamplona. By analysing camera images from the Plaza Consistorial during the chupinazo in four editions, a team has modelled what the movement of this human tide looks like. The physical theory of dense crowds can be applied in other circumstances, say the authors, who include scientists from the University of Navarra. In their paper published in Nature, they offer a strategy to anticipate these movements in real time and help prevent events such as avalanches.

UNESCO has proclaimed 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. This initiative aims to ‘raise public awareness of the importance of quantum science and its applications’, as well as to celebrate and recognise 100 years since the initial development of quantum mechanics. But why is this scientific discipline so relevant? We explore with experts the key issues and the impact of quantum science and technology on the development of our society.

The 'father' of the Higgs boson, British physicist Peter Higgs, died on Monday at the age of 94 at his home in Edinburgh (UK), according to a statement released today by the University of Edinburgh. Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013, along with François Englert, for having predicted in 1964 the existence of a new particle, the so-called Higgs boson. This particle was confirmed almost half a century later by experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L'Huillier for developing "experimental methods generating attosecond light pulses". These advances made it possible to observe the motion of particles in atoms on the shortest time scale captured by humans. An attosecond is a unit of time equivalent to one trillionth of a second, roughly the time it takes light to travel the diameter of an atom.

A team of South Korean researchers claims to have achieved a superconductor at room temperature and pressure for the first time in history. If true, it would mean a revolution in physics with implications for the whole of society. The material, called LK-99, is based on a copper-doped lead apatite framework. The article is a preprint and can be read in the ArXiv repository, where the research community shares their work before it is reviewed for publication in a scientific journal.

The IceCube neutrino observatory, built deep under Antarctic ice, has detected the emission of high-energy neutrinos from within the Milky Way. According to the research, published in the journal Science, this is the first time scientists have obtained solid evidence for the emission of these particles within our galaxy, as they had previously identified high-energy neutrino emission from extragalactic sources.

The International Pulsar Timing Array (IPTA) consortium has discovered evidence for the existence of a cosmic background of gravitational waves. The results, published by different IPTA consortia in several scientific journals, would show that this cosmic background would be the result of collisions of supermassive black holes. In 2015, researchers from the LIGO and Virgo collaborations made the first direct observation of gravitational waves caused by the collision of two stellar-mass black holes. These waves oscillate several times per second. What the consortia have now found are gravitational waves emitted by supermassive binary black holes at the centre of galaxies, waves that oscillate on timescales of many years.

Two decades of work with numerous setbacks, a budget of more than 10 billion dollars and a journey of 1.5 million kilometres to provide us with images of the universe in unprecedented detail have led Science magazine to choose the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as the science breakthrough of 2022.