For more than a century, schoolbook physics has divided matter into neat categories like solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. A ...

New research offers clearer insight into how phase transitions unfold at the atomic scale in real materials. When ice turns into water, the change happens almost instantly. Once the melting ...

Physicists are now watching matter behave in a way that defies everyday intuition, with atoms and even light itself arranging ...

High school science misses a lot of the science researchers actually work with. For example, you learn that there are three states of matter—solid, liquid, and gas—but in advanced physics, things get ...

While universal formulas exist for every other phase transition (liquid-to-gas, gas-to-liquid, even solid-to-gas), no such formula exists for predicting when a solid melts into a liquid. A new study ...

Chemists have developed a new charge-carrying molecule that possesses liquid-like conductivity even in the solid state ( ...

This schematic illustrates the MALIO software, a machine learning structure analysis tool designed to analyze and distinguish the local structures of BP I and BP II liquid crystal phases. By ...

The ultrafast laser excitation of matters leads to nonequilibrium states with complex solid-liquid phase-transition dynamics. We used electron diffraction at mega–electron volt energies to visualize ...