Condensed matter physics

Renormalization has become perhaps the single most important advance in theoretical physics in 50 years.

Push or crush a new class of materials, and they’ll undergo record-breaking temperature changes.

At the molecular level, glass looks like a liquid. But an artificial neural network has picked up on hidden structure in its molecules that may explain why glass is rigid like a solid.

One hundred years after it was proposed, the Ising model is used to understand everything from magnets to brains.

Anyons don’t fit into either of the two known particle kingdoms. To find them, physicists had to erase the third dimension.

Sometimes a mirror that reflects 99.9999% of light isn’t good enough.

Glass is anything that’s rigid like a crystal, yet made of disordered molecules like a liquid. To understand why it exists, researchers are attempting to create the perfect, still-hypothetical “ideal glass.”

As the founding director of a new institute for fundamental research in Rwanda, the physicist Omololu Akin-Ojo hopes to stem the brain drain of Africa’s brightest minds.

Snow crystals come in two main types. The “pope” of snowflake physics has a new theory that explains why.