Condensed matter physics

Physicists discovered strange supersolids, constructed new kinds of superconductors, and continued to make the case that the cosmos is far weirder than anyone suspected.

Three new species of superconductivity were spotted this year, illustrating the myriad ways electrons can join together to form a frictionless quantum soup.

New observations of microscopic vortices confirm the existence of a paradoxical phase of matter that may also arise inside neutron stars.

Electrons have been seen uniting into entities with fractions of electric charge, this time without a magnetic field coaxing them into it.

Scientists are pursuing materials that can conduct electricity with perfect efficiency under ambient conditions. In this episode, the physicist Siddharth Shanker Saxena tells co-host Janna Levin about what makes this hunt so difficult and consequential.

A series of advances seemed to promise the impossible: the existence of quantum states that would never, ever fall into disarray. But physicists are now discovering that the pull of disorder may not be so easily overcome.

In an atomically thin stack of semiconductors, a mechanism unseen in any natural substance causes electrons’ spins to align.

From the smallest scales to the largest, the physical world provided no shortage of surprises this year.

For 50 years, physicists have understood current as a flow of charged particles. But a new experiment has found that in at least one strange material, this understanding falls apart.