The NASA Quesst mission will fly a supersonic aircraft over various communities to test noise-mitigating technology. Supersonic aircraft generate a series of shock waves that merge into two distinct booms. The planes drag these incredibly loud sounds along their flight path, creating unacceptable noise levels over land. So far, sonic booms have prevented commercial supersonic flight over land, but fixing the noise could cut flight times in half. At the 183rd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Gautam Shah…

Orbital observations unveil the presence of an enormous mantle plume pushing the surface of Mars upward and driving intense volcanic and seismic activity. On Earth, shifting tectonic plates reshuffle the planet’s surface and make for a dynamic interior, so the absence of such processes on Mars led many to think of it as a dead planet, where not much happened in the past 3 billion years. In the current issue of Nature Astronomy, scientists from the University of Arizona challenge…

Studying an atomic clock on-board a spacecraft inside the orbit of Mercury and very near to the Sun might be the trick to uncovering the nature of dark matter, suggests a new study published in Nature Astronomy.  Dark matter makes up more than 80 per cent of mass in the universe, but it has so far evaded detection on Earth, despite decades of experimental efforts. A key component of these searches is an assumption about the local density of dark…

New method harnesses image scanning superresolution for enhanced photon efficiency in light-sheet microscopy. In biological imaging, researchers aim to achieve 3D, high-speed, and high-resolution, with low photobleaching and phototoxicity. The light-sheet fluorescence microscope (LSFM) helps meet that aim. Based on a unique excitation and detection scheme, the LSFM can image live specimens with high spatiotemporal resolution and low photobleaching. It has shown great potential for 3D imaging of biological samples. The principle of LSFM technology is to illuminate the sample…

Demonstration of a free-electron laser driven by plasma accelerated electron beams. Extremely intense light pulses generated by free-electron lasers (FELs) are versatile tools in research. Particularly in the X-ray range, they can be deployed to analyze the details of atomic structures of a wide variety of materials. Until now, FELs such as the European XFEL in Germany are based on conventional electron accelerators, which make them long and expensive. An international team led by Synchrotron SOLEIL, France, and Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf…

Back in the late 1980s, astronomers from several countries initiated the effort to build a telescope with a collecting area approaching one square kilometer (one million square meters). Some three decades later, after years of engineering design and international science diplomacy, the project reaches another important milestone this year. On December 05, construction of the SKA Observatory (SKAO)’s telescopes formally begins with ceremonies in South Africa and Australia. It was already a long way to the foundation of the SKA…

Scientists develop a meaningful approach to analyze how a material’s microstructure relates to its macroscopic physical properties. Soft magnetic materials, i.e., materials that can be easily magnetized and demagnetized, play an essential role in transformers, generators, and motors. The ability of a magnetic material to resist an external magnetic field without changing its magnetization is known as “coercivity,” a property closely linked to the energy loss. In applications such as electric cars, low-coercivity materials are highly desirable to achieve higher…

Ultrafast lightwave control of electrons in crystals. The quantum realm of atomic particles is embedded with randomness. Still, precise control of quantum systems, such as quantum computers, is of great importance for modern quantum science and prospective quantum technology. In the classical world, time is constantly moving forward. But in the quantum world, time is theoretically malleable and reversible. And it is through these time-reversal dynamics that scientists have attempted to control quantum systems. For example, spin echoes – proposed…

Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, under the direction of Prof. WANG Rongsheng and Prof. LU Quanming, used data from the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission to directly observe bursty and turbulent magnetic reconnection in the solar wind. Their findings were published in Nature Astronomy. Magnetic reconnection is an energy-releasing process that causes explosive phenomena in interplanetary space. During the process, the magnetic energy is rapidly released to heat and accelerate the…

Large telescope receiver optics confirmed in lab prior to installation at Simons Observatory. Some of the largest and most sophisticated telescopes ever made are under construction at the Simons Observatory in Northern Chile. They are designed to measure cosmic microwave background – electromagnetic radiation left over from the formation of the universe – with unprecedented sensitivity. In a new study, researchers detail an analysis method that could improve these telescopes by evaluating their performance before installation. “We developed a way…

…laser upgrade opens new research possibilities. A new addition to the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator Center means researchers can explore extreme plasmas, radiation biology, materials for quantum computers, and beyond. Things are looking brighter than ever at the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center run by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. A recently completed upgrade will expand the center’s capabilities into new areas, including studies of particle acceleration, extremely hot plasmas, cancer treatment techniques, and materials for…

How quantum optics illuminates the nature of the quark. Scientists from the University of Rostock, Germany were able to recreate fundamental physical properties from the realm of elementary particle physics in a photonic system. The results are published in the renowned scientific journal “Nature Physics”. In their fundamental research, experimental physicists routinely bring giant yet intricate machinery to bear: Particle accelerators of enormous size smash together microscopic particles at velocities close to the speed of light, releasing unimaginable amounts of…

Device could advance quantum computing and quantum networks. Optical photons are ideal carriers of quantum information. But to work together in a quantum computer or network, they need to have the same color — or frequency — and bandwidth. Changing a photon’s frequency requires altering its energy, which is particularly challenging on integrated photonic chips. Recently, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) developed an integrated electro-optic modulator that can efficiently change the frequency…

Researchers at Google Quantum AI have produced quantum states that are resilient to decoherence that typically plagues quantum computers. Physicists at Google Quantum AI have used their quantum computer to study a type of effective particle that is more resilient to environmental disturbances that can degrade quantum calculations. These effective particles, known as Majorana edge modes, form as a result of a collective excitation of multiple individual particles, like ocean waves form from the collective motions of water molecules. Majorana…

EU project ELIoT presents LiFi solutions for the mass market. The project ELIoT (Enhance Lighting for the Internet of Things), part of the EU Horizon 2020 initiative, has been successfully completed. Coordinated by the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI), the consortium has developed LiFi solutions for the mass market since 2019, enabling wireless data transmission via light in the Internet of Things (IoT). To conclude the project, the researchers demonstrated a new LiFi infrastructure in real-world application scenarios and presented…

Discovery shows heat movement slowing down under extreme pressure instead of speeding up. UCLA researchers and their colleagues have discovered a new physics principle governing how heat transfers through materials, and the finding contradicts the conventional wisdom that heat always moves faster as pressure increases. Up until now, the common belief has held true in recorded observations and scientific experiments involving different materials such as gases, liquids and solids. The researchers detailed their discovery in a study published last week…