Condensed matter physics

One hundred years after it was proposed, the Ising model is used to understand everything from magnets to brains.

Anyons don’t fit into either of the two known particle kingdoms. To find them, physicists had to erase the third dimension.

Sometimes a mirror that reflects 99.9999% of light isn’t good enough.

Glass is anything that’s rigid like a crystal, yet made of disordered molecules like a liquid. To understand why it exists, researchers are attempting to create the perfect, still-hypothetical “ideal glass.”

As the founding director of a new institute for fundamental research in Rwanda, the physicist Omololu Akin-Ojo hopes to stem the brain drain of Africa’s brightest minds.

Snow crystals come in two main types. The “pope” of snowflake physics has a new theory that explains why.

While studying materials made from DNA-coated nanoparticles, researchers found a new form of this matter: lattices in which smaller particles roam like electrons in metallic bonds.

A new theoretical model may help explain the shocking onset of superconductivity in stacked, twisted carbon sheets.

A new experiment confirms the existence of “superionic ice,” a bizarre form of water that might comprise the bulk of giant icy planets throughout the universe.