NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has revealed the once-hidden features of the protostar within the dark cloud L1527, providing insight into the beginnings of a new star. These blazing clouds within the Taurus star-forming region are only visible in infrared light, making it an ideal target for Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The protostar itself is hidden from view within the “neck” of this hourglass shape. An edge-on protoplanetary disk is seen as a dark line across the middle of the…

New device opens the doors to applications in communication, quantum computing, astronomy. Femtosecond pulsed lasers — which emit light in ultrafast bursts lasting a millionth of a billionth of a second — are powerful tools used in a range of applications from medicine and manufacturing, to sensing and precision measurements of space and time. Today, these lasers are typically expensive table-top systems, which limits their use in applications that have size and power consumption restrictions. An on-chip femtosecond pulse source…

A new statistical model developed by researchers from the University of Oldenburg can describe wind turbulence with considerably greater accuracy than ever before. The physicists have made important progress in realistically simulating the often extreme fluctuations of the wind. They also developed a method which uses this model to calculate three-dimensional wind fields based on data from a limited number of measurement points. The method is suitable for applications not just in the field of wind energy but also other…

… leading to ‘picophotonics’. Researchers at Purdue University have discovered new waves with picometer-scale spatial variations of electromagnetic fields which can propagate in semiconductors like silicon. The research team, led by Dr. Zubin Jacob, Elmore Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Department of Physics and Astronomy (courtesy), published their findings in APS Physics Review Applied in a paper titled, “Picophotonics: Anomalous Atomistic Waves in Silicon.” “The word microscopic has its origins in the length scale of a micron which is a million…

Using a simulation method based on random numbers scientists were able to describe the properties of warm dense hydrogen as accurately as never before. Finding out the properties of quantum systems that are made of many interacting particles is still a huge challenge. While the underlying mathematical equations are long known, they are too complex to be solved in practice. Breaking that barrier most probably would lead to a plethora of new findings and applications in physics, chemistry and the…

Quantum technology on its way into society: Joint project DiaQNOS to develop quantum sensors to improve brain tumor surgery. Removing a brain tumor presents surgeons with special challenges: They must remove the tumor without damaging healthy brain tissue. Among other things, it is important to keep an eye on the motor cortex responsible for movement. If, for example, a nerve pathway leading from this to the arm is severed, the patient will no longer be able to move that arm…

Innovative electronics require state-of-the-art technologies and manufacturing processes. For many medium-sized companies, this is an investment that is almost impossible to bear. But thanks to the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS and its two clean rooms, the latest research results and technologies on 200 and 300 mm wafers are also accessible to smaller companies. The offer ranges from consulting to process development and pilot series production. The level of automation and efficiency in industry has increased significantly with Industry…

… at the end of the competence center’s first funding phase. Robots should perform decontamination tasks as independently as possible in environments that are hostile to humans, e.g. in the remediation of contaminated sites or in the dismantling of nuclear facilities and the decontamination of power plant components – with the aim of allowing humans to stay out of the danger zone. This vision was at the beginning of ROBDEKON. Now, the first, four-year funding phase of the competence center…

General neutron star structure revealed. Through extensive model calculations, physicists at Goethe University Frankfurt have reached general conclusions about the internal structure of neutron stars, where matter reaches enormous densities: depending on their mass, the stars can have a core that is either very stiff or very soft. The findings were published simultaneously in two articles today (The Astrophysical Journal Letters, DOI 10.3847/2041-8213/ac9b2a, DOI 10.3847/2041-8213/ac8674). So far, little is known about the interior of neutron stars, those extremely compact objects…

A team of astronomers have found that planet formation in our young Solar System started much earlier than previously thought, with the building blocks of planets growing at the same time as their parent star.   A study of some of the oldest stars in the Universe suggests that the building blocks of planets like Jupiter and Saturn begin to form while a young star is growing. It had been thought that planets only form once a star has reached…

The first result from an experiment at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams measures how long exotic nuclei can survive at the edge of stability. A new study led by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has measured how long it takes for several kinds of exotic nuclei to decay. The paper, published today in Physical Review Letters, marks the first experimental result from the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), a DOE Office of Science…

Artificial intelligence has revealed that prehistoric footprints thought to be made by a vicious dinosaur predator were in fact from a timid herbivore. In an international collaboration, University of Queensland palaeontologist Dr Anthony Romilio used AI pattern recognition to re-analyse footprints from the Dinosaur Stampede National Monument, south-west of Winton in Central Queensland. “Large dinosaur footprints were first discovered back in the 1970s at a track site called the Dinosaur Stampede National Monument, and for many years they were believed to be left…

Cosmological observations of the orbits of stars and galaxies enable clear conclusions to be drawn about the attractive gravitational forces that act between the celestial bodies. The astonishing finding: visible matter is far from sufficient for being able to explain the development or movements of galaxies. This suggests that there exists another, so far unknown, type of matter. Accordingly, in the year 1933, the Swiss physicist and astronomer Fritz Zwicky inferred the existence of what is known now as dark…

The transformation between skyrmions and bimerons has now been realized by scientists. Skyrmions and bimerons are fundamental topological spin textures in magnetic thin films with asymmetric exchange interactions and they can be used as information carrier for next generation low energy consumption memory, advanced neuromorphic computing, and advanced quantum computing as they have multiple degrees of freedom that can carry information. The transformation between isolated skyrmions and bimerons will be an essential operation for future computing architecture based on multiple…

UTA physicists find new way to measure properties of a material’s surface layer. Physicists at The University of Texas at Arlington have developed a new technique that can measure the properties of the topmost atomic layer of materials without including information from the underlying layers. Researchers from the Positron Lab in the UTA Department of Physics utilized a process called auger-mediated positron sticking (AMPS) to develop a novel spectroscopic tool to measure the electronic structure of the surface of materials…

A Tohoku University researcher has increased the performance of a high-power electrodeless plasma thruster, moving us one step closer to deeper explorations into space. Innovations in terrestrial transportation technologies, such as cars, trains, and aircraft, have driven historical technologies and industries so far; now, a similar breakthrough is occurring in space thanks to electric propulsion technology. Electric propulsion is a technique utilizing electromagnetic fields to accelerate a propellant and to generate thrust that propels a spacecraft. Space agencies have pioneered…