Physical Review Letters - Fresh Lime Soda

Quasicrystal, heal thyself

Oct 21, 2025 5 min read

Scientists have uncovered a remarkable self-healing property in a strange class of materials known as quasicrystals, revealing their ability to grow into a perfect, single structure even when faced wi…

What does a quantum Bayes’s rule look like?

Oct 4, 2025 7 min read

Analysis Scicomm Science Bayes's rule Bayesian network Bayesianism Choi operators commutativity completely positive trace-preserving map noise correction Physical Review Letters principle of minimum change probability quantum computing quantum information theory stochastic processes unitarity variational Bayesian inference

Bayes's rule is one of the most fundamental principles in probability and statistics. It allows us to update our beliefs in the face of new evidence. In its simplest form, the rule tells us how to…

Rescuing superconductivity

Dec 21, 2024 4 min read

Analysis Science Ashkan Salamat BCS theory carbonaceous sulphur hydride lutetium hydride Nature journal Nature Reviews Physics peer review Physical Review Letters Ranga Dias room-temperature superconductivity

From a paper in Nature Reviews Physics, December 19, 2024: One of the forefront fields of modern superconductivity research is that on hydrides at high pressures. Over the past few years, this resear…

Unexpected: Magnetic regions in metal blow past speed limit

Dec 21, 2023 4 min read

Scicomm ferromagnetism ferromagnets magnetic domains magnetic permeability nickel Physical Review Letters pump-probe spin quantum number ultrafast phenomena

You’re familiar with magnetism, but do you know what it looks like at the smallest scale? Take a block of iron, for example. It’s ferromagnetic, which means if you place it near a permanent magnet - l…

You can do worse than watching paint dry - ask physics

Dec 18, 2023 3 min read

Scicomm active process advection compressive stress evaporation Jean-Baptiste Salmon Physical Review Letters polymer gelation relative humidity skin sweating

I live in Chennai, a city whose multifaceted identity includes its unrelenting humidity. Its summers are seldom hotter than those in Delhi but they are more unbearable because it leaves people sweaty,…

The journal's part in a retraction

Sep 29, 2023 3 min read

Science Ashkan Salamat Brad Ramshaw James Hamlin lutetium hydride Nature journal peer review Physical Review Letters Ranga Dias retraction room-temperature superconductivity

What explains a journal's peer-review producing two different results on two separate occasions?…

Is Dias bringing the bus back?

Aug 16, 2023 3 min read

Scicomm Science Ashkan Salamat lutetium hydride manganese sulphide Physical Review Letters Ranga P Dias research misconduct room-temperature superconductivity The New York Times University of Nevada University of Rochester

So Physical Review Letters formally retracted that paper about manganese sulphide, in the limelight for having been coauthored by Ranga P. Dias, yesterday. The retraction notice states: "Of the a…

Gerald Guralnik (1936-2014)

Jun 5, 2014 4 min read

Uncategorized Francois Englert Gerald Guralnik Higgs boson Nobel Prize for physics Peter Higgs Physical Review Letters primacy Satyendra Nath Bose theoretical physics Tom Kibble

Of the six scientists who came up with the idea of a Higgs boson in the mid-1960s, independently or in collaboration with others, I've met all of one. Tom Kibble was at the Institute of Mathematic…