Discoveries in physics, chemistry and mathematics
The first sequences of the solar photosphere obtained with a 4 m-class telescope reveal, at a resolution of about 19 km, Kelvin–Helmholtz vortices along the edges of magnetic concentrations.
In a sample of (10,087 ± 44) million J/ψ, BESIII sees no evidence for the X(2370)→K*(892)⁰K̄⁰ submode: its significance is 0.1 σ and the product branching fraction is limited to 2.7 × 10⁻⁶ at 90% confidence. The suppression supports the ‘flavour singlet’ interpretation; identifying it as a glueball remains a model-based conclusion, not a direct detection of bound gluons.
Since the 1970s, a marginal hypothesis has held that what makes a proton a proton is not lodged in its three quarks, but in a Y-shaped junction made of gluons. The STAR collaboration has weighed the two scenarios on four billion collisions of isobaric nuclei — two billion per species — and on photon-gold collisions: baryon number reaches the centre of the collision nearly twice as efficiently as the naive expectation of the quark picture. The authors conclude that this picture is disfavored, without announcing any statistical significance or claiming to have detected the junction.
The X-rays from magnetar 1E 1547.0−5408 are 65% polarized at 2 keV, reaching nearly 80% at certain phases — a level that surface models without refraction cannot explain. Vacuum birefringence, predicted by QED almost 90 years ago, offers the most natural reading. Strong evidence, not yet direct confirmation.
In rhombohedrally stacked graphene, a team from MIT and Basel describes a family of neighboring superconductors: four characterized in the bare pentalayer, five further regions obtained by simple contact. The three that respond to the field withstand 8.5 T in the plane — dozens of times the limit that ought to destroy them — and one of them appears only at high field.
On August 29, 1831, Michael Faraday discovers that a magnet moving inside a copper coil generates a measurable electric current. This principle — Faraday's law — underpins every generator, transformer, and electric motor in the modern world.