Science Highlights

Scientists use collisions of heavy ions moving near the speed of light to recreate and investigate the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). By measuring the attenuation of fast particles travelling through the QGP, physicists learn more about the QGP and the conditions that existed shortly after the Big Bang.

Hexagonal iron sulfide is a type of multiferroic, a versatile material with both magnetic and ferroelectric coupling. New research on this material provides a route to materials with tunable electrical and magnetic behaviors for potential applications in information storage and spintronics computing.

Scientists explore materials' magnetism by studying the oscillations of magnetic effects, or "magnons." They have long predicted that magnons can interact and combine to form new quasiparticles. Scientists have now used neutron scattering to find these multiple-magnon "bound states" in real materials.

Researchers are working on new materials that actively self-assemble. In this research, scientists used a magnetic field to make metal particles spin at the liquid interface. This spinning activity created swarms of rod-like particles that then formed vortices that assembled into dynamic lattice structures that are reconfigurable and capable of self-healing.

The "proton radius puzzle" arose in 2010, when a then-new experimental method for measuring the size of the proton revealed a value 4 percent smaller than obtained from previous methods. Nuclear physicists may have now solved the proton radius puzzle using a novel electron scattering technique.