The researchers behind this work hail from the Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics in Beijing, with collaborators at Tsinghua University. Led by Tianhao Liu and Linjie Song, and including Qiaoran Wu and Wenming Zou, the team tackles a striking question about how many distinct states can exist when several quantum fluids share a…
The night sky isn’t just darkness; it’s a data frontier begging to be read. Weather satellites keep watch around the clock, but when the Sun has gone to bed, the most humanly intuitive view—the visible-light canvas of the world—goes dim. For decades, meteorologists have relied on infrared signals to peer through clouds and darkness, like…
Gravitational waves have turned the cosmos into a kind of orchestra, where the dirge of collapsing stars and the hush of spacetime murmurs carry stories we can hear only through precise detectors and careful theory. In the latest turn of that story, a team led by Alejandra Gonzalez, with collaborators from across Europe and North…
The conventional wisdom among financial experts often paints a bleak picture of homeownership. Many advise against it, viewing houses as illiquid, risky assets that underperform stock investments over the long haul. But a new study from researchers at California State University, Fullerton; the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; and the University of Missouri,…
What autoformalization is and why it could matter Mathematics is a language with two dialects. The everyday speech we use to describe a problem is not the same as the precise, machine-checkable language used by proof assistants such as Lean, Coq, or Isabelle. Autoformalization is the project of teaching a computer to translate a natural…
In the quiet, humming world of quantum cryptography, the dream is simple: a group of people should share a secret that no one—not even a boundless computer—can crack. The physics of light and information promises that kind of security, but the real world isn’t perfectly quiet. Noise, lost signals, and finite data can turn a…
Plasma, the fourth state of matter, behaves like a living, turbulent ocean. In one charged sea, waves ripple, collide, and sometimes form solitary packets that glide along without losing their shape—solitons. For decades, physicists have loved the idea that the same mathematics describing tiny ripples in a fluid could also capture giant, robust waves in…
The Large Hadron Collider keeps throwing curves at our understanding of the tiniest building blocks. Among the most intriguing players on the stage are the top quarks, heavy enough to act like test particles for the quantum rules that bind the subatomic world. Their spins don’t just flip and flop in isolation; they whisper about…
In the grand cathedral of Kahler geometry, holomorphic 1-forms are like the pipes of a cosmic organ. They carry music about the shape of space itself. When such a form vanishes somewhere, it’s as if a note goes silent mid‑melody, hinting at hidden twists and fractures in the structure. For years, mathematicians have asked what…
Cosmology often feels like a grand detective story where the clues are not just galaxies and supernovae, but the deepest rules that govern reality itself. A new paper from a team anchored in Greek institutions takes a bold turn in that story by asking what happens if the very thermodynamic rules we apply at horizons…
Our digital lives are increasingly interwoven with 5G networks, the backbone of modern communication. Yet, beneath the surface of seamless connectivity lies a critical vulnerability. A new study from CSIRO’s Data61 in Australia, led by researchers Nazatul H. Sultan and Xinlong Guan, exposes a significant flaw in the 5G-Authentication and Key Agreement (5G-AKA) protocol –…
In the intricate dance of quantum information theory, completely positive operators play a starring role. These mathematical objects, which can be thought of as the quantum equivalent of certain matrix transformations, underpin much of how we understand quantum systems and their evolution. At the heart of recent advances lies a mysterious quantity called the capacity…
Imagine trying to teach a computer to understand video the way a human does. It’s not just about recognizing objects; it’s about understanding the flow of time, the sequence of events, and the subtle cues that tell us what’s important. Now, a team at Nanyang Technological University and ByteDance Inc. is pushing the boundaries of…
The discovery of hidden-charm pentaquarks over the past decade rewired how physicists think about what can bind quarks. These exotic states, barely defying the neat three-quark picture, emerged as subtle bumps in collider data and suggested that the strong force is willing to improvise more complex arrangements than textbook baryons and mesons. The new paper…
What holds the universe’s smallest building blocks together? It’s a question that has propelled particle physics for a century, and the answers keep getting stranger. The familiar picture of the proton as a neat package of quarks, glued together by gluons, is now giving way to something far more dynamic and weird, especially when those…
Peering into the Complexity of Multiplex Networks Imagine a vast network, not just of connections, but of interconnected layers. This isn’t some abstract concept; it’s the reality of many systems we encounter daily. Think of international trade, where countries (nodes) interact through various commodities (layers). Or consider brain networks, where brain regions (nodes) interact differently…
Imagine a doctor using an AI to diagnose a heart condition from an electrocardiogram (ECG). Or a factory supervisor relying on algorithms to predict when a machine will break down, based on sensor readings. These are time series problems – data points collected over time, revealing patterns that can save lives and money. But what…
When scientists talk about computing with light, they’re often chasing speed, energy efficiency, and a kind of hardware that behaves like a brain without the fragility of silicon. The newest twist in that quest comes from a collaboration spanning the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Maryland, Princeton University, and the University of Cambridge. The…
The city is a living organism, its streets veins through which countless vehicles, pedestrians, and buses move in a rhythm that never quite repeats. Researchers are getting closer to giving traffic signals a form of perception—so they can respond not just to a fixed script, but to the actual beat of daily life. A recent…
What holds a galaxy together? It’s a question that seems simple, but the answer weaves together gravity, electromagnetism, and the very fabric of spacetime. Now, a physicist at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena has peered into the theoretical innards of a galaxy made of charged dust, asking a fundamental question: is it stable? Think of a galaxy not…