The dynamics of 'hotspot forming' high-energy quasiparticles in a superconducting nanowire

Energetic quasiparticles possess a collection of quantum characteristics that operate in a particle-like way in superconducting nanostructures, and they can undergo relaxation by involving many cascaded interactions between electrons, phonons and Cooper pairs. These interactions are significant to the performance of devices such as qubits or photon detectors, yet they remain to be well understood via quasiparticle regulated experiments. Typically, such experiments have incorporated solid-state tunnel junctions with a fixed tunnel barrier.

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It's not as difficult as you think to shout upwind, shows study

For years, Ville Pulkki has been wondering why it feels so difficult to shout upwind. The sensation is common enough to have found its way into an idiom about not being understood. But Pulkki, a professor of acoustics at Aalto University, wanted a scientific explanation for the phenomenon—and there wasn't been one.

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Understanding the origin of matter with the CUORE experiment

There is so much that we do not yet know about neutrinos. Neutrinos are very light, chargeless, and elusive particles that are involved in a process called beta decay. Understanding this process may reveal the origin of matter in the universe.

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CERN takes first small steps towards giant particle accelerator

Europe's CERN laboratory has taken its first steps towards building a huge new particle accelerator that would eclipse its Large Hadron Collider—and hopes to see light at the end of the tunnel.

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Simulations with a machine learning model predict a new phase of solid hydrogen

Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, is found everywhere from the dust filling most of outer space to the cores of stars to many substances here on Earth. This would be reason enough to study hydrogen, but its individual atoms are also the simplest of any element with just one proton and one electron. For David Ceperley, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, this makes hydrogen the natural starting point for formulating and testing theories of matter.

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Probing fundamental symmetries of nature with the Higgs boson

Where did all the antimatter go? After the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts. Why we live in a universe of matter, with very little antimatter, remains a mystery. The excess of matter could be explained by the violation of charge-parity (CP) symmetry, which essentially means that certain processes that involve particles behave differently to those that involve their antiparticles.

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New compact accelerator to help preserve heritage artworks

Beyond fundamental research, accelerators are well known for their contribution to the medical field, especially to cancer therapy. However, they can also be used in more unexpected ways, such as for the analysis of historical artifacts and works of art.

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International team of physicists explore microscopic filament behavior

Recently-published research from an international team of physicists reveals how the three-dimensional shape of rigid microscopic filaments determines their dynamics when suspended in water, and how control of that shape can be used to engineer solid-like behavior even when the suspension is more than 99% water.

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Novel durable copper-aluminum-zinc shape memory alloys for energy-efficient refrigeration

The elastocaloric effect is a phenomenon where a material displays a temperature change when it is exposed to a mechanical stress. The change in temperature occurs due to an entropy difference resulting from a martensitic transformation accompanied by material's crystal structure change under stress.

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Defying gravity with the Brazil nut effect

Physicists from the University of Utrecht and the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw have observed—for the first time experimentally—the Brazil nut effect in a mixture of charged colloidal particles.

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Why are networks stable? Researchers solve a 50-year-old puzzle

A single species invades an ecosystem causing its collapse. A cyberattack on the power system causes a major breakdown. These types of events are always on our minds, yet they rarely result in such significant consequences. So how is it that these systems are so stable and resilient that they can withstand such external disruptions? Indeed, these systems lack a central design or blueprint, and still, they exhibit exceptionally reliable functionality.

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Particle trio exceeds expectations at Large Hadron Collider

The ATLAS experiment has confirmed that a trio of particles—a top-antitop quark pair and a W boson—occurs more frequently than expected in the wake of proton-proton collisions inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

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New model describes the actions that need to be taken by a person riding a swing

A team of physicists, mathematicians and psychologists from Jumonji University, Nagoya University and Hokkaido University, all in Japan, working with a colleague from Macquarie University, in Australia, has developed a model to describe the actions that need to be taken by a person riding a swing to optimize their ride.

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Teasing strange matter from the ordinary

In a unique analysis of experimental data, nuclear physicists have made the first-ever observations of how lambda particles, so-called "strange matter," are produced by a specific process called semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering (SIDIS). What's more, these data hint that the building blocks of protons, quarks and gluons, are capable of marching through the atomic nucleus in pairs called diquarks, at least part of the time. These results come from an experiment conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.

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Nucleons in heavy ion collisions are half as big as previously expected

To study atomic nuclei and subatomic particles, scientists use the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to collide heavy ions—atomic nuclei completely stripped of their surrounding electrons. In these collisions, the quarks and gluons that normally make up nucleons (protons and neutrons) melt into a new state of matter called a quark-gluon plasma (QGP).

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New experimental evidence of the restoration of chiral symmetry at high matter density

The QCD vacuum (i.e., the ground state of vacuum in the quantum chromodynamics regime) is theoretically characterized by the presence of non-zero expectation values of condensates, such as gluons and quark–antiquark pairs. Instead of being associated with a lack of particles and interactions in an empty space, physics theory regards this state as filled with the so-called condensates, which have the same quantum numbers as the vacuum and cannot be directly observed.

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Physicists lead experiments to explore the force that binds the universe

The universe began about 14 billion years ago with a single point that contained a vast array of fundamental particles, according to the prevailing theory known as the Big Bang. Under the pressure of extreme heat and energy, the point inflated and then expanded to become the universe as we know it. That expansion continues to this day.

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Quantum 'magic' could help explain the origin of spacetime

A quantum property dubbed "magic" could be the key to explaining how space and time emerged, a new mathematical analysis by three RIKEN physicists suggests. The research is published in the journal Physical Review D.

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The ATLAS collaboration observes the electroweak production of two jets and a Z-boson pair

The ATLAS collaboration, the large research consortium involved in analyzing data collected by the ATLAS particle collider at CERN, recently observed the electroweak production of two Z bosons and two jets. This crucial observation, presented in Nature Physics, could greatly contribute to the understanding of standard model (SM) particle physics.

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Visualizing differences in nuclear structure

Helium usually has two protons and two neutrons strongly bound to each other, often forming a substructure within the nucleus. A nucleus composed of several such substructures is called a cluster structure. In the standard picture, nuclei are difficult to understand in terms of so-called shell structure; because there was no way to clearly distinguish whether each nucleus had a cluster or a shell structure.

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Stopping storms from creating dangerous urban geysers

During intense rainstorms, residents of urban areas rely on stormwater sewers to keep streets and homes from flooding. But in some cases, air pockets in sewers combine with fast-moving water to produce waterspouts that can reach dozens of feet high and last for several minutes. These so-called storm geysers can flood the surrounding area, cause damage to nearby structures, injure bystanders, and compromise drainage pipes.

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How forest density slows granular flows

One way to reduce the damage caused by avalanches in the mountains is to place obstacles in their path. These obstacles can be artificial barriers or natural forests. Knowing how the avalanche interacts with obstacles is essential to mitigate the damage from snow avalanches as well as other hazardous geophysical granular flows such as debris flows or mudslides.

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Stripes within crystals hint at behavior of electrons in quantum systems

Hidden stripes in a crystal could help scientists understand the mysterious behavior of electrons in certain quantum systems, including high-temperature superconductors, an unexpected discovery by RIKEN physicists suggests.

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A universal protocol that inverts the evolution of a qubit with a high probability of success

Researchers at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in Vienna recently devised a universal mechanism to invert the evolution of a qubit with a high probability of success. This protocol, outlined in Physical Review Letters, can propagate any target qubit back to the state it was in at a specific time in the past.

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Random matrix theory approaches the mystery of the neutrino mass

When any matter is divided into smaller and smaller pieces, eventually all you are left with—when it cannot be divided any further—is a particle. Currently, there are 12 different known elementary particles, which in turn are made up of quarks and leptons, each of which come in six different flavors. These flavors are grouped into three generations—each with one charged and one neutral lepton—to form different particles, including the electron, muon, and tau neutrinos. In the Standard Model, the masses of the three generations of neutrinos are represented by a three-by-three matrix.

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A novel way to get to the excited states of exotic nuclei

An atomic nucleus assumes discrete energy levels when added energy excites that nucleus. These energy levels are the nucleus' unique fingerprint; no two nuclei have identical energy patterns. For exotic nuclei, which have unbalanced numbers of protons and neutrons and often only exist for a fraction of a second, researchers have devised a variety of methods to measure the energies of their excited levels.

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Life: Modern physics can't explain it—but our new theory, which says time is fundamental, might

Over the short span of just 300 years, since the invention of modern physics, we have gained a deeper understanding of how our universe works on both small and large scales. Yet, physics is still very young and when it comes to using it to explain life, physicists struggle.

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X-ray magnetic circular dichroism: Looking at magnets in the right light

Magnetic nanostructures have long been part of our everyday life, e.g., in the form of fast and compact data storage devices or highly sensitive sensors. A major contribution to the understanding of many of the relevant magnetic effects and functionalities is made by a special measurement method: X-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD).

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Previously unknown isotope of uranium discovered

A team of nuclear physicists affiliated with multiple institutions in Japan, working with a colleague from Korea, has discovered a previously unknown uranium isotope with atomic number 92 and mass 241. In their study, reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group forced the isotope to reveal itself and tested the results of their efforts to show that what they had found was indeed uranium-241.

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Recreating the double-slit experiment that proved the wave nature of light in time, instead of space

Imperial physicists have recreated the famous double-slit experiment, which showed light behaving as particles and a wave, in time rather than space.

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ALICE collaboration sees long-range spatial correspondence in simplest collisions yet

When atomic nuclei such as gold or lead nuclei collide at high energy in particle colliders, they can produce quark–gluon plasma (QGP)—a hot and dense state of matter predicted to have existed shortly after the Big Bang. One of the key features of QGP formation in such heavy-ion collisions is a long-range spatial correspondence, or correlation, between the particles that are created in the collisions.

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