The shape of gold nanostructures changes depending on how they are imaged. This electron-microscope image shows a nanosized cube wrapped in a gold layer. The tiny package is the result of reactions ...

A pattern of surface waves bestowed with fivefold symmetry hosts topological structures. Soon after quasicrystals made their debut in 1984, physicists realized that the ordered, nonrepeating ...

A new technique for generating solid fibers from a liquid jet is easier to model—and thus easier to control—than past methods. Transformed by light. These seven photos show a liquid streaming downward ...

The creation of modern quantum mechanics was a messy business in which many of the participants did not grasp the significance of their own discoveries. The wave nature of electrons is revealed in ...

Figure 1: Will two objects fall at the same rate in a vacuum? Galileo was the first to test this equivalence principle, and he was followed by many others, including the Apollo astronauts. Now, the ...

Top quarks and antiquarks have been detected in heavy-ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, showing that all six quark flavors were present in the Universe’s first moments. The ATLAS ...

Particle physicists are faced with a growing list of “anomalies”—experimental results that conflict with the standard model but fail to overturn it for lack of sufficient evidence. For their study of ...

Phonon lasing—coherent amplification of phonons by stimulated emission—has been achieved in a purely acoustic analog of a three-level laser scheme. What is the appeal of phonon lasers? One potential ...

After receiving a Ph.D. in applied physics from Stanford University in 2009, Jon A. Schuller took an appointment at Columbia University as a Fellow of their Energy Frontier Research Center. In this ...

In 1935, Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen (EPR) wrote a now famous paper questioning the completeness of the formalism of quantum mechanics. Rejecting the idea that a measurement on ...

Analogs to massless fermions predicted by particle physicists 80 years ago have been found in a crystalline metal and in a photonic crystal. Figure 1: Two possible Fermi surfaces (blue lines) for ...

Figure 1: An electronic version of a self-contained (autonomous) Maxwell demon. The “system” is a single-electron box connected to an external potential. The demon monitors the charge on the box.