A Century Later, Ramanujan’s Pi Equations Are Helping Physicists Unlock the Secrets of Nature
In 1914, Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan published a short paper detailing several unusual formulas for calculating the value…
‘Zombie Stars’ Might Be a Beacon in Our Search for Dark Matter
As physicist Cumrun Vafa once told me, puzzles in science often come in pairs, each serving as the…
That Plate You Just Dropped Followed a Weirdly Predictable Rule You’ve Never Heard Of
One innate (perhaps underappreciated) function of physics is to explain and generalize how stuff works in the real…
Learning quantum states of continuous-variable systems
Trace distance The trace distance between two quantum states ρ1 and ρ2 is defined as $${d}_{{\rm{tr}}}(\;{\rho }_{1},{\rho }_{2}):=\frac{1}{2}\|{\rho…
Fermi polarons under strain-induced pseudomagnetic fields
Pseudospin in strained TMDs The spatial symmetry of TMDs dictates that a linearly polarized photon in a state…
Reality Is Too Complex For Any Cosmic Computer Simulation, Study Suggests
How do we know we’re not living in a computer simulation? Is it even possible to tell? For…
Does gravity produce quantum weirdness? Proposal divides physicists
Physicists are questioning whether gravity can produce quantum entanglement between two masses.Credit: David Parker/Science Photo Library The nature…
Inadequacy of the Casimir force for explaining a strong attractive force in a micrometre-sized narrow-gap re-entrant cavity
Pate, J., Goryachev, M., Chiao, R., Sharping, J. & Tobar, M. Casimir spring and dilution in macroscopic cavity…
6 Times Einstein Missed the Mark, but Still Changed Physics
Albert Einstein is undeniably one of the greatest names in physics. But Einstein, for all his contributions to…
Chaos controlled and disorder driven phase transitions induced by breaking permutation symmetry
Solvable case of \(p=0\), generic initial coherent states It is both instructive and interesting to first examine the…