Hunting for dark quarks

Quarks are the smallest particles that we know of. In fact, according to the Standard Model of particle physics, which describes all known particles and their interactions, quarks should be infinitely small. If that's not mind-boggling enough, enter dark quarks – hypothetical particles that have been proposed to explain dark matter, an invisible form of matter that fills the universe and holds the Milky Way and other galaxies together.

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Device harvests energy from low-frequency vibrations

A wearable energy-harvesting device could generate energy from the swing of an arm while walking or jogging, according to a team of researchers from Penn State's Materials Research Institute and the University of Utah. The device, about the size of a wristwatch, produces enough power to run a personal health monitoring system.

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The potential harbingers of new physics persist in LHC data

For some time now, researchers have noted several anomalies in the decays of beauty mesons in the data coming in from the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Are they more than just statistical fluctuations? The latest analysis, taking into account so-called long-distance effects in the decays of particles, increases the probability that the anomalies are not an error in the measuring techniques.

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Fruit flies and electrons: Researchers use physics to predict crowd behavior

Electrons whizzing around each other and humans crammed together at a political rally don't seem to have much in common, but researchers at Cornell are connecting the dots.

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When your X-ray subject has wings—peering inside insects with the advanced photon source

Slowly flapping its orange and black wings, a monarch butterfly sips liquid from a patch of mud. Its proboscis – the mouthpart that sucks up liquids – grazes the damp soil. For years, biologists knew that butterflies drew liquids up from surfaces with pores differently than they do from flowers. But they had no way to observe those differences.

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New insights into semiconductors for spintronic applications from hard X-ray photoemission

"Spintronics" holds promise for new types of devices for information processing and data storage, with ones and zeros being stored in the spin state of electrons as well as their electric charge. Such devices could be faster and more energy efficient than current electronics.

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Two new ways to measure the gravitational constant

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in China and one in Russia has devised two new ways to measure the gravitational constant. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes the two methods and how accurate they were. Stephan Schlamminger with the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the U.S. writes a News & Views piece on the work done by the team in the same journal edition.

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Cosmologists propose new way to form primordial black holes

What is dark matter? How do supermassive black holes form? Primordial black holes might hold the answer to this longstanding question. Leiden and Chinese cosmologists have identified a new way in which these hypothetical objects could be produced immediately after the Big Bang. Their research has been published in Physical Review Letters.

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Study demonstrates a new recurrence-based method that mimics Kolmogorov-Smirnov test

The recurrence plot is a vital tool for analyzing nonlinear dynamic systems, especially systems involving empirically observed time series data. RPs show patterns in a phase space system and indicate where data visit the same coordinates. RPs can also mimic some types of inferential statistics and linear analyses, such as spectral analysis. A new paper in the journal Chaos, provides a proof of concept for using RPs to mimic the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, which scientists use to determine if two data sets significantly differ.

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Researchers develop a new technique to forecast geomagnetic storms

The Earth's magnetic field extends from pole to pole and is strongly affected by solar wind from the sun. This "wind" is a stream of charged particles constantly ejected from the sun's surface. Occasional sudden flashes of brightness known as solar flares release even more particles into the wind. Sometimes, the flares are followed by coronal mass ejections that send plasma into space.

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Physicist Philip Harris on first observation of long-predicted Higgs boson decay

Today, scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, have announced that, for the first time, they have observed the Higgs boson transforming into elementary particles known as bottom quarks as it decays. Physicists have predicted this to be the most common way in which most Higgs bosons should decay, but until now, it has been extremely difficult to pick out the decay's subtle signals. The discovery is a significant step towards understanding how the Higgs boson gives mass to all the fundamental particles in the universe.

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Manmade mangroves could get to the 'root' of the problem for threats to coastal areas

With threats of sea level rise, storm surge and other natural disasters, researchers from Florida Atlantic University's College of Engineering and Computer Science are turning to nature to protect humans from nature. They are developing innovative ways to guard coastlines and prevent scouring and erosion from waves and storms using bioinspired materials that mimic mangrove trees found along shores, rivers and estuaries in the tropics and subtropics. Growing from a tangle of roots that twist their way out of the mud, mangrove trees naturally protect shorelines, shelter coastal ecosystem habitats and provide important water filtration. In many cases, these roots trap sediments flowing down rivers and off the land, helping to stabilize the coastline.

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Electric polarization in the macroscopic world and electrons moving at atomic scales

Femtosecond X-ray experiments in combination with a new theoretical approach establish a direct connection between electric properties in the macroscopic world and electron motions on the time and length scale of atoms. The results open a new route for understanding and tailoring the properties of ferroelectric materials.

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Come together: New laser technique binds aluminum with plastic in injection molding

As developers in the automotive and airline industries push to make more efficient vehicles, they are turning their attention to designing sturdy, lightweight machines. Designing lightweight materials, however, requires carefully joining together different types of materials like metals and polymers, and these additional steps drive up manufacturing costs. New work in laser technology recently increased the adhesion strength of metal-plastic hybrid materials.

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Researchers uncover the science behind blowing bubbles

What exactly happens when you blow on a soap film to make a bubble? Behind this simple question about a favorite childhood activity is some real science, researchers at New York University have found.

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Long-sought decay of Higgs boson observed

Six years after its discovery, the Higgs boson has at last been observed decaying to fundamental particles known as bottom quarks. The finding, presented today at CERN1 by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is consistent with the hypothesis that the all-pervading quantum field behind the Higgs boson also gives mass to the bottom quark. Both teams have submitted their results for publication today.

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Taking the temperature of protoDUNE

When crane operators at CERN lowered a custom 7.5-metre thermometer into one of the prototypes for the planned Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) earlier this month, it looked like a silver straw sliding into a giant juice carton. But designing and installing this intricate instrument was far from child's play.

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Physicists experimentally verify 40-year-old fluid equations

For decades, researchers have been using equations derived in the mid-1970s for a variety of fluid applications involving inks, foams, and bubbles, among other uses. These fundamental fluid equations describe how much force is required to pull a solid particle from a liquid surface. Although these equations have been experimentally confirmed for millimeter-sized particles, experimental confirmation in the micrometer regime has been lacking.

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The dimension of a space can be inferred from the abstract network structure

Networks describe relations between objects. They show how objects relate to one another and which ones are mutually influential. In this context, how does space impact structure? Geoinformatics scientist Dr. Franz-Benjamin Mocnik was particularly interested in answering this question. In his study, the Heidelberg University researcher demonstrated that the spatial reference can be identified in a number of datasets of different thematic networks. Thereby, the dimension of the space – that is, the spatial expanse in different directions – can be derived from the abstract structure of a network alone.

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On the genesis of shape: There is no magic in remote synchronization

In some physical systems, even elements quite distant from one another are able to synchronize their actions. At a first glance, the phenomenon appears mysterious. Using a network of simple electronic oscillators interconnected as a ring, researchers from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow have shown that remote synchronization can, at least in certain cases, be explained quite clearly.

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Uncovering atomic movements in crystal

Scientists can spend a long time in heated debates over tiny details – for example, how and whether atoms in a crystal move when heated, thereby altering the symmetry. Using computer simulations for the mineral lead telluride on the CSCS supercomputer Piz Daint, ETH researchers have resolved a long-standing controversy.

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A novel graphene quantum dot structure takes the cake

In a marriage of quantum science and solid-state physics, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have used magnetic fields to confine groups of electrons to a series of concentric rings within graphene, a single layer of tightly packed carbon atoms.

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Perfect inversion of complex structures

Perfectly inverting complex structures is of great technical importance. Researchers at ETH have now succeeded in turning the magnetic and electric structure of materials into their opposites using a single magnetic field pulse.

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Theory aids analysis of nuclear materials

Nuclear emergency teams, safeguards specialists and others may one day benefit from an expanded nuclear fission chain theory and detectors developed by a team of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) physicists.

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Breaking down band structures—system could help researchers design new materials with specific properties

Most of the time, cooking is a matter of following a recipe—combine specific amounts of specific ingredients in the right way and the predictable outcome is that you'll wind up with a tasty meal.

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Excited atoms throw light on anti-hydrogen research

Swansea University scientists working at CERN have published a study detailing a breakthrough in antihydrogen research.

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Future information technologies: Nanoscale heat transport under the microscope

A team of researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) and the University of Potsdam has investigated heat transport in a model system comprising nanometre-thin metallic and magnetic layers. Similar systems are candidates for future high-efficiency data storage devices that can be locally heated and rewritten by laser pulses (heat-assisted magnetic recording). Measurements taken with extremely short X-ray pulses have now shown that the heat is distributed 100 times slower than expected in the model system. The results are published in Nature Communications.

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Researchers develop tools to predict the dispersal of chemical plumes, pollutants

On April 4, 2017, the town of Khan Sheikhoun in northwest Syria experienced one of the worst chemical attacks in recent history. A plume of sarin gas spread more than 10 kilometers (about six miles), carried by buoyant turbulence, killing more than 80 people and injuring hundreds.

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Quantum simulation reveals mobility edge in a low-dimensional disordered landscape

A recent flood of research scholarship on electronic transport in low-dimensional (2-D or 1D) materials like graphene or carbon nanotubes reflects the tremendous potential of these materials to unveil a deeper understanding of the laws that govern the sometimes surprising emergent behavior of electrons. Scientists have probed novel materials like these to uncover the physics of topological superconductivity and topological insulators. But one of the biggest challenges researchers face in studying real materials is the presence of uncontrolled impurities that influence electronic transport.

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Video: HIE-ISOLDE's phase 2 reaches completion

CERN's ISOLDE facility has been in operation for more than 50 years. It produces radioactive isotopes for studies of the structure of atomic nuclei and a variety of other purposes including medical applications. Now, Phase 2 of its HIE-ISOLDE upgrade has reached completion.

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Researchers develop sub-7-nm memory device without nanofabrication

Scientists have developed some of the tiniest magnets to date, just 3-7 nanometers (nm) in size. Due to their small dimensions and high thermal stability, as well as the simple self-assembly process used to make them, the nanomagnets represent an important step toward designing next-generation memory devices with ultra-high densities and low power consumption.

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Can we have a fire in a highly vacuumed environment?

Toyohashi University of Technology researchers have discovered that non-flaming combustion (smoldering) of a porous specimen can be sustained, even under nearly 1 percent of atmospheric pressure. The thermal structure of a 2-mm-diameter burning specimen at very near extinction condition was successfully measured using an embedded ultra-fine thermocouple, clarifying the key issues that lead to fire extinction at low pressures. The outcome of this research will contribute to improved space exploration fire safety strategies.

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New data to improve models of atmosphere circulation

A team of scientists from the Institute of Mechanics, MSU, demonstrated how random fluctuations in the rotation speed and noise influence the number of vortexes in the Couette spherical flow. They report that the level of noise and the flow regime have a complicated nonlinear correlation. The new data will contribute to more exact models of natural flows including atmospheric circulation. The results of the work were published in the Chaos journal.

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Researchers discover link between magnetic field strength and temperature

Researchers recently discovered that the strength of the magnetic field required to elicit a particular quantum mechanical process, such as photoluminescence and the ability to control spin states with electromagnetic (EM) fields, corresponds to the temperature of the material. Based on this finding, scientists can determine a sample's temperature to a resolution of one cubic micron by measuring the field strength at which this effect occurs. Temperature sensing is integral in most industrial, electronic and chemical processes, so greater spatial resolution could benefit commercial and scientific pursuits. The team reports their findings in AIP Advances.

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ICARUS neutrino detector installed in new Fermilab home

For four years, three laboratories on two continents have prepared the ICARUS particle detector to capture the interactions of mysterious particles called neutrinos at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

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