fundamental physics – Quanta Magazine

The First Nuclear Clock Will Test if Fundamental Constants Change

Joseph Howlett — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 15:02:43 +0000

At 11:30 one night in May 2024, a graduate student, Chuankun Zhang, saw a signal that physicists have sought for 50 years. As a peak rose from the static on his monitor at the research institute JILA in Boulder, Colorado, Zhang dropped a screenshot in a group chat with his three lab mates. One by one they hopped out of bed and trickled in. After several sanity checks to make sure that what they...

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Diminishing Dark Energy May Evade the ‘Swampland’ of Impossible Universes

Steve Nadis — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 14:20:11 +0000

On the morning of April 4, physicists filed into a third-floor meeting room at Harvard University’s Jefferson Laboratory. Word had gotten out that there would be a big announcement from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration, a group of physicists who are investigating dark energy — a mysterious, repulsive form of energy that permeates the universe. The meeting room at...

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AI Starts to Sift Through String Theory’s Near-Endless Possibilities

Charlie Wood — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 14:00:56 +0000

String theory captured the hearts and minds of many physicists decades ago because of a beautiful simplicity. Zoom in far enough on a patch of space, the theory says, and you won’t see a menagerie of particles or jittery quantum fields. There will only be identical strands of energy, vibrating and merging and separating. By the late 1980s, physicists found that these “strings” can cavort in just a...

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Hopes of Big Bang Discoveries Ride on a Future Spacecraft

Elise Cutts — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 14:50:47 +0000

At a conference in Japan a few years ago, David Dunsky attended a talk about gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time created when massive objects like stars and black holes accelerate. Dunsky was a graduate student in particle physics at the time, and his interests seemingly lay elsewhere. Particle physicists seek the more fundamental truth underpinning the physical rules we’re...

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Dark Energy May Be Weakening, Major Astrophysics Study Finds

Charlie Wood — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 15:00:41 +0000

Physicists have deduced subtle hints that the mysterious “dark” energy that drives the universe to expand faster and faster may be slightly weakening with time. It’s a finding that has the potential to shake the foundations of physics. “If true, it would be the first real clue we have gotten about the nature of dark energy in 25 years,” said Adam Riess, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins...

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