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Can you provide a list of the most important discoveries/breakthroughs in physics recently? By recent, I mean the past decade or so. All branches of physics are welcome.

Basically, I am interested in major physics breakthroughs/discoveries which haven't become well-known yet outside their narrow specialties. Most breakthroughs in the 90s like string dualities and the accelerating universe have already become common knowledge.

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Trying to judge the importance of "breakthroughs" that "haven't become well known" is a fools errand. Time will tell. In the mean time, all the credible suggestions I see below have become well known outside the sub discipline that gave rise to them. – dmckee♦ Feb 6 '11 at 15:40

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One of the biggest recent developments in high-energy physics is the confirmation of neutrino oscillations and the consequent realization that neutrinos must have some non-zero mass.

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The connection between mass and oscillation was known before any observational evidence (include Ray Davis' Homestake Mine experiment), so I take issue with "subsequent". – dmckee♦ Feb 6 '11 at 15:43
@dmckee: yes, but you still need to know that there is oscillation to deduce there is mass. So while the implication $A \to B$ came before $A$, the confirmation of $B$ came only after $A$ and so David is right :) – Marek Feb 6 '11 at 16:29
@Marek: No. People the people who ran Kamiokande, SNO, Super-K and the rest said "if these experiments see a positive signal that means neutrinos are massive". The realization was simultaneous with the measurement of oscillations. "Consequent" would be fine. – dmckee♦ Feb 6 '11 at 21:21
@dmckee: Marek has identified my meaning correctly. I very much doubt that all those scientists were capable of making two realizations simultaneously, and it should be clear which one had to come first. – David Zaslavsky♦ Feb 6 '11 at 22:24
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Iron-based high-Tc superconductors

The cuprate high-Tc superconductors completely revolutionised the field of superconductivity in the late 80's but proved very difficult to understand and over 20 years later the problem still stands. A new class of high-Tc materials, the iron-pnictides, were discovered in 2008 which have provided a whole new set of system to study.

Iron-pnictides are generally much simpler in structure than the cuprates meaning the crystal growers can generally make larger, better crystals and the theorists have an easier time of it as well.

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The isolation of a graphene --- a single layer of graphite --- was another breakthrough. 2D graphene has many unusual properties, all related to a highly delocalized and strongly entangled band of electrons.

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In theoretical side, I think Witten's discovery that all five string theories are different limits of one unique theory and in experimental side it has to be the surprising discovery that the universe is expanding in an accelerating manner.

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Witten's achievement is in the mathematical physics. – Vladimir Kalitvianski Feb 6 '11 at 21:36
@Vladimir: last time I checked, mathematical physics had physics in the name :) – Marek Feb 6 '11 at 22:24
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@Vladimir: besides, mathematical physics is usually concerned with providing proofs. This is hardly the case with any of this stringy stuff. So it's definitely theoretical physics anyway. – Marek Feb 6 '11 at 22:28
No, the theoretical physics is different from the mathematical physics. Not all our fantasies, however beautiful, reach, and "promising" they are, correspond to reality. Especially those that are not based on experimental data. – Vladimir Kalitvianski Feb 6 '11 at 22:29
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@Vladimir: seems you don't have the slightest idea about what either mathematical or theoretical physics is. Mathematical physics is field of math. There is no guessing, just proofs. Theoretical physics (whether it concerns itself with tested theories or just new untested models) is physics where proofs are not required (and indeed usually not done at all). Whether it connects with experiment or not is completely irrelevant. That's what the name theory is about... – Marek Feb 12 '11 at 14:58
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I know this was more than a decade ago, but the discovery and formulation of the AdS/CFT correspondence stating that a conformal field theory in d dimensions without gravity is equivalent to a theory of quantum gravity over an anti de Sitter background one dimension higher was a major breakthrough.

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It's a mathematical physics. – Vladimir Kalitvianski Feb 6 '11 at 21:35
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This also happened more than a decade ago, but the discovery of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background of the order of $10^{-5}$ by the COBE satellite was also groundbreaking. Subsequent measurements by WMAP have shown the power spectrum is approximately scale-invariant and Gaussian.

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The discovery of a landscape of compactifications in string theory with exponentially many KKLT compactifications is another recent groundbreaking discovery. The landscape made the strong anthropic principle respectable for the first time, and solved fine-tuning problems like the cosmological constant problem.

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It's a mathematical physics. – Vladimir Kalitvianski Feb 6 '11 at 21:36
Everyone knew there was a landscape already in the late 1970s, when Scherk and Schwarz studied toroidal compactification. The only reason this is considered a recent discovery is because Ed Witten and Ed Witten only either believed that there is a mechanism to select a unique solution, or told people this so that they would be motivated to study string theory. It's hard to tell. Following Witten, many people in the 1980s said there would be only one solution to string theory, although every graduate student knew there was a landscape even then. – Ron Maimon Sep 19 '11 at 0:01
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There are many fantastic discoveries slightly outside your time-horizon, like the discovery of a cosmological constant or the AdS/CFT correspondence, but I'll respect your time-horizon:

  1. LHC - the main discovery so far was that LHC is working ;-), which is highly non-trivial; the real discoveries will come this decade, like Higgs or, if it exists at the TeV scale, new physics (like SUSY)

  2. Carbon - nanotubes and graphene will keep physicists and engineers busy for at least a decade (engineers probably much longer)

  3. WMAP - the WMAP data are very accurate and allow to put relevant bounds on the cosmological parameters, thereby already ruling out some speculative modesl of our Universe

  4. Quark Gluon Plasma - LHC converts lead into quark gluon plasma; RHIC has been converting gold into quark gluon plasma; this has tremendously enhanced our understanding about the QCD phase diagram and also allowed applications of the AdS/CFT correspondence, like the famous shear viscosity over entropy density calculation

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1) Black hole radiation (Hawking radiation) 2) Discovery of the dark energy 3) Evaluation of the BH entropy from string theory.

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1) not recent (theoretically) and unconfirmed (experimentally) 2) discovery, really? Would you be so kind and provide a reference? – Marek Feb 6 '11 at 8:27
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@Marek some would say that an accelerating expansion of the cosmos implies the existence of dark energy. Obviously such indirect inference is not the same as direct observation. I think you could easily find dozens of references on BH entropy from string theory on arXiv. – user346 Feb 6 '11 at 15:07
@space_cadet: I know the distinction between indirect evidence and discovery. This answer claims the latter. As for the last sentence: what are you referring to? I've never mentioned part 3) of this answer. – Marek Feb 6 '11 at 16:27
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@Marek I know you know the difference and I'm sure @James knows the difference. I was just pointing out that @James had likely just made a semantic error - not something I would down-vote. And yes you didn't refer to part 3. My mistake. – user346 Feb 6 '11 at 17:33
@space_cadet: well, it renders the answer invalid. As soon as everything is fixed I'll remove my down-vote (and perhaps will even up-vote). I think I could edit the answer myself but I am still reluctant, even in the CW mode, to change other people's stuff :) – Marek Feb 6 '11 at 18:59
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Three ideas with disruptive potential remain undiscussed and are public since 2002/3. All Darkness can be enlightened now. They do not colide with SR/GR nor QM and do not need any speculative entity. The authors provide physical models, and math, that fits the observed data.

1 - Is it spacetime or, is it space + time? How sure we are?

2 - Is it space expansion or a matter shrinking scenario, or a combination of both? How sure we are?

3 - a particle model by Douglas Pinnow 'The Resonant Universe'

Questioning our rooted beliefs (or myths?):

1 - We used to assume that the atom sizes are absolute and we have no physical basis to assert that. This presumption is an obfuscation to the understanding of the properties of the universe and time. This paper analyses the effects that arise from the perspective of an 'instant observer', leading to the natural split of spacetime into space + time. A scale-invariant, and self-similar, model of the Universe is presented there. All we know is that the ratio 'space/matter' is getting greater. Because we use 'atomic properties' to take measures we can explore 'more space', 'less matter' or both, as time goes by. An independent derivation of the Einstein Special Relativity is also presented.

2 - This paper extends the above one and is easier to follow. The author presents a model of our Universe that is scale-invariant (self-similar) where Dark Energy is not invited and has only one parameter, the Hubble constant. He explores the consequences of it in the past history, and future, of the Solar System and the Earth and the primordial ambient of Life's Origin. The comparison is made with the values of SM.

3 - Pinnow presents a monograph with a new model of particles, based only on EM (Electromagnetism), and with only one parameter - the electron mass. He derives the main particles properties to within 1% of their values, and the barionic masses well bellow 1%, that does not suffer the barionic 'spin crisis'. His predictions are different from the SM expectations, no Higgs particle ;) and can be tested with the data obtained at LHC. He follows the steps of Goedecke, Haus and others, on the non-radiating condition of the EM field.

resuming:

With 1) and 2) - a ONE parameter model - there is no space expansion, no BB, no Inflation era, no DE, no DM, no cosmological constant, and make me understand better some issues like the GRBs properties, the 'isotope stability valley' and understand the why of the measured variability of the fine structure constant (by Webb et al), and the Pioneer 10 and 11 anomaly, and supermassive BH, etc,etc ...

With 3) - a ONE parameter model - All particle mass, the rest mass, can be converted to energy avoiding the formation of BH. Thanks, because I feel unconfortable with Black Holes, and this is not possible under SM.

I'm a follower, not the author. As the mammals were born in the time of the dinosaurs also revolutionary ideas are born on the fringes of mainstream thinking.

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I think my idea of "electronium" as a compound system including the electron and "its" quantized electromagnetic field deserves some attention. It is a non perturbative solution of some coupled QED equations advanced as a physical and mathematical ansatz. It may help construct divergence-less theories.

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Can you think of something that somebody else has done? Listing your own work under "most important recent discoveries" is hardly a way to sound credible. Even if your work is indeed that important. – user346 Feb 6 '11 at 15:05
Can you look at an achievement and judge independently or you need somebody else's opinion instead? – Vladimir Kalitvianski Feb 6 '11 at 15:11
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If my opinion about the work I know the best of all is not credible, how can my opinion about somebody else's work be more credible? – Vladimir Kalitvianski Feb 6 '11 at 15:27
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It's not credible because there is bias. – Robert Smith Feb 6 '11 at 15:32
First, I present it quite modestly; next, if he wants unknown achievements, authors may say a word in their favor just because the achievements are unknown yet. – Vladimir Kalitvianski Feb 6 '11 at 19:36
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