Research Highlights in 2024

A paper in Nature Physics puts forward a statistical mechanics theory to explain the risks of not having enough slack in a time-sensitive system.

A paper in Physical Review Letters sheds new light on a 40-year-old puzzle, and provides new insights into fluid mechanics.

An article in Nature reports an on-chip titanium:sapphire laser.

A paper in Science Advances provides a mechanics-based explanation for why flightless birds run the way they do.

With its capability to observe faint objects from the distant past, JWST is discovering objects that were thought to be rare; for example, compact objects that appear as little red dots are more than they seem.

80 years ago, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Isidor Isaac Rabi.

99 years ago, the 1924 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded — one year late — to Karl Manne Siegbahn.

60 years ago, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Charles Townes, Nicolay Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov.

20 years ago, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to David Gross, Frank Wilczek and David Politzer.

A model of voters, based on the Ising model, gives an explanation for why elections are often so close.

In 1924, Ernst Ising thought he showed a simple model for ferromagnetism couldn't work. 100 years later, that model, now named for him, is used across all of physics.

A paper in Royal Society Open Science presents an Ising-like model to describe changes in land use.

A paper in Nature Electronics reports a proof-of-concept Ising machine with all-to-all connectivity.

An article in Nature Communications uses an Ising-like model to determine the interactions between monomers in a component of the cyanobacterial circadian clock.

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.