Detectors News

September 19, 2025

Top Headlines

Scientists Finally Solve a Century-old Quantum Mystery

Aug. 29, 2025 — A Vermont research team has cracked a 90-year-old puzzle, creating a quantum version of the damped harmonic oscillator. By reformulating Lamb’s classical model, they showed how atomic vibrations can be fully described while preserving quantum ...

This Tiny Iron Catalyst Could Transform the Future of Clean Energy

Aug. 27, 2025 — Hydrogen fuel cells could power cars, devices, and homes with nothing but water as a byproduct—but platinum’s cost holds them back. Chinese researchers have now unveiled a breakthrough iron-based catalyst that could rival platinum while boosting ...

Scientists Finally Solve the Mystery of What Triggers Lightning

Aug. 1, 2025 — A Penn State-led research team has unraveled the long-standing mystery of how lightning begins inside thunderclouds. Their findings offer the first quantitative, physics-based explanation for lightning initiation—and a glimpse into the stormy ...

Building Electronics That Don’t Die: Columbia's Breakthrough at CERN

July 29, 2025 — Deep beneath the Swiss-French border, the Large Hadron Collider unleashes staggering amounts of energy and radiation—enough to fry most electronics. Enter a team of Columbia engineers, who built ultra-rugged, radiation-resistant chips that now ...

Breakthrough Battery Lets Physicists Reverse Entanglement—and Rewrite Quantum Law

July 7, 2025 — Scientists have finally uncovered a quantum counterpart to Carnot’s famed second law, showing that entanglement—once thought stubbornly irreversible—can be shuffled back and forth without loss ...

Self-lighting Chip Uses Quantum Tunneling to Spot a Trillionth of a Gram

June 27, 2025 — Imagine detecting a single trillionth of a gram of a molecule—like an amino acid—using just electricity and a chip smaller than your fingernail. That’s the power of a new quantum-enabled biosensor developed at EPFL. Ditching bulky lasers, it ...

One Shot, Game Changed: How RAVEN Captured a Petawatt Laser and Supercharged Fusion Research

June 27, 2025 — Scientists have developed a groundbreaking technique called RAVEN that can capture the full complexity of an ultra-intense laser pulse in a single shot—something previously thought nearly ...

Ultra-thin Lenses That Make Infrared Light Visible

June 2, 2025 — Physicists have developed a lens with 'magic' properties. Ultra-thin, it can transform infrared light into visible light by halving the wavelength of incident ...

New Laser Smaller Than a Penny Can Measure Objects at Ultrafast Rates

June 2, 2025 — Researchers have engineered a laser device smaller than a penny that they say could power everything from the LiDAR systems used in self-driving vehicles to gravitational wave detection, one of the most delicate experiments in existence to observe ...

Laser Technique Revolutionizes Ultra-high Temperature Ceramic Manufacturing for Space, Defense Applications

May 30, 2025 — Researchers have demonstrated a new technique that uses lasers to create ceramics that can withstand ultra-high temperatures, with applications ranging from nuclear power technologies to spacecraft ...

New 2D Quantum Sensor Breakthrough Offers New Opportunities for Magnetic Field Detection

May 29, 2025 — Physicists have unveiled a breakthrough in quantum sensing by demonstrating a 2D material as a versatile platform for next-generation nanoscale vectorial ...

Machine Learning Simplifies Industrial Laser Processes

May 27, 2025 — Laser-based metal processing enables the automated and precise production of complex components, whether for the automotive industry or for medicine. However, conventional methods require time- and resource-consuming preparations. Researchers are ...

Latest Headlines

updated 10:29am EDT

Strange Signals at Absolute Zero Hint at Dark Matter’s Secrets

Sep. 16, 2025 — QROCODILE has set record-breaking sensitivity in the search for dark matter, detecting signals at energy levels once thought impossible. These results may be just the first step toward finally ...

Scientists Capture Elusive Liquid Carbon — a Diamond in Disguise

Sep. 12, 2025 — Scientists have, for the first time, successfully studied liquid carbon in the lab by combining a powerful high-performance laser with the European XFEL x-ray laser. The experiment captured fleeting ...

Black Holes Just Proved Stephen Hawking Right With the Clearest Signal Yet

Sep. 12, 2025 — Gravitational-wave astronomy has exploded since 2015, capturing hundreds of black hole and neutron star collisions. With ever-clearer signals, researchers are testing Einstein’s relativity and ...

Strange New Shapes May Rewrite the Laws of Physics

Aug. 18, 2025 — By exploring positive geometry, mathematicians are revealing hidden shapes that may unify particle physics and cosmology, offering new ways to understand both collisions in accelerators and the ...

Gold Refuses to Melt at Temperatures Hotter Than the Sun’s Surface

Aug. 18, 2025 — For the first time, researchers have measured atomic temperatures in extreme matter and found gold surviving at 19,000 kelvins, more than 14 times its melting point. The result dismantles a ...

Room-Temperature Quantum Breakthrough Freezes Motion Without Cooling

Aug. 18, 2025 — ETH Zurich scientists have levitated a tower of three nano glass spheres using optical tweezers, suppressing almost all classical motion to observe quantum zero-point fluctuations with unprecedented ...

Accidental Lab Discovery Reveals Gold’s Secret Chemistry

Aug. 11, 2025 — Scientists at SLAC unexpectedly created gold hydride, a compound of gold and hydrogen, while studying diamond formation under extreme pressure and heat. This discovery challenges gold’s reputation ...

Scientists Capture the Secret Quantum Dance of Atoms for the First Time

Aug. 11, 2025 — Using the world’s most powerful X-ray laser, researchers have captured the hidden, never-ending vibrations of atoms inside molecules. This first-ever direct view of zero-point motion reveals that ...

Scientists Freeze Quantum Motion Without Cooling

Aug. 11, 2025 — ETH Zurich researchers levitated a nano glass sphere cluster with record-setting quantum purity at room temperature, avoiding costly cooling. Using optical tweezers, they isolated quantum zero-point ...

Einstein Was Wrong: MIT Just Settled a 100-Year Quantum Debate

Aug. 2, 2025 — Physicists at MIT recreated the double-slit experiment using individual photons and atoms held in laser light, uncovering the true limits of light’s wave–particle duality. Their results proved ...

After 50 Years, Scientists Finally Catch Elusive Neutrinos Near a Reactor

Aug. 1, 2025 — A tiny 3 kg detector has made a huge leap in neutrino science by detecting rare CEvNS interactions at a Swiss reactor. This elusive effect, long predicted and hard to measure, was captured with ...

Decades of Chemistry Rewritten: A Textbook Reaction Just Flipped

July 28, 2025 — Penn State researchers have uncovered a surprising twist in a foundational chemical reaction known as oxidative addition. Typically believed to involve transition metals donating electrons to organic ...

You’ve Never Seen Atoms Like This Before: A Hidden Motion Revealed

July 26, 2025 — A pioneering team at the University of Maryland has captured the first-ever images of atomic thermal vibrations, unlocking an unseen world of motion within two-dimensional materials. Their innovative ...

Can One Vanishing Particle Shatter String Theory — and Explain Dark Matter?

July 5, 2025 — Scientists are on the trail of a mysterious five-particle structure that could challenge one of the biggest theories in physics: string theory. This rare particle—never seen before and predicted ...

Photons Collide in the Void: Quantum Simulation Creates Light out of Nothing

June 8, 2025 — Physicists have managed to simulate a strange quantum phenomenon where light appears to arise from empty space a concept that until now has only existed in theory. Using cutting-edge simulations, ...

Scientists Freeze Quantum Motion Using Ultrafast Laser Trick

June 5, 2025 — Harvard and PSI scientists have managed to freeze normally fleeting quantum states in time, creating a pathway to control them using pure electronic tricks and laser ...

New Fuel Cell Could Enable Electric Aviation

May 27, 2025 — Engineers developed a fuel cell that offers more than three times as much energy per pound compared to lithium-ion batteries. Powered by a reaction between sodium metal and air, the device could be ...

A Dental Floss That Can Measure Stress

May 23, 2025 — Scientists create a floss pick that samples cortisol within saliva as a marker of stress and quantifies it with a built-in electrode. The system uses a polymer casting technology that can be adapted ...

Controlling Quantum Motion and Hyper-Entanglement

May 23, 2025 — A new experiment encodes quantum information in the motion of the atoms and creates a state known as hyper-entanglement, in which two or more traits are linked among a pair of ...

New Biosensor Solves Old Quantum Riddle

May 23, 2025 — Researchers united insights from cellular biology, quantum computing, old-fashioned semiconductors and high-definition TVs to both create a revolutionary new quantum biosensor. In doing so, they shed ...

Mind the Band Gap! -- Researchers Create New Nanoscale Forms of Elementary Semiconductor With Tunable Electronic Properties

May 21, 2025 — Researchers have demonstrated that by using a semiconductor with flexible bonds, the material can be moulded into various structures using nano containers, without altering its composition, the ...

Tiny Microlaser Sensors Offer Supercharged Biosensing

May 19, 2025 — Researchers have developed a 3D micro-printed sensor for highly sensitive on-chip biosensing, opening new opportunities for developing high-performance, cost-effective lab-on-a-chip devices for early ...

Focused Ultrasound Halts Growth of Debilitating Brain Lesions

May 15, 2025 — A new, incision-free technique developed at UVA Health to treat debilitating brain lesions called cerebral cavernous malformations, or cavernomas, has shown great promise in early testing, halting ...

Satellite Data from Ship Captures Landslide-Generated Tsunami

May 14, 2025 — New research demonstrates shipborne navigation systems have potential to improve tsunami detection and ...

New Nanoparticle Could Make Cancer Treatment Safer, More Effective

May 14, 2025 — Scientists have created a new nanoparticle that could make ultrasound-based cancer treatments more effective and safer, while also helping prevent tumors from coming back. To make the therapy even ...

Got Data? Breastfeeding Device Measures Babies' Milk Intake in Real Time

May 14, 2025 — New device can give peace of mind and reduce anxiety for breastfeeding moms. It uses bioimpedance, which is currently used to measure body fat, and streams clinical-grade data to a smartphone or ...

Ultrasound Unlocks a Safer, Greener Way to Make Hydrogels

May 9, 2025 — Researchers have developed a new way to create hydrogels using ultrasound, eliminating the need for toxic chemical initiators. This breakthrough offers a faster, cleaner and more sustainable approach ...

Green Fabrication of Hybrid Materials as Highly Sensitive X-Ray Detectors

May 9, 2025 — New bismuth-based organic-inorganic hybrid materials show exceptional sensitivity and long-term stability as X-ray detectors, significantly more sensitive than commercial X-ray detectors. In ...

3D Printing in Vivo Using Sound

May 8, 2025 — New technique for cell or drug delivery, localization of bioelectric materials, and wound healing uses ultrasound to activate printing within the ...

The Squid Galaxy's Neutrino Game Just Leveled Up

May 8, 2025 — In space, energetic neutrinos are usually paired with energetic gamma rays. Galaxy NGC 1068, however, emits strong neutrinos and weak gamma rays, which presents a puzzle for scientists to solve. A ...