Yu Zhang

At 78 K, a crystal of Mn₃Si₂Te₆ turns into an inductor that needs neither copper wire nor a superconductor. The electrons inside it spontaneously organize into closed vortices with a definite sense of rotation: chiral orbital currents.

To quickly dissolve sugar, you don't need to stir carefully — just shake the glass. A similar principle works in quantum systems: noise, usually considered a disturbance, speeds up the transition to a thermal state.

Dark matter is five times more massive than ordinary matter, yet it emits no light. Its nature remains unknown. One candidate is the ultra-light axion particle. Axions could pierce right through the planet, barely noticing atoms.

In an accelerator, particles collide, and for a fleeting instant a D meson is born — a particle that lives for less time than it takes light to cross a grain of sand. It promptly shatters into lighter fragments: a kaon, a lepton, and a neutrino.

In a particle accelerator in Beijing, an anti-Lambda hyperon, a rare antimatter particle, slams into an ordinary proton. Instead of simply disappearing, they transform into a whole bouquet of other particles: a positively charged kaon, two pions, and sometimes additional neutral pions. Such transformations for the anti-Lambda had never been observed before.

In a particle accelerator, the anti-lambda particle is a rare guest. It is born on the fly, lives for a tiny fraction of a second, and usually decays on its own. But sometimes it manages to collide with an ordinary proton, and then a whole shower of light particles is born: kaons, pions.

A tossed coin is the simplest source of randomness. But if the coin is shaved, it starts cheating. In the quantum world, light plays the role of the coin: its properties are fundamentally unpredictable. The catch is that the device that “flips” the quantum coin might be faulty or even swapped by an adversary.

In the BEPCII accelerator, electrons and positrons collide, producing billions of particles. Among them is the J/ψ meson, which lives for less than a billionth of a second. Its decay sometimes yields an eta meson (ηc), an even shorter-lived clump of quarks.

The crystal Ba4Ru3O10 was long considered a simple antiferromagnet: when cooled to 100 K, the spins of ruthenium atoms align in opposite directions, like rows of arrows pointing at each other. But new measurements show that at the same temperature, something more happens — a hidden charge density wave is born inside the material.

The J/psi particle lives for an instant and then decays into lighter particles, much like a snapped string scattering into pieces. Physicists from the BESIII collaboration caught over ten billion such decays to figure out exactly what 'pieces' are produced.

When a particle decays, it doesn't just vanish: it transforms into a whole set of other particles, and each transformation has its own script. Physicists from the BESIII collaboration have, for the first time, broken down the rare decay of the D0 meson step by step: it turns into two kaons and two pions.

Every second, billions of decays happen inside our bodies, and nobody notices. But physicists do: they smash particles in accelerators and watch what fragments they fly into. Hidden in those fragments is the answer to why we exist at all. Right after the Universe was born, there were equal amounts of particles and antiparticles, but today all we see around us is particles.

Imagine a balance scale with identical weights, yet one pan always tips lower. In the world of elementary particles, this imbalance is called CP violation: particles and their mirror twins (antiparticles) behave slightly differently.

A laser strikes the crystal, and it responds with flashes of light, like a bell ringing after a blow. But if the bell is warm, its sound wavers and fades. Same here: the crystal's atoms constantly jitter from heat, and this jitter disrupts the electrons' smooth flight, making the light dim and blurry.

The charmed particle D+ lives for a tiny fraction of a second before breaking apart into lighter particles, like an overloaded bridge losing its supports. Physicists at the BESIII collider caught millions of such decays and sorted them out. In one decay mode, four pions and an eta meson are produced. The probability of this event turned out to be higher than expected: about 3 chances in 1000.

Quarks are the tiny building blocks that make up protons and neutrons. Usually, they stick together in pairs: a particle and its mirror-image antiparticle. But sometimes quarks form more exotic combinations, which physicists call exotic states.

In a distant galaxy, at a distance that light takes 11 billion years to cross, something flashed. The Einstein Probe X-ray telescope caught a brief, needle-prick-like burst: it lasted only a few dozen seconds.

A massive star ends its life in a spectacular collapse: the core compresses into a neutron star or a black hole, while the outer layers fly off in a dazzling supernova.

To determine the size of the proton cloud in an atomic nucleus, physicists collide an unstable nucleus with a target and observe how many protons it loses. The larger the projectile nucleus, the more often it grazes target nuclei and loses particles.

An archaeologist carefully brushes away layer after layer, and each new stratum at the charmonium dig is a rare decay captured by the detector. Charmonium — a bound state of a charm quark and its antiquark — lives for mere fractions of a second, yet it manages to tell us about the forces that hold quarks together.