Icicles and hot air
Here’s two things that you probably don’t know about icicles — they are usually filled with liquid water and their shapes are defined by hot air. So says a theory put forth by Martin...
Exploding excited electron bubbles
First observations of excited electron bubbles in superfluid helium reveal puzzling features
Read article: Condensates reap Nobel reward
Condensates reap Nobel reward
In 1924 the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose sent a paper to Einstein in which he derived the Planck law for black-body radiation by treating the photons as a gas of identical particles. Einstein ...
Magnetic vortices defy melting moment
The behaviour of magnetic vortices controls many physical properties of high-temperature superconductors, including their ability to carry current without resistance – a classic hallmark of supe...
The search for liquid fivefold symmetry
In molecular materials like water, the structural units that make up the liquid state can also dictate the properties of the frozen solid. But what about monatomic liquids that are composed of single ...
Vortices multiply in superfluid helium-II
Now Demosthenes Kivotides, Carlo Barenghi and David Samuels at the University of Newcastle in the UK have discovered another surprising feature of liquid helium. They have predicted that the coupled m...
Read article: Liquid hydrogen turns superfluid
Liquid hydrogen turns superfluid
Superfluids are among the most peculiar and counterintuitive of all materials. They have no viscosity, which allows an object travelling in a pure superfluid to move without friction. Similarly, they ...
Revealing the invisible
Physicists, more than most people, are accustomed to dealing with gases. Yet even physicists often treat gases as something to be taken for granted, a sort of Platonic ideal with interesting or useful...
