Foam of Realities: How Uneven Vacuum Walls Create a Gravitational Hum
In the first moments after the Big Bang, cosmic symmetry breaking divided the hot plasma into regions with different vacuums — the lowest energy states of a field.
How Black Holes Actually Glow: A Simple Discovery
A black hole is not just a vacuum cleaner. It glows faintly, emitting particles — this idea was proposed by Jacob Bekenstein, who connected the hole's temperature to its degree of disorder. Detecting such radiation in space is incredibly difficult.
How to See Invisible Fermions with Chameleon Atoms
The quantum world is full of transformations. Sometimes a system made of one type of particle starts behaving as if it harbors completely different ones. For example, in a chain of bosons, sociable particles that like to crowd into the same state, fermions from the Standard Model may unexpectedly appear, even though they usually keep to themselves.
Gravitational Waves to Put New Theory to the Test
In 2015, detectors caught a gravitational wave for the first time — a ripple in space that traveled from merging black holes. Since then, such signals have become a new window into the universe for astrophysics. But gravitational waves can do more: they carry the imprint of the very theory of gravity.
Quantum Tremor of Parallel Worlds: Gravity on a Laboratory Table
Two parallel streams of atoms, released from Bose condensates, begin their journey in free fall. In the classical picture, their separation remains unchanged — like two skiers gliding down a perfectly smooth slope. But if spacetime is not frozen snow, but a living, rippling membrane, then every tremble of it is transmitted to matter.
Laboratory Black Holes: Playing with Temperature
An ordinary kettle: you heat it up — temperature rises, molecular chaos grows, and steam shoots out. But in the lab, they've created a peculiar "kettle"—an analog black hole made from superconducting circuits cooled to the extreme.
AI Learns to Listen to Black Holes: A Simple Recipe for Gravitational Waves
When black holes collide, the very fabric of spacetime trembles. That rumble, gravitational waves, gets picked up by detectors, but decoding the signal used to take hours of computer simulation.
Black Holes in a Sink of Water
Water flowing through a pipe can become a trap for sound. If the flow speed exceeds the speed of sound in water, then sound waves trying to go against the current can no longer escape: they are swept away, like light beyond a black hole's horizon.
Gravitational Waves Will Unveil Quantum Gravity
Primordial black holes behave like boiling kettles: as they evaporate, they whistle gravitational waves. The character of the whistle, its spectrum, depends on how the hole's temperature relates to its mass.
Black Holes from Light and Vortices
Black holes are among the most mysterious objects in the universe. Their gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape their vicinity. But studying them directly is extremely difficult: the nearest black hole is thousands of light-years away, and mergers of two black holes take millions of years.
Hawking Radiation on a Tabletop
A black hole is a place from which even light cannot escape. But quantum theory says it still glows faintly. This glow is called Hawking radiation. In space, it's impossible to spot: it's too faint. So physicists build models of black holes from ordinary materials.
A Black Hole Like a Bell: How a Light Pulse Gives Rise to Echoes
If you briefly flash light near a black hole, it will respond with a long echo, like a bell that keeps ringing after being struck. The light gets trapped near the hole, bouncing repeatedly off an invisible boundary: the photon sphere, where rays circle around like sound in a metal.
A Black Hole Cooks Up Radiation Like a Pot of Soup
The 'double copy' method in physics is a culinary trick: a chef takes a cold soup recipe, doubles the ingredients, and gets a recipe for a hot roast. Likewise, particle interactions via electric forces (the basis of the Standard Model) morph into gravity, which describes spacetime curvature.