Phonons are the collective vibrations that move through a solid. They can be thought of as waves traveling across the atomic ...

When a magnetic material is bombarded with short pulses of laser light, it loses its magnetism within femtoseconds (10 –15 seconds). The spin, or angular momentum, of the electrons in the material ...

A pair of photons enters an optical maze, and sometimes they leave as something new. Not new in the everyday sense, since both were still photons when they came out.

In a new study ( Nature Physics, "Orbital Seebeck effect induced by chiral phonons" ), researchers developed the most ...

During the 2026 Winter Olympics, athletes will leap off ramps, slide across ice and spin through the air. These performances will look different to my students who have studied physics through sports.

Photons can have half-integer values of angular momentum when they are confined to fewer than three dimensions. That is the conclusion of physicists in Ireland, who have revived an experiment first ...

Introduction You might have seen figure skaters spinning around quickly and then tucking their arms to spin faster—or opening them to spin more slowly. This happens, thanks to a physics concept known ...

In an introductory physics course, there are three big ideas. There is the work-energy principle, the momentum principle and then the angular momentum principle. I'll skip the work-energy principle ...

Optical vortices are currently one of the most intensively studied topics in optics. These light beams, which carry orbital angular momentum (OAM), have been successfully utilized in the visible and ...