ultrafast process

At the center of many galaxies sits a supermassive black hole. When gas falls onto it, the gas heats up and shines brighter than an entire galaxy: this is an active galactic nucleus. Sometimes a true hurricane erupts from there: a stream of ionized gas racing at tens of percent of the speed of light.

A compass needle turns slowly, but inside some materials, tiny magnetic moments can flip over timescales that are hard to imagine. A team of physicists has calculated how to make them change direction in a quadrillionth of a second — faster than a lightbulb blinks.

Ordinary window glass may seem frozen forever, but inside, atoms never stay still. In amorphous germanium telluride (GeTe)—a material used in rewritable discs and non-volatile memory — physicists have for the first time directly tracked how atomic bonds stretch and bend in trillionths of a second.

Two dim stars whirl so close together that one siphons material off the other, like a spoon delicately skimming foam from broth. Astronomers have for the first time calculated the fate of such pairs — ultracool and brown dwarfs, the coldest and dimmest inhabitants of the galaxy. Previously, it was thought that mass exchange between them was impossible: they were too fragile.

Tearing apart an aluminum cube just a few nanometers wide is like trying to watch a droplet fall in slow motion when the camera itself is firing at machine-gun speed. Atoms inside the metal vibrate trillions of times per second, while real deformation in the lab takes minutes.

A laser flash strikes a copper oxide crystal, and magnetic excitation waves, magnons, ripple outward like ripples on water. For the first time, scientists traced their path from birth to disappearance with femtosecond precision (millionths of a billionth of a second).

In a glass of water, ultrasound creates tiny bubbles. They grow and shrink, and sometimes they collapse sharply, like a popping soap bubble, but thousands of times faster. Near these bubbles float small particles — for example, nickel spheres the size of dust motes.

A fridge magnet holds on thanks to tiny internal arrows: each one like a miniature compass. If you hit the metal with an ultrashort flash of light, these arrows start to jitter chaotically, and magnetism melts away in a millionth of a billionth of a second. Previously, such 'melting' was too fast to observe.

Scaling up a quantum computer is like weaving a web of light: each thread trembles with thermal breath, threatening to tear the nascent pattern.