Inside high-energy proton collisions, quarks and gluons briefly form a dense, boiling state before cooling into ordinary ...

The production of entropy, which means increasing the degree of disorder in a system, is an inexorable tendency in the macroscopic world owing to the second law of thermodynamics. This makes the ...

High energy proton collisions can be pictured as a roiling sea of quarks and gluons, including short lived virtual particles. At first glance, this ...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 6, 2023 – Though a cornerstone of thermodynamics, entropy remains one of the most vexing concepts to teach budding physicists in the classroom. As a result, many people oversimplify ...

Physicists have employed a version of Maxwell's demon to reduce entropy in a three-dimensional lattice of super-cooled, laser-trapped atoms -- a process that could help speed progress toward creating ...

The steady tick of a clock usually feels simple and dependable. Something swings or vibrates in a controlled rhythm and marks the passing of each moment. What you rarely notice is the hidden cost ...

Physicists at Penn State University have devised a quantum equivalent of a famous 19th-century thought experiment, capable of creating order out of an array of randomly distributed atoms. Such highly ...