An experiment with ultracold atoms reveals that a strongly driven quantum system doesn’t always heat up as expected. In daily life, doing work on something over and over usually makes it warmer. You ...

For more than a century, gravity has been the stubborn outlier in physics, resisting every attempt to merge Einstein’s smooth ...

Ultracold atoms have successfully mimicked a fundamental quantum effect normally found in electronic circuits.

Scientists may have finally unlocked the unusual role quasiparticles known as "anyons" play in a pair of quantum experiments ...

Governments and tech companies continue to pour money into quantum technology in the hopes of building a supercomputer that can work at speeds we can't yet fathom to solve big problems.

In 1977, an American physicist named John H. Van Vleck won the Nobel Prize for his work on magnetism. In his Nobel lecture, ...

The Indian Strings Meeting (ISM) 2025, an international conference on string theory and high-energy physics, was jointly organised by IIT Bhubaneswar and NISER Bhubaneswar from 9th to 14th December ...

For close to a century, scientists have been trying to marry Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and quantum theory—our two best bets on understanding the universe on a macroscopic and ...

The ball rolls across the floor because it was kicked, just as Earth orbits the sun because it is tugged by gravity. The connection between cause and effect is fundamental to how we understand the ...

A century ago, the strange behavior of atoms and elementary particles led physicists to formulate a new theory of nature. That theory, quantum mechanics, found immediate success, proving its worth ...

We’re celebrating 180 years of Scientific American. Explore our legacy of discovery and look ahead to the future. This year is the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, according to ...

In July 1925, physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote a letter to Wolfgang Pauli sharing his new ideas about what would eventually become known as quantum theory. A hundred years later, that theory has been ...