Solving a murder case with physics

In 2009, famed music producer Phil Spector was found guilty of the murder of actress Lana Clarkson, who was found dead from a single gunshot to her mouth at close range in Spector's California mansion.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3h5SXVi

Researchers document quantum melting of Wigner Crystals

In 1934, physicist Eugene Wigner made a theoretical prediction based on quantum mechanics that for 87 years went unseen.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3due0yw

Search for heavy bosons sets new limits

Since discovering the Higgs boson in 2012, the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN has been working to understand its properties. One question in particular stands out: why does the Higgs boson have the mass that it does? Experiments have measured its mass to be around 125 GeV—yet the Standard Model implies it has much larger mass and requires a very large correction to the mathematics in order to align theory with observation, leading to the "naturalness problem."

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

Hunting dark energy with gravity resonance spectroscopy

Dark Energy is widely believed to be the driving force behind the universe's accelerating expansion, and several theories have now been proposed to explain its elusive nature. However, these theories predict that its influence on quantum scales must be vanishingly small, and experiments so far have not been accurate enough to either verify or discredit them. In new research published in EPJ ST, a team led by Hartmut Abele at TU Wien in Austria demonstrates a robust experimental technique for studying one such theory, using ultra-cold neutrons. Named "Gravity Resonance Spectroscopy" (GRS), their approach could bring researchers a step closer to understanding one of the greatest mysteries in cosmology.

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

Identifying a topological fingerprint

A FLEET theoretical study out this week has found a 'smoking gun' in the long search for the topological magnetic monopole referred to as the Berry curvature.

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

Quantum random number generator sets benchmark for size, performance

As pervasive as they are in everyday uses, like encryption and security, randomly generated digital numbers are seldom truly random.

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

A proprioceptive mechanism to enable fish-like swimming in robots

Over the past few decades, roboticists have developed a variety of robots inspired by nature, humans and animals. To effectively mimic animals or humans, however, these robots should not only look like them; they should also move in similar ways.

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

'Edge of chaos' opens pathway to artificial intelligence discoveries

Scientists at the University of Sydney and Japan's National Institute for Material Science (NIMS) have discovered that an artificial network of nanowires can be tuned to respond in a brain-like way when electrically stimulated.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3hinhL7

Is reality a game of quantum mirrors? A new theory suggests it might be

Imagine you sit down and pick up your favorite book. You look at the image on the front cover, run your fingers across the smooth book sleeve, and smell that familiar book smell as you flick through the pages. To you, the book is made up of a range of sensory appearances.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3hi8T5N

Optical tweezer technology tweaked to overcome dangers of heat

Three years ago, Arthur Ashkin won the Nobel Prize for inventing optical tweezers, which use light in the form of a high-powered laser beam to capture and manipulate particles. Despite being created decades ago, optical tweezers still lead to major breakthroughs and are widely used today to study biological systems.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3x3DgU8

Method uses radio signals to image hidden and speeding objects

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Wavsens LLC have developed a method for using radio signals to create real-time images and videos of hidden and moving objects, which could help firefighters find escape routes or victims inside buildings filled with fire and smoke. The technique could also help track hypersonic objects such as missiles and space debris.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3h7KoIg

Rearranging orchestral musicians to reduce disease-spreading aerosols

A team of researchers at the University of Utah Salt Lake City has found, via simulation, that it is possible to rearrange musicians playing wind instruments in an orchestra to reduce the spread of disease-laden aerosols. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes simulations they ran that showed airflow patterns during orchestral performances and what they found.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3qvoXp2

A high-resolution microscope built from LEGO and phone bits

Microscopy is an essential tool in many fields of science and medicine. However, many groups have limited access to this technology due to its cost and fragility. Now, researchers from the Universities of Göttingen and Münster have succeeded in building a high-resolution microscope using nothing more than children's plastic building bricks and affordable parts from a mobile phone. They then went on to show that children aged nine to 13 had significantly increased understanding of microscopy after constructing and working with the LEGO microscope. Their results were published in The Biophysicist.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3zWzy0k

Mechanism behind XFEL-induced melting of diamond unveiled

The ultrafast melting of diamond under intense x-ray irradiation has been visualized for the first time by RIKEN researchers. This observation will help scientists improve experimental methods that use high-intensity x-ray pulses to determine the structures of materials.

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

Theoretical proof that a strong force can create lightweight subatomic particles

Using only a pen and paper, a theoretical physicist has proved a decades-old claim that a strong force called Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD) leads to light-weight pions, reports a new study published on June 23 in Physical Review Letters.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3h5hMj1

The fifth quartet: Excited neon discovery could reveal star qualities

Scientists from the Department of Physics and the Research Center for Nuclear Physics (RCNP) at Osaka University, in collaboration with Kyoto University, used alpha particle inelastic scattering to show that the theorized "5α condensed state" does exist in neon-20. This work may help us obtain a better understanding the low-density nucleon many-body systems.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3wX6DY4

Scientists present new measurements of β-delayed two-proton decay of 27S

Two-proton decay is a quantum tunneling process. The tunneling probability depends on the available energy and the height of the Coulomb barrier, which in turn depends on the nuclear charge Z (number of protons). Two-proton emission is a typical three-body breakup process, including the daughter nucleus and two protons, in which pairing correlations play an important role. Therefore, a detailed study of two-proton emission is of great significance for exploring the open quantum system, pairing correlations and exotic nuclear structure.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2U0W2Nr

How physics breaks down in a black hole

One of the most cherished laws of physics—the conservation of charge—has come under fire in "startling" research by physicists.

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

Physicists use electric fields to induce oscillations in tiny particles

A challenging frontier in science and engineering is controlling matter outside of thermodynamic equilibrium to build material systems with capabilities that rival those of living organisms. Research on active colloids aims to create micro- and nanoscale "particles" that swim through viscous fluids like primitive microorganisms. When these self-propelled particles come together, they can organize and move like schools of fish to perform robotic functions, such as navigating complex environments and delivering "cargo" to targeted locations.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3x5UBMp

Concepts from physics explain importance of quarantine to control spread of COVID-19

Mathematical models that describe the physical behavior of magnetic materials can also be used to describe the spread of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

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

ATLAS experiment measures top quark polarization

Unique among its peers is the top quark—a fascinating particle that the scientific community has been studying in detail since the 90s. Its large mass makes it the only quark to decay before forming bound states (a process known as hadronisation) and gives it the strongest coupling to the Higgs boson. Theorists predict it may also interact strongly with new particles—if it does, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the ideal place to find out as it is a "top-quark factory."

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

The first observation of the superscattering effect of metamaterials

Entering an invisible doorway to catch a train at King's Cross station in London is a renowned fictional scene from the Harry Potter series. In recent decades, physicists have been trying to produce a similar effect by focusing their research efforts on illusion devices.

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

Sound-induced electric fields control the tiniest particles

Engineers at Duke University have devised a system for manipulating particles approaching the miniscule 2.5 nanometer diameter of DNA using sound-induced electric fields. Dubbed "acoustoelectronic nanotweezers," the approach provides a label-free, dynamically controllable method of moving and trapping nanoparticles over a large area. The technology holds promise for applications in the fields ranging from condensed matter physics to biomedicine.

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

Synthetic tree enhances solar steam generation for harvesting drinking water

About 2.2 billion people globally lack reliable access to clean drinking water, according to the United Nations, and the growing impacts of climate change are likely to worsen this reality.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3d6bFd7

First wave COVID-19 data underestimated pandemic infections

Two COVID-19 pandemic curves emerged within many cities during the one-year period from March 2020 to March 2021.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3qoU0CL

Tree pollen carries SARS-CoV-2 particles farther, facilitates virus spread

Most models explaining how viruses are transmitted focus on viral particles escaping one person to infect a nearby person. A study on the role of microscopic particles in how viruses are transmitted suggests pollen is nothing to sneeze at.

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

What the Muon g-2 results mean for how we understand the universe

The news that muons have a little extra wiggle in their step sent word buzzing around the world this spring.

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

A colorful look at fast-flying particles

The strong nuclear force is one of the four fundamental forces of nature, along with the electromagnetic, gravitational and weak nuclear forces. The branch of particle physics that deals with the strong nuclear force is called quantum chromodynamics (QCD). The term "chromo" refers to the charge in the theory, which is called color (not related to the everyday meaning of the word in terms of visible light). It is important to understand more about QCD, since it gives us a better understanding of nature as a whole and of the universe we occupy. This thesis develops new equations that describe how quantities measured in experiments depend on energy. One such equation describes the energy dependence of the odderon, a particle that has been made famous in international news recently due to its observation at CERN in late 2020. We also use a new method to calculate evolution equations without making the usual assumption that QCD has infinitely many colors, instead of the three colors it has in reality.

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

New research into the spreading of infections reveals need for greater collaboration between biology and physics

Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, together with epidemiologist Lone Simonsen from Roskilde University form part of the panel advising the Danish government on how to tackle the different infection-spreading situations we have all seen unfold over the past year. Researchers have modeled the spread of infections under a variety of scenarios, and the Coronavirus has proven to not follow the older models of disease spreading.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3cYND3A

New possibilities for detecting Hawking radiation emitted by primordial black holes

While many physicists have predicted the existence of dark matter, a type of matter that does not absorb, reflect or emit light, so far no one has been able to observe it experimentally or determine its fundamental nature. Light primordial black holes (PBHs), black holes the formed in the early universe, are among the most promising dark matter candidates. However, the existence of these black holes has not yet been confirmed.

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

Domestic superconducting dipole magnet reaches 12 Tesla

The high-field superconducting magnet team of Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has made progress in a new round of performance tests that ended on June 13. The magnetic field of the dipole magnet developed by the team exceeded 12 Tesla (Tesla) in two apertures at 4.2 K, reaching more than 85% of the critical performance capacity of the superconducting wire. This magnet, including its design, superconducting materials, cables, coils, and related equipment and platform, is based on domestic technologies.

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

Imaging at the tip of a needle

A team of physicists, led by Dr. David Phillips from the University of Exeter, have pioneered a new way in which to control light that has been scrambled by passage through a single hair-thin strand of optical fiber. These ultra-thin fibers hold much promise for the next generation of medical endoscopes—enabling high-resolution imaging deep inside the body at the tip of a needle.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3gCYH8N

CERN: How we're probing the universe's origins using record precision measurements

What happened at the beginning of the universe, in the very first moments? The truth is, we don't really know because it takes huge amounts of energy and precision to recreate and understand the cosmos on such short timescales in the lab. But scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Switzerland aren't giving up.

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

Vortex, the key to information processing capability: Virtual physical reservoir computing

In recent years, physical reservoir computing, one of the new information processing technologies, has attracted much attention. This is a physical implementation version of reservoir computing, which is a learning method derived from recurrent neural network (RNN) theory. It implements computation by regarding the physical system as a huge RNN, outsourcing the main operations to the dynamics of the physical system that forms the physical reservoir. It has the advantage of obtaining optimization instantaneously with limited computational resources by adjusting linear and static readout weightings between the output and a physical reservoir without requiring optimization of the weightings by back propagation.

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

The demonstration of hydrodynamic cloaking and shielding at the microscale

Researchers at Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, Technische Universität Darmstadt, and IBM Research Europe have recently proposed a new strategy to simultaneously achieve microscale hydrodynamic cloaking and shielding. While the idea of cloaking or shielding objects has been around for some time now, in contrast with other previously developed methods the technique they proposed allows physicists to dynamically switch between these two states.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3cQMif5

The absorption of an individual electrons captured on video

Researchers at the University of Gothenburg have observed the absorption of a single electron by a levitated droplet with such a magnification that it is visible with the naked eye and can even be measured with a normal millimeter scaled ruler.

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

New super-resolution microscopy method approaches the atomic scale

Scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine have developed a computational technique that greatly increases the resolution of atomic force microscopy, a specialized type of microscope that "feels" the atoms at a surface. The method reveals atomic-level details on proteins and other biological structures under normal physiological conditions, opening a new window on cell biology, virology and other microscopic processes.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3cOSog9

Particles with 'eyes' allow a closer look at rotational dynamics

Colloids—mixtures of particles made from one substance, dispersed in another substance—crop up in numerous areas of everyday life, including cosmetics, food and dyes, and form important systems within our bodies. Understanding the behavior of colloids therefore has wide-ranging implications, yet investigating the rotation of spherical particles has been challenging. Now, an international team including researchers from The University of Tokyo Institute of Industrial Science has created particles with an off-center core or "eye" that can be tracked using microscopy. Their findings are published in Physical Review X.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3iLC3N5

When testing Einstein's theory of general relativity, small modeling errors add up fast

Small modeling errors may accumulate faster than previously expected when physicists combine multiple gravitational wave events (such as colliding black holes) to test Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, suggest researchers at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. The findings, published June 16 in the journal iScience, suggest that catalogs with as few as 10 to 30 events with a signal-to-background noise ratio of 20 (which is typical for events used in this type of test) could provide misleading deviations from general relativity, erroneously pointing to new physics where none exists. Because this is close to the size of current catalogs used to assess Einstein's theory, the authors conclude that physicists should proceed with caution when performing such experiments.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3qc3xx7

Sticky baseballs: The physics of the latest scandal in Major League Baseball

Cheating in baseball is as old as the game itself, and pitchers' modifying the ball's surface is part of that long history. Adding to the lore of cheating is a new scandal involving pitchers who may be applying sticky substances—what players refer to as "sticky stuff"—to baseballs.

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

More than a bumpy ride: Turbulence offers boost to birds

Most sensible air travelers dread turbulence. A little atmospheric hiccup can shake airplanes, rattle nerves and spill beverages. A Cornell University-led study found that birds don't mind at all.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/2S1ljXa

Scientists expose the cold heart of landfalling hurricanes

Hurricanes are powerful weather events born in the open sea. Fueled by moisture from the warm ocean, hurricanes can intensify in strength, move vast distances across the water, and ultimately unleash their destruction upon land. But what happens to hurricanes after they've made landfall remains an open question.

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

Modeling the friction between pages in a book

It all started with a shaky washing machine. Pedro Reis, head of the Flexible Structures Laboratory at EPFL's School of Engineering, rolled up a piece of fabric and placed it under the machine to stop it from moving. After he saw how well the rolled-up fabric worked as a vibration damper, he got to thinking. He spoke with Samuel Poincloux, a postdoc at his lab, about his idea and they soon realized that the physics behind a piece of rolled-up material undergoing deformation is actually quite non-trivial. They set out to model the process, but given all the different variables involved, they decided to first simplify the problem. Instead of using rolled-up fabric, they started with a layered object possessing a similar geometry: a book. "For our experiments, we used flexible plastic sheets that we stacked up like the pages in a book, so that we could adjust and measure their collective properties," says Poincloux.

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

Portable technology offers boost for nuclear security, arms control

About five years ago, Areg Danagoulian, associate professor in the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), became intrigued by a technique developed by researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory that uses a neutron beam to identify unknown materials.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3zuM0o2

Searching for heavy new particles with the ATLAS Experiment

Since discovering the Higgs boson in 2012, the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN has been working to understand its properties. One question in particular stands out: why does the Higgs boson have the mass that it does? Experiments have measured its mass to be around 125 GeV—yet the Standard Model implies it has much larger mass and requires a very large correction to the mathematics in order to align theory with observation, leading to the "naturalness problem."

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3gbDu5H

Novel materials: Sound waves traveling backward

Acoustic waves in gases, liquids, and solids usually travel at an almost constant speed of sound. So-called rotons are an exception: their speed of sound changes significantly with the wavelength, and it is also possible that the waves travel backward. Researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) are studying the possibilities of using rotons in artificial materials. These computer-designed metamaterials, produced by ultra-precise 3D laser printing, might be used in the future to manipulate or direct sound in ways that have never been possible before. A report on the researchers' work has been published in Nature Communications.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3ivp6qi

GEM simplifies the internal structure of protons and their collisions

Inside each proton or neutron there are three quarks bound by gluons. Until now, it has often been assumed that two of them form a "stable" pair known as a diquark. It seems, however, that it's the end of the road for the diquarks in physics. This is one of the conclusions of the new model of proton-proton or proton-nucleus collisions, which takes into account the interactions of gluons with the sea of virtual quarks and antiquarks.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/353E1QO

When physics meets financial networks

Generally, physics and financial systems are not easily associated in people's minds. Yet, principles and techniques originating from physics can be very effective in describing the processes taking place on financial markets. Modeling financial systems as networks can greatly enhance our understanding of phenomena that are relevant not only to researchers in economics and other disciplines, but also to ordinary citizens, public agencies and governments. The theory of Complex Networks represents a powerful framework for studying how shocks propagate in financial systems, identifying early-warning signals of forthcoming crises, and reconstructing hidden linkages in interbank systems.

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

Dynamics of contact electrification

A new report on Science Advances developed by Mirco Kaponig and colleagues in physics and nanointegration in Germany, detailed the very basic concept of contact electrification between two metals. In a new experimental method, the researchers followed the charge of a small sphere bouncing on a grounded planar electrode on a timescale down to 1 microsecond. The team noted how the sphere discharged in the moment of contact lasting for 6 to 8 microseconds. At the moment of disruption of the electrical contact, the sphere regained charge far beyond expectations relative to the contact potential difference. The excess charge arose with increasing contact area.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3w7nWFG

Researchers reveal relationship between magnetic field and supercapacitors

Since energy storage devices are often used in a magnetic field environment, scientists regularly explore how an external magnetic field affects the charge storage of nonmagnetic aqueous carbon-based supercapacitor systems.

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

ATLAS experiment searches for 'charming' decay of the Higgs boson

Key to understanding the Higgs boson and its role in the Standard Model is understanding how it interacts with matter particles, i.e. quarks and leptons. There are three generations of matter particles, varying in mass from the lightest (first generation) to the heaviest (third generation). Although hints of second-generation lepton interactions have started to appear, physicists have only experimentally confirmed that the masses of the heaviest quarks originate from their interactions with the Higgs field. So far, lighter quarks have not yet been observed interacting with the Higgs boson.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3zh1QSO

Physicists achieve significant improvement in spotting accelerator-produced neutrinos in a cosmic haystack

How do you spot a subatomic neutrino in a "haystack" of particles streaming from space? That's the daunting prospect facing physicists studying neutrinos with detectors near Earth's surface. With little to no shielding in such non-subterranean locations, surface-based neutrino detectors, usually searching for neutrinos produced by particle accelerators, are bombarded by cosmic rays—relentless showers of subatomic and nuclear particles produced in Earth's atmosphere by interactions with particles streaming from more-distant cosmic locations. These abundant travelers, mostly muons, create a web of crisscrossing particle tracks that can easily obscure a rare neutrino event.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3w7PVop

Technique characterizes phases of superfluids changing to supersolids and back

A team of researchers from the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information and the University of Innsbruck, has developed a technique for characterizing the phases a superfluid undergoes as it changes to a supersolid and then back again. The group has written a paper describing their technique and have uploaded it to the arXiv preprint server.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3v5gDwU

Cabling for Large Hadron Collider upgrade project reaches halfway mark

The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has passed the halfway mark in the multi-year process of fabricating crucial superconducting cables as part of a project to upgrade the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. This upgrade, now in progress, will greatly increase the facility's collision rate and its scientific productivity.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3x7CEfR

Could the source of the GW190814 event be a black hole-strange quark star system?

On the 14th of August 2019, the LIGO-Virgo collaboration detected a gravitational wave signal believed to be associated with the merging of a binary stellar system composed of a black hole with a mass of 23 times the mass of the sun (M⊙) and a compact object with a mass of about 2.6 M⊙. The nature of GW190814ʼs secondary star is enigmatic, since, according to the current astronomical observations, it could be the heaviest neutron star or the lightest black hole ever observed.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3zb6Jgp

Subatomic particle seen changing to antiparticle and back

Physicists have proved that a subatomic particle can switch into its antiparticle alter-ego and back again, in a new discovery revealed today.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/35d1ejH

Laser-focused on supercooled water

Drink in this factoid: water is the weirdest liquid of all.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3v3wRGO

New COVID-19 model reveals effectiveness of travel restrictions

More strategic and coordinated travel restrictions likely could have reduced the spread of COVID-19 in the early stages of the pandemic. That's according to new research published in Communications Physics. This finding stems from new modeling conducted by a multidisciplinary team of scientists and engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

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

Physicists report definitive evidence how auroras are created

The aurora borealis, or northern lights, that fill the sky in high-latitude regions have fascinated people for thousands of years. But how they're created, while theorized, had not been conclusively proven.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3x6K6HV

Artificial intelligence and data mining are being used to measure aerodynamic flows

Developing new ways to measure turbulent flows that are more efficient and reliable is the main objective of the NEXTFLOW research project at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), funded by an ERC Starting Grant from the European Union. These techniques, which use new developments in artificial intelligence and data mining, can be used to improve the aerodynamics of means of transport and reduce their environmental impact.

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

A framework to simulate the same physics using two different Hamiltonians

Researchers at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University in Japan have recently been investigating situations in which two distinct Hamiltonians could be used to simulate the same physical phenomena. A Hamiltonian is a function or model used to describe a dynamic system, such as the motion of particles.

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

Smashing gold with finesse: Shockless compression experiments establish new pressure scales

To test the Standard Model of particle physics, scientists often collide particles using gigantic underground rings. In a similar fashion, high-pressure physicists compress materials to ever greater pressures to further test the quantum theory of condensed matter and challenge predictions made using the most powerful computers.

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

Stripes give away Majoranas

Majorana particles have been getting bad publicity: a claimed discovery in ultracold nanowires had to be retracted. Now Leiden physicists open up a new door to detecting Majoranas in a different experimental system, the Fu-Kane heterostructure, they announce in Physical Review Letters.

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

How is the genome like an open book? New research shows cells' 'library system'

The organization of the human genome relies on physics of different states of matter—such as liquid and solid—a team of scientists has discovered. The findings, which reveal how the physical nature of the genome changes as cells transform to serve specific functions, point to new ways to potentially better understand disease and to create improved therapies for cancer and genetic disorders.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3yRh01b

A new dimension in the quest to understand dark matter

As its name suggests, dark matter—material which makes up about 85% of the mass in the universe—emits no light, eluding easy detection. Its properties, too, remain fairly obscure.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3ib3bEG

THOR: Driving collaboration in heavy-ion collision research

In the universe's earliest moments, particles existed in an unimaginably hot plasma, whose behavior was governed by deeply complex webs of interaction between individual particles. Today, researchers can recreate these exotic conditions through high-energy collisions between heavy ions, whose products can tell us much about how hot, strongly-interacting matter behaves. Yet without extensive, highly coordinated collaborations between researchers across many different backgrounds, studies like this simply wouldn't be possible. This Topical Issue of EPJ A draws together a large collection of papers inspired by the theory of hot matter and relativistic heavy-ion collisions (THOR) European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action. Running between November 2016 and April 2021, THOR has provided a way for over 300 researchers involved in heavy-ion collision analysis to freely exchange their ideas, leading to exciting new advances in the wider field of particle physics.

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

Researchers learn how swimming ducks balance water pressure in their feathers while diving

A team of students working with Jonathan Boreyko, associate professor in mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech, has discovered the method ducks use to suspend water in their feathers while diving, allowing them to shake it out when surfacing. The discovery opens the door for applications in marine technology. Findings were published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

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

World's smallest, best acoustic amplifier emerges from 50-year-old hypothesis

Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories have built the world's smallest and best acoustic amplifier. And they did it using a concept that was all but abandoned for almost 50 years.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3yVFB4K

A better look at how particles move

If you take a bucket of water balloons and jostle one of them, the neighboring balloons will respond as well. This is a scaled-up example of how collections of cells and other deformable particle packings respond to forces. Modeling this phenomenon with computer simulations can shed light on questions about how cancer cells invade healthy tissue or how leaves and flowers grow. But the behavior of cell aggregates is extremely complex, and fully capturing their structure and dynamics has proved tricky.

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

A new direction of topological research is ready for take off

In a joint effort, ct.qmat scientists from Dresden, Rostock, and Würzburg have accomplished non-Hermitian topological states of matter in topolectric circuits. The latter acronym refers to topological and electrical, giving a name to the realization of synthetic topological matter in electric circuit networks. The main motif of topological matter is its role in hosting particularly stable and robust features immune to local perturbations, which might be a pivotal ingredient for future quantum technologies. The current ct.qmat results promise a knowledge transfer from electric circuits to alternative optical platforms, and have just been published in Physical Review Letters.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/34ClDy5

Christie's to sell Isaac Newton's notes for greatest work

Handwritten notes that show one of history's greatest scientific minds in action are going up for auction in London.

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

Light-shrinking material lets ordinary microscope see in super resolution

Electrical engineers at the University of California San Diego developed a technology that improves the resolution of an ordinary light microscope so that it can be used to directly observe finer structures and details in living cells.

from General Physics News - Science News, Physics News, Physics, Material Sciences, Science https://ift.tt/3fDpd1h