Tamed Phantom: The Axion Spring of the Universe
Since Saul Perlmutter and his colleagues discovered the accelerated expansion of the universe, physicists have been scratching their heads over the nature of dark energy.
Quantum Field Theory with a Built-In Limit
Quantum electrodynamics, or QED, describes how light interacts with charged particles — for example, electrons. It is one of the most precise theories in history: its predictions match experiment to the eleventh decimal place.
Vacuum’s Memory: How Information Survives in a Black Hole
The black hole paradox has haunted physicists for decades. If a hole evaporates, where does its contents go? Discoveries by Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein showed that saving the laws of nature requires an unconventional move.
Imagine the universe as a woven blanket of invisible threads.
Dark energy may be losing energy: explaining strange behavior
In the late 1990s, astronomers including Saul Perlmutter discovered that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. The cause was dubbed dark energy — an invisible force stretching the cosmos.
Quantum Dance of Electrons in a Sandwich
Two thin sheets with honeycomb patterns were stacked and slightly rotated, creating a new pattern — a moiré, like the shimmer of silk. The electrons in the experiment behaved similarly: they arranged themselves into two layers, with one layer rotated exactly 30 degrees relative to the other.
Waffle Structure of the Vacuum: From String Fluxes to Dark Energy
The mystery of dark energy is a chasm. Quantum field theory predicts a density 10¹²⁰ times larger than observed. In the string landscape, this abyss takes shape — myriads of vacua with different energies, and we are nestled in one of them.
How the Void Sticks Atoms to the Wall
Vacuum is not silent emptiness, but a boiling cauldron of quantum fluctuations, born from nothing and vanishing in billionths of a second. This invisible symphony acts like a constant wind, pressing an atom against a wall — as if a powerful bass note pushes a light ball.
Birth of Light from the Quantum Void
The quantum vacuum is not emptiness, but a tautly stretched string, where particles constantly appear and vanish. Abruptly changing conditions, like shifting the mirrors of a microcavity, causes the 'string' to emit real photons.
Memory in Vibrating Sand
A handful of sand on a vibrating table is like a crowd on a dance floor that still holds the rhythm of the old song for a second after the DJ has switched to a new one. Scientists made a thin layer of grains bounce on a vertically shaking platform and abruptly changed the shaking intensity.
Black Hole Did Not Destroy Quantum Entanglement
Fragile as ice in a furnace, quantum entanglement usually perishes from the slightest heat. Near a black hole, where space is twisted by Einstein's gravity and Hawking radiation Hawking's heats things up, any bond should be destroyed.
Magnetic field turns the void into a motor
Two metal plates in a perfect vacuum attract each other. Even Richard Feynman compared emptiness to a boiling foam: particle pairs are born and immediately vanish, creating the Casimir effect. If the plates are asymmetric, they also start to twist — that's a vacuum motor.
But rotation doesn't require oddly shaped parts.
Salt in the Cell Changes the Rules of the Game
In a glass of salty water, even if it sits perfectly still, something is always happening. Tiny salt particles, ions, float and collide, sending ripples through the water. These ripples are invisible, but they create a force that attracts or repels nearby objects.
Previously, it was thought that this force only acts over very short distances, as if it quickly fades out.
The Vacuum as Conductor: How Quantum Emptiness Rewrites the Properties of Matter
The hall is silent, but the conductor has already raised the baton. The orchestra is quiet, yet the score is changing. So it is in an optical resonator: there is no light, but the quantum vacuum—that emptiness filled with short-lived field fluctuations—is already conducting the…