Physics News

• On February 26, 2024, an ion collision conducted by physicists at the RHIC particle accelerator at the US Brookhaven National Laboratory created the strongest magnetic field in the Universe. It existed for a fraction of a second, but it was 10,000 times more powerful than the magnetic fields generated by neutron stars in space.

• 2023 – Nobel Laureates in Physics – Anne L’Huillier (France), Ferenc Krausz (Hungary) and Pierre Agostini (USA) for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter

• On September 28, 2023, the first direct observation of antihydrogen atoms falling under the influence of Earth’s gravity revealed that it affects them in the same way as ordinary matter. The discovery made by the ALPHA collaboration of physicists shows that antigravity does not exist.

• On June 5, 2023, researchers working at the ST40 spherical tokamak heated the plasma to a record 8.6 kiloelectron volts, equivalent to an ion temperature of over a hundred million Kelvin.

• On March 31, 2023, physicists for the first time managed to observe the simultaneous birth of four top quarks at the Large Hadron Collider (CERN).

• On December 14, 2022, the energy obtained by thermonuclear fusion at the NIF (Livermore National Laboratory) laser facility exceeded the energy of laser radiation for the first time.

• 2022 – Nobel Laureates in Physics – Alain Aspect (France), Anton Zeilinger (Austria) and John Clauser (United States) for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.

• On September 26, 2022, NASA’s DART space probe, during an experimental mission, crashed into asteroid 65803 Didymus in a controlled manner for the first time in history. The purpose of the mission is to develop a strategy to protect the Earth from asteroids.

• On February 11, 2022, astronomers report the discovery of Alcyoneus, the largest known galaxy, 5 million parsecs (16.3 million light-years) in diameter.

• 2021 – Nobel Laureates in Physics – Klaus Hasselmann (Germany) and Syukuro Manabe (Japan) for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming and Giorgio Parisi (Italy) for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.

• On May 20, 2021, a new record high resolution for atomic imaging is reported, with instrumental blurring reduced to less than 20 picometres.

• On March 9, 2021, the world’s fastest Fugaku supercomputer was brought to full capacity in Japan.

• On January 14, 2021, the Dark Energy Survey Project released the results of observations, including a catalog of almost 700 million astronomical objects.

• 2020 – Nobel Laureates in Physics – Roger Penrose (United Kingdom) for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity; Reinhard Genzel (Germany) and Andrea Ghez (United States) for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.

• In 2020, physicists from South Korea set a new world record for the KSTAR tokamak type magnetic plasma installation. Scientists managed to hold high-temperature plasma for a record 20 seconds at an ion temperature of over 100 million degrees

• On September 14, 2020, a «marker of life» (phosphine gas) was found in the atmosphere of Venus in an amount that cannot be explained by known abiogenic processes, so it is considered a possibility for the existence of microbes on this planet.

• 2019 – Nobel Laureates in Physics – Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz (Switzerland) for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star; James Peebles (Canada) for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology.

• In October 2019, Google announced the achievement of quantum advantage – the ability of quantum computers to perform calculations that can not be performed on conventional computers. Calculation time can be reduced by several thousand times.

• The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration observed the supermassive black hole at the center of M87, finding the dark central shadow in accordance with General Relativity, further demonstrating the power of this 100 year-old theory. 

• In March, 2019 to the World wide web the Internet 30 years were executed (30 facts about the Internet).

• 26th General Conference on Weights and Measures has made the decision – kilogram, ampere, kelvin, and mole were redefined at this meeting, in terms new permanently fixed values of the Planck constant, elementary charge, Boltzmann constant and Avogadro constant, respectively.

• 2018 – Nobel Laureates in Physics – Gerard Mourou (France), Donna Strickland (Canada) for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics”, in particular “for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses & Arthur Ashkin (United States) for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics”, in particular “for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems.

• 2017 – Nobel Laureates in Physics – Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, Barry Barish (all United States) for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.

• Evidence for light-by-light scattering in heavy-ion collisions with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

• IBM 50-qubit quantum computer

• 2016 – Nobel Laureates in Physics – David J. Thouless, F. Duncan M. Haldane, John M. Kosterlitz (all United Kingdom) for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter

• In 2016, participants in the LIGO project announced that they had managed for the first time to record gravitational waves caused by the collapse of two black holes, which occurred 1.3 billion years ago.

• 2015 – Nobel Laureates in Physics – Takaaki Kajita (Japan), Arthur B. McDonald (Canada) for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass