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Category: particle physics

Magnets Could Become the Next Generation of Gravitational Wave Detectors

When Einstein’s predicted ripples in spacetime pass through magnetic fields, they cause the current carrying wires to dance at the gravitational wave frequency, creating potentially detectable electrical signals. Researchers have discovered that the same powerful magnets used to hunt for dark matter could double as gravitational wave detectors. This means experiments already searching for the universe’s most elusive particles could simultaneously capture collisions between black holes and neutron stars, getting two of physics’ most ambitious experiments for the price of one, while potentially opening entirely new windows into the universe’s most violent events.

Dark matter could create dark dwarfs at the center of the Milky Way

Dark matter is one of nature’s most confounding mysteries. It keeps particle physicists up at night and cosmologists glued to their supercomputer simulations. We know it’s real because its mass prevents galaxies from falling apart. But we don’t know what it is.

Dark matter doesn’t like other matter and may prefer its own company. While it doesn’t seem to interact with regular baryonic matter, it could possibly react with itself and self-annihilate. It needs a tightly-packed environment to do that, and that may lead to a way astrophysicists can finally detect it.

New theoretical research outlines how this could happen and states that sub-stellar objects, basically , could host the process. The research is titled “Dark dwarfs: -powered sub-stellar objects awaiting discovery at the ,” and it’s published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. The lead author is Djuna Croon, a and assistant professor in the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology in the Department of Physics at Durham University.

Scientists Confirm The Existence Of Element 117

The official Periodic Table of the Elements is one step closer to adding element 117 to its ranks. That’s thanks to an international team of scientists that was able to successfully create several atoms of element 117, which is currently known as Ununseptium until it’s given an official name.

The paper for this experiment has been published in Physical Review Letters.

Element 117 was first created in a joint collaboration between American and Russian scientists back in 2010. However, before an element can be officially added to the Periodic Table of Elements, its discovery must be independently confirmed.

Energy–speed relationship of quantum particles challenges Bohmian mechanics

The study of the relationship between particle speed and negative kinetic energy, arising in regions in which, according to classical mechanics, particles are not allowed to enter, reveals behaviour that appears to contradict the predictions of Bohmian mechanics.

Higgs-boson properties clarified through decay pattern analysis

The ATLAS collaboration finds evidence of Higgs-boson decays to muons and improves sensitivity to Higgs-boson decays to a Z boson and a photon.

Studies of the properties of the Higgs boson featured prominently in the program of the major annual physics conference, the 2025 European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics (EPS-HEP), held this week in Marseille, France. Among the results presented by the ATLAS collaboration were two results narrowing in on two exceptionally rare Higgs-boson decays.

The first process under study was the Higgs-boson decay into a pair of muons (H→μμ). Despite its scarceness—occurring in just 1 out of every 5,000 Higgs decays—this process provides the best opportunity to study the Higgs interaction with second-generation fermions and shed light on the origin of mass across different generations. Up to now, the interactions of the Higgs boson with have only been observed for particles from the third, heaviest, generation: the tau lepton and the top and bottom quarks.

Can the Large Hadron Collider snap string theory?

In physics, there are two great pillars of thought that don’t quite fit together. The Standard Model of particle physics describes all known fundamental particles and three forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. Meanwhile, Einstein’s general relativity describes gravity and the fabric of spacetime.

However, these frameworks are fundamentally incompatible in many ways, says Jonathan Heckman, a at the University of Pennsylvania. The Standard Model treats forces as dynamic fields of particles, while general relativity treats gravity as the smooth geometry of spacetime, so gravity “doesn’t fit into physics’s Standard Model,” he explains.

In a recent paper in Physical Review Research, Heckman, Rebecca Hicks, a Ph.D. student at Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences, and their collaborators turn that critique on its head. Instead of asking what string theory predicts, the authors ask what it definitively cannot create. Their answer points to a single exotic particle that could show up at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). If that particle appears, the entire string-theory edifice would be, in Heckman’s words, “in enormous trouble.”

Cheap Catalyst Turns Acids Into Pharmaceutical Gold

Carboxylic acids are common components in bioactive compounds and serve as widely available building blocks in organic synthesis. When transformed into carboxy radicals, these acids can initiate the formation of valuable carbon-carbon and carbon-heteroatom bonds, a key step in the creation of new materials and pharmaceutical agents. Despite their utility, few existing methods rely on cost-effective catalysts.

Addressing this gap, a team from WPI-ICReDD and the University of Shizuoka developed a straightforward hydrogen atom transfer (HAT) strategy that selectively converts carboxylic acids into carboxy radicals. This method employs xanthone, a commercially available and inexpensive organic ketone, as the photocatalyst. The study was recently published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The KATRIN experiment sets new constraints on general neutrino interactions

Neutrinos are elementary particles that are predicted to be massless by the standard model of particle physics, yet their observed oscillations suggest that they do in fact have a mass, which is very low. A further characteristic of these particles is that they only weakly interact with other matter, which makes them very difficult to detect using conventional experimental methods.

The KATRIN (Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino) experiment is a large-scale research effort aimed at precisely measuring the effective mass of the electron anti-neutrino using advanced instruments located at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany.

The researchers involved in this experiment recently published the results of a new analysis of data from the second measurement campaign in Physical Review Letters, which set new constraints on interactions involving neutrinos that could arise from unknown physics that is not explained by the standard model, also known as general neutrino interactions.

New method replaces nickel and cobalt in battery for cleaner, cheaper lithium-ion batteries

A team of McGill University researchers, working with colleagues in the United States and South Korea, has developed a new way to make high-performance lithium-ion battery materials that could help phase out expensive and/or difficult-to-source metals like nickel and cobalt.

The team’s breakthrough lies in creating a better method of producing “disordered rock-salt” (DRX) cathode particles, an alternative battery material. Until now, manufacturers struggled to control the size and quality of DRX particles, which made them unstable and hard to use in manufacturing settings. The researchers addressed that problem by developing a method to produce uniformly sized, highly crystalline particles with no grinding or post-processing required.

“Our method enables mass production of DRX cathodes with consistent quality, which is essential for their adoption in and renewable energy storage,” said Jinhyuk Lee, the paper’s corresponding author and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mining and Materials Engineering.

“Australia Just Changed Batteries Forever”: Quantum Tech Unleashed With 1,000 Times the Life, Leaving Global Energy Giants Reeling in Shock

A quantum battery operates on the principles of quantum mechanics, diverging from traditional batteries which rely on ion flow for charging and discharging. In quantum batteries, energy is stored by moving electrons into higher energy states with photons acting as charge carriers. During charging, photons transfer their energy to electrons, enabling storage.

Key quantum properties, such as entanglement and superabsorption, are harnessed to enhance the charging rate. Entanglement allows particles to function cohesively during the charging or discharging process, while superabsorption increases the energy storage capacity, leading to higher energy densities. Despite their theoretical potential and scalability, practical quantum batteries have faced challenges, with existing prototypes unable to sustain energy beyond a few nanoseconds.

“This Battery Breaks Every Rule”: Scientists Unveil Groundbreaking Water Battery That Delivers 220 Full Cycles With Zero Capacity Loss or Performance Drop