Gold usually melts at 1,300 kelvins—a temperature hotter than fresh lava from a volcano. But scientists recently shot a nanometers-thick sample of gold with a laser and heated it to an astonishing ...

What occurs when you subject a metal renowned for its stability, blast it with a laser pulse only 45 femtoseconds in duration, and heat it to 19,000 kelvins but it won’t melt? Physicists had long ...