A new computational method for predicting the properties of a wide range of materials has been created by researchers in the US. The algorithm is based on the principles of statistical physics, which ...

Temperature is a statistical concept. Very small systems, consisting of a small number of particles, are not usually described statistically. Scientists have now measured how quantum systems reach a ...

Statistical physics and thermodynamics provide a framework for relating the behaviour of microscopic particles to the macroscopic properties of a system. Thermodynamics casts these macroscopic, or ...

The behaviour of liquids at an interface is an important physical problem with wide-ranging fundamental and practical implications. For example, the behaviour of a liquid squeezed between two surfaces ...

For decades, a sharp kink in the energy spectrum of particles raining down from space has taunted astrophysicists, hinting at powerful engines in our Galaxy but refusing to reveal their identity. Now ...

Hints that dark matter might be destroying itself have flickered through astronomical data for more than a decade, but a new ...

Sid Redner of Boston University in the US uses statistical physics to model large-scale social phenomena and has a particular interest in voting behaviour. He tells Edwin Cartlidge about the virtues ...