Scientists have developed a new concept of mathematical modeling

A team of scientists from the Research Center "Fundamental Problems of Thermophysics and Mechanics," of Samara Polytech is engaged in the construction of new mathematical models and the search for methods for their study in relation to a wide range of local nonequilibrium transport processes in various physical systems. An innovative approach developed not so long ago is based on a modern version of third-generation thermodynamics. The project of these scientists, "Development, theoretical research and experimental verification of mathematical models of oscillatory processes, heat and mass transfer and thermomechanics with two- and multiphase delays" was among the winners of the RFBR contest. Recent research results are published in the journal Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/35aC968

Buckyballs release electron-positron pairs in forward directions

When electrons collide with positrons, their antimatter counterparts, unstable pairs can form in which both types of particle orbit around each other. Named 'positronium,' physicists have now produced this intriguing structure using a diverse range of positron targets—from atomic gases to metal films. However, they have yet to achieve the same result from vapours of nanoparticles, whose unique properties are influenced by the 'gases' of free electrons they contain in well-defined, nanoscopic regions.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2QgtWYH

Electronics at the speed of light

A European team of researchers including physicists from the University of Konstanz has found a way of transporting electrons at times below the femtosecond range by manipulating them with light. This could have major implications for the future of data processing and computing.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2EONkqs

Physicists find ways to overcome signal loss in magnonic circuits

Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Kotelnikov Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics, and N.G. Chernyshevsky Saratov State University have demonstrated that the coupling elements in magnonic logic circuits are so crucial that a poorly selected waveguide can lead to signal loss. The physicists developed a parametric model for predicting the waveguide configuration that avoids signal loss, built a prototype waveguide, and tested the model in an experiment. Their paper was published in the Journal of Applied Physics.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/396gUG1

The coolest LEGO in the universe

For the first time, LEGO has been cooled to the lowest temperature possible in an experiment which reveals a new use for the popular toy.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/395kGQ4

Study suggests universal method for measuring light power

Always on the lookout for better ways to measure all kinds of things, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have published a detailed study suggesting an "elegant" improved definition for the standard unit of light power, the optical watt.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2rYpN3Q

'The Demon in the Machine' is named physics book of the year in UK

Paul Davies' newest book, The Demon in the Machine, takes aim at one of the great outstanding scientific enigmas—what is life, how and why does it emerge and what distinguishes the living from the non-living? The book, which was published this past October in the U.S. has now been named the top physics book of 2019 by Physics World, a publication of the UK Institute of Physics.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2SdbwLm

No storm in a teacup: It's a cyclone on a silicon chip

University of Queensland researchers have combined quantum liquids and silicon-chip technology to study turbulence for the first time, opening the door to new navigation technologies and improved understanding of the turbulent dynamics of cyclones and other extreme weather.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2EFulP2

Researchers directly measure 'Cheerios effect' forces for the first time

There's an interesting fluid dynamics phenomenon that happens every morning in millions of cereal bowls. When there are just a few bits of cereal left floating on top of the milk, they tend to cluster together in the middle or around the edges of the bowl, rather than dispersing across the surface.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2ECtX3O

Improving efficiency, effectiveness of security X-ray technology

The smuggling of contraband, such as explosives and drugs, is a major threat in airport security. These risks have increased in modern times with the uptick in parcel delivery, but security inspection methods have not seen any significant improvements.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2r926oS

First intrinsic magnetic topological insulator discovered

The so-called topological insulators are those materials that are insulators in bulk, i.e., those that do not allow electric currents in their volume, but that are conductors on their surfaces. Unlike the usual conductors, that is, metals, the electric current circulating in a topological insulator does not suffer any loss of energy. This property opens great possibilities for application in electronics, since it would enable the fabrication of more efficient, faster and low-energy consumption devices. This is an objective as desirable as it is necessary in the current scenario of rapid advance of energy demand worldwide, which threatens our environment. For that very reason, the discovery of topological insulators about a decade ago caused a global research boom in the fields of nanotechnology and condensed matter physics.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/36VjWep

Ultrashort X-ray technique to probe conditions found at the heart of planets

Combining powerful lasers and bright X-rays, Imperial and STFC researchers have demonstrated a technique that will allow new extreme experiments.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2MbWdyJ

Physicists determine the barely-measurable property entropy for the first time in complex plasmas

Since the end of the 19th century, physicists have known that the transfer of energy from one body to another is associated with entropy. It quickly became clear that this quantity is of fundamental importance, and so began its triumphant rise as a useful theoretical quantity in physics, chemistry and engineering. However, it is often very difficult to measure. Professor Dietmar Block and Frank Wieben of Kiel University (CAU) have now succeeded in measuring entropy in complex plasmas, as they reported recently in the renowned scientific journal Physical Review Letters. In a system of charged microparticles within this ionized gas, the researchers were able to measure all positions and velocities of the particles simultaneously. In this way, they were able to determine the entropy, as it was already described theoretically by the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann around 1880.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2sESHGa

For Canadian researcher, it's a microscopic Christmas

There was Tiny Tim, and then the Little Drummer Boy—but they had nothing on the microscopic gingerbread house believed to be the smallest in the world and unveiled Wednesday by a Canadian researcher.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2PYT7PA

Researchers crack Newton's elusive three-body problem

It's been nearly 350 years since Sir Isaac Newton outlined the laws of motion, claiming "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." These laws laid the foundation to understand our solar system and, more broadly, to understand the relationship between a body of mass and the forces that act upon it. However, Newton's groundbreaking work also created a pickle that has baffled scientists for centuries: The Three-Body Problem.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2r4ZOXQ

Topological materials for information technology offer lossless transmission of signals

New experiments with magnetically doped topological insulators at BESSY II have revealed possible methods of lossless signal transmission that involve a surprising self-organization phenomenon. In the future, it might be possible to develop materials with such characteristics at room temperature that can be used as processing units in quantum computing, for example. The study has been published in Nature.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2EI4hmJ

Research reveals a singular moment: When a bubble breaks free

Understanding how a drop or bubble suspended in a larger mass of fluid divides into multiple pieces is invaluable for engineers designing chemical reactors, engines and ships, as well as for geoscientists studying interactions of oceans and the atmosphere. But the difficult math underlying the phenomenon has forced scientists to rely on idealized systems that lack real-world nuance. Now, researchers at Princeton University have described the breakup of bubbles surrounded by turbulent flows like those found in industrial processes or in nature.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/34AEdnK

Study unveils new spatiotemporal dynamics of carriers in perovskite thin films

Hybrid organic or inorganic halide perovskites are a unique class of solar cell materials that break some of the material design rules that have been in place for over 30 years. For instance, they can achieve an extraordinarily high performance, despite being rich in defects and disordered on a macroscopic scale.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2tkd2AH

Products of nuclear transmutations are spotted with unprecedented detail

Ancient Greeks imagined that everything in the natural world came from their goddess Physis; her name is the source of the word physics. Present-day nuclear physicists at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have created a GODDESS of their own—a detector providing insight into astrophysical nuclear reactions that produce the elements heavier than hydrogen (this lightest of elements was created right after the Big Bang).

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2YY5OOP

Discovery reveals tractionless motion is possible

In an article published in Physical Review Letters, Bristol scientists have answered the fundamental question: "Is it possible to move without exerting force on the environment?", by describing the tractionless self-propulsion of active matter.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/38J3OhM

Leptons help in tracking new physics

Electrons with 'colleagues'—other leptons—are one of many products of collisions observed in the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. According to theorists, some of these particles may be created in processes that extend beyond standard physics. The latest analysis verifies these predictions.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2S0d6Qu

New heat model may help electronic devices last longer

A University of Illinois-based team of engineers has found that the model currently used to predict heat loss in a common semiconductor material does not apply in all situations. By testing the thermal properties of gallium nitride semiconductors fabricated using four popular methods, the team discovered that some techniques produce materials that perform better than others. This new understanding can help chip manufacturers find ways to better diffuse the heat that leads to device damage and decreased device lifespans.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2tpSXsX

Laser-based prototype probes cold atom dynamics

By tracking the motions of cold atom clouds, astronomers can learn much about the physical processes which play out in the depths of space. To make these measurements, researchers currently use instruments named 'cold atom inertial sensors' which, so far, have largely been operated inside the lab. In new work published in EPJ D, a team of physicists at Muquans and LNE-SYRTE (the French national metrology laboratory for time, frequency and gravimetry) present an innovative prototype for a new industrial laser system. Their design paves the way for the development of cold atom inertial sensors in space.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2RXGV41

A general theory on explosions that happen against deformable objects

In line with current international research about the interaction of matter with high energies, the University of Seville researcher Alfonso M. Gañán Calvo has studied the explosive behavior of matter subjected to the highest known energy densities produced by humans on the Earth. As a result, he has developed a general theory and the first predictive analytical model of a three-dimensional violent explosion against a liquid object (very deformable). The scientific article that gathers these results has been given the distinction of being highlighted as a suggested article by the editor of Physical Review Letters in the latest issue of that publication.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/35DMPv6

Physicist proposes a new approach in modeling the evolution of the universe

A physicist from RUDN University has proposed a new theoretical model for the interaction of spinor and gravitational fields. He considered the evolution of the universe within one of the variants of the widespread Bianchi cosmological model. In this case, a change in the calculated field parameters led to changes in the evolution of the universe under consideration. Upon reaching certain values, it began to shrink down to the Big Bang. The article was published in the journal The European Physical Journal Plus.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2LZKDGJ

New open release from CERN streamlines interactions with theoretical physicists

What if you could test a new theory against data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)? Better yet, what if the expert knowledge needed to do this was captured in a convenient format? This tall order is now on its way from the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN, with the first open release of full analysis likelihoods from an LHC experiment.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2st49oe

Colliding molecules and antiparticles

Antiparticles—subatomic particles that have exactly opposite properties to those that make up everyday matter—may seem like a concept out of science fiction, but they are real, and the study of matter-antimatter interactions has important medical and technological applications. Marcos Barp and Felipe Arretche from the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil have modelled the interaction between simple molecules and antiparticles known as positrons and found that this model agreed well with experimental observations. This study has been published in The European Physical Journal D.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/35u5iKV

Scientists 'tune in' to proton spin precession

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a non-invasive way to measure the "spin tune" of polarized protons at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)—an important factor for maintaining these spinning particles' alignment.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/36vvp44

Slippery when wet: How does lubrication work?

In a recent paper in Science Advances, researchers from the University of Amsterdam present new experimental insight into how lubrication works. They have developed a new method using fluorescent molecules to directly observe nanometric lubrication films with a sensitivity of a single molecular layer. Their quantitative description of the relation between topography, contact pressure and lubrication provides a deeper understanding of lubrication.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/38tpuhE

Tiny quantum sensors watch materials transform under pressure

Since their invention more than 60 years ago, diamond anvil cells have made it possible for scientists to recreate extreme phenomena—such as the crushing pressures deep inside the Earth's mantle—or to enable chemical reactions that can only be triggered by intense pressure, all within the confines of a laboratory apparatus that you can safely hold in the palm of your hand.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2LOWWWq

New technology improves gravitational wave detectors by cutting quantum noise

Physicists have successfully developed a new instrument that significantly reduces quantum-level noise that has thus far limited experiments' ability to spot gravitational waves. Collisions between massive black holes and stars are thought to generate these ripples in space-time that were first detected in 2015. In all, about 11 detections have been fully confirmed so far.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/38wdwnx

Does tapping your can of beer really keep it from fizzing all over you?

A team of researchers at the University of Denmark has tested the popular notion that tapping a can of beer after it has been shaken will prevent it from spraying when it is opened. Their paper describes a trial they carried out along with their conclusions, and is available on the arXiv preprint server.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2LOH5XC

Study unveils new nonlinear dynamics of spinning bosonic stars

Although researchers have been studying dark matter and trying to observe it, its nature is a longstanding scientific mystery. The standard cosmological model suggests that approximately one-quarter of cosmological energy and matter is almost immune to electromagnetic interactions, thus the only way to observe it is to study its gravitational effects. However, the type of particles that make up dark matter is still a subject of debate.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2EdflYI

Is there dark matter at the center of the Milky Way?

MIT physicists are reigniting the possibility, which they previously had snuffed out, that a bright burst of gamma rays at the center of our galaxy may be the result of dark matter after all.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Pcipug

Insects' drag-based flight mechanism could improve tiny flying robots

Thrips are tiny insects 2 millimeters long, about as long as four human hairs are thick. Thrips are known for their unwelcome ability to devour garden plants and, lately, to inform the design of microrobotics.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2YxnAYU

Scientists are designing accelerators that one day could help clean the environment

It's been 30 years since a pilot project in Miami-Dade County found that blasting wastewater with electrons could clean it up, removing all kinds of nasty stuff, from mircroorganisms to harsh chemicals.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/38nswE9

Study gathers the first observation of leptonic decay D+→τ+ντ

The Beijing Spectrometer III (BESIII) collaboration, a large team of researchers from universities worldwide conducting particle physics studies has recently reported the first observation of the leptonic decay D+→τ+ντ. This observation, presented in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, opens up the possibility of additional tests of mu/tau universality in D decays.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/38lzdGZ

The X17 factor: A particle new to physics might solve the dark matter mystery

A team of scientists in Hungary recently published a paper that hints at the existence of a previously unknown subatomic particle. The team first reported finding traces of the particle in 2016, and they now report more traces in a different experiment.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3464CtE

Study calls 200-year-old law about gas mixtures into question

According to a new study led by a team from The University of New Mexico, centuries-old laws about the behavior of gas mixtures do not apply in the presence of shock waves.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2E2Th2R

Shape-programmable dielectric liquid crystal elastomer actuators

Materials scientists aim to use bioinspired soft robots to carry out advanced interactions between humans and robots, but the associated technology remains to be developed. For example, soft actuators must perform quickly with force to deliver programmable shape changes and the devices should be easy to fabricate and energy efficient for untethered applications. In a new report on Science Advances, Zoey S. Davidson and an interdisciplinary research team in the departments of Physical Intelligence, Materials Science and Engineering, and the School of Medicine in Germany, U.S. and Turkey, combined several characteristics of interest using two distinct active materials systems to build soft robots.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2E1c6DG

Liquid flow is influenced by a quantum effect in water

Researchers at EPFL have discovered that the viscosity of solutions of electrically charged polymers dissolved in water is influenced by a quantum effect. This tiny quantum effect influences the way water molecules interact with one another. Yet, it can lead to drastic changes in large-scale observations. This effect could change the way scientists understand the properties and behavior of solutions of biomolecules in water, and lead to a better understanding of biological systems.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Pm7nBq

Gamma-ray laser moves a step closer to reality

A physicist at the University of California, Riverside, has performed calculations showing hollow spherical bubbles filled with a gas of positronium atoms are stable in liquid helium.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/34XdPFT

Fish scattering sound waves has impact on aquaculture

Schools of fish can scatter sound waves, which has impacts on fish farming. Fisheries acoustics have been studied for over 40 years to assess biomass and optimize aquaculture applications.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2OVsM5s

Has physics ever been deterministic?

Researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the University of Vienna and the University of Geneva, have proposed a new interpretation of classical physics without real numbers. This new study challenges the traditional view of classical physics as deterministic.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2OUkg6Y

Simple experiment explains magnetic resonance

Physicists at University of California, Riverside, have designed an experiment to explain the concept of magnetic resonance. The project was carried out by undergraduate students in collaboration with local high school teachers.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/38f7TK8

A momentous view on the birth of photoelectrons

The creation of photoelectrons through ionisation is one of the most fundamental processes in the interaction between light and matter. Yet, deep questions remain about just how photons transfer their linear momentum to electrons. With the first sub-femtosecond study of the linear photon momentum transfer during an ionisation process, ETH physicists provide now unprecedented insight into the birth of photoelectrons.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Ruo00N

New instrument extends LIGO's reach

Just a year ago, the National Science Foundation-funded Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, was picking up whispers of gravitational waves every month or so. Now, a new addition to the system is enabling the instruments to detect these ripples in space-time nearly every week.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2rh8daL

Non-adiabatic dynamics of strongly driven diffusive Josephson junctions

Understanding how microwave absorption changes the transport properties of diffusive Josephson junctions is at the forefront of interest in the quantum transport community. It is especially relevant for current efforts to address the current-phase relation in topological Josephson junctions, and more generally, the microwave transport in quantum devices.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/389srnk

Standard compression algorithm could revolutionize physical and biological computations, researchers say

Entropy, a measure of the molecular disorder or randomness of a system, is critical to understanding a system's physical composition. In complex physical systems, the interaction of internal elements is unavoidable, rendering entropy calculation a computationally demanding, and often impractical, task. The tendency of a properly folded protein to unravel, for example, can be predicted using entropy calculations.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2RqEW8p

Atom music lets listeners experience atomic world through sound

Atom music is a fun new way to explore the atomic world via musical synthesis techniques.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/380sh1L

How small is a small-world network?

Discovered in the field of social sciences in the 1960s, the phenomenon known as small-world networks has fascinated popular culture and science for decades. It arose from the observation that in the world, any two people are connected by a short chain of social ties.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2rQAc15

How the U.S. hydrogen bomb secrets disappeared

Given a choice of items to lose on a train, a top-secret document detailing the newly developed hydrogen bomb should be on the bottom of the list. In January 1953, amid the Red Scare and the Korean War, that's exactly what physicist John Archibald Wheeler lost.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Lkosuk

Scientists develop new primary method for measurement of pressure

Scientists from the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) have implemented a novel pressure measurement method, partly as a byproduct of the work on the "new" kelvin. In addition to being new, this procedure is a primary method, i.e. it only depends on natural constants. As an independent method, it can be used to check the most accurate pressure gauges, for which PTB is known as the world leader.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Y6mT8I

This 'fix' for economic theory changes everything from gambles to Ponzi schemes

Whether we decide to take out that insurance policy, buy Bitcoin, or switch jobs, many economic decisions boil down to a fundamental gamble about how to maximize our wealth over time. How we understand these decisions is the subject of a new perspective piece in Nature Physics that aims to correct a foundational mistake in economic theory.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/35U55QL

Student solves a 100-year-old physics enigma

An EPFL Bachelor's student has solved a mystery that has puzzled scientists for 100 years. He discovered why gas bubbles in narrow vertical tubes seem to remain stuck instead of rising upward. According to his research and observations, an ultra-thin film of liquid forms around the bubble, preventing it from rising freely. And he found that, in fact, the bubbles are not stuck at all—they are just moving very, very slowly.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Dzbcho

NA61/SHINE gives neutrino experiments a helping hand

Neutrinos are the lightest of all the known particles that have mass. Yet their behavior as they travel could help answer one of the greatest puzzles in physics: why the present-day universe is made mostly of matter when the Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. In two recent papers, the NA61/SHINE collaboration reports particle measurements that are crucial for accelerator-based experiments studying such neutrino behavior.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2spwTxT

The plot thickens for a hypothetical X17 particle

Fresh evidence of an unknown particle that could carry a fifth force of nature gives the NA64 collaboration at CERN a new incentive to continue searches.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2L75lE1

Researchers find potential solution to overheating mobile phones

Modern computer memory encodes information by switching magnetic bits within devices. Now, a ground-breaking study conducted by researchers from NUS Electrical and Computer Engineering has found a new efficient way of using 'spin waves' to switch magnetization at room temperature for more energy-efficient spin memory and logic devices.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/35NeJER

Our place in the universe will change dramatically in the next 50 years – here's how

In 1900, so the story goes, prominent physicist Lord Kelvin addressed the British Association for the Advancement of Science with these words: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now."

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2rzk3gm

Superconductivity theory under attack

Measurements on a superconducting material show an abrupt transition between a normal metal and a "strange" metal. The really strange thing, however, is that this abruptness disappears when the temperature falls. "We don't have any theoretical machinery for this," says theoretical physicist Jan Zaanen, coauthor of a Science article, "this is something that only a quantum computer can calculate."

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2L6GmRl

Thermo-chemical power generation integrated with forced convection cooling

Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology combine forced convection cooling with thermo-electrochemical energy conversion to create a self-sustaining liquid cooling system. A liquid electrolyte is circulated through a cell to cool a hot object, and the reversible chemical reaction in the cell generates a higher electric power than the hydrodynamic pump work required to drive the liquid through the cell. This technology resolves the longstanding unaddressed issue of the loss of free energy component of the thermal energy.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2R06VeC

Toward more efficient computing, with magnetic waves

MIT researchers have devised a novel circuit design that enables precise control of computing with magnetic waves—with no electricity needed. The advance takes a step toward practical magnetic-based devices, which have the potential to compute far more efficiently than electronics.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2OTEQ6g

ATLAS Experiment probes the quark-gluon plasma in a new study of photo-produced muon pairs

At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the electromagnetic fields of Lorentz-contracted lead nuclei in heavy-ion collisions act as intense sources of high-energy photons, or particles of light. This environment allows particle physicists to study photon-induced scattering processes, which can not be studied elsewhere.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2sn5m0e

Natural van der Waals heterostructural single crystals with magnetic and topological properties

Heterostructures with magnetism and topology (geometry) are promising materials to realize exotic topological quantum states. However, such materials are challenging to engineer or synthesize. In a new report on Science Advances, Jiazhen Wu and an interdisciplinary research team in the departments of Materials Research, Optoelectronic Science, Physics, Condensed Matter Research and Advanced Materials in Japan and China, reported the development of natural magnetic van der Waals heterostructures. The constructs exhibited controllable magnetic properties while maintaining their topological surface states.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2QXfDdU

A fifth fundamental force could really exist, but we haven't found it yet

The universe is governed by four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. These forces drive the motion and behavior of everything we see around us. At least, that's what we think. But over the past several years, there's been increasing evidence of a fifth fundamental force. New research hasn't discovered this fifth force, but it does show that we still don't fully understand these cosmic forces.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/33qhR82

Theorem explains why quantities such as heat and power can fluctuate in microscopic system

The second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy of an isolated system always tends to increase over time until it reaches a maximum. In other words, disorganization increases without outside intervention. Electrical equipment inevitably heats up as part of the energy is dissipated in the form of heat instead of being used for mechanical work, and objects deteriorate over time but do not spontaneously regenerate.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2rqtqPf

Chemical herders could impact oil spill cleanup

Oil spills in the ocean can cause devastation to wildlife, so effective cleanup is a top priority. One method to clean up oil spills is by burning, which only works if the oil is heavily concentrated in one area. Research from Johns Hopkins University shows the effects of chemical herders, which are agents that may be used to concentrate oil spills, on wave breaking.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2QSvFWd

Industrial bread dough kneaders could use physics-based redesign

Bakers have been crafting bread for more than 6,000 years with four simple ingredients: flour, salt, water and yeast. Apart from using high-quality ingredients, the kneading process and amount of time the dough is given to rise ultimately determine the bread's quality.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2OHiGnC

From firearms to fish—following patterns to discover causality

Mathematicians have successfully applied a new, pictorial approach to answer complex questions that puzzle analysts, such as, do media stories on firearm legislation influence gun sales? Cause-and-effect queries like this pop up in various fields, from finance to neuroscience, and objective methods are needed to deliver reliable answers.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2XM3I3V

Resolving the 'proton radius puzzle'

How do you measure the width of a proton?

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2OkV5du

Harvesting fog can provide fresh water in desert regions

Fog harvesting is a potential practical source of fresh water in foggy coastal deserts, and current solutions rely on meter scale nets/meshes. The mesh geometry, however, presents a physiologically inappropriate shape for millimeter scale bulk bodies, like insects.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2OkiZ8W

A new framework could aid the search for heavy thermal dark matter

Astrophysicists have been searching for dark matter for several decades, but these searches have so far yielded disappointing results. In a recent study, two researchers at Weizmann Institute of Science and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel have introduced a new theoretical framework outlining a mechanism of elementary thermal dark matter with a mass up to 1014 GeV.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2shqk0l

Researchers set new upper limit on neutrino mass

An international team of researchers has used a new spectrometer to find and set an upper limit for the mass of a neutrino. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group describes how they came up with the new limit and why they believe finding it was important.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2sbW8Ui

Fire ants' raft building skills react as fluid forces change

Fire ants build living rafts to survive floods and rainy seasons. Georgia Tech scientists are studying if a fire ant colony's ability to respond to changes in their environment during a flood is an instinctual behavior and how fluid forces make them respond.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/33gmOjz

Fossils reveal swimming patterns of long extinct cephalopod

Computational fluid dynamics can be used to study how extinct animals used to swim. Scientists studied 65 million-year-old cephalopod fossils to gain deeper understanding of modern-day cephalopod ecosystems.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/35yE4SH

Low-frequency sound may predict tornado formation

How can you tell when a storm is going to produce a tornado even before the twister forms? Research from Oklahoma State University and University of Nebraska-Lincoln indicates prior to tornado formation, storms emit low-frequency sounds.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2qJOuQN

Fluid dynamics taught through dance

A collaboration at University of Michigan is taking a unique approach to fluid mechanics by teaching it through dance. Fluid mechanics professor Jesse Capecelatro and choreographer Veronica Stanich, both from the University of Michigan, teamed up to create Kármán Vortex Street, a dance improvisation guided by physics properties.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2rnN4LJ

Not all changeups are created equal; seam shifted wake baffles hitters

While changing the rotation rate/axis of a thrown baseball has long been a weapon in a pitcher's arsenal, some pitchers, like Washington Nationals star Stephen Strasburg, manipulate the baseball's wake to create unexpected movement from a familiar delivery (his changeup).

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/37sM6hX

Heating techniques could improve treatment of macular degeneration

Age-related macular degeneration is the primary cause of central vision loss and results in the center of the visual field being blurred or fully blacked out. Though treatable, some methods can be ineffective or cause unwanted side effects.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2qHV5Lr

Shaking head to get rid of water in ears could cause brain damage, physicists find

Trapped water in the ear canal can cause infection and even damage, but it turns out that one of the most common methods people use to get rid of water in their ears can also cause complications. Researchers at Cornell University and Virginia Tech show shaking the head to free trapped water can cause brain damage in small children.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2OJDKd0

Optimal archery feather design depends on environmental conditions: study

When it comes to archery, choosing the right feathers for an arrow is the key to winning. This necessity for precision makes it crucial to understand how environment and design effect arrows in flight.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2qwi4cA

New method for using spin waves in magnetic materials

Smaller, faster, more energy-efficient—this is the goal that developers of electronic devices have been working towards for years. In order to be able to miniaturize individual components of mobile phones or computers for example, magnetic waves are currently regarded as promising alternatives to conventional data transmission functioning by means of electric currents. The reason: As chips become smaller and smaller, electrical data transmission at some point reaches its limits, because electrons that are very close to each other give off a lot of heat—which can lead to a disruption of physical processes.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2QDWBsN

Physicists determine dripline for fluorine and neon isotopes

An international team of physicists with the BigRIPS experiment taking place at the RIKEN Radioactive Isotope Beam Factory in Japan has determined the dripline for fluorine and neon isotopes. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the researchers describe how they found the driplines and where their research is headed next.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2XITVLR

Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer measurements unveil properties of cosmic helium

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) collaboration, a large group of researchers from CERN and other institutes worldwide, has recently presented a series of precision measurements of the properties of cosmic Helium isotopes 3He and 4He. These measurements were collected by the AMS, a spectrometer located on the International Space Station (ISS).

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2rcRx3N

New tech puts virtual sense of touch at our fingertips

Garrett Anderson has never known the pleasure of holding hands with both his children at the same time.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/37zsIzU

Study on surface damage to vehicles traveling at hypersonic speeds

Vehicles moving at hypersonic speeds are bombarded with ice crystals and dust particles in the surrounding atmosphere, making the surface material vulnerable to damage such as erosion and sputtering with each tiny collision. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studied this interaction one molecule at a time to understand the processes, then scaled up the data to make it compatible with simulations that require a larger scale.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2NZdlZD

Laying out directions for future of reliable blood clotting molecule models

Blood clots have long been implicated in heart attacks and strokes, together accounting for almost half of deaths annually in the United States. While the role of one key protein in the process, called von Willebrand factor, has been established, a reliable model for predicting how vWF collects in blood vessels remains elusive.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/37ke2UW

Birds of a feather flock together, but how do they decide where to go?

Coordinated behavior is common in a variety of biological systems, such as insect swarms, fish schools and bacterial colonies. But the way information is spread and decisions are made in such systems is difficult to understand.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2CY50iM

When stuck in water, bees create a wave and hydrofoil atop it, study finds

Walking on Caltech's campus, research engineer Chris Roh (MS '13, Ph.D. '17) happened to see a bee stuck in the water of Millikan Pond. Although it was a common-enough sight, it led Roh and his advisor, Mory Gharib (Ph.D. '83), to a discovery about the potentially unique way that bees navigate the interface between water and air.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/35d1EUX

A four-way switch promises greater tunability of layered materials

A scientific team from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Vanderbilt University has made the first experimental observation of a material phase that had been predicted but never seen. The newly discovered phase couples with a known phase to enable unique control over material properties—an advance that paves the way to eventual manipulation of electrical conduction in two-dimensional (2-D) materials such as graphene.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2OpZpH4

Protein imaging at the speed of life

To study the swiftness of biology—the protein chemistry behind every life function—scientists need to see molecules changing and interacting in unimaginably rapid time increments—trillionths of a second or shorter.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2CT4xOP

Foam offers way to manipulate light

There is more to foam than meets the eye. Literally. A study by Princeton scientists has shown that a type of foam long studied by scientists is able to block particular wavelengths of light, a coveted property for next-generation information technology that uses light instead of electricity.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2NYDKXw

ADMX experiment places world's best constraint on dark matter axions

ADMX, with its world-leading sensitivity, has ruled out axions of a certain mass range as dark matter.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/35fxNeq

Hot electrons harvested without tricks

Semiconductors convert energy from photons (light) into an electron current. However, some photons carry too much energy for the material to absorb. These photons produce "hot electrons," and the excess energy of these electrons is converted into heat. Materials scientists have been looking for ways to harvest this excess energy. Scientists from the University of Groningen and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) have now shown that this may be easier than expected by combining a perovskite with an acceptor material for hot electrons. Their proof of principle was published in Science Advances on 15 November.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2COYo6c

LHCb looks to the future with SciFi detector

For the LHCb detector at the Large Hadron Collider, the ongoing second long shutdown (LS2) of CERN's accelerator complex will be a period of metamorphosis. After two successful data-collection runs, the detector is being upgraded to improve the precision of its physics measurements, many of which are the best in the world. There will therefore be five times more collisions every time proton bunches cross within the detector after LS2 and the LHCb collaboration plans on increasing the data-readout rate from 1 megaHertz to the LHC's maximum interaction frequency of 40 megaHertz (or every 25 nanoseconds).

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/35936YD

Discovery of a new type of particle beam instability

Accelerated, charged particle beams do what light does for microscopes: illuminate matter. The more intense the beams, the more easily scientists can examine the object they are looking at. But intensity comes with a cost: the more intense the beams, the more they become prone to instabilities.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2NS1zjL

Physicists irreversibly split photons by freezing them in a Bose-Einstein condensate

Light can be directed in different directions, usually also back the same way. Physicists from the University of Bonn and the University of Cologne have, however, succeeded in creating a new one-way street for light. They cool photons down to a Bose-Einstein condensate, which causes the light to collect in optical "valleys" from which it can no longer return. The findings from basic research could also be of interest for the quantum communication of the future. The results are published in Science.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2QhBxYH

How do you make the world's most powerful neutrino beam?

What do you need to make the most intense beam of neutrinos in the world? Just a few magnets and some pencil lead. But not your usual household stuff. After all, this is the world's most intense high-energy neutrino beam, so we're talking about jumbo-sized parts: magnets the size of park benches and ultrapure rods of graphite as tall as Danny DeVito.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2OcV363

From sci-fi to science lab: Holograms you can 'feel'

Walking, talking holograms have been a staple of sci-fi films since Princess Leia was magically brought to life in "Star Wars".

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/32NB1US

Top cosmologist's lonely battle against 'Big Bang' theory

James Peebles won this year's Nobel prize in physics for helping transform the field of cosmology into a respected science, but if there's one term he hates to hear, it's "Big Bang Theory."

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2ph0cBD

Could the mysteries of antimatter and dark matter be linked?

Could the profound mysteries of antimatter and dark matter be linked? Thinking that they might be, scientists from the international BASE collaboration, led by Stefan Ulmer of the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research, and collaborators have performed the first laboratory experiments to determine whether a slightly different way in which matter and antimatter interact with dark matter might be a key to solving both mysteries.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2XdgMyW

Fluid dynamics provides insight into wildfire behavior

The Kincade Fire has been burning through Sonoma County, California, displacing people from their homes and leaving destruction in its wake. It is a stark reminder of the increasingly pressing need for a better understanding of how fires begin and spread.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2NJMSiQ

Unpacking the microstructure of stabilized oil-in-water emulsions using neutron scattering techniques

An international team led by New Zealand food scientists at the Riddet Institute has used neutron scattering techniques to characterize the structure of an oil-in-water emulsion commonly used in foods, such as milk, cream, salad dressings and sauces.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2NJVcyN

Etalumis 'reverses' simulations to reveal new science

Scientists have built simulations to help explain behavior in the real world, including modeling for disease transmission and prevention, autonomous vehicles, climate science, and in the search for the fundamental secrets of the universe. But how to interpret vast volumes of experimental data in terms of these detailed simulations remains a key challenge. Probabilistic programming offers a solution—essentially reverse-engineering the simulation—but this technique has long been limited due to the need to rewrite the simulation in custom computer languages, plus the intense computing power required.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2XbDAz4

Deep learning expands study of nuclear waste remediation

A research collaboration between Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Brown University, and NVIDIA has achieved exaflop performance on the Summit supercomputer with a deep learning application used to model subsurface flow in the study of nuclear waste remediation. Their achievement, which will be presented during the "Deep Learning on Supercomputers" workshop at SC19, demonstrates the promise of physics-informed generative adversarial networks (GANs) for analyzing complex, large-scale science problems.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2QbyS2G

Using sound waves to remotely target drugs to tumors

The lack of a clinically viable method to track and direct cancer drugs to tumors is a big problem for targeted therapeutics.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2KiaGIq

Sound-redirecting prototype could fool eavesdroppers

Tuning the instruments that produce some of our most indelible sound waves—guitars, pianos, vocal chords—has become commonplace, expected, easy.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2CDfDHm

LHCf gears up to probe birth of cosmic-ray showers

Cosmic rays are particles from outer space, typically protons, travelling at almost the speed of light. When the most energetic of these particles strike the atmosphere of our planet, they interact with atomic nuclei in the atmosphere and produce cascades of secondary particles that shower down to the Earth's surface. These extensive air showers, as they are known, are similar to the cascades of particles that are created in collisions inside particle colliders such as CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In the next LHC, run starting in 2021, the smallest of the LHC experiments—the LHCf experiment—is set to probe the first interaction that triggers these cosmic showers.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/33zWJx6

New research synthesizes different aspects of causality in quantum field theory

In current quantum field theory, causality is typically defined by the vanishing of field commutators for spacelike separations. Two researchers at the University of Massachusetts and Universidade Federal Rural in Rio de Janeiro have recently carried out a study discussing and synthesizing some of the key aspects of causality in quantum field theory. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, is the result of their investigation of a theory of quantum gravity commonly referred to as "quadratic gravity."

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2PYDRnj

A new type of fire, the fuel of the future?

Later this month a Texus rocket will launch from Esrange, Sweden, that will travel about 260 km upwards and fall back to Earth offering researchers six minutes of zero gravity. Their experiment? Burning metal powder to understand a new type of fire.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2X2GcPO

Researchers convert 2-D images into 3-D using deep learning

A UCLA research team has devised a technique that extends the capabilities of fluorescence microscopy, which allows scientists to precisely label parts of living cells and tissue with dyes that glow under special lighting. The researchers use artificial intelligence to turn two-dimensional images into stacks of virtual three-dimensional slices showing activity inside organisms.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/34LV9YT

Machine learning enhances light-beam performance at the advanced light source

Synchrotron light sources are powerful facilities that produce light in a variety of "colors," or wavelengths—from the infrared to X-rays—by accelerating electrons to emit light in controlled beams.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2NNJMZM

Obtaining order in the "frustrated" landscape of disordered magnetism

Identifying a material's magnetic structure is a key to unlocking new features and higher performance in electronic devices. However, solving increasingly complex magnetic structures requires increasingly sophisticated approaches.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2NMm8wK

Researchers measure wake of supersonic projectiles

Imaging technology has vastly improved over the past 30 years. It's been about that long since the flow coming off of the base of projectiles, such as ballistic missiles, has been measured. Researchers in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign used a modern measurement technique called stereoscopic particle image velocimetry to take high-resolution measurements of the complicated flow field downstream of a blunt-based cylinder moving at supersonic speeds, which is representative of a projectile or an unpowered rocket.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2WPRTZO

Researchers model avalanches in two dimensions

There's a structural avalanche waiting inside that box of Rice Krispies on the supermarket shelf. Cornell researchers are now closer to understanding how those structures behave—and in some cases, behave unusually.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2qt73YW

New measurement yields smaller proton radius

Using the first new method in half a century for measuring the size of the proton via electron scattering, the PRad collaboration has produced a new value for the proton's radius in an experiment conducted at the Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2WPpZ05

CERN appoints Gianotti, first woman chief, to 2nd term

The European research center that runs the world's largest atom smasher says it has reappointed Italian physicist Fabiola Gianotti, its first woman chief, for a second five-year term.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/34yww1U

Simulations show how massive black holes could be formed by mergers

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. along with one in India and one in Hungary has created simulations that could explain how larger than expected black holes could form near supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group describes how they made their simulations and what they showed.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2NJvQjz

Rotational form of spontaneous crystallographic ordering discovered in ferroic material

A team of researchers from the University of Michigan and Rutgers University has discovered a rotational form of spontaneous crystallographic ordering in a ferroic material. In their paper published in the journal Nature Physics, the group describes their work with ferro-rotational orders under different conditions and what they learned about them. Manfred Fiebig with ETH Zurich has published a News & Views piece on the work done by the team in the same issue—he also gives a brief history of ferromagnetism and what has been learned about it over the past 2,000 years.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2JUX1qh

World-leading microscopes take candid snapshots of atoms in their 'neighborhoods'

We can directly see the hidden world of atoms thanks to electron microscopes, first developed in the 1930s. Today, electron microscopes, which use beams of electrons to illuminate and magnify a sample, have become even more sophisticated, allowing scientists to take real-world snapshots of materials with a resolution of less than half the diameter of a hydrogen atom.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/36Gmlu8

Target practice: Perfecting the Mu2e production target

Before Mu2e, there was MECO.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2pCzt2Q

Engineers exploit the repeating structure of turbulence to create a more complete model of the phenomenon

A Caltech engineer has unlocked some of the secrets behind turbulence, a much-studied but difficult-to-pin-down phenomenon that mixes fluids when they flow past a solid boundary.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2qx5Akf

Physics of windshield-cracking raindrops could demolish kidney stones

A plane has to be going pretty fast for a mere raindrop to crack its windshield, but it can happen. Now, new models of the physics behind the improbable feat may just help doctors crack kidney stones to pieces.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2ChQ0fe

Researchers design 'intelligent' metamaterial to make MRIs affordable and accessible

Boston University researchers have developed a new, "intelligent" metamaterial—which costs less than ten bucks to build—that could revolutionize magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), making the entire MRI process faster, safer, and more accessible to patients around the world. The technology, which builds on previous metamaterial work by the team, was described in a new paper in Advanced Materials.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2CdjQRN

Black holes sometimes behave like conventional quantum systems

A group of Skoltech researchers led by Professor Anatoly Dymarsky have studied the emergence of generalized thermal ensembles in quantum systems with additional symmetries. As a result they found that black holes thermalize the same way ordinary matter does. The results of their study were published in Physical Review Letters.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2NMfTcc

Study observes anomalous decay of coherence in a dissipative many-body system

In quantum physics, some of the most interesting effects are the result of interferences. Decoherence, or loss of coherence, occurs when a quantum system eventually loses the ability to produce interferences, due to external noise or coupling to a larger and unmonitored system (i.e. the surrounding environment).

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/36CIBVy

Laser pulses create topological state in graphene

Discovering ways to control the topological aspects of quantum materials is an important research frontier because it can lead to desirable electrical and spin transport properties for future device technologies. Now MPSD scientists have discovered a pioneering laser-driven approach to generate a topological state in graphene. Their work has just been published in Nature Physics.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/36FwmI7

Why is ice so slippery?

The answer lies in a film of water that is generated by friction, one that is far thinner than expected and much more viscous than usual water through its resemblance to the "snow cones" of crushed ice we drink during the summer. This phenomenon was recently demonstrated by researchers from the CNRS and ENS-PSL, with support from the École polytechnique, in a study that appeared in Physical Review X on November 4, 2019.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2rcw3UN

Researchers find best classroom shapes for fish swimming in schools

A team of researchers has identified the best arrangements for fish swimming in schools—formations that are superior in terms of saving energy while also optimizing speed. Its findings, which appear in the journal Physical Review X, point to potential new ways to enhance energy-producing technologies.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2NzVO92

Extending electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy to nanoliter volume protein single crystals

Biochemists can use electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) on protein single crystals to determine the ultimate electronic structure of paramagnetic protein intermediates and investigate the relative magnetic tensor to a molecular structure. The method is, however, withheld by typical protein crystal dimensions (0.05 to 0.3 mm) that do not provide sufficient signal intensity during protein crystallography. In a new study on Science Advances, Jason W. Sidabras and an interdisciplinary research team in the departments of Chemical Energy Conversion, Photobiotechnology, Institute for Biology and Experimental Physics in Germany presented a microwave self-resonant microhelix to quantify nanoliter samples. The scientists implemented the technique in a commercial X-band (mid-range frequency; 9.5 GHz) EPR spectrometer. The self-resonant microhelix provided a measured signal-to-noise improvement compared to other commercial EPR resonators. The work enables advanced EPR techniques to study protein single crystals for X-ray crystallography, without size-related exclusions or challenges. To demonstrate the method, Sidabras et al. used single crystal protein [FeFe]-hydrogenase (from Clostridium pasteurianum) with 0.3 mm by 0.1 mm by 0.1 mm dimensions.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2WKQvIa

Bringing ideas to life through experimental physics

Even the most brilliant scientific ideas need data. Just this year, the first-ever image of a black hole finally provided the evidence needed to support Einstein's 100-year-old theories. 

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2q8vx9V

Numerical evidence for the merger of MOTSs inside a binary black hole

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Rochester Institute of Technology and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics have recently gathered strong numerical evidence for a new phenomenon that takes place in the interior of binary black holes. In their study, published in Physical Review Letters, they collected observations that could offer exciting new insight into the merger of marginally outer trapped surfaces (MOTSs) in a binary black hole (BBH), a system consisting of two black holes in close orbit around each other.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2PDV4m6

Dark matter experiment's central component takes a deep dive—nearly a mile underground

Q: How do you get a 5,000-pound, 9-foot-tall particle detector, designed to hunt for dark matter, nearly a mile underground?

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2JAXQEw

Novel NRL instrument enhances ability to measure nuclear materials

Researchers with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) designed and built an instrument called NAUTILUS to provide new measurement capabilities unlike those available at other laboratories to measure nuclear, cosmo/geo-chemical, and electronic materials.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2NqR6KO

Scientists reveal the physics of Jackson Pollock's painting technique

The celebrated painter Jackson Pollock created his most iconic works not with a brush, but by pouring paint onto the canvas from above, weaving sinuous filaments of color into abstract masterpieces. A team of researchers analyzing the physics of Pollock's technique has shown that the artist had a keen understanding of a classic phenomenon in fluid dynamics—whether he was aware of it or not.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2PzpdCS

Researchers build a biomimetic 'soft cannon' to understand how fungal spores are dispersed

A team of researchers from the Technical University of Denmark, the University of Copenhagen and Wageningen University and Research has built a tiny biomimetic 'soft cannon' to better understand how fungal spores are dispersed. In their paper published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, the group describes building their tiny cannon and what they learned from firing it.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2q2i1V6

LS2 Report: Linac4 knocking at the door of the PS Booster

Busy activity has returned to the CERN Control Centre (CCC), where the Operation group coordinates the current Linac4 test run, supported by the Accelerators and Beam Physics (ABP) group and all the involved equipment groups. As we write, the nominal 160 MeV beam has already reached the Linac4 dump.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2BTFmej

Scientists learn how to make oxygen 'perform' for them

When it comes to the fundamentals of making better materials—stronger-but-thinner glass for televisions or phone screens, for example—it almost always comes down to the building blocks of science. Understand the structure around an atom, the most basic piece of any material, and you might be able to change that material for the better.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/349Q9Ny

A new type of acoustic insulation enables sound to be concentrated in corners

A group of researchers from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), in collaboration with Chinese scientists from the University of Nanjing (NJU), have designed a new type of acoustic insulation that enables sound waves to be concentrated in corners. This line of research could have applications in industrial ultrasound technologies or in the improvement of certain medical diagnostic tests such as ultrasound.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/34cEPQI

First magnet installed for the ALPS II experiment at DESY

The international ALPS II ("Any light particle search") collaboration installed the first of 24 superconducting magnets today, marking the start of the installation of a unique particle physics experiment to look for dark matter. Located at the German research centre DESY in Hamburg, it is set to start taking data in 2021 by looking for dark matter particles that literally make light shine through a wall, thus providing clues to one of the biggest questions in physics today: what is the nature of dark matter?

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2NiKCgS

Liquid crystal droplets as versatile microswimmers

Nature's most common swimmers are single-celled organisms such as microalgae that swim toward light sources, and sperm cells that swim toward an ovum. For a physicist, cells are simply biochemical machines, which must obey well-described laws of chemistry and physics. Can scientists therefore create life-like, swimming micro-machines without invoking biology?

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2PuCc8M

Researchers uncover an anomaly in the electromagnetic duality of Maxwell Theory

Researchers at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (WPI) and Tohoku University in Japan have recently identified an anomaly in the electromagnetic duality of Maxwell Theory. This anomaly, outlined in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, could play an important role in the consistency of string theory.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/320W9XH

Using an accurate measurement of the parameters of planetary bodies to constrain the mass of the graviton

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in France has revisited the idea of improving on estimates of the upper limit of the mass of a graviton. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group describes their accurate measurement of the parameters of planetary bodies and what they found.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2PtwjIV

Mathematics reveals new insights into Marangoni flows

The Marangoni effect is a popular physics experiment. It is produced when an interface between water and air is heated in just one spot. Since this heat will radiate outwards, a temperature gradient is produced on the surface, causing the fluid to move through the radiation process of convection. When un-dissolvable impurities are introduced to this surface, they are immediately swept to the side of the water's container. In turn, this creates a gradient in surface tension which causes the interface to become elastic.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/349ZRzG

Placing another piece in the dark matter puzzle

Very little is known about the exact nature of dark matter. Currently, some of the most promising dark matter candidates are extremely light bosonic particles such as axions, axion-like particles or even dark photons. "These can also be regarded as a classical field oscillating at a certain frequency. But we can't yet put a figure on this frequency—and therefore the mass of the particles," explains Professor Dmitry Budker. "That is why in the CASPEr research program, we are systematically investigating different frequency ranges looking for hints of dark matter."

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2NhTTpn

Study shows ability to detect light from UV to the IR optical regimes using spin currents

A University of Wyoming researcher and his team have shown that the spin Seebeck effect (SSE) can be used to detect light across a broad optical range—ultraviolet through visible to near-infrared. This work has future implications on novel spin current-based technologies.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2NiCqgv

Alert system for failing nuclear plant pipes uses thin films and sound vibrations

A failing pipe can be tough to spot. It may cause a puddle, produce another sign of damage, or simply burst before detection. A flooded kitchen or laundry room is messy and inconvenient, but the stakes are much, much higher in nuclear power plants—which on average contain many miles of pipeline.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2MTFcdp

Small magnets reveal big secrets

An international research team led by a physicist at the University of California, Riverside, has identified a microscopic process of electron spin dynamics in nanoparticles that could impact the design of applications in medicine, quantum computation, and spintronics.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/343gtJ6

Physicists simulate critical 'reheating' period that kickstarted the Big Bang

As the Big Bang theory goes, somewhere around 13.8 billion years ago the universe exploded into being, as an infinitely small, compact fireball of matter that cooled as it expanded, triggering reactions that cooked up the first stars and galaxies, and all the forms of matter that we see (and are) today.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2qD504z

Science reveals improvements in Roman building techniques

The Romans were some of the most sophisticated builders of the ancient world. Over the centuries, they adopted an increasingly advanced set of materials and technologies to create their famous structures. To distinguish the time periods over which these improvements took place, historians and archaeologists typically measure the colours, shapes and consistencies of the bricks and mortar used by the Romans, along with historical sources.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Nc1cir

Deflating beach balls and drug delivery

Many natural microscopic objects—red blood cells and pollen grains, for example—take the form of distorted spheres. The distortions can be compared to those observed when a sphere is 'deflated' so that it steadily loses internal volume. Until now, most of the work done to understand the physics involved has been theoretical. Now, however, Gwennou Coupier and his colleagues at Grenoble Alps University, France have shown that macroscopic-level models of the properties of these tiny spheres agree very well with this theory. The new study, which has implications for targeted drug delivery, was recently published in The European Physical Journal E.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2pMTO53

Insulating antiferromagnetic materials for future computers

Future computer technology based on insulating antiferromagnets is progressing. Electrically insulating antiferromagnets such as iron oxide and nickel oxide consist of microscopic magnets with opposite orientations. Researchers see them as promising materials replacing current silicon components in computers. Physicists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in collaboration with Tohoku University in Sendai in Japan, the synchrotron sources BESSY-II at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB), and Diamond Light Source, the UK's national synchrotron, have demonstrated how information can be written and read electrically in insulating antiferromagnetic materials.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2omRktW

Scientists confirm a new 'magic number' for neutrons

An international collaboration led by scientists from the University of Hong Kong, RIKEN (Japan), and CEA (France) have used the RI Beam Factory (RIBF) at the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-base Science to show that 34 is a "magic number" for neutrons, meaning that atomic nuclei with 34 neutrons are more stable than would normally be expected. Earlier experiments had suggested, but not clearly demonstrated, that this would be the case.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Nb9fMl

Cooking up a new theory for better accelerators

While particle accelerators may be on the cutting edge of science, the building and preparation of some particle accelerator components has long been more of an art form, dependent on recipes born of trial and error. Now, Ari Deibert Palczewski hopes to change that. A staff scientist at the Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, Palczewski has been awarded a DOE Early Career Research Program grant to put the science back into particle accelerator preparation.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2NfjKOG

The way is clear: CORNING taps neutrons for developing new glass compositions

Scientists above all else are problem solvers.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2N9Ayqh

How to spot a wormhole (if they exist)

A new study outlines a method for detecting a speculative phenomenon that has long captured the imagination of sci-fi fans: wormholes, which form a passage between two separate regions of spacetime.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2W9jAwv

Researchers work to create infrared detectors for viper-like night vision

Much like some snakes use infrared to "see" at night, University of Central Florida researchers are working to create similar viper vision to improve the sensitivity of night-vision cameras.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/32InZsC

Prisoner's dilemma game reveals cooperation leads to leadership

Game theory is a field which applies mathematics to understand the science behind logical decision-making behavior and social structures. Game theory has historically studied cooperation and hierarchy, and has sought to explain why individuals cooperate, even though they might be better off not to do so.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2BCRqjX

Magnetics with a twist: Scientists find new way to image spins

Cornell researchers have put a new spin on measuring and controlling spins in nickel oxide, with an eye toward improving electronic devices' speed and memory capacity.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/31CHuBM

3-D printing, bioinks create implantable blood vessels

A biomimetic blood vessel was fabricated using a modified 3-D cell printing technique and bioinks, which were formulated from smooth muscle cells from a human aorta and endothelial cells from an umbilical vein. The result is a fully functional blood vessel with a dual-layer architecture that outperforms existing engineered tissue and brings 3-D-printed blood vessels several fundamental steps closer to clinical use.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2BvaEbn

Deuteron-like heavy dibaryons—a step towards finding exotic nuclei

Have you ever wondered how the Sun creates the energy that we get from it every day and how the other elements beside hydrogen have formed in our universe? Perhaps you know that this is due to fusion reactions where four nuclei of hydrogen join together to produce a helium nucleus. Such nucleosynthesis processes are possible solely due to the existence, in the first place, of stable deuterons, which are made up of a proton and a neutron. Probing deeper, one finds that a deuteron consists of six light quarks. Interestingly, the strong interaction between quarks, which brings stability to deuterons, also allows for various other six-quark combinations, leading to the possible formation of many other deuteron-like nuclei. However, no such nuclei, though theoretically speculated about and searched for experimentally many times, have yet been observed.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2p626Vz

Halfway toward LHC consolidation

The Large Hadron Collider is such a huge and sophisticated machine that the slightest alteration requires an enormous amount of work. During the second long shutdown (LS2), teams are hard at work reinforcing the electrical insulation of the accelerator's superconducting dipole diodes. The LHC contains not one, not two, but 1232 superconducting dipole magnets, each with a diode system to upgrade. That's why no fewer than 150 people are needed to carry out the 70 000 tasks involved in this work.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/32ElXJY

Cell stiffness may indicate whether tumors will invade

Engineers at MIT and elsewhere have tracked the evolution of individual cells within an initially benign tumor, showing how the physical properties of those cells drive the tumor to become invasive, or metastatic.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/31yj4sT

The DUNE experiment could lead to new discoveries about solar neutrinos

The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is an international research collaboration aimed at exploring topics related to neutrinos and proton decay, which should start collecting data around 2025. In a recent study featured in Physical Review Letters, a team of researchers at Ohio State University have showed that DUNE has the potential to deliver groundbreaking results and insight about solar neutrinos.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Brs9Js

Volcanic ash modifies the height, width and lifetime of a standing shock wave that can occur during volcanic eruptions

Imagine you're getting ready to fly to your favorite vacation destination when suddenly a volcano erupts, sending massive amounts of volcanic ash into the atmosphere, and forcing the cancellation of your flight. That's exactly what happened in April 2010 when Eyjafjallajokull, a volcano in Iceland, erupted and disrupted air travel in Europe for six days. Scientists are now using plasma physics to predict the characteristics of these hazardous ash plumes.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2MYnofR

Gravity crystals: A new method for exploring the physics of white dwarf stars

Grab a mixing bowl from your kitchen, throw in a handful of aluminum balls, apply some high voltage, and watch an elegant dance unfold where particles re-arrange themselves into a distinct "crystal" pattern. This curious behavior belongs to the phenomenon known as Wigner crystallization, where particles with the same electrical charge repel one another to form an ordered structure.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Mz7n15

Reducing open-circuit voltage loss in organic solar cells

Researchers at Institute for Molecular Science in Japan report that organic solar cells (OSCs) with high mobility and highly crystalline donor (D) and acceptor (A) materials were able to reduce an open-circuit voltage (VOC) loss. The origin of the high VOC was that the highly crystalline D/A interface reduced the energy loss related to charge recombination. The results demonstrate that careful design of the D/A interface enables high power conversion efficiencies in OSCs.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/31sEyHT

Ultrafast particle interactions could make quantum information devices feasible

Energy is information. Lengthening the time during which a system is capable of retaining energy before losing it to the local environment is a key goal for the development of quantum information. This interval is called the "coherence time." Several studies have been performed with the aim of retarding decoherence.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/31pcNzL

Bio-circuitry mimics synapses and neurons in a step toward sensory computing

Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of Tennessee and Texas A&M University demonstrated bio-inspired devices that accelerate routes to neuromorphic, or brain-like, computing.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2VUKdVN

Researchers probe features of star clusters surrounding supermassive black holes

At the center of the galaxy, millions of stars whirl in orbits around a supermassive black hole. This circuit can take anywhere from a few hours for stars close to the event horizon of the black hole to thousands of years for their distant neighbors. The nature of the dance—how the stars interact collectively through their gravitational forces—can vary from galaxy to galaxy.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2VQmUML

Small high-voltage transmission electron microscope built in Japan

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Japan has built a high-voltage transmission electron microscope small enough to reside in a university lab. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group describes building the first-of-its-kind microscope and how well it works.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2MleQQZ

Experiment measures velocity in 3-D

Many of today's scientific processes are simulated using computer-driven mathematical models. But for a model to accurately predict how air flow behaves at high speeds, for example, scientists need supplemental real life data. Providing validation data, using up-to-date methods, was a key motivating factor for a recent experimental study conducted by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/31nmH57

New understanding of the evolution of cosmic electromagnetic fields

Next year is the 200 year anniversary of the discovery of electromagnetism by the Danish physicist H.C. Ørsted. Even 200 years after its discovery, the existence of electromagnetism still brings up new puzzles pertaining to their origin.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/33sXGGS

Dynamic pattern of skyrmions observed

Cu2OSeO3 is a material with unusual magnetic properties. Magnetic spin vortices known as skyrmions are formed within a certain temperature range when in the presence of a small external magnetic field. Currently, moderately low temperatures of around 60 Kelvin (-213 degrees Celsius) are required to stabilise their phase, but it appears possible to shift this temperature range to room temperature. The exciting thing about skyrmions is that they can be set in motion and controlled very easily, thus offering new opportunities to reduce the energy required for data processing.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/35yWK5I

Science follows from furry mysteries

Greg Gbur's new book from Yale University Press, "Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics," takes on a strange topic for a physicist—the mysteries of the cat.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/32jwCd9

Chains of atoms move at lightning speed inside metals

A phenomenon that has previously been seen when researchers simulate the properties of planet cores at extreme pressures has now also been observed in pure titanium at atmospheric pressure. Chains of atoms dash around at lightning speeds inside the solid material.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2q8J15g

Giving ATLAS a boost

The outer realms of the periodic table, where stable, long-lived isotopes give way to radioactive ions, offer nuclear scientists a unique glimpse into the structure of nuclei and a better understanding of how the different elements in our universe came to be as a result of stellar fusion or supernova explosions.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2MkVXhj

Modeling airborne disease diffusion

With outbreaks of airborne diseases such as measles occurring with growing frequency, modeling how the diffusion process works in dynamic contact networks is an increasingly important research area for epidemiology. A team including Macquarie University researchers Mohammad Shahzamal, Raja Jurdak, and Bernard Mans has developed a computational diffusion model that overcomes previous limitations in capturing an accurate view of the possible spread of infection. The research has been published in Royal Society Open Science.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2VISAn8

Alphabet of 140 puzzle pieces programs origami

How can a single origami crease pattern be folded into two precisely defined target shapes? Researchers at AMOLF and Leiden University have created an "alphabet" of 140 origami "puzzle pieces" that allows them to do just that, as described today in Nature Physics. This discovery could help in the construction of origami robots and toward designing smart programmable materials.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/33yHqEv

Six degrees of nuclear separation

Argonne scientists look to 3-D printing to ease separation anxiety, which paves the way to recycle more nuclear material.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3181zj0

Meet the new prototype in electromagnetic oil spill remediation technology

Many Fermilab followers are aware that Fermilab's Office of Partnerships & Technology Transfer licensed the laboratory's electromagnetic oil spill remediation technology to Natural Science LLC in 2015. This agreement enabled Natural Science, led by physicist and inventor Arden Warner, to design and develop a novel electromagnetic technology for cleaning oil spills. A key milestone of the agreement was to produce the first prototype and then move toward commercialization.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/318tJu2

Physicists look to navigational 'rhumb lines' to study polymer's unique spindle structure

From the intricate patterns of pollen grains to the logarithmic spirals of nautilus shells, biology is full of complex patterns, shapes, and geometries. Many of these intricate structures play important roles in biological function, but can be difficult to create in a lab without state-of-the-art equipment or expensive and energy-consuming processes and materials.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2IFABcc

Modelling ion beam therapy

Hadron beam therapy, which is often used to treat solid tumours, involves irradiating a tumour with a beam of high-energy charged particles, most often protons; these transfer their energy to the tumour cells, destroying them. It is important to understand the precise physics of this energy transfer so the tumour can be targeted precisely. Pablo de Vera of MBN Research Center, Frankfurt, Germany and co-workers in the Universities of Murcia and Alicante, Spain, have produced a consistent theoretical interpretation of the most accurate experimental measurements of ion beams energy deposition in liquid water jets, which is the most relevant substance for simulating interactions with human tissue. Their work is published in The European Physical Journal D.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/322tAK0

A new run of the CLOUD experiment examines the direct effect of cosmic rays on clouds

CERN's colossal complex of accelerators is in the midst of a two-year shutdown for upgrade work. But that doesn't mean all experiments at the Laboratory have ceased to operate. The CLOUD experiment, for example, has just started a data run that will last until the end of November.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2VtqFI1

Demonstrating slow light in rubidium vapor using single photons from a trapped ion

Quantum networks can be practically implemented to interface with different quantum systems. In order to photonically link hybrid systems with combined unique properties of each constituent system, scientists must integrate sources with the same photon emission wavelength. For instance, trapped ions and neutral atoms can both have compelling properties as nodes and memories within quantum networks but without photonic linking due to their vastly different operating wavelengths. In a recent report on Science Advances, J.D. Siverns and colleagues at the Joint Quantum Institute, Department of Physics and the Army Research Laboratory in the U.S. demonstrated the first interaction between neutral atoms and photons emitted from a single trapped ion.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/35nwIlT

The secret to sneaky float serves

A research team led by the University of Tsukuba studied the aerodynamics of a volleyball using a wind tunnel and hitting robot. They found that no matter the orientation of a standard ball, the pattern of panels presents an asymmetric surface to the flow of air, leading to deviations in its flight patterns. This work may help shed light on unsolved questions in the field of fluid dynamics.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2OAbEmf

Tests start at CERN for large-scale prototype of new technology to detect neutrinos

Scientists working at CERN have started tests of a new neutrino detector prototype, using a very promising technology called "dual phase." If successful, this new technology will be used at a much larger scale for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by the U.S Department of Energy's Fermilab.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2MsOsUi

Physics researchers break new ground, explore unknown energy regions

Florida State University physicists are using photon-proton collisions to capture particles in an unexplored energy region, yielding new insights into the matter that binds parts of the nucleus together.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2M2CykT

Cosmic theorist and planet-hunters share physics prize as Nobels reward otherworldly discoveries

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three researchers for their contributions to two unique fields.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/35gNN0K

Physicists report a way to 'hear' dark matter

Physicists at Stockholm University and the Max Planck Institute for Physics have turned to plasmas in a proposal that could revolutionise the search for the elusive dark matter.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2nuHZj8

Are we alone? Nobel Prize goes to three who tackled cosmic query

They are two of the most fundamental questions not just of science, but of humanity: How did we get here? And are we alone?

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/325HHhW

'Big Bang Theory' gets shout out to Nobel Prize announcement

Life imitated art Tuesday when "The Big Bang Theory"—the popular U.S. television show, not the scientific explanation for how the universe began—made its way into the annals of Nobel history.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/31ZgDRb

From 'weirdo' PhD stargazer to Nobel Physics laureate

As a student astronomer scanning the skies with homemade instruments a quarter of a century ago, Didier Queloz spent months doubting the data that led him to an inescapable conclusion: he'd just discovered the first planet outside Earth's solar system.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2MrsYH8

Physicists measure the variation of the top-quark mass for the first time

For the first time, CMS physicists have investigated an effect called the "running" of the top quark mass, a fundamental quantum effect predicted by the Standard Model.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2IvHqwY

Swiss Nobel Physics laureates hail win as 'simply extraordinary'

Two Swiss scientists who on Tuesday won the Nobel Physics Prize along with a Canadian-American colleague hailed their win as "simply extraordinary".

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2MrrBIR

Nobel Prize for Physics awarded to 3 scientists for their contribution to understanding of the evolution of the universe

Canadian-American James Peebles and Swiss scientists Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz on Tuesday won the Nobel Physics Prize for their work in cosmology, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2LVEPOL

Nobel Prize in Physics to be awarded

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics will be awarded Tuesday, a day after two Americans and one British scientist were given the award for Physiology or Medicine.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2AR7SNb

Cesium vapor aids in the search for dark matter

The hunt for dark matter is one of the most exciting challenges facing fundamental physics in the 21st century. Researchers have long known that it must exist, as many astrophysical observations would otherwise be impossible to explain. For example, stars rotate much faster in galaxies than they would if only 'normal' matter existed.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/31PT4KB

Using velocity-induced acoustic oscillations as a standard ruler at cosmic dawn

Our current understanding of physics suggests that there are two main types of matter in the universe known as dark and baryonic matter. Dark matter is made up of material that scientists cannot directly observe, as it does not emit light or energy. On the other hand, baryonic matter is made up of normal atomic matter, including protons, neutrons and electrons.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/35d3aHB

Partnership plans to produce Mo-99 to fill global demand for medical applications

SHINE Medical Technologies and partner Phoenix LLC have developed a new way to produce molybdenum-99 (Mo-99) for use in medical applications. They claim that testing has shown their new technology breaks the world record for the strongest nuclear fusion reactor in a steady-state system.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/30Of4UQ

Oobleck's weird behavior is now predictable

It's a phenomenon many preschoolers know well: When you mix cornstarch and water, weird things happen. Swish it gently in a bowl, and the mixture sloshes around like a liquid. Squeeze it, and it starts to feel like paste. Roll it between your hands, and it solidifies into a rubbery ball. Try to hold that ball in the palm of your hand, and it will dribble away as a liquid.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2obFgvy

Computer model helps make sense of human memory

Brains are a mazy network of overlapping circuits—some pathways encourage activity while others suppress it. While earlier studies focused more on excitatory circuits, inhibitory circuits are now understood to play an equally important role in brain function. Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) and the RIKEN Center for Brain Science have created an artificial network to simulate the brain, demonstrating that tinkering with inhibitory circuits leads to extended memory.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/30UTxK2

More energy means more effects—in proton collisions

The higher the collision energy of particles, the more interesting the physics. Scientists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow have found further confirmation of this assumption, this time, in the high energy collision of protons with protons or lead nuclei.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/31SLajL

Molecular hydrogen becomes semimetallic at pressures above 350 GPa

According to condensed matter physics predictions, at a high enough pressure, hydrogen should dissociate and transform into an atomic metal. However, the exact pressure range at which this occurs has not yet been ascertained, and the process through which hydrogen becomes a metal is still somewhat unclear.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/352Cmd7

New 'fuzzy' dark matter research disrupts conventional thinking

New research conducted at the University of Sussex has simulated dark matter in a new way for the first time, disrupting conventional thinking about the make-up of the universe. The research, published in Physical Review Letters, was done alongside Princeton, Harvard, Cambridge and MIT universities and others.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2pK4Act