sputtering

In a ring-shaped channel between two toothed rings, microspheres are suspended: some with a radius of 8 micrometers, others 14. The discharge is switched on, and the particles start moving. The small ones go one way, the large ones the other. It is like a shopping mall where escalators for people of different heights run in opposite directions.

Inside a microscope that sees individual atoms, it's cold and silent: the temperature is around -268°C, and the interior is in perfect vacuum. To place individual iron atoms on such a stage, you usually need a direct 'corridor' from the evaporator to the sample. But in the coldest instruments, that corridor is blocked by thermal shields, making deposition a puzzle.

A fusion reactor is like a super-hot furnace where plasma reaches millions of degrees. The walls are made of tungsten, the most refractory metal there is. But even tungsten needs protection: fast particles from the plasma bombard the surface and knock atoms loose. These ejected atoms enter the plasma and cool it down, like a spoonful of cold milk in hot tea.

Quantum computers make mistakes. Each qubit is like a ball balanced on the tip of a pencil: a slight tremor in the hand and it rolls off. To keep the balls from falling, you need someone to notice the wobble and correct it in time.

Quantum computers of the future will likely communicate via light. An atom stores information, and a photon carries it across the network. But an atom doesn't hang still: it jitters and oscillates, and this motion can corrupt the signal. Previously, engineers could only calculate for a stationary atom.

Imagine a multilayered shell where metal and insulator layers alternate like pages in a book. Such a structure can make an object hidden inside invisible to an observer. Light bends around it as water smoothly flows around a smooth stone: no ripple, no splash — no reflection, no shadow.

Space is full of invisible sprinters — particles racing nearly at the speed of light. They are caught in the solar wind, near neutron stars, and even in the intergalactic void between galaxies. But what accelerates them where there are no shock waves or magnetic reconnections?

A crowd is trapped in a narrow corridor between two rows of mirrors. Every now and then, someone shoves the wall hard, and a rumble rolls down the corridor — similarly, in the plasma of galaxy clusters, whistler waves and ion-cyclotron waves appear.

Light from distant stars travels for millions of years, but X-rays can't be caught with ordinary glass: they pass right through it like a bullet through paper. That's why X-ray telescopes need special lenses: stacks of tiny prisms that gently deflect the rays and focus them to a single point.

In helium cooled to near absolute zero, the liquid stops rubbing against itself and begins to flow without any resistance.

Plasma is a gas in which electrons are stripped from atoms, and it conducts electricity. In space, such gas is often so rarefied that particles rarely collide, and its behavior is described by the equations of motion for each particle. The computer method Particle-in-Cell (PIC) does exactly that: it tracks millions of particles and the electric fields they create.

The cosmic microwave background is a faint glow left over from the Big Bang, like the cooling embers of a campfire. It encodes gravitational waves that may have arisen in the first fractions of a second, when the universe inflated faster than light.

In a particle accelerator, electrons race around a ring at nearly the speed of light. When such an electron collides with a photon, a particle of light, the photon bounces off like a ball hitting a moving truck and flies away with much greater energy.

A coffee drop on a table dries and leaves a ring — coffee particles gather at the edge. But if charged nanoparticles float in the drop, the picture becomes richer: the deposit cracks like mud in a dried-up puddle. Physicists studied how the particle charge and the surface on which the drop dries change these cracks.

In a ring accelerator, particles race around in circles like cars on a roundabout. Normally, when new particles are injected, they take random spots on that roundabout — the beam becomes 'fluffy.' In a new experiment at the SNS accelerator, the eigenpainting method was applied: particles were injected so that they only entered one 'lane'—a single oscillation mode…

A water droplet on a fresh polymer film behaves like a guest on new furniture: sometimes it spreads out, sometimes it beads up. This behavior tells you how ready the surface is to repel dirt or, conversely, to hold paint. Previously, such tests were done by hand, one film at a time. Now there's a robot called PANDA-film.

Two particles cling to each other like climbers on the same rope and fly toward a wall. When they hit, will they bounce off together, or will the rope snap? What does it depend on? Physicists considered the simplest case: everything happens on a single line, the particles attract only when they occupy the same point, and the wall is perfectly rigid.

Four cesium atoms hang in vacuum, held by laser tweezers like beads on an invisible thread. Around them is a ring resonator, a closed loop of mirrors where light circulates without obstacles. When a probe beam strikes this tiny chain, something strange happens: the atoms scatter light not uniformly in all directions, but predominantly in one direction.