What We're Reading

A chameleon-like force that shifts its nature based on its environment could explain a major physics quandary: how the mysterious substance called dark energy is compelling the cosmos to expand faster and faster. But research published recently in Nature Physics casts doubt on some chameleon theories.

Researchers at the University of Chicago and colleagues have identified a way of manipulating the spin states of the molecular qubits by placing them in an asymmetric chemical environment. The resulting spin states are more stable against noise from fluctuating magnetic fields than those in symmetric environments.

Chiara Mingarelli, an astrophysicist at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics, describes the effects when two galaxies — and the supermassive black holes at these galaxies' centers — merge into one.

For decades, scientists have been mystified about what happens to stuff that falls into a black hole. The quandary is called the black hole information paradox, and it has stopped physics in its tracks. But in recent years, scientists have made a breakthrough that may finally solve the puzzle and begin to show how black holes really work.

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.