Rajesh Kumar

Shine light on an FePS3 crystal, and it responds with its own glow, like a neon sign, but much fainter and in the infrared range. This glow is not random: it depends on how the crystal is oriented. The scientists took samples from a thick chunk down to a single-atom layer and observed four emission bands — at 1.24 electronvolts, 1.79, 2.3, and 2.56.

In August 2019, the LIGO and Virgo detectors picked up gravitational waves from the merger of two compact objects in a binary star. One weighed 23 solar masses — a standard black hole. The other came in at 2.5–2.67 M⊙.

The map of dense nuclear matter resembles a road map: lines of phase transitions cross at critical points, like highways at intersections. Until now, only two intersections were known on such a map: the nuclear liquid-gas and deconfinement, where hadrons dissolve into quarks.