Department of Physics, University of Western Australia

04/06/2026

By definition, elementary particles can't be broken into smaller pieces. But in a new theoretical study published in Physical Review Letters, Johannes Skaar and colleagues have revealed what would happen if you tried anyway for a single photon. The answer is deeply strange: attempting to cut a photo...

08/10/2025

The Nobel in Physics goes to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis concerning experiments with an electrical circuit in which they demonstrated both quantum mechanical tunnelling and quantised energy levels in a system big enough to be held in the hand.
Includes a lecturette which starts 4 minutes into in the video.
https://phys.org/news/2025-10-nobel-prize-physics-scientists-discoveries.html

Daily science news on research developments, technological breakthroughs and the latest scientific innovations

15/04/2025

https://pubs.aip.org/aip/jap/article/137/12/124503/3340828/Cosmic-ray-radiography-of-a-human-phantom

Cosmic ray muons that reach the earth's surface provide a natural source of radiation that is used for radiography. In this paper, we show that radiography usin

10/04/2025

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/breakthrough-prize-winner-gerard-t-hooft-says-quantum-mechanics-is-nonsense/?

After netting the world’s highest-paying science award, preeminent theoretical physicist Gerard ’t Hooft reflects on his legacy and the future of physics

14/03/2025

https://phys.org/news/2025-03-laser-supersolid.html

A small international team of nanotechnologists, engineers and physicists has developed a way to force laser light into becoming a supersolid. Their paper is published in the journal Nature. The editors at Nature have published a Research Briefing in the same issue summarizing the work.

18/12/2024

A group of Brazilian researchers has presented an innovative proposal to resolve a decades-old debate among theoretical physicists: How many fundamental constants are needed to describe the observable universe? Here, the term "fundamental constants" refers to the basic standards needed to measure ev...

17/12/2024

https://phys.org/news/2024-12-particle-mass.html?

For the first time, scientists have observed a collection of particles, also known as a quasiparticle, that's massless when moving one direction but has mass in the other direction. The quasiparticle, called a semi-Dirac fermion, was first theorized 16 years ago, but was only recently spotted inside...

17/12/2024

13/11/2024

https://atlas.cern/Updates/Briefing/Observation-Top-PbPb

The ATLAS Collaboration at CERN has observed top-quark pair production in lead-lead ion collisions, marking the first observation of this process in nucleus-nucleus interactions. This result represents a significant step forward in heavy-ion physics, paving the way for new measurements of the quark-...

10/10/2024

https://theconversation.com/physics-nobel-awarded-to-neural-network-pioneers-who-laid-foundations-for-ai-240833

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, the 2024 Physics Nobel laureates, developed computer systems that can memorise and learn from patterns in data.