At the smallest scales of nature, the rules of the world shift in ways that can feel unsettling and beautiful at the same ...

Physicists have finally watched positronium, a short‑lived atom made of an electron and its antimatter twin, behave like a rippling quantum wave instead of a tiny billiard ball. In a set of ...

Scientists have demonstrated that atoms can exhibit wave-like behavior, challenging long-held assumptions that experiments of this nature were impossible and opening new doors in quantum physics. The ...

When last we saw [xoreaxeax], he had built a lens-less optical microscope that deduced the structure of a sample by recording ...

Scientists have observed “bending” atoms using a crystal grating—an experiment once believed impossible at the high energies required. The authors of a new, non-peer reviewed study detail how the a ...

High-energy X-ray diffraction patterns from a single grain of i-Gd-Cd were taken at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory with the beam parallel to the five-fold axis.

I learned in October 2022’s Breakthrough that the spikes of stars in high-power photos are called diffraction spikes. Why do they appear as two crosses at 45 degrees to each other? The diffraction ...

Condensed-matter physics and materials science have a silo problem. Although researchers in these fields have access to vast amounts of data – from experimental records of crystal structures and ...