New property of light discovered

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Spain and the U.S. has announced that they have discovered a new property of light—self-torque. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes how they happened to spot the new property and possible uses for it.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2X90iWI

Engineers report a new low-power lighting technology

Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences have designed and tested a prototype cathodoluminescent lamp for general lighting. The new lamp, which relies on the phenomenon of field emission, is more reliable, durable, and luminous than its analogues available worldwide. The development was reported in the Journal of Vacuum Science & Technology B.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2X52xKY

Order from chaos: Australian vortex studies are first proof of 70-year-old theory of turbulence in fluids

Two Australian studies published this week offer the first proof of a 70-year-old theory of turbulence.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2KGyp6Q

The often-heard complaint that motorcycles can influence the outcome of races is justified

In professional cycling, in-race motorcycles such as TV motorcycles drive in between the riders. In the slipstream behind the motorcycle, cyclists can gain time. For the first time, the exact extent of this advantage has been scientifically investigated. It turns out to be even more advantageous than expected. Using computer simulations and wind tunnel measurements, Professor Bert Blocken of Eindhoven University of Technology and KU Leuven—in collaboration with software company ANSYS—investigated the effect. He found that a motorcyclist 30 meter in front of a rider reduces drag by 12 percent. A rider who cycles behind this motorcyclist for one minute therefore can gain 2.6 seconds.

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

A new quasi-2D superconductor that bridges a ferroelectric and an insulator

Researchers at the Zavoisky Physical-Technical Institute and the Southern Scientific Center of RAS, in Russia, have recently fabricated quasi-2-D superconductors at the interface between a ferroelectric Ba0.8Sr0.2TiO3 film and an insulating parent compound of La2CuO4. Their study, presented in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, is the first to achieve superconductivity in a heterostructure consisting of a ferroelectric and an insulator.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Yd4GWk

Generating more electricity from waste heat by applying pressure

Researchers at Osaka University have been able to enhance the power factor of a promising thermoelectric material by more than 100% by varying the pressure, paving the way for new materials with improved thermoelectric properties. Thermoelectric materials have the unique ability to generate electricity from temperature differences and therefore could potentially be used to convert otherwise wasted heat (such as heat from hot laptops or servers) into usable electricity.

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

Experiment reverses the direction of heat flow

Heat flows from hot to cold objects. When a hot and a cold body are in thermal contact, they exchange heat energy until they reach thermal equilibrium, with the hot body cooling down and the cold body warming up. This is a natural phenomenon we experience all the time. It is explained by the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the total entropy of an isolated system always tends to increase over time until it reaches a maximum. Entropy is a quantitative measure of the disorder in a system. Isolated systems evolve spontaneously toward increasingly disordered states and lack of differentiation.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2ZR1Dn2

Proposed set of conservation laws find order in the chaos of turbulence

Turbulence can be found in places large and small, from exploding supernovae and sprawling ocean currents, to the unstable plasmas that form within tiny fusion fuel cells bombarded with lasers.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2RBX6Sx

The fundamental physics of frequency combs sheds light on nature's problem-solving skills

Nature has a way of finding optimal solutions to complex problems. For example, despite the billions of ways for a single protein to fold, proteins always fold in a way that minimizes potential energy. Slime mold, a brainless organism, always finds the most efficient route to a food source, even when presented with an obstacle. A jump rope, when held on both ends, always ends up in the same shape, a curve known as catenary.

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

Experimental physicists redefine ultrafast, coherent magnetism

Electronic properties of materials can be directly influenced via light absorption in under a femtosecond (10-15 seconds), which is regarded as the limit of the maximum achievable speed of electronic circuits. In contrast, the magnetic moment of matter has only been able to be influenced up to now by a light and magnetism-linked process and roundabout way by means of magnetic fields, which is why magnetic switching takes that much longer and at least several hundred femtoseconds.

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

Quantum ghost imaging improved by using five-atom correlations

In conventional imaging methods, a beam of photons (or other particles) is reflected off the object to be imaged. After the beam travels to a detector, the information gathered there is used to create a photograph or other type of image. In an alternative imaging technique called "ghost imaging," the process works a little differently: an image is reconstructed from information that is detected from a beam that never actually interacts with the object.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2INY3UT

Chiral zero sound found in Weyl semimetals

A pair of researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has found that a chiral zero sound (CZS) effect can be induced in Weyl semimetals. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, Zhida Song and Xi Dai describe their experiments with Weyl semimetals and what they found.

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

Data visualization could reveal nature of the universe

As cosmologists ponder the universe—and other possible universes—the data available to them is so complex and vast that it can be extremely challenging for humans alone to comprehend.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2X4ViaM

Finding missing network links could help develop new drugs, stop disease, ease traffic

A new mathematical model of the structure of networks could help find new cancer drugs, speed up traffic flow and combat sexually transmitted disease.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2RvKWKM

Researcher shows physics suggests life could exist in a 2-D universe

James Scargill, a physicist at the University of California, has written a paper reporting that the laws of physics allow for the existence of a life-supporting two-dimensional universe. MIT's Technology Review has reviewed the paper and found that the work does show that such a 2+1 universe could exist.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2IMA6h3

Boosting light-based computing

University of Twente spinoff company QuiX is currently developing a photonic chip using the quantum properties of light for carrying out complex calculations. The new chip, of which a first version is already operational, calculates using light, photons, and will be an attractive platform for discovering the potential of quantum computing and for experimenting with new ways of calculating. Further development of the photonics processor will be made possible through an investment by Oost NL, University of Twente and some informal investors.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2FzNp2i

Physicists develop new method to prove quantum entanglement

One of the essential features required for the realization of a quantum computer is quantum entanglement. A team of physicists from the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) introduces a novel technique to detect entanglement even in large-scale quantum systems with unprecedented efficiency. This brings scientists one step closer to the implementation of reliable quantum computation. The new results are of direct relevance for future generations of quantum devices and are published in the current issue of the journal Nature Physics.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2xd0GJC

Applying the Goldilocks principle to DNA structure

The Goldilocks of fairy-tale fame knew something about porridge. It needed to be just right—neither too hot nor too cold. Same with furniture—neither too hard nor too soft. In a different context, scientists at UC San Diego know something about DNA. They know that the strands of our genetic code, if extended, would measure two meters, or about six feet. They also know that the strands fold into and move within the cell nucleus the size of about a hundredth of a millimeter. But they don't know how and in what state of matter this occurs, so they decided to check.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2J3dBmT

Climbing droplets driven by mechanowetting on transverse waves

Modern applications use self-cleaning strategies and digital microfluids to control individual droplets of fluids on flat surfaces but existing techniques are limited by the side-effects of high electric fields and high temperatures. In a new study, Edwin De Jong and co-workers at the interdisciplinary departments of Advanced Materials, Mechanical Engineering and Complex Molecular Systems developed an innovative "mechanowetting" technique to control droplet motion on changing surfaces based on the interfacial surface tension.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2WVdfZ7

Approaching the magnetic singularity

In many materials, electrical resistance and voltage change in the presence of a magnetic field, usually varying smoothly as the magnetic field rotates. This simple magnetic response underlies many applications including contactless current sensing, motion sensing, and data storage. In a crystal, the way that the charge and spin of its electrons align and interact underlies these effects. Utilizing the nature of the alignment, called symmetry, is a key ingredient in designing a functional material for electronics and the emerging field of spin-based electronics (spintronics).

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2Iuzhch

Physicists team up to tackle proton radius problem

Ten years ago, just about any nuclear physicist could tell you the approximate size of the proton. But that changed in 2010, when atomic physicists unveiled a new method that promised a more precise measurement. The new quantity came up 4% shorter than expected, setting off a scramble within the nuclear and atomic physics communities to determine if this discrepant result was due to new physics or an indication of problems with the extractions of the quantity from experiments.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2L37Jwh

Einstein's relativity document gifted to Nobel museum

The Nobel Museum in Stockholm has been gifted Albert Einstein's first paper published after he received the Nobel Prize in 1922 and discussing his then still controversial relativity theory.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2Xud3iS

Using fluid dynamics to perfect crêpe cooking techniques

A pair of fluid dynamics physicists, one with Ecole Polytechnique, the other the University of Canterbury, have used their respective backgrounds to develop the optimal way to fry a crêpe. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Fluids, Edouard Boujo and Mathieu Sellier describe their approach to finding the best way to cook a crêpe.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2L5OOAX

Neutrons get a wider angle on DNA and RNA to advance 3-D models

Scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland are using neutrons at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to capture new information about DNA and RNA molecules and enable more accurate computer simulations of how they interact with everything from proteins to viruses. Resolving the 3-D structures of the body's fundamental genetic materials in solution will play a vital role in drug discovery and development for critical medical treatments.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2x69Lnm

The hunt for hot nuclear matter

In particle physics, a jet is a shower of collimated particles generated by a highly energetic quark or gluon. In a lead-lead collision, jets must traverse through quark gluon plasma, altering their energy, track and consistency.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2IVA3OH

How a walk through CERN's corridors helped lead to the discovery of the gluon 40 years ago

Forty years ago, in 1979, experiments at the DESY laboratory in Germany provided the first direct proof of the existence of gluons—the carriers of the strong force that "glue" quarks into protons, neutrons and other particles known collectively as hadrons. This discovery was a milestone in the history of particle physics, as it helped establish the theory of the strong force, known as quantum chromodynamics.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2WNPOAZ

Researchers solve mystery of how gas bubbles form in liquid

The formation of air bubbles in a liquid appears very similar to its inverse process, the formation of liquid droplets from, say, a dripping water faucet. But the physics involved is actually quite different, and while those water droplets are uniform in their size and spacing, bubble formation is typically a much more random process.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2KnF3i1

100-year-old physics model replicates modern Arctic ice melt

The Arctic is melting faster than we thought it would. In fact, Arctic ice extent is at a record low. When that happens—when a natural system behaves differently than scientists expect—it's time to take another look at how we understand the system. University of Utah mathematician Ken Golden and atmospheric scientist Court Strong study the patterns formed by ponds of melting water atop the ice. The ponds are dark, while the ice is bright, meaning that the bigger the ponds, the darker the surface and the more solar energy it absorbs.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2wYPPCY

Using waves to move droplets

Controlling individual droplets leads to more efficient self-cleaning surfaces and lab-on-a-chip implementations. University of Groningen professor Patrick Onck and colleagues from Eindhoven University of Technology have shown that this is possible by using a technique named mechanowetting. The researchers report a way of transporting droplets by using transverse surface waves, which even works on inclined or vertical surfaces. The research was published in Science Advances on 14 June.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2XlmWzt

A simple formula that could be useful for air purification, space propulsion, and molecular analyses

When a raindrop falls through a thundercloud, it is subject to strong electric fields that pull and tug on the droplet, like a soap bubble in the wind. If the electric field is strong enough, it can cause the droplet to burst apart, creating a fine, electrified mist.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2MU9a2L

Gaining a better understanding of what happens when two atoms meet

An international team of researchers has demonstrated a new way to gain a detailed understanding of what happens when two atoms meet. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group describes their experiments, which involved observing closely as two atoms came into contact with one another.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2MOovC4

Discovery of light-induced ferroelectricity in strontium titanate

Light can be used not only to measure materials' properties, but also to change them. Especially interesting are those cases in which the function of a material can be modified, such as its ability to conduct electricity or to store information in its magnetic state. A team led by Andrea Cavalleri from the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg have used terahertz frequency light pulses to transform a non-ferroelectric material into a ferroelectric one.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2MPexjL

National MagLab creates world-record magnetic field with small, compact coil

A novel magnet half the size of a cardboard toilet tissue roll usurped the title of "world's strongest magnetic field" from the metal titan that had held it for two decades at the Florida State University-headquartered National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2MOMctU

Small currents for big gains in spintronics

University of Tokyo researchers have created an electronic component that demonstrates functions and abilities important to future generations of computational logic and memory devices. It is between one and two orders of magnitude more power efficient than previous attempts to create a component with the same kind of behavior. This could have applications in the emerging field of spintronics.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2MKQPFf

Physicists take a step closer to building a graphene-based topological insulator

In 2005, condensed matter physicists Charles Kane and Eugene Mele considered the fate of graphene at low temperatures. Their work led to the discovery of a new state of matter dubbed a "topological insulator," which would usher in a new era of materials science.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2MJNZk5

Diffusing wave paradox may be used to design micro-robotics

Amoeba are unusual creatures that form when a dispersed population of cells spontaneously comes together and reorganizes itself into a multicellular macroscopic organism. To do this, a few leader cells emit chemical pulses that cause the other individual cells to move in the direction opposite to that of the traveling pulses, leading to the formation of dense clusters.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2Rad1ap

An interaction of slipping beams

Accelerators generate beams of subatomic particles for cutting-edge science. The greater a beam's intensity, the more opportunities there are to study particle interactions. One way to increase the intensity is to merge two beams with a technique called slip-stacking. However, when combining them, the beams' interaction may cause instability.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2Iaun4j

New result in hunt for mysterious magnetic monopoles

Cutting a magnet in half yields two magnets, each with its own north and south pole. This apparent absence of an isolated magnetic pole, or "magnetic monopole," has puzzled physicists for more than a century. It would seem perfectly natural for a magnetic monopole to exist; Maxwell's equations would reflect complete symmetry between electricity and magnetism if particles with magnetic charge were observed. But the mystery remains: While every known particle is either electrically charged or neutral, none have been found to be magnetically charged.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2IuZshK

Using a selective light absorber to build a photothermal catalysis system

Researchers at Hebei University in China and Hakkaido University in Japan have recently used a selective light absorber to construct a photothermal system that can generate temperatures up to 288°C under weak solar irradiation (1 kW m-2). This system, presented in Nature Communications, achieved a temperature three times higher than that generated by traditional phototermal catalysis systems.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2F3g6Eq

Direct atom-resolved imaging of magnetic materials

In conventional electron microscopes, performing atomic-resolution observations of magnetic materials is particularly difficult because high magnetic fields are inevitably exerted on samples inside the magnetic objective lens. Newly developed magnetic objective-lens system provides a magnetic-field-free environment at the sample position. This enables direct, atom-resolved imaging of magnetic materials such as silicon steels. This novel electron microscope is expected to be extensively used for the research and development of advanced magnetic materials.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2wQ3zQ0

Changes in pressure, more so than temperature, strongly influence how quickly liquids turn to gas

It's a process so fundamental to everyday life—in everything from your morning coffeemaker to the huge power plant that provides its electricity—that it's often taken for granted: the way a liquid boils away from a hot surface.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2WyTbeZ

A new candidate for dark matter and a way to detect it

Two theoretical physicists at the University of California, Davis have a new candidate for dark matter, and a possible way to detect it. They presented their work June 6 at the Planck 2019 conference in Granada, Spain and it has been submitted for publication.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/31mTKqZ

Researchers develop new metamaterial that can improve MRI quality and reduce scan time

Could a small ringlike structure made of plastic and copper amplify the already powerful imaging capabilities of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine? Xin Zhang, Stephan Anderson, and their team at the Boston University Photonics Center can clearly picture such a feat. With their combined expertise in engineering, materials science, and medical imaging, Zhang and Anderson, along with Guangwu Duan and Xiaoguang Zhao, designed a new magnetic metamaterial, reported in Communications Physics, that can improve MRI quality and cut scan time in half.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2Kf1LZZ

What if dark matter is lighter? Report calls for small experiments to broaden the hunt

The search for dark matter is expanding. And going small.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2MECfPD

Settling the debate: Solving the electronic surface states of samarium hexaboride

A team led by Osaka University used angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy to probe the unusual surface conductivity of samarium hexaboride crystals. They showed that the material is a co-existing phase of "topological insulator" in which electrical current can flow along the surface but not through the bulk of the sample, a "Kondo insulator," which undergoes a metal-to-insulator transition due to the strong electron correlation. This work, which demonstrates that topological insulators can simultaneously have strong electron correlations, may allow for the development of quantum spin devices that use the magnetic spins of individual electrons to outperform current computers.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2I5CGOx

Dashing the dream of ideal 'invisibility' cloaks for stress waves

Whether Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, which perfectly steers light waves around objects to make them invisible, will ever become reality remains to be seen, but perfecting a more crucial cloak is impossible, a new study says. It would have perfectly steered stress waves in the ground, like those emanating from a blast, around objects like buildings to make them "untouchable."

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2Zb4w1B

Manipulating electron spin using artificial molecular motors

Artificial molecular switches and machines have undergone rapid advances over the past several decades. Particularly, artificial molecular motors are highly attractive from the viewpoint of chirality switching during rotational steps. Now, researchers fabricated an electron's spin-filtering device that can switch the spin polarization direction by light irradiation or thermal treatment. The present results are beneficial to the development of solid-state functionalities emerging from nanosized motions of molecular switches.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2WUQK5L

Probing semiconductor crystals with a sphere of light

Tohoku University researchers have developed a technique using a hollow sphere to measure the electronic and optical properties of large semiconducting crystals. The approach, published in the journal Applied Physics Express, improves on current photoluminescence spectroscopy techniques and could lead to energy savings for mass producers, and thus consumers, of power devices.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2QSNaUl

New evidence from LHC shows pentaquark has a molecule-like structure

A team of researchers working on the LHCb collaboration has found evidence showing that a pentaquark they have observed has a molecule-like structure. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group describes the evidence and the structure of the pentaquark they observed.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2KtJcAq

A quantum simulation of Unruh radiation

Researchers at the University of Chicago (UChicago) have recently reported an experimental observation of a matter field with thermal fluctuations that is in accordance with Unruh's radiation predictions. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, could open up new possibilities for research exploring the dynamics of quantum systems in a curved spacetime.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2Xw5K7i

Modelling reveals new insight into the electrical conductivity of ionic liquids

A collaborative investigation has revealed new insight into how room temperature ionic liquids (RTILs) conduct electricity, which may have a great potential impact for the future of energy storage.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2WJNtq3

The waltz of the LHC magnets has begun

Major endeavors are underway in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) over the past few weeks, with the extraction of magnets from the accelerator tunnel. The LHC has a total of 1232 dipoles, magnets which bend the particles' trajectories, and 474 quadrupoles, which squeeze the bunches. All these magnets are superconducting, i.e. they operate at a temperature of -271°C, are 15 meters long and weigh up to 28 tons. So moving them around is no trivial matter.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2QPG6Id

Radon inferior to radion for electric dipole moments (EDM) searches

An international research team led by the University of Liverpool has made a discovery that will help with the search for electric dipole moments (EDM) in atoms and could contribute to new theories of particle physics, such as supersymmetry.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2WM6Bnf

How a giant 'thermos bottle' will help in understanding antimatter

One of the big questions physicists are trying to answer is what happened to all the antimatter in our universe. The universe was born out of a hot soup of both matter and antimatter particles (for example, the antiparticle to an electron is a positron). But something happened billions of years ago to tip the balance to matter, and antimatter disappeared. In fact, if this had not happened, we humans would not be here: when antimatter and matter particles collide, they transform into pure energy.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2WNSXQA

The secret to making stuff better? Shoot it with a laser

Faster computers. More efficient solar panels. More powerful electric cars.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2WrX6dj

Chip design dramatically reduces energy needed to compute with light

MIT researchers have developed a novel "photonic" chip that uses light instead of electricity—and consumes relatively little power in the process. The chip could be used to process massive neural networks millions of times more efficiently than today's classical computers do.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2QPntDZ

New mechanism allows lower energy requirement for OLED displays

Scientists from RIKEN and the University of California San Diego, in collaboration with international partners have found a way to significantly reduce the amount of energy required by organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs). OLEDs have attracted attention as potential replacements for liquid crystal diodes, since they offer advantages such as being flexible, thin, and not requiring backlighting.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2WdvALT

Making a splash is all in the angle

Making a splash depends on the angle of a liquid as it hits and moves along a surface, according to a new study from Queen Mary University of London.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2wN67Pf

No assumptions needed to simulate petroleum reservoirs

Hidden deep below our feet, petroleum reservoirs are made up of hydrocarbons like oil and natural gas, stored within porous rock. These systems are particularly interesting to physicists, as they clearly show how temperature gradients between different regions affect the gradients of fluid pressures and compositions. However, because these reservoirs are so hard to access, researchers can only model them using data from a few sparse points, meaning many of their properties can only be guessed at.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2QN5rCq

2-D spintronics has already transformed computing – now we're making it work in three dimensions

Spintronics might not be the sort of word that comes up in everyday discussions, but it has been revolutionising computer technology for years. It's the branch of physics that involves manipulating the spin of a flow of electrons, which first reached consumers in the late 1990s in the form of magnetic computer hard drives with several hundreds of times the storage capacity of their predecessors.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2WnnHbK

Electron bunches keep ions cool at RHIC

Accelerator physicists have demonstrated a groundbreaking technique using bunches of electrons to keep beams of particles cool at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)—a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science user facility for nuclear physics research at Brookhaven National Laboratory. This "bunched-beam" electron cooling technique will enable higher particle collision rates at RHIC, where scientists study the collision debris to learn about the building blocks of matter as they existed just after the Big Bang.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2K2Fdvc

Dowsing for electric fields in liquid crystals

You may not know it, but you probably spend several hours a day looking at nematic liquid crystals; they are used in virtually every smartphone, computer and TV screen. They are liquids composed of elongated molecules, which in some situations can be oriented in a curious way termed the 'dowser texture', which is sensitive to external conditions. Physicists Pawel Pieranski of the Universite Paris-Sud, Paris, France and Maria Helena Godinho of Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal have now published a paper in EPJ E that shows that the dowser texture responds to electric fields in different ways in different nematic materials.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2MtDpgX

Laws of physics replace trial and error in new approaches to bioprinting

3-D printers can be used to make a variety of useful objects by building up a shape, layer by layer. Scientists have used this same technique to "bioprint" living tissues, including muscle and bone.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2WfDG6K

3-D magnetic interactions could lead to new forms of computing

A new form of magnetic interaction which pushes a formerly two-dimensional phenomenon into the third dimension could open up a host of exciting new possibilities for data storage and advanced computing, scientists say.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2HUiy23

Can we model heavy nuclei from first principles?

Modelling the properties of atomic nuclei is a demanding task. It requires a theory that we can apply to a large variety of nuclear species regardless of their masses. M.Sc. Gianluca Salvioni's doctoral dissertation on theoretical nuclear physics attempts formulating such a theory by using inputs from accurate first-principle calculations available for light nuclei.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2JVWohW

Researchers demonstrate continuous lasing action in devices made from perovskite materials

Lead-halide perovskites are considered one of the most promising materials for the production of the lasers of the future. A new joint Tel Aviv University (TAU) and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) study published in Nature Communications on February 28 demonstrates remarkable continuous lasing action in devices made from perovskites.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2MCKN9U

Accurate probing of magnetism with light

Probing magnetic materials with extreme ultraviolet radiation allows to obtain a detailed microscopic picture of how magnetic systems interact with light—the fastest way to manipulate a magnetic material. A team of researchers led by the Max Born Institute has now provided the experimental and theoretical groundwork to interpret such spectroscopic signals. The results were published in Physical Review Letters.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2QIzifl

Solar cell defect mystery solved after decades of global effort

A team of scientists at the University of Manchester has solved a key flaw in solar panels after 40 years of research around the world.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2wvoCaA

Tuning the topological insulator Sb2Te3: Just add iron

Iron-doping of the topological insulator Sb2Te3 results in useful electronic and magnetic properties, quantified in a recent FLEET study at the University of Wollongong.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2Z2KnL8

Researchers develop a fast, all-visible-light molecular switch with 100 nm band separation

A collaborative of institutions including the University of Groningen has developed an entirely new class of molecular photoswitches that meet many requirements previously considered unobtainable. The results have been published in Nature Communications on 3 June.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science http://bit.ly/2WerUtr