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The spreading of a liquid drop on a solid surface is a simple, everyday phenomenon. And while it is known that when a drop of oil is placed on a solid surface, its radius increases as its thickness decreases, the mechanisms underlying the process are still not well understood on a microscopic level, particularly at the moving edge between the liquid and solid, which is known as the "contact line" region.

Researchers have been investigating the connection between fifth century Himalayan instruments used in religious ceremonies and modern physics.

In this month's special issue of Physics World, which examines the science and applications of invisibility, Martin McCall and Paul Kinsler of Imperial College London describe a new type of invisibility cloak that does not just hide objects – but events.

(PhysOrg.com) -- John J. Chapman, a physicist working for NASA has presented an idea for a new type of fusion thruster for possible use by space traveling vehicles at the IEEE Symposium going on in Chicago this week. In the presentation, as explained on IEEE Spectrum, Chapman suggests that boron be used as an “aneutronic” fuel source, stating that doing so makes the energetic particles easier to deal with than traditional materials.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Right now, many researchers around the world are working on ways to move away from electronics-dominated computing systems. There are a number of ideas about how this can be accomplished

(PhysOrg.com) -- Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics scientists generate amplitude-squeezed light fields using single atoms trapped inside optical cavities.

(PhysOrg.com) -- In yet another stab at trying to prove the existence of dark matter, Dan Hooper and colleagues have published a paper on arXiv describing what they believe to be credible evidence of the material believed to comprise most of the mass in the Universe. They say, according to a recent BBC post, that it could be that electrons are created when high energy dark matter particles crash into one another, giving rise to the synchrotron radiation that has thus far puzzled scientists here on Earth.

(PhysOrg.com) -- "Spatially entangled photons is a hot topic in quantum information science, and optical fibers are the cornerstone of our communication society," Wolfgang Loffler tells PhysOrg.com. "So far, though, no one that we know of has demonstrated that you can use a fiber to transport a photon entangled in its spatial degree of freedom."

(PhysOrg.com) -- At the smallest scales, magnetism may not work quite the way scientists expected, according to a recent paper in Physical Review Letters by Rafal Oszwaldowski and Igor Zutic of the University at Buffalo and Andre Petukhov of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.

Institute for Solid State Physics, the University of Tokyo and RIKEN announced that researchers from both institutes succeeded in the magnetic control of anomalous Hall effect (AHE) induced by spin chirality.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A Princeton researcher and his international collaborators have used lasers to peek into the complex relationship between a single electron and its environment, a breakthrough that could aid the development of quantum computers.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Bartosz Grzybowski, a physical chemist at Northwestern University, and his team of colleagues offer evidence in a paper published in Science, that shows that what scientists have believed to be true about the causes behind the creation of static electricity, is wrong.

(PhysOrg.com) -- "Scientists have been interested in generating and observing macroscopic quantum superpositions in order to test quantum mechanics at the macroscopic scale," physicist Hyunseok Jeong of Seoul National University in Seoul, South Korea, told PhysOrg.com. "There have been many papers in which the authors claim to have generated mesoscopic or macroscopic superpositions, often called 'Schrodinger cat states.' However, quoting A

A Q&A with physicist William Trischuk about the Large Hadron Collider.

On June 22, 2011, the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf set a new world record for magnetic fields with 91.4 teslas. To reach this record, Sergei Zherlitsyn and his colleagues at the High Magnetic Field Laboratory Dresden (HLD) developed a coil weighing about 200 kilograms in which electric current create the giant magnetic field – for a period of a few milliseconds