Physicists have long relied on elegant theorems to connect the abstract math of quantum theory with the tangible behavior of ...

Keeping you up to date with the chemistry news that matters most. Published by the American Chemical Society.

In recent years, heat has stopped being just a number on a thermometer and has become something we can literally see at the atomic scale. In 2025, an international team led by Yichao Zhang used an ...

Researchers have developed a way to visualise boron nitride layers that are one atom thick. These ultrathin sheets are typically almost impossible to detect with standard optical microscopes. The team ...

Open the Youtube video In a quiet lab at Argonne National Laboratory, Saw-Wai Hla and his team were huddled around their instruments late one night when they detected the spectral signature they had ...

A new microscopy technique allows scientists to see single-atom-thick boron nitride by making it glow under infrared light. Researchers from the Physical Chemistry and Theory departments at the Fritz ...

Researchers have discovered how to design and place single-photon sources at the atomic scale inside ultrathin 2D materials, lighting the path for future quantum innovations. Like perfectly controlled ...

If you think of a single atom as a grain of sand, then a wavelength of visible light — which is a thousand times larger than the atom’s width — is comparable to an ocean wave. The light wave can dwarf ...

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.