Researchers at the NOMAD Laboratory at the Fritz Haber Institute have been engaged in describing how surfaces change in contact with reactive gas phases under different temperature and pressure conditions. Researchers at the NOMAD Laboratory at the Fritz Haber Institute have been engaged in describing how surfaces change in contact with reactive gas phases under different temperature and pressure conditions. For this purpose, they have developed the so-called replica exchange grand canonical method (REGC). The results were published in the…

The first ever exoplanets were discovered 30 years ago around a rapidly rotating star, called a pulsar. Now, astronomers have revealed that these planets may be incredibly rare. The new work will be presented tomorrow (Tuesday 12 July) at the National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2022) by Iuliana Nițu, a PhD student at the University of Manchester. The processes that cause planets to form, and survive, around pulsars are currently unknown. A survey of 800 pulsars followed by the Jodrell Bank…

Data centers — dedicated spaces for storing, processing and disseminating data — enable everything from cloud computing to video streaming. In the process, they consume a large amount of energy transferring data back and forth inside the center. With demand for data growing exponentially, there is increasing pressure for data centers to become more energy efficient. Data centers house servers, high-powered computers that talk to each other through interconnects, which are physical connections that allow for the exchange of data….

The new frontier for self-driving vehicles and portable devices in a chip. ‘Light’ features a study by the Politecnico di Milano in collaboration with the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa. A study by the Politecnico di Milano, conducted together with Stanford University, the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa and the University of Glasgow and published in the prestigious journal Light: Science & Applications, has found a way to separate and distinguish optical beams even if they are superimposed and the…

… using archive at NSF’s NOIRLab. Amateur astronomer delves into archival data at the Community Science and Data Center to discover 34 ultracool dwarfs accompanying low-mass stars or white dwarfs. How often do stars live alone? For brown dwarfs — objects that straddle the boundary between the most massive planets and the smallest stars — astronomers need to uncover more examples of their companions to find out. Ace citizen scientist Frank Kiwy has done just that by using the Astro…

A potential step forward in understanding complex quantum turbulence. A research group of Professor Makoto Tsubota and Specially Appointed Assistant Professor Satoshi Yui, both from the Graduate School of Science and the Nambu Yoichiro Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics, Osaka Metropolitan University, in cooperation with their colleagues from Florida State University and Keio University, conducted a systematic numerical study of vortex diffusion in quantum turbulence in superfluid helium-4 (He II) at extremely low temperatures, near absolute zero (−273°C), and…

Analysis offers new means to predict ‘cosmological signatures’ for models of dark matter. A team of physicists has developed a method for predicting the composition of dark matter—invisible matter detected only by its gravitational pull on ordinary matter and whose discovery has been long sought by scientists. Its work, which appears in the journal Physical Review Letters, centers on predicting “cosmological signatures” for models of dark matter with a mass between that of the electron and the proton. Previous methods…

Switching something on and off again usually takes it back into its original state. A new magnetic material, however, has to be switched four times, while the spin of atoms moves once in a circle. If you switch a bit in the memory of a computer and then switch it back again, you have restored the original state. There are only two states that can be called “0 and 1”. However, an amazing effect has now been discovered at TU…

Novel method suppresses background noise in STED microscopy selectively and effectively, with potential for integration into other dual-beam point-scanning techniques. Nanoscopy describes the ability to see beyond the generally accepted optical limit of 200–300 nm. Stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy, developed by Stefan W. Hell and Jan Wichmann in 1994, and experimentally demonstrated by Hell and Thomas Klar in 1999, is a superresolution technique for nanoscopy. STED microscopy has made considerable progress and is widely used in practical research. But…

Breakthrough could point the way towards new quantum technology. University of Chicago physicists have invented a “quantum flute” that, like the Pied Piper, can coerce particles of light to move together in a way that’s never been seen before. Described in two studies published in Physical Review Letters and Nature Physics, the breakthrough could point the way towards realizing quantum memories or new forms of error correction in quantum computers, and observing quantum phenomena that cannot be seen in nature. Assoc. Prof. David Schuster’s…

Measuring the shape of intense bursts of terahertz light paves the way for future accelerator technologies. The Science Researchers have developed a new technique to better measure special “terahertz” light. This light travels in waves longer than the infrared light that is beyond what the human eye perceives. The new sampling technique preserves the correlations between position and time in a pulse of terahertz light. The technique allows researchers to measure the shape of terahertz “light bullets,” focused flashes of…

Comets are fossils from the ancient times and from the depths of our Solar System, and they are relics from the formation of the sun, planets, and moons. A team led by chemist Dr. Nora Hänni of the Physics Institute of the University of Bern, Department of Space Research and Planetary Sciences, has now succeeded for the first time in identifying a whole series of complex organic molecules at a comet as they report in a study published end of…

Scientists from the University of Lisbon (Portugal) and the University of Stuttgart (Germany) have managed to synthesize and extensively characterize a series of cobalt molecules that exhibit the properties of molecular magnets, an encouraging result for the future of quantum-scale computing. The current demand for the exchange and manipulation of data through information technologies, caused by the massification of electronic devices, has led scientists to reflect about more efficient computation methods. Storing information in binary systems works by switching between…

Star with the shortest orbital period around black hole discovered. A newly discovered star only takes four years to travel around the black hole at the centre of our galaxy / publication in ‘The Astrophysical Journal’. Researchers at the University of Cologne and Masaryk University in Brno (Czech Republic) have discovered the fastest known star, which travels around a black hole in record time. The star, S4716, orbits Sagittarius A*, the black hole in the centre of our Milky Way,…

Nature in the wrong direction. Physicists observed a strange new type of behaviour in a magnetic material when it’s heated up. The magnetic spins ‘freeze’ into a static pattern when the temperature rises, a phenomenon that normally occurs when the temperature decreases. They publish their findings in Nature Physics on July 4th. The researchers discovered the phenomenon in the material neodymium, an element that they described several years ago as a ‘self-induced spin glass’. Spin glasses are typically alloys where…

Joint project involving experimental and theoretical physicists and coordinated by Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz is providing greater insight into the pinning effects of skyrmions. We know hurricanes mainly from worldwide weather phenomena, but they have started to occur more frequently also in Europe. However, when researchers use an optical Kerr microscope to zoom in on thin films of magnetic material, they see something related happening in the microcosm, given the right conditions: a sort of micro-scale magnetic hurricane. Physicists call…