Supercomputer probes famous but messy particle split
New Scientist
A team of researchers from the U.K., the U.S. and Germany has used the IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, plus other supercomputers, to simulate a kaon decaying into two pions for the first time. Read the associated Physical Review Letters abstract.More

Ultrasound waves with a twist
Physics World
An international team of physicists has simultaneously measured the angular momentum and torque exerted by acoustic waves for the first time. It found that this ratio agrees exactly with the predicted theory for acoustic and optical waves. According to the researchers, their techniques may also have potential in medical imaging and treatment. Read the abstract of the forthcoming Physical Review Letters article.More

Oxford professor Steven Rawlings death: No further action
BBC News
Oxford astrophysicist Steven Rawlings, 50, was found dead at a bungalow in Southmoor, U.K., belonging to fellow university professor Dr. Devinder Sivia. Sivia, 49, was arrested on suspicion of murder and bailed following the death on Jan. 12.More

Physicists discover new type of particle - sort of
ScienceNOW
In 1937, after the rise of quantum mechanics, Ettore Majorana, an Italian theoretical physicist, realized that the new physics implied the existence of a novel type of particles, now called Majorana fermions. After a 75-year hunt, researchers have now spotted the first solid evidence of their existence. And their discovery could hold the key to finally creating workable quantum computers. More

Trade-off coding for quantum communication provides more benefits than previously thought
PhysOrg
In a new study, scientists have found that trade-off coding strategies can in fact have remarkable performance gains when communicating over an optical channel compared with other traditional optical communication strategies. The finding could lead to transmitting classical and quantum information simultaneously at much higher rates than is possible with other techniques. Read the associated Physical Review Letters abstract.More

The mathematical proof that got a physicist out of a traffic ticket
io9
Dmitri Krioukov, a UC San Diego physicist, was recently given a ticket for running a stop sign. He went to court to argue the ticket, armed with a scientific paper that mathematically demonstrated that he really had stopped. He won. Read the associated Physics Central story.
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Physicists create first long-distance quantum link
ScienceNOW
For more than a decade, physicists have been developing quantum-mechanical methods to pass secret messages without fear that they could be intercepted. But they still haven't created a true quantum network - the fully quantum-mechanical analog to an ordinary telecommunications network in which an uncrackable connection can be forged between any two stations or "nodes" in a network. Now, a team of researchers in Germany has built the first true quantum link using two widely separated atoms. A complete network could be constructed by combining many such links, the researchers say. More

Astronomers peer into stellar sandstorms
Physics World
An international team of astronomers has found a potential explanation of how red-giant stars lose the bulk of their mass towards the end of their lives - a process currently not fully understood.More

Infant galaxy offers tantalizing peek at early Universe
Nature News
Astronomers are claiming a new benchmark in the quest to see the Universe's first galaxies. By taking advantage of a rare cosmic zoom lens - in which the gravity of a large mass magnifies light from objects in the distant background - a team of U.S. and European researchers has spotted a galaxy so remote its light was emitted just 490 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was a mere 3.6 percent of its current age. More

Where do space and time come from? New theory offers answers, if only physicists can figure it out
Scientific American
The theory was put forward in the late 1980s by Russian physicists Mikhail Vasiliev and the late Efin Fradkin of the Lebedev Institute in Moscow, but is so mathematically complex and conceptually opaque that whenever someone brought it up, most theorists started talking about the weather, soccer, reality TV - anything but that theory.More

How planets paint rings around stars
TIME
For something formed by the iron hand of physics, the universe has a lovely aesthetic sense - its galaxies spiral, its novas explode, its nebuale spread like great, sculpted clouds. For sheer cosmic delicacy, however, few things can touch the planetary ring. Neptune has one, Uranus has one, and Saturn, of course, has a braided, nested collection of them. Now, a less well-known ring around an otherwise unremarkable star is providing a new way to find Earth-like planets beyond our own solar system. More