The melting of materials seems like a simple phenomenon. However, when their thickness is reduced to just a few atoms, established rules waver. In this two-dimensional mode, new states emerge ...

When ice melts into water, it happens quickly, with the transition from solid to liquid being immediate. However, very thin materials do not adhere to these rules. Instead, an unusual state between ...

For more than a century, schoolbook physics has divided matter into neat categories like solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. A wave of recent experiments is now tearing at those boundaries, revealing ...

Jun Wu, Minxue Tang, Lingrong Zhao, Pengfei Zhu, Tao Jiang, Xiao Zou, Liang Hong, Sheng-Nian Luo, Dao Xiang, Jie Zhang Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...