The process involved here sounds unwieldy, but is, in fact, quite simple: a material has a 6-fold rotation symmetry if the arrangement of its atoms remains unchanged when it is rotated by 60 degrees – ...

Flawed conservation laws are consequences of a much deeper principle: Noether’s theorem. Conservation laws are among the most important tools in physics. They feel as fundamental as you can get. And ...

While this specific type of twisting, known as ferro-rotation, is found in many solid materials, its physical effects and implications have remained largely unexplored. This is partly because both I ...

So-called “higher symmetries” are illuminating everything from particle decays to the behavior of complex quantum systems. For that reason, research across physics is now building to a crescendo. It ...

Symmetry attracts us. Studies comparing people’s reactions to different faces have shown, for example, that they find highly symmetrical faces more attractive than less symmetrical faces. The symmetry ...