Latest press releases

What does a physicist see when looking at the NFT market?

21 February 2024

The market for collectible digital assets, or non-fungible tokens, is an interesting example of a physical system with a large scale of complexity, non-trivial dynamics and an original logic of financial transactions. At the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow, its global statistical features have been analysed more extensively.

more

Magnesium still has the potential to become an efficient hydrogen store

24 January 2024

It is easy to be optimistic about hydrogen as an ideal fuel. It is much more difficult to come up with a solution to an absolutely fundamental problem: how to store this fuel efficiently? A Swiss-Polish team of experimental and theoretical physicists has found the answer to the question of why previous attempts to use the promising magnesium hydride for this purpose have proved unsatisfactory – and why they may succeed in the future.

more

Pomerons in the proton do not destroy maximal entanglement

17 January 2024

When a high-energy photon strikes a proton, secondary particles diverge in a way that indicates that the inside of the proton is maximally entangled. An international team of physicists with the participation of the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow has just demonstrated that maximum entanglement is present in the proton even in those cases where pomerons are involved in the collisions.

more

LHCb: Correlations show nuances of the particle birth process

23 November 2023

High-energy ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider are capable of producing a quark-gluon plasma. But are heavy atomic nuclei really necessary for its formation? And above all: how are secondary particles later born from this plasma? Further clues in the search for answers to these questions are provided by the latest analysis of collisions between protons and protons or ions, observed in the LHCb experiment.

more

Cheap and efficient ethanol catalyst from laser-melted nanoparticles

8 November 2023

Ethanol fuel cells are regarded as promising sources of green electricity. However, expensive platinum catalysts are used in their production. Research on laser melting of suspensions, carried out at the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow, has led researchers to materials that catalyse ethanol with a similar – and potentially even greater – efficiency to platinum, yet are made of an element that is many times cheaper than platinum.

more