For two centuries, students have learned that heat flows and engines work according to rigid limits that no machine can beat.

Almost exactly 200 years ago, French physicist Sadi Carnot determined the maximum efficiency of heat engines. The Carnot ...

Particle and nuclear physics evokes evokes images of huge accelerators probing the extremes of matter. But in this round-up ...

The results are an important stress test for theories and future experiments in atomic physics. 1.97007 femtometre (quadrillionths of a metre): That’s how unimaginably tiny the radius of the atomic ...

If an atomic physicist like Nathan Lundblad could slip the surly bonds of Earth’s gravitational pull, what kind of experiment would he dream up? About a decade ago, that very question was posed to ...

According to all the known laws of physics, the Big Bang should have created a Universe consisting of both matter and ...

Physicists are learning to treat light not as an untouchable beam that simply passes through matter, but as something that ...

For nearly 50 years, physicists have dreamed of the secrets they could unlock by raising the energy state of an atom's nucleus using a laser. The achievement would allow today's atomic clocks to be ...

In March 2018, researchers launched what looks like a white, cooler-sized fridge to the International Space Station. That heavy box houses a $100 million facility known as the Cold Atom Laboratory, ...

While many Earth-based experiments have been run to try to detect dark matter, the mysterious substance remains elusive. Now physicists have proposed a new experiment that would try to find signals by ...