Yale research recognized as a Top Ten Physics Breakthrough of 2024
A Wright Lab experiment capitalizes on simple physics to produce a groundbreaking technique to detect particle decay.

Yale Daily News
In December, the publishing group Physics World recognized a work by physics researchers from the Yale Wright Laboratory as one of its 2024 top ten physics breakthroughs.
The acclimated experiment, led by the physics graduate student Jiaxiang Wang GRD ’25 under the guidance of professor David Moore’s group, entrapped a silica sphere using a focused laser beam in a process called optical trapping. The sphere was embedded with radioactive lead atoms which decayed over several hours.
The subsequent effect can be surmised from simple physics.
Imagine you were standing on a skateboard and threw a baseball forward. You would be propelled backward.
Now imagine you are standing on a skateboard with multiple people, each having their own baseballs. In the two-dimensional scenario, the skateboard is constrained by forward or backward motion along one axis. However, instead imagine multiple people with baseballs on a sphere, levitating in a vacuum, which has freedom of movement in three dimensions. This is the technique Wang and his team have implemented.
“The detector is a sphere that is levitated in vacuum and is like a skateboard. The radioactive particles are like the players who are standing on the skateboard. And when the particles decay into alpha and beta particles, the sphere, which is like a skateboard, will be recoiled,” Wang said. “We sense how much this is recoiled to measure how much the product of the decay varies.”
In other words, the sphere’s minuscule recoil is a result of the conservation of momentum.
The Yale researchers’ paper, titled “The Mechanical Detection of Nuclear Decays,” explores this technique. An increased sensitivity in their apparatuses could lead to the proof of the existence of hypothetical particles.
The paper became more widespread than Wang anticipated, from appearances in Physics World to Chemistry World. Wang had faced previous rejections from other journals and recalled initial self-doubt. The growth of the technique’s audience has solidified for him a thriving interest in his work.
The American Physical Society’s magazine featured a comic explaining Wang’s recoil experiment in analogy to the children’s book Dr. Seuss’ “Horton Hears a Who.” Wang was pleasantly surprised at the comic’s accuracy.
Thomas Penny, a doctoral associate and co-author of the paper, had a similar reaction to these publications.
“It’s really nice to see the work we do highlighted by a bunch of different journals. It makes the work we do feel important,” Penny said. “Especially with the comic in particular, it shows they’re really making an effort to communicate the science we do to people who do not have a physics background.”
Penny foresees the technique to be used extensively, including in understanding certain cancer therapies, detecting nuclear contamination and locating the presence of neutrinos, or subatomic particles traveling near the speed of light.
The editors of Physics World recognized such future potential applications of Wang’s experiment. Their top 10 list is chosen each year based on the criteria of importance in scientific progress and the interest of their readers.
“It involves physics everyone’s heard about, and it might have applications for detecting neutrinos in the future. So that’s why it’s in our top ten,” Margaret Harris, online editor of the Physics World, wrote.
Wright Laboratory is located at 272 Whitney Ave.
Correction, Jan. 27: The article has been corrected to accurately reflect Penny’s foresight of the technique in understanding certain cancer therapies.