Theoretical particle physics articles within Nature Physics

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  • Comment |

    Supersymmetric quantum field theories have special properties that make them easier to study. This Comment discusses how the constraints that supersymmetry places on renormalization group flows have been used to study strongly coupled field theories.

    • Jaewon Song

  • News & Views |

    The production of particle–antiparticle pairs in a vacuum — the Schwinger effect — requires extreme conditions that are out of reach of tabletop experiments. A mesoscopic simulation of this phenomenon has now been carried out in graphene devices.

    • Roshan Krishna Kumar

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Observations of the Schwinger effect—the creation of matter by electric fields—have been hindered by the high required field strength. A mesoscopic variant of the Schwinger effect has now been realized in graphene transistors.

    • A. Schmitt
    • , P. Vallet
    •  & B. Plaçais

  • Editorial |

    We celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson — a whopping 48 years after its prediction.

  • Comment |

    As we celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson, CERN’s Director-General at that time reminisces about the years leading up to this milestone.

    • Rolf-Dieter Heuer

  • News & Views |

    The ATLAS Collaboration has confirmed with top quark events that the coupling of charged leptons to the weak interaction is universal — showcasing the feasibility of performing high-precision electroweak measurements at proton–proton colliders.

    • Florencia Canelli
    •  & Benjamin Kilminster

  • News & Views |

    Recent measurements of observables related to proton and neutron spin properties at low energies are in disagreement with the available theoretical predictions, and continue to challenge nuclear experimentalists and theorists alike.

    • Mohammad W. Ahmed

  • Editorial |

    The recent measurement of the muon’s anomalous magnetic moment increases the tension with predictions from theory. Or does it?

  • Article |

    Measurements of the proton’s spin structure in experiments scattering a polarized electron beam off polarized protons in regions of low momentum transfer squared test predictions from chiral effective field theory of the strong interaction.

    • X. Zheng
    • , A. Deur
    •  & Z. W. Zhao

  • Letter
    | Open Access

    The cores of neutron stars could be made of hadronic matter or quark matter. By combining first-principles calculations with observational data, evidence for the presence of quark matter in neutron star cores is found.

    • Eemeli Annala
    • , Tyler Gorda
    •  & Aleksi Vuorinen

  • Comment |

    The Large Hadron Collider has completed its second data-taking period. For the next two years, the accelerator will shut down and the experiments will undergo major upgrades. Here’s a take on our past achievements — and a preview of the future.

    • Niels Tuning

  • Research Highlight |

    • Stefanie Reichert

  • Article |

    A quantity that connects quantum information and gravity in the light of gauge/gravity correspondence is pointed out, leading to interesting properties of the entanglement of purification predicted in the holographic theories.

    • Koji Umemoto
    •  & Tadashi Takayanagi

  • Progress Article |

    Beyond the standard model, the weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) hypothesis for dark matter is one of the most compelling, and the one being tested at the Large Hadron Collider.

    • Oliver Buchmueller
    • , Caterina Doglioni
    •  & Lian-Tao Wang

  • Progress Article |

    A renaissance of interest in a numerical technique known as the conformal bootstrap is surveyed, and its implications for the determination of critical exponents in a range of spin models is discussed.

    • David Poland
    •  & David Simmons-Duffin

  • Letter |

    A magnetotransport study of zirconium pentatelluride now reveals evidence for a chiral magnetic effect, a striking macroscopic manifestation of the quantum and relativistic nature of Weyl semimetals.

    • Qiang Li
    • , Dmitri E. Kharzeev
    •  & T. Valla

  • News & Views |

    Photons emitted by extragalactic sources provide an opportunity to test quantum gravity effects that modify the speed of light in vacuum. Studying the arrival times of these cosmic messengers further constrains the energy scales involved.

    • Agnieszka Jacholkowska

  • News & Views |

    The Higgs mechanism is normally associated with high energy physics, but its roots lie in superconductivity. And now there is evidence for a Higgs mode in disordered superconductors near the superconductor–insulator transition.

    • Philip W. Anderson

  • News & Views |

    Dark matter remains experimentally elusive. But what if it is more classical than expected, resembling a spatially varying field? A network of atomic clocks would be able to detect its variations.

    • Rana Adhikari
    • , Paul Hamiton
    •  & Holger Müller

  • Letter |

    A proposal for detecting dark matter originating from light fields rather than particles makes use of existing networks of atomic clocks to measure time discrepancies between clocks that are spatially separated.

    • A. Derevianko
    •  & M. Pospelov

  • Research Highlights |

    The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura "for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources."

    • Joerg Heber

  • News & Views |

    Holographic dualities discovered in string theory may provide methods for extracting the real-time response of quantum systems from numerical simulations performed in imaginary time.

    • Joe Bhaseen

  • Research Highlights |

    The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 has been awarded to François Englert and Peter Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider".

    • Alison Wright

  • News & Views |

    Although electrically charged black holes seem remote from superconductors and strange metals in the laboratory, they might be intimately related by the holographic dualities discovered in string theory.

    • Jan Zaanen

  • Article |

    Strongly interacting condensed-matter systems are often computationally intractable. By introducing a periodic lattice to a holographic model developed by string theorists, it becomes possible to study anisotropic materials that are insulating in certain directions but conducting in others.

    • Aristomenis Donos
    •  & Sean A. Hartnoll

  • News & Views |

    A reworking of the theory of particle interactions — the same theory but rendered in a new form based on twistor geometry — is likely to have wide implications for physics, including the reformulation of gravity.

    • Andrew Hodges

  • News & Views |

    Granular materials, ranging from fruit to rocks to powders, can change rapidly from a static jammed state to a free-flowing state. Insight from dynamical systems theory reveals that this tendency is governed by the growth of instabilities, rather than stress on individual particles.

    • Troy Shinbrot

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