Materials science

In nonreciprocal systems, where Newton’s third law falls apart, “exceptional points” are helping researchers understand phase transitions and possibly other phenomena.

Animals sculpt the optical properties of their tissues at the nanoscale to give themselves “structural colors.” New work is piecing together how they do it.

Federica Coppari uses the world’s most powerful laser to recreate the cores of distant worlds.

The secret to making a qubit for future quantum computers might depend on knowing how to tie knots in unusual materials, argues the physicist Charlie Marcus.

The zoo of spontaneously emerging particlelike entities known as quasiparticles has grown quickly and become more and more exotic. Here are a few of the most curious and potentially useful examples.

The computational physicist Sharon Glotzer finds unifying principles that structure the chaotic dance of the particles that make up matter.

An unexpected superconductor was beginning to look like a fluke, but a new theory and a second discovery have revealed that emergent quasiparticles may be behind the effect.

Inside cells, droplets of biomolecules called condensates merge, divide and dissolve. Their dance may regulate vital processes.

Has physics reached the limits of what we can discover — or are the possibilities only just beginning?