Physics News and Discussions

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Is darkness faster than light?

26 March 2026

A research group from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology reports in Nature an unprecedented achievement in electron microscopy: the direct measurement of “dark points” within light waves. By doing so, they were able to confirm a prediction from the 1970s that the speed of these points exceeds the speed of light.

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1121580

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Physicists resolve a long-standing puzzle over the size of a proton

Two extremely precise experiments agree with a previously shocking measurement of just how big the proton is, which may help future searches for new particles

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan
10 April 2026

At long last, we have pinned down the size of a proton. More than 15 years after an experiment unexpectedly shook the world of particle physics, researchers are regaining their grip on one of this fundamental particle’s most basic properties.

Look around you, and everything you see will be filled with protons. The proton is a fundamental building block of our world – and until 2010, we thought we understood it fairly well. We knew its composition – it is made from three quarks – and we knew its size.

Then, a measurement based on an exotic hydrogen atom showed that the proton may actually be about 4 per cent smaller than expected. Physicists scrambled, exploring sources of experimental error as well as theories about new physics phenomena that could resolve this “proton radius puzzle”. In 2019, another experiment strengthened the evidence that the proton’s size had long been overestimated.

Now, the issue may have finally been settled by a pair of complementary experiments that make the case for the smaller proton more convincing than ever before. They revealed the proton to have a radius of about 0.84 femtometres, or less than 1 million-billionth of a metre.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/25 ... -a-proton/



A vacuum chamber used to measure electron transitions in atomic hydrogen, from which the proton’s size was inferred
Axel Beyer/MPQ

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https://interestingengineering.com/inno ... -magnetism

Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory are advancing next-generation electronics by unlocking the behavior of magnetism at the atomic scale.

Their latest research focuses on spintronics, a technology that uses electron spin instead of charge to process and store data more efficiently.

By studying ultrathin van der Waals magnets, the team has revealed how nanoscale magnetic domains form and evolve, offering new control over information states.

The breakthrough paves the way for faster, smaller, and energy-efficient devices, addressing the growing demands of AI and data-intensive computing.

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