short range correlations

Two nuclei with the same number of particles but different neutron skin shapes collide at speeds close to the speed of light. Ruthenium-96 and zirconium-96 are like twins, one with a slightly thicker coat. This difference changes how particles carry charge in the fireball of the collision.

Two electrons that leave a metal needle tip almost simultaneously start to repel each other, like two people trying to squeeze through a narrow door at the same time. The closer they are, the more they get in each other's way.

Three billiard balls scatter across the table after a strike: their trajectories depend only on the initial push. But in the world of atomic nuclei, things are more complex: particles sense each other on the fly, even if they are not bound together. For a long time, physicists could only measure pairwise interactions, while what happens when three meet remained behind the scenes.

A massive star exhausts its fuel, and its core collapses in a fraction of a second. A supernova is born, along with a brief but powerful shower of neutrinos. These particles barely interact with matter, so they fly away freely, carrying information about the catastrophe.

At accelerators, by smashing heavy nuclei, physicists briefly create a quark-gluon plasma — a state of matter where quarks and gluons are not confined inside particles but are free. For a long time, it was imagined as a gas, but experiments showed it's an almost perfect liquid.

The James Webb Space Telescope peered into the era when the expansion of the Universe stretched the light of distant objects into the red, and found a scattering of strange sources — 'little red dots'. Their spectra broke the usual patterns: they are blue in the ultraviolet, but deep red in the optical, as if seen through a cherry veil.

A handful of matches falls on the table. Each lies however it lands, but in our minds we turn each into an arrow — from one end to the other. Now ask: can you get from one point to another by moving only in the direction of the arrows? A group of points where you can reach any one from any other is called a strongly connected cluster.

At first glance, the atomic nucleus is a cramped communal apartment where protons and neutrons (together called nucleons) live by strict rules. Each occupies its own orbit, like electrons in an atom, and on average everything looks orderly.

A spinning top whirls so fast it's about to fly apart. Add to it a super-strong magnet — one that, if placed on the Moon, would wipe data from every credit card on Earth. That's a magnetar: an ultra-dense remnant of an exploded star, a lump of matter where a teaspoon weighs as much as a mountain.

Two tin nuclei collide at about two-thirds the speed of light. For an instant, a hot, dense cloud forms, and protons fly out in all directions. If you catch pairs of protons and measure how often they fly off in the same direction, you can work out the size of that cloud. This method is called femtoscopy: it works like a microscope for nuclear scales.

When a massive star explodes, its remnants fly apart like fragments of fireworks. But how do we know how far away such an explosion occurred? Astronomers have found a way: they look at the gas clouds that these remnants collide with. The idea is simple. Supernova remnants are often surrounded by clouds of cold molecular gas.

When two lead nuclei collide at tremendous speed, a cloud of scorching matter is born for an instant — denser and hotter than the center of the Sun. Through this cloud fly jets of particles: narrow, laser-like beams knocked out by the impact. The CMS detector captures their tracks and shows how the jets change as they fight through the hot 'fog'.

Deep inside the Large Hadron Collider, lead nuclei are accelerated to nearly the speed of light and smashed together. In such collisions, a multitude of particles are born, including kaons, particles containing a strange quark, and deuterons, the nuclei of heavy hydrogen.

The Large Hadron Collider doesn't just smash protons: it also collides entire atomic nuclei. When two nuclei smash together at tremendous speed, they create a tiny blob of matter so hot that protons and neutrons melt into a 'soup' of quarks and gluons.

The antiproton is the proton's twin, only with a negative charge. When such a twin approaches a nucleus, it doesn't just bounce off: a whole dance of attraction and repulsion unfolds between them.

When a massive star dies and explodes, it releases not only light but also invisible lightweight particles. They fly out in all directions at nearly the speed of light. Only a small fraction reaches Earth, but each explosion sends its own clump. These clumps stretch along the way: fast particles overtake slow ones, and by the time they arrive, a clump can be spread over tens of thousands of years.

Inside a neutron star, matter is squeezed so tightly that a single teaspoon weighs as much as a mountain. Under such pressure, ordinary particles, protons and neutrons, can transform into exotic particles known as hyperons. These particles resemble neutrons but contain strange quarks.

When a massive star explodes as a supernova, its material slams into the surrounding shell of cosmic dust and gas, like an invisible fur coat. The impact spawns myriads of neutrinos, ghostly particles that zip through planets without swerving.

Inside a neutron star, matter is squeezed so tightly that a teaspoon of its material would weigh as much as a mountain. We can't directly see what happens to particles under such conditions, but stars tell us about themselves through gravitational waves and light when two such stars merge.

A pair of neutron stars is like two heavy bowling balls slowly spiraling toward each other. They are born together from a binary system of massive stars, but it can take hundreds of millions of years before they finally collide. When they do, a short gamma-ray burst erupts — a brilliant explosion visible across half the universe.

Heavy water (the kind where ordinary hydrogen is replaced by its beefier cousin, deuterium) was subjected to an electric current. Palladium settled on the cathode, and in this modest electrochemical bath, detectors repeatedly caught something unexpected: traces of slow neutrons.