lifetime

In 1946, proposed a method that revolutionized archaeology: determining age by the decay of radiocarbon. The clock ticks: every 5730 years, half of the atoms vanish. But why so slowly? For a light nucleus, this is an anomaly — typical lifetimes are millions of times shorter. The mystery held for seven decades.

An orchestra of billions of cesium atoms struck a single note, and it sounded for 17 hours without fading. That’s no exaggeration: Chinese physicists created a continuous time crystal with a record-breaking lifespan. A time crystal is a system that breaks time symmetry, spontaneously pulsating in an unchanging rhythm.

In the grand orchestra of the universe, every instrument has its own rhythm. Electrons in an atom make quantum leaps in femtoseconds, neurons in the brain exchange signals in milliseconds, and a human needs tenths of a second to become aware of the 'now.' Physicists have long sought the conductor…

Billions of tiny motors hum inside every living creature. Cells ceaselessly pump substances, burn sugar, and build new proteins, and all this invisible motion warms us from within. To maintain order, life must dissipate heat into the environment, like a stove that never goes out. The power of this internal heating is almost independent of size.

Black holes are not eternal: they slowly lose energy, emitting entropy — a measure of hidden information — as heat. This process was predicted by Stephen Hawking. But until now, it remained a mystery what happens at the very end, when the hole has almost disappeared and must return the captured data.

An eight-kilogram rhesus macaque can live up to forty years. A cat of the same weight rarely sees its twentieth birthday. This difference is no accident: across all primates, from tiny marmosets to gorillas, lifespan is markedly longer than in other mammals of similar body mass. Standard models linking lifespan to metabolic rate fall short here.

An optical tweezer is a laser beam that holds an atom in place, much like fingers holding a pea. Arrays of these tweezers form the basis of future quantum computers. But there's a catch: not every tweezer catches an atom. Typically, only half of the traps get filled, and for molecules, even fewer. Empty spots break the whole setup.

Inside every atom lives a proton. For a long time, it was considered as eternal as matter itself. But theories that unify all forces of nature predict that, sooner or later, the proton will decay. The only question is how long we have to wait. In the Japanese detector Super-Kamiokande — a giant tank of ultra-pure water — physicists searched for signs of such a decay.

In the first minutes of the Big Bang, the universe whipped up a cocktail of hydrogen, helium, and a pinch of lithium.

Inside an atom's nucleus, protons and neutrons stack in layers, like spectators in a packed hall. When a layer is full, the nucleus becomes especially stable — physicists call these 'full rows' magic numbers. One of them, 32, has long been elusive: in nuclei with 32 neutrons, its effect is weak, and in some neighbors it seems absent altogether.

A glowing dot in a vacuum chamber refuses to go out, even though the light source has long been switched off. A single ytterbium ion, held by electric fields, is stuck in an excited state, as if the electron inside it has forgotten how to return to its usual place.

An atomic nucleus usually follows its own rules: its decay doesn't care about temperature, pressure, or molecular neighbors. But the uranium-235m isotope is a striking exception. This nucleus sits in an excited state, like a tightly coiled spring, and sooner or later it releases the extra energy.

The neutron star 1E 161348-5055 in the supernova remnant RCW 103 pulses with a period of 6.67 hours. That's very slow for such a compact object, and astronomers long puzzled over what was going on.

A pebble drops into a pond, and ripples spread across the water. But sometimes the pebble doesn't sink right away: it skims beneath the surface, travels a few meters, and only then surfaces, creating ripples in an unexpected spot.

In the thirties, Pauli realized: without tiny ghost-like particles, the energy of stars doesn't add up. Thus neutrinos were born — intangible wanderers that permeate everything.

Conventional atomic clocks are essentially optical counters: they rely on spectroscopy — a method for measuring the frequency of radiation with high precision as electrons jump between energy levels.

A quantum system, once born, does not forget it. Even after dozens of lifetimes, a trace of the initial state remains in its decay: a slowly decreasing power-law tail. For two fluorescent dyes, erythrosine B and eosin Y, this tail has been observed for the first time in two spectral channels simultaneously.

A tuning fork cut from a perfect metal rings at a single frequency. Its sound is as pure as a mathematical formula. But clamp it in a vise or dip it in a viscous liquid, and the tone smears, picks up noise, and loses its sharpness. The nucleus of scandium-45 behaves much the same way when placed in a crystal lattice.