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Category: physics

AI helps solve decades-old maze in frustrated magnet physics

The study, conducted by Brookhaven theoretical physicist Weiguo Yin and described in a recent paper published in Physical Review B, is the first paper emerging from the “AI Jam Session” earlier this year, a first-of-its-kind event hosted by DOE and held in cooperation with OpenAI to push the limits of general-purpose large language models applied to science research. The event brought together approximately 1,600 scientists across nine host locations within the DOE national laboratory complex. At Brookhaven, more than 120 scientists challenged and evaluated the capabilities of OpenAI’s latest step-based logical reasoning AImodel built for complex problem solving.

Yin’s AI study focused on a class of advanced materials known as frustrated magnets. In these systems, the electron spins—the tiny magnetic moments carried by each electron—cannot settle on an orientation because competing interactions pull them in different directions. These materials have unique and fascinating properties that could translate to novel applications in the energy and information technology industries.

Making lighter work of calculating fluid and heat flow

Scientists from Tokyo Metropolitan University have re-engineered the popular Lattice-Boltzmann Method (LBM) for simulating the flow of fluids and heat, making it lighter and more stable than the state-of-the-art.

By formulating the algorithm with a few extra inputs, they successfully got around the need to store certain data, some of which span the millions of points over which a simulation is run. Their findings might overcome a key bottleneck in LBM: memory usage.

The work is published in the journal Physics of Fluids.

A new five-year survey of the Magellanic Clouds will answer some questions about our neighbors

The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are irregular dwarf galaxies and satellites of the Milky Way. The LMC is about 163,000 light-years away and the SMC is about 206,000 light-years away, and their close proximity makes them excellent laboratories for the study of galaxies in general. The Clouds are the focus of a new research group being formed at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP).

Both clouds are home to numerous objects and regions that capture astronomers’ attention. The LMC hosts the Tarantula Nebula, an extremely active star-forming region that contains some of the largest stars known. The SMC hosts NGC 346, an open star cluster that contains numerous massive stars and is still forming many high-mass stars. The Clouds also contain variable stars that act as standard candles in the cosmic distance ladder. That’s just a sample from a long list of the clouds’ interesting features.

It can be easier to study things like star formation in galaxies other than the Milky Way, because we’re inside the Milky Way and can’t see all of it. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are excellent natural laboratories to study how galaxies evolve because astronomers can see them from a good vantage point.

New method realize ohmic contacts in n-type MoS₂ transistors at cryogenic temperatures

Semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are a class of layered materials exhibiting unique optoelectronic properties that could be leveraged to develop transistors, sensors and other nanoelectronics. Despite their advantages, creating robust ohmic contacts that connect a metal electrode in transistors to semiconducting TMDs at cryogenic temperatures has proved challenging.

This has so far limited the use of these materials for either studying or developing nanoelectronics that operate at low temperatures.

In a paper in Nature Electronics, researchers at the Liaoning Academy of Materials, Shanxi University and other institutes introduced a new technique for realizing ohmic contacts to the TMD molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) at , and found that in those transistors can be surprisingly high.

New window insulation blocks heat, but not your view

Physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder have designed a new material for insulating windows that could improve the energy efficiency of buildings worldwide—and it works a bit like a high-tech version of Bubble Wrap.

The team’s material, called Mesoporous Optically Clear Heat Insulator (MOCHI), comes in large slabs or thin sheets that can be applied to the inside of any window. So far, the team only makes the material in the lab, and it’s not available for consumers. But the researchers say MOCHI is long-lasting and is almost completely transparent.

That means it won’t disrupt your view, unlike many insulating materials on the market today.

Study links vanishing of specific heats at absolute zero with principle of entropy increase

In a new publication, Professor José-María Martín-Olalla, from the Department of Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Seville, has described the direct link between the vanishing of specific heats at absolute zero—a general experimental observation established in the early 20th century—and the second law of thermodynamics.

The study, published in Physica Scripta, reinterprets a 100-year-old problem and completes the consequences of the principle of increasing entropy in the universe.

The new study follows another published in the European Physical Journal Plus in June 2025, in which Professor Martín-Olalla linked Nernst’s theorem (the other general property of matter at absolute zero) with the second law of thermodynamics, correcting an original idea of Einstein’s.

Slow changes in radio scintillation can nudge pulsar timing by billionths of a second

For 10 months, a SETI Institute-led team watched pulsar PSR J0332+5434 (also called B0329+54) to study how its radio signal “twinkles” as it passes through gas between the star and Earth. The team used the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) to take measurements between 900 and 1,956 MHz and observed slow, significant changes in the twinkling pattern (scintillation) over time.

The research is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Pulsars are spinning remnants of massive stars that emit flashes of radio waves, a type of light, in very precise and regular rhythms, due to their high rotation speed and incredible density. Scientists can use sensitive radio telescopes to measure the exact times at which pulses arrive in the search for patterns that can indicate phenomena such as low-frequency gravitational waves.

Rare high-resolution observations of a flare-prolific solar active region

Scientists have captured an exceptionally rare, high-resolution view of an active region that produced two powerful X-class solar flares—an achievement rarely possible from Earth. Using the GREGOR solar telescope in Tenerife, researchers recorded the explosive activity of the sun’s most energetic sunspot group of 2025, revealing twisted magnetic structures and the early stages of flare ignition with unprecedented detail. The flares triggered fast coronal mass ejections that lit up Earth’s skies with vivid auroras in the nights that followed.

Challenges of observing solar flares High-resolution observations of strong solar flares are extremely rare and difficult to obtain with ground-based solar telescopes.

“Strong flares occur either on the backside of the sun, or during the night, or when the weather is cloudy, or when the seeing conditions are poor, or when they are just outside the field of view, where the telescope is pointing,” says Prof. Carsten Denker head of the Solar Physics section at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) and first author of the study published in Research Notes of the AAS.

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