Dewdrops on a spiderweb reveal the physics behind cell structures

As any cook knows, some liquids mix well with each other, but others do not. For example, when a tablespoon of vinegar is poured into water, a brief stir suffices to thoroughly combine the two liquids. However, a tablespoon of oil poured into water will coalesce into droplets that no amount of stirring can dissolve. The physics that governs the mixing of liquids is not limited to mixing bowls; it also affects the behavior of things inside cells. It's been known for several years that some proteins behave like liquids, and that some liquid-like proteins don't mix together. However, very little is known about how these liquid-like proteins behave on cellular surfaces.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3r3vqXk

By changing their shape, some bacteria can grow more resilient to antibiotics

New research led by Carnegie Mellon University Assistant Professor of Physics Shiladitya Banerjee demonstrates how certain types of bacteria can adapt to long-term exposure to antibiotics by changing their shape. The work was published in the journal Nature Physics.

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

Harnessing the power of AI to understand warm dense matter

The study of warm dense matter helps us understand what is going on inside giant planets, brown dwarfs, and neutron stars. However, this state of matter, which exhibits properties of both solids and plasmas, does not occur naturally on Earth. It can be produced artificially in the lab using large X-ray experiments, albeit only at a small scale and for short periods of time. Theoretical and numerical models are essential to evaluate these experiments, which are impossible to interpret without formulas, algorithms, and simulations. Scientists at the Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS) at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) have now developed a method to evaluate such experiments more effectively and faster than before.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/36o4Ccp

National laboratories' look to the future of light sources with new magnet prototype

With a powerful enough light, you can see things that people once thought would be impossible. Large-scale light source facilities generate that powerful light, and scientists use it to create more durable materials, build more efficient batteries and computers, and learn more about the natural world.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/39pnk58

An efficient tool to link X-ray experiments and ab initio theory

Molecules consisting of many atoms are complex structures. The outer electrons are distributed among the different orbitals, and their shape and occupation determine the chemical behavior and reactivity of the molecule. The configuration of these orbitals can be analyzed experimentally. Synchrotron sources such as BESSY II provide a method for this purpose: Resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS). However, to obtain information about the orbitals from experimental data, quantum chemical simulations are necessary. Typical computing times for larger molecules take weeks, even on high-performance computers.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3t3y5lB

CERN's latest LS2 Report: Beams circulate in the PS Booster

If you follow CERN on social media, you probably saw back in December that the first beam had been injected into the PS Booster (PSB), thus connecting the machine for the first time to the new Linac4.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3qXIVrf

Size of helium nucleus measured more precisely than ever before

In experiments at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, an international research collaboration has measured the radius of the atomic nucleus of helium five times more precisely than ever before. With the aid of the new value, fundamental physical theories can be tested and natural constants can be determined even more precisely. For their measurements, the researchers needed muons—these particles are similar to electrons but are around 200 times heavier. PSI is the only research site in the world where enough so-called low-energy muons are produced for such experiments. The researchers are publishing their results today in the journal Nature.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3ce73Sn

How heavy is dark matter? Scientists radically narrow the potential mass range for the first time

Scientists have calculated the mass range for Dark Matter—and it's tighter than the science world thought.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/36ioq0K

Expert in fluid dynamics explains how to reduce the risk of COVID-19 airborne transmission inside a car

Varghese Mathai is a physicist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who studies the flow of fluids and gases. He conducted a study using computational fluid dynamics simulations to understand how air flows inside a car and its implications for COVID-19 airborne transmission. In this interview, he explains the optimal ways to ensure maximum airflow inside a car.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3a7DMGj

BASE opens up new possibilities in the search for cold dark matter

The Baryon Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (BASE) at CERN's Antimatter Factory has set new limits on the existence of axion-like particles, and how easily those in a narrow mass range around 2.97 neV could turn into photons, the particles of light. BASE's new result, published by Physical Review Letters, describes this pioneering method and opens up new experimental possibilities in the search for cold dark matter.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3aaKzyX

Mathematical model verifies a correct understanding of epidemic's severity

A research team led by City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has built a mathematical model to explore and analyze the relationship between disease transmission, people's awareness about the disease and their resulting behaviors, as well as information spread by the mass media and opinion leaders. The research may shed some insights on responding to COVID-19 and other similar infectious diseases.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3aaDM8r

Compelling evidence of neutrino process opens physics possibilities

The COHERENT particle physics experiment at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory has firmly established the existence of a new kind of neutrino interaction. Because neutrinos are electrically neutral and interact only weakly with matter, the quest to observe this interaction drove advances in detector technology and has added new information to theories aiming to explain mysteries of the cosmos.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/39kJtlf

First direct band gap measurements of wide-gap hydrogen using inelastic X-ray scattering

Utilizing a newly developed state-of-the-art synchrotron technique, a group of scientists led by Dr. Ho-kwang Mao, Director of HPSTAR, conducted the first-ever high-pressure study of the electronic band and gap information of solid hydrogen up to 90 GPa. Their innovative high pressure inelastic X-ray scattering result serves as a test for direct measurement of the process of hydrogen metallization and opens a possibility to resolve the electronic dispersions of dense hydrogen. This work is published in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3clgHma

Nuclear physicist's voyage toward a mythical island

Theories were introduced as far back as the 1960s about the possible existence of superheavy elements. Their most long-lived nuclei could give rise to a so-called "island of stability" far beyond the element uranium. However, a new study, led by nuclear physicists at Lund University, shows that a 50-year-old nuclear physics manifesto must now be revised.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Yg1aMl

Physicists discover new physical effect

Scientists have found that a perpendicular magnetic field makes electrically neutral quasiparticles (excitons) in semiconductors behave like electrons in the Hall effect. This discovery will help researchers to study the physics of excitons and Bose-Einstein condensates.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3iMu2oQ

Supercomputers aid scientists studying the smallest particles in the universe

Since the 1930s, scientists have been using particle accelerators to gain insights into the structure of matter and the laws of physics that govern our world. These accelerators are some of the most powerful experimental tools available, propelling particles to nearly the speed of light and then colliding them to allow physicists to study the resulting interactions and particles that form.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3qUrurO

To find the right network model, compare all possible histories

Two family members test positive for COVID-19—how do we know who infected whom? In a perfect world, network science could provide a probable answer to such questions. It could also tell archeologists how a shard of Greek pottery came to be found in Egypt, or help evolutionary biologists understand how a long-extinct ancestor metabolized proteins.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3ccyP1R

Better bundled: New principle for generating X-rays

X-rays are usually difficult to direct and guide. X-ray physicists at the University of Göttingen have developed a new method with which the X-rays can be emitted more precisely in one direction. To do this, the scientists use a structure of thin layers of materials with different densities of electrons to simultaneously deflect and focus the generated beams. The results of the study were published in the journal Science Advances.

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

Exchange bias set in a spin-glass phase could arise in a disordered antiferromagnet

A team of researchers from the University of California, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Nuclear Research Center—Negev and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory has developed a way to isolate antiferromagnet (AFM) heterostructures in the absence of a ferromagnet (FM) to study the coupling that occurs between AFM order parameters and spin-glass parameters. In their paper published in the journal Nature Physics, the group describes an exchange bias set in a spin-glass phase that could arise in a disordered antiferromagnet. Minhyea Lee, with the University of Colorado has published a News & Views piece in the same journal outlining the work done by the team.

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

Long-distance and secure quantum key distribution (QKD) over a free-space channel

Quantum key distribution (QKD) is a technique that enables secure communications between devices using a cryptographic protocol that is partly based on quantum mechanics. This communication method ultimately allows two parties to encrypt and decrypt messages they send to each other using a unique key that is unknown to other parties.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3oijIWK

Physicists build unique antennas that improve MRI quality and safety

Scanners applied in research use not just one antenna that emits and receives the signal, but several of them, which can cause severe burns to inner tissues and organs. Thus, researchers are forced to power scanners with less voltage, which negatively affects the quality of their studies. Now, ITMO physicists, together with their colleagues from the M-Cube consortium, have created the first ever leaky-wave antennas for MRI scanners. The device can conduct body organ diagnostics without risks for patient health while also raising the quality of images acquired in research scanners.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/369zMEj

Physicists succeed in filming phase transition with extremely high spatial and temporal resolution

Laser beams can be used to change the properties of materials in an extremely precise way. This principle is already widely used in technologies such as rewritable DVDs. However, the underlying processes generally take place at such unimaginably fast speeds and at such a small scale that they have so far eluded direct observation. Researchers at the University of Göttingen and the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen have now managed to film, for the first time, the laser transformation of a crystal structure with nanometre resolution and in slow motion in an electron microscope. The results have been published in the journal Science.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3pgm8qn

The mystery of pointy oil droplets

A certain type of oil droplets changes shape when cooled and shrunk: from spherical through icosahedral to flat hexagonal. Two competing theories couldn't fully explain this, but now, a Physical Review Letter by Ireth García-Aguilar and Luca Giomi solves the mystery.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/39Wpd8E

Record-breaking laser link could provide test of Einstein's theory

Scientists from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) and the University of Western Australia (UWA) have set a world record for the most stable transmission of a laser signal through the atmosphere.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3paAVmi

Search for axions from nearby star Betelgeuse comes up empty

The elusive axion particle is many times lighter than an electron, with properties that barely make an impression on ordinary matter. As such, the ghost-like particle is a leading contender as a component of dark matter—a hypothetical, invisible type of matter that is thought to make up 85 percent of the mass in the universe.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3bWwp7n

Turbulence model could help design aircraft capable of handling extreme scenarios

In 2018, passengers onboard a flight to Australia experienced a terrifying 10-second nosedive when a vortex trailing their plane crossed into the wake of another flight. The collision of these vortices, the airline suspected, created violent turbulence that led to a free fall.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3p5j9kh

Do simulations represent the real world at the atomic scale?

Computer simulations hold tremendous promise to accelerate the molecular engineering of green energy technologies, such as new systems for electrical energy storage and solar energy usage, as well as carbon dioxide capture from the environment. However, the predictive power of these simulations depends on having a means to confirm that they do indeed describe the real world.

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

Fastener with microscopic mushroom design holds promise

A Velcro-like fastener with a microscopic design that looks like tiny mushrooms could mean advances for everyday consumers and scientific fields like robotics.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3sHuREf

Light-controlled Higgs modes found in superconductors; potential sensor, computing uses

Even if you weren't a physics major, you've probably heard something about the Higgs boson.

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

Eggs reveal what may happen to brain on impact

What causes brain concussions? Is it direct translational or rotational impact? This is one of the research areas currently being explored by Qianhong Wu's lab at Villanova University.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/38ZLfb2

A realistic model of the ITER tokamak magnetic fusion device

Tokamaks, devices that use magnetic fields to confine plasma into torus-shaped chamber, could play a crucial role in the development of highly performing nuclear fusion reactors. The ITER tokamak, which is set to be the largest nuclear tokamak in the world, is particularly likely to shape the way in which nuclear reactors will be fabricated in the future.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3itWaNi

Light-induced twisting of Weyl nodes switches on giant electron current

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory and collaborators at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the University of Alabama at Birmingham have discovered a new light-induced switch that twists the crystal lattice of the material, switching on a giant electron current that appears to be nearly dissipationless. The discovery was made in a category of topological materials that holds great promise for spintronics, topological effect transistors, and quantum computing.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3p01ACf

New mathematical model: How dangerous bacteria form colonies

It can be observed every time you take a shower: Small droplets of water join together to form larger and larger drops—until they are so heavy that they run down the wall. Scientists call this daily-life phenomenon coalescence—which surprisingly also provides the key to understanding how bacteria form colonies. Researchers at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), the Max-Planck-Zentrum für Physik und Medizin (MPZPM) in Erlangen and the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden (MPI-PKS) have now succeeded in developing a statistical model to describe the formation, dynamics and mechanics of such cell assemblies. They have published their results in the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3iqrbSh

The long-range transport of deconfined magnetic hedgehogs

Spintronics is an emerging area of research that aims to develop devices that transmit, process and store information leveraging the intrinsic angular momentum of electrons, known as spin. A key objective of spintronics studies is to identify strategies to use magnetic insulators to achieve the transport of signals over long distances.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/35ScDG3

Using drones to create local quantum networks

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in China has used drones to create a prototype of a small airborne quantum network. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the researchers describe sending entangled particles from one drone to another and from a drone to the ground.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3nYXfho

Engineers find a way to control chemical catalysts with sculpted light

Like a person breaking up a cat fight, the role of catalysts in a chemical reaction is to hurry up the process—and come out of it intact. And, just as not every house in a neighborhood has someone willing to intervene in such a battle, not every part of a catalyst participates in the reaction. But what if one could convince the unengaged parts of a catalyst to get involved? Chemical reactions could occur faster or more efficiently.

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

Understanding how sound waves travel through disordered materials

A team of researchers lead by the University of Tsukuba have created a new theoretical model to understand the spread of vibrations through disordered materials, such as glass. They found that as the degree of disorder increased, sound waves traveled less and less like ballistic particles, and instead began diffusing incoherently. This work may lead to new heat- and shatter-resistant glass for smartphones and tablets.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2XM7ZVy

Precise measurements of cluster formation in outer neutron 'skin' of a range of tin isotopes

A large international team of researchers has developed a way to measure cluster formations in the outer neutron 'skin' of a range of tin isotopes rich in neutrons. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes using knockout reactions to obtain evidence of the formation of α clusters at the surface of tin isotopes rich in neutrons. Or Hen, with MIT, has published a Perspectives piece in the same journal issue outlining the study and its relevance to neutron star research.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/39BdXhF

Artificial intelligence beats us in chess, but not in memory

In the last decades, artificial intelligence has shown to be very good at achieving exceptional goals in several fields. Chess is one of them: in 1996, for the first time, the computer Deep Blue beat a human player, chess champion Garry Kasparov. A new piece of research shows now that the brain strategy for storing memories may lead to imperfect memories, but in turn, allows it to store more memories, and with less hassle than AI. The new study, carried out by SISSA scientists in collaboration with Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience & Centre for Neural Computation, Trondheim, Norway, has just been published in Physical Review Letters.

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

A new way to look for gravitational waves

In a paper published today in Physical Review Letters, Valerie Domcke of CERN and Camilo Garcia-Cely of DESY report on a new technique to search for gravitational waves—the ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were first detected by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations in 2015 and earned Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017.

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

Physical virology shows the dynamics of virus reproduction

The reproductive cycle of viruses requires self-assembly, maturation of virus particles and, after infection, the release of genetic material into a host cell. New physics-based technologies allow scientists to study the dynamics of this cycle and may eventually lead to new treatments. In his role as physical virologist, Wouter Roos, a physicist at the University of Groningen, together with two longtime colleagues, has written a review article on these new technologies, which was published in Nature Reviews Physics on 12 January.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3nGYLEJ

How aerosols are formed

ETH Zurich researchers conducted an experiment to investigate the initial steps in the formation of aerosols. Their findings are now aiding efforts to better understand and model that process—for example, the formation of clouds in the atmosphere.

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

Studying chaos with one of the world's fastest cameras

There are things in life that can be predicted reasonably well. The tides rise and fall. The moon waxes and wanes. A billiard ball bounces around a table according to orderly geometry.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Kf2Wdm

Limits of atomic nuclei predicted: Scientists simulate large region of the chart of nuclides

Novel calculations have enabled the study of nearly 700 isotopes between helium and iron, showing which nuclei can exist and which cannot. In an article published in Physical Review Letters, scientists from TU Darmstadt, the University of Washington, the Canadian laboratory TRIUMF, and the University of Mainz report how they simulated for the first time using innovative theoretical methods a large region of the chart of nuclides based on the theory of the strong interaction.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3nCaIvz

Mathematics explains how giant whirlpools form in developing egg cells

Egg cells are among the largest cells in the animal kingdom. If moved only by the random jostlings of water molecules, a protein could take hours or even days to drift from one side of a forming egg cell to the other. Luckily, nature has developed a faster way: cell-spanning whirlpools in the immature egg cells of animals such as mice, zebrafish and fruit flies. These vortices enable cross-cell commutes that take just a fraction of the time. But until now, scientists didn't know how these crucial flows formed.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3q9Ib22

APS upgrade takes first practice run building modules for the new storage ring

If you ever built a complex model out of LEGOs, you know the value of assembling parts of that model in pieces before attaching them to the whole. That same strategy is being used to upgrade the electron storage ring at the heart of the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility at Argonne National Laboratory.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3ibqMD7

Could we harness energy from black holes?

A remarkable prediction of Einstein's theory of general relativity—the theory that connects space, time, and gravity—is that rotating black holes have enormous amounts of energy available to be tapped.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/39xm4f6

Using neural networks for faster X-ray imaging

A team of scientists from Argonne is using artificial intelligence to decode X-ray images faster, which could aid innovations in medicine, materials and energy.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2XDVX0t

Physicists get closer to examining the symmetries underlying our universe

Every field has its underlying principles. For economics it's the rational actor; biology has the theory of evolution; modern geology rests on the bedrock of plate tectonics.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Xyh5oT

No disassembly required: Non-destructive method to measure carrier lifetime in SiC

Silicon carbide (SiC), a versatile and resistant material that exists in multiple crystalline forms, has attracted much attention thanks to its unique electronic properties. From its use in the first LED devices, to its applications in high-voltage devices with low power losses, SiC displays exceptional semiconductor behavior. So far, the operating voltages for unipolar SiC devices are below 3.3 kV. Though useful for the electronic systems of cars, trains, and home appliances, unipolar SiC-based devices cannot be used in power generation and distribution systems, which operate at voltages above 10 kV.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3qeGRe6

The realization of a single-quantum-dot heat valve

While many research teams worldwide are trying to develop highly performing quantum computers, some are working on tools to control the flow of heat inside of them. Just like conventional computers, in fact, quantum computers can heat up significantly as they are operating, which can ultimately damage both the devices and their surroundings.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3nBTdLU

A new approach to film atoms and molecules vibrating inside solids

Theoretical and experimental scientists have come together to watch solids vibrate.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3siS0g6

A charge-density-wave topological semimetal

Topological materials are characterized by unique electronic and physical properties that are determined by the underlying topology of their electronic systems. Scientists from the Max Planck Institutes for Microstructure Physics (Halle) and for Chemical Physics of Solids (Dresden) have now discovered that (TaSe4)2I is the first material in which a charge density wave induces a phase transition between the semimetal to insulator state.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2XBK7Ux

There's no way to measure the speed of light in a single direction

Special relativity is one of the most strongly validated theories humanity has ever devised. It is central to everything from space travel and GPS to our electrical power grid. Central to relativity is the fact that the speed of light in a vacuum is an absolute constant. The problem is, that fact has never been proven.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3qdxhrR

Movers and shakers: New evidence for a unifying theory of granular materials

Understanding the dynamics of granular materials—such as sand flowing through an hourglass or salt pouring through a shaker—is a major unsolved problem in physics. A new paper describes a pattern for how record-sized "shaking" events affect the dynamics of a granular material as it moves from an excited to a relaxed state, adding to the evidence that a unifying theory underlies this behavior.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/35mtjW4

An avalanche of violence: Analysis reveals predictable patterns in armed conflicts

New work by SFI's Collective Computation Group (C4) finds that human conflict exhibits remarkable regularity despite substantial geographic and cultural differences.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3s9dQCn

Using the SYK model to examine the fast-charging process of quantum batteries

The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, an exactly solvable model devised by Subir Sachdev and Jinwu Ye, has recently proved useful for understanding the characteristics of different types of matter. As it describes quantum matter without quasiparticles and is simultaneously a holographic version of a quantum black hole, it has so far been adopted by both condensed matter and high-energy physicists.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3bkovEh

Researchers achieve on-demand storage in integrated solid-state quantum memory

Researchers from CAS Key Laboratory of Quantum Information of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have demonstrated on-demand storage of photonic qubits in an integrated solid-state quantum memory for the first time. This work was published in Physics Review Letters.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/38s3vtI

Researchers question fundamental study on the Kondo effect

The Kondo effect influences the electrical resistance of metals at low temperatures and generates complex electronic and magnetic orders. Novel concepts for data storage and processing, such as using quantum dots, are based on this. In 1998, researchers from the United States published spectroscopic studies on the Kondo effect using scanning tunneling microscopy, which are considered ground-breaking and have triggered countless others of a similar kind. Many of these studies may have to be re-examined now that Jülich researchers have shown that the Kondo effect cannot be proven beyond doubt by this method. Instead, another phenomenon is creating precisely the spectroscopic 'fingerprint' that was previously attributed to the Kondo effect.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3nlqnix

Machine-learning models of matter beyond interatomic potentials

Combining electronic structure calculations and machine learning (ML) techniques has become a common approach in the atomistic modeling of matter. Using the two techniques together has allowed researchers, for instance, to create models that use atomic coordinates as the only inputs to inexpensively predict any property that can be computed by the first-principles calculations that had been used to train them.

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

New hard disk write head analytical technology can increase hard disk capacities

Using synchrotron radiation at SPring-8—a large-scale synchrotron radiation facility—Tohoku University, Toshiba Corporation, and the Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute (JASRI) have successfully imaged the magnetization dynamics of a hard disk drive (HDD) write head for the first time, with a precision of one ten-billionth of a second. The method makes possible precise analysis of write head operations, accelerating the development of the next-generation write heads and further increasing HDD capacity. Details of the research were published in the Journal of Applied Physics on October 6 and presented at the 44th Annual Conference on Magnetics in Japan, on December 14.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/396NIj6

The first evidence of top quark production in nucleus-nucleus collisions

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration, a large group of researchers from different institutes worldwide, has recently gathered the very first evidence of top quark production in nucleus-nucleus collisions. Their work, outlined in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, was based on lead-lead collision data gathered by the CMS particle detector, at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Lrn7oL

Next-generation particle beam cooling experiment under way at Fermilab accelerator

Before researchers can smash together beams of particles to study high-energy particle interactions, they need to create those beams in particle accelerators. And the tighter the particles are packed in the beams, the better scientists' chances of spotting rare physics phenomena.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3no8Dmw

How chaos and tendency to reach thermal equilibrium arise from fundamental laws of physics

Normally the word "chaos" evokes a lack of order: a hectic day, a teenager's bedroom, tax season. And the physical understanding of chaos is not far off. It's something that is extremely difficult to predict, like the weather. Chaos allows a small blip (the flutter of a butterfly wing) to grow into a big consequence (a typhoon halfway across the world), which explains why weather forecasts more than a few days into the future can be unreliable. Individual air molecules, which are constantly bouncing around, are also chaotic—it's nearly impossible to pin down where any single molecule might be at any given moment.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3s6fPaS

Insights through atomic simulation

A recent special issue of the Journal of Chemical Physics highlights Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's (PNNL) contributions to developing two prominent open-source software packages for computational chemistry used by scientists around the world.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2Mz2G9I

Researchers develop broadband X-ray source needed to perform new measurements at NIF

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have developed an X-ray source that can diagnose temperature in experiments that probe conditions like those at the very center of planets.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3bg38UC

Physicists observe competition between magnetic orders

They are as thin as a hair, only a hundred thousand times thinner—so-called two-dimensional materials, consisting of a single layer of atoms, have been booming in research for years. They became known to a wider audience when two Russian-British scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for the discovery of graphene, a building block of graphite. The special feature of such materials is that they possess novel properties that can only be explained with the help of the laws of quantum mechanics and that may be relevant for enhanced technologies. Researchers at the University of Bonn (Germany) have now used ultracold atoms to gain new insights into previously unknown quantum phenomena. They found out that the magnetic orders between two coupled thin films of atoms compete with each other. The study has been published in the journal Nature.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3hPM0q5

Study demonstrates the quenching of an antiferromagnet into high resistivity states

Antiferromagnetism is a type of magnetism in which parallel but opposing spins occur spontaneously within a material. Antiferromagnets, materials that exhibit antiferromagnetism, have advantageous characteristics that make them particularly promising for fabricating spintronic devices.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/395g25o

Machine learning improves particle accelerator diagnostics

Operators of the primary particle accelerator at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility are getting a new tool to help them quickly address issues that can prevent it from running smoothly. A new machine learning system has passed its first two-week test, correctly identifying glitchy accelerator components and the type of glitches they're experiencing in near-real-time.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3nia46f

First glimpse of polarons forming in a promising next-gen energy material

Polarons are fleeting distortions in a material's atomic lattice that form around a moving electron in a few trillionths of a second, then quickly disappear. As ephemeral as they are, they affect a material's behavior, and may even be the reason that solar cells made with lead hybrid perovskites achieve extraordinarily high efficiencies in the lab.

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

Experiment to precisely measure electrons moves forward

A new probe of the humble electron may provide insight into the forces at work inside the heart of matter. Now, the MOLLER experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility is one step closer to carrying out an experiment to gain that new insight. The experiment has just received a designation of Critical Decision 1, or CD-1, from the DOE, which is a greenlight to move forward in design and prototyping of equipment.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/391ga5S

Scrambled supersolids: Researchers discover a soft form of a solid

Supersolids are materials that are fluid and solid at the same time. Physicists from Innsbruck and Geneva have for the first time investigated what happens when such a state is brought out of balance. They discovered a soft form of a solid of great interest for science. As the researchers led by Francesca Ferlaino and Thierry Giamarchi report in Nature Physics, they were also able to reverse the process and restore supersolidity.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/358Qp2c