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When stacking apples on a market stall, fruit sellers "naturally" adopt a particular arrangement: a regular pyramid with a triangular base. A French-German team, which includes in particular the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, has demonstrated that this arrangement is favored for reasons of mechanical stability. This work, which is published on the Physical Review Letters (PRL) website, could contribute to the design of organized porous materials.

(Phys.org) -- Can light self-bend into an arc? Can shape-preserving optical beams truly bend along a circular path? A confident answer emerged in this week’s Physical Review Letters.

A clock accurate to within a tenth of a second over 14 billion years – the age of the universe – is the goal of research being reported this week by scientists from three different institutions. To be published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the research provides the blueprint for a nuclear clock that would get its extreme accuracy from the nucleus of a single thorium ion.

The faster a clock ticks, the more precise it can be.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Just as NASA engineers test new rocket designs in computer studies before committing themselves to full prototypes, so physicists will often model matter under various circumstances to see whether something new appears. This is especially true of atomtronics, a relatively new science devoted to creating artificial tailored materials consisting of neutral atoms held in an array with laser beams, or atoms moving along a desired track under electric or magnetic influence. A new study shows how a simple "joystick" consisting of an adjustable magnetic field can create several new phases of atomtronic matter, several of them never seen before.

An article published in Physical Review E and conducted by Spanish researchers at the universities of Granada and Barcelona might lead to a revolutionary change in water desalination and filtration methods.

A new theory developed by Prof Gerrit van der Laan, from the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and Diamond Light Source, and published this week in the journal Physical Review Letters, provides a powerful sum rule that scientists can use to explore the properties of novel materials, such as those used for spintronics devices.

Top-heavy structures are more likely to maintain their balance while hovering in the air than are those that bear a lower center of gravity, researchers at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Department of Physics have found.

Optical techniques enable us to examine single molecules, but do we really understand what we are seeing? After all, the fuzziness caused by effects such as light interference makes these images very difficult to interpret.

Are there parallel universes? And how will we know? This is one of many fascinations people hold about quantum physics

Are there parallel universes? And how will we know?

(PhysOrg.com) -- A trio of Japanese physicists have applied a reformulation of string theory, called IIB, whereby matrices are used to describe the properties of the physical universe, on a supercomputer, to effectively show that the universe spontaneously ballooned in three directions, leaving the other six dimensions tightly wrapped, as string theory has predicted all along.

(PhysOrg.com) -- In investigating the behavior of large-amplitude standing water waves, mathematician Jon Wilkening of the University of California, Berkeley, has discovered that the waves’ behavior cannot be explained as simply as previously proposed.

Physicists from the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a theory that describes, in a unified manner, the coexistence of liquid and pinned solid phases of electrons in two dimensions under the influence of a magnetic field.

(PhysOrg.com) -- One of the laws of nature may vary across the Universe, according to a study published today in the journal Physical Review Letters.