What We're Reading

The National Ignition Facility has produced a plasma in which self-heating locally surpasses not only the external heating but also all loss mechanisms, fulfilling the so-called Lawson criterion for fusion ignition. The result brings the scheme tantalizingly close to a holy grail of the field: getting fusion to produce a net energy greater than that contained in the driving laser pulses.

A team of physicists, including Philipp Dumitrescu, who was at the Flatiron Institute when the experiments were carried out, have devised a mind-bending error-correction technique that could dramatically boost the performance of quantum computers.

The creation of an “extra” dimension in time could change the way we think about matter as well as helping build quantum computers that could themselves change the world, according to researchers at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Quantum Physics and their collaborators who found it.

NPR speaks to CCA astrophysicist Rachel Somerville, who is among the many researchers engulfed by a whirlwind of possible discoveries from the $10 billion telescope's early sightings.

A machine-learning algorithm that includes a quantum circuit generates realistic handwritten digits and performs better than its classical counterpart.

Announced today from the White House with NASA, the image shows a small portion of the sky — comparable to the span of a grain of sand held at arm’s length — enhanced considerably by the JWST’s light-collecting power. The result is a view of thousands of galaxies. The more remote ones date to a time more than 13 billion years ago, not long after the dawn of the universe, and have been magnified into view by a massive galaxy in the foreground.

Using a pair of meter-long, vibrating metal beams, scientists have made a new measurement of “Big G,” also known as Newton’s gravitational constant, researchers report July 11 in Nature Physics. The technique could help physicists get a better handle on the poorly measured constant.

Maryna Viazovska, a Ukrainian who is now a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, is known for proofs for higher-dimensional equivalents of the stacking of equal- sized spheres. She is also only the second woman ever to win the Fields Medal.

With a new host of questions, CERN plans to restart the particle accelerator this month to possibly better understand cosmic unknowns like dark matter.

Jason Hunt, an astrophysicist at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics, is among the many researchers who are benefiting from the latest data release from the ESA's probe. This new release is adding significant detail to our understanding of the nearly 2 billion objects in the Milky Way.