physics

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.

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have announced the success of an experiment at their National Ignition Facility. With analysis of the results still underway, it would be the first net energy gain from a nuclear fusion. The news was revealed on Sunday by the Financial Times newspaper with information provided by sources with knowledge of the experiment.

The journal Nature publishes a quantum simulation of a holographic wormhole on a quantum processor. The demonstration, carried out with the Google Sycamore processor, represents a further step towards the possibility of studying quantum gravity in the laboratory.

After almost three months of delays caused by various technical problems and two hurricanes, the Artemis I mission was successfully launched this morning, the first of a programme that will take the first woman astronaut to the moon. It has 42 days ahead of it, during which the spacecraft will orbit our satellite and test the stability of this lunar orbit, because in the future a space station will be located there to receive the astronauts on their journey from Earth.

For the first time, the IceCube collaboration team has found evidence for high-energy neutrino emission from NGC 1068, an active galaxy 47 million light-years away with a supermassive black hole. The finding, made with the detector located under the Antarctic ice sheet, is published in the journal Science.