Electron Microscopes

Scientists at ETH Zurich have discovered a new type of magnetism. Experiments show that an artificially produced material becomes magnetic through a mechanism that hasn’t been seen before.

While studying a material that could help unlock the secrets of superconductors, scientists have accidentally discovered a “demon” particle that was first theorized almost 70 years ago, but had never been experimentally confirmed.

Many quantum effects can only be produced at extremely cold temperatures, which limits how useful they would be in real-world tech. Now, Princeton researchers have demonstrated a strange quantum state taking place in a material at room temperature.

Movements at the particle scale happen extremely quickly, which makes it hard to see what’s going on in there. Now engineers have developed an “attoclock” that can take snapshots of electrons in increments as small as quintillionths of a second.

Researchers at MIT have observed “electron whirlpools” for the first time. The bizarre behavior arises when electricity flows as a fluid, which could make for more efficient electronics.

The microscopic world is important to understand, but tricky to study in detail. Researchers at EPFL have now developed a new microscopy technique that combines two existing ones, allowing scientists to build high-definition 3D images of cells inside and out.

Superconductivity occurs when electrons in a metal pair up. Scientists in Germany have now discovered that electrons can also group together into families of four, creating a new state of matter and potentially a new type of superconductivity.

Researchers have discovered a material that can switch between an insulator and a conductor freely, even at room temperature. The material, a compound of manganese and sulfide (MnS2), starts off as an insulator but becomes conductive under pressure.

Physicists have outlined a relatively simple new way to create antimatter, by firing two lasers at each other to reproduce the conditions near a neutron star, converting light into matter and antimatter. Doing so could unlock cosmological mysteries.

Researchers at ETH Zurich have created a crystal made entirely of electrons. The structures have been theorized for decades, but this marks the first time they’ve been experimentally confirmed in the lab.

Graphene just keeps getting weirder. Engineers at ETH Zurich have now managed to tweak the overachieving material so that some parts of a flake can be an electrical insulator while other areas act as a superconductor, just nanometers apart.

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider probes the fringes of known physics, and now the facility has found particles not behaving as predicted. While it’s early days, the discovery hints at the existence of new particles or forces beyond the Standard Model.