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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Resolving the 'proton radius puzzle'

How do you measure the width of a proton?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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".

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Target practice: Perfecting the Mu2e production target

Before Mu2e, there was MECO.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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