Physics in Pictures by Topic
Subatomic
LaserFest Photons
Photons are the particles that make up light. Who knew that they were also soft and cuddly? Welcome to LaserFest 2010!
Supernovae Surprise
There's no avoiding the tragic end of a large star's life: it dies in a catastrophic explosion called a supernova.
Speed Trap
Like traffic cops with radar guns, physicists can now gauge the speed of electrons in a current.
Smashing Ions
Brookhaven National Laboratory's new Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) smashes two high-energy beams of gold nuclei together head-on, in an attempt to create a state of matter, called quark-gluon plasma, that last existed only ten millionths of a second after the Big Bang.
Crystal Clear
When an all-electron Wigner crystal (top) is squeezed too tightly, the electron wave functions begin to overlap (middle), and then create a quantum liquid (bottom).
Radioactive Hotdog?
A spark flying between a metal doorknob and your hand is an intricate chain of electrical events.
Tiny Tubes
Entangled pairs of particles, in which measuring the state of one simultaneously determines the state of the other, are a central part of proposed schemes for quantum cryptography and teleportation.
Tracking Traveling Excitons
Researchers have tracked their first exciton. A team of researchers recently reported that they imaged the wave-like motion of the particle, which is essential to the operation of lasers in CD players and grocery scanners.
Mini-BooNE
MiniBooNE (mini booster neutrino experiment), a new experiment at Fermilab, has just begun its search for neutrino oscillations.
Mesoscopic Mystery
Researchers continue to push rival interpretations of a vexing problem in mesoscopic physics, the size scale where quantum and classical worlds co-exist.
The World's Largest Cyclotron
If you are asked how a watch works, one of the first things you might do is open one up and look at the parts inside.
In Synch
Electrons don't normally know one direction from another, so researchers were perplexed a few years ago when they found a cold plane of electrons suddenly choosing to conduct many times better in one direction than in the perpendicular one.
T-ray Vision
X-rays may be as familiar as your local dentist's office or airport security checkpoint, but it's unlikely that you've ever encountered a powerful T-ray—a beam of terahertz radiation.
Turning Circles
Quantum communication schemes using light normally rely on the two types of photon polarization to encode information a bit at a time.
The Incredible Shrinking Nucleus
Objects in nucleus may be smaller than they appear. At least, that's what current research suggests.
High-Speed Chase
Relativity theory insists that no matter what speed you choose for your spaceship--snail-like or close to light speed--the laws of physics always look the same.
The Circle Game
Like a planet orbiting the sun, some ideas keep coming around. In the 1920s, the inventors of quantum mechanics scuttled the notion that an atom behaves like a tiny solar system.
Catching Neutrinos
The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) in Ontario, Canada has been designed to "catch" neutrinos from the sun.
Catch a Quasiperiodic Wave
Quasicrystals are unusual metallic alloys whose atoms are arranged in orderly patterns that are not quite crystalline.
Transparent Nuclei
A two-quark particle shot into a large nucleus is ordinarily absorbed, as its quarks interact with the nuclear quarks. But in some cases it can sail right through. Now a research team has reported that they have observed this so-called color transparency in the lower energy realm, where such quark-scale effects aren't normally seen. The results—which are somewhat controversial—could help theorists who hope to bring the clean calculations of high energy, particle physics down into the messy world of lower energy nuclear physics.