NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark: detecting the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the universe’s birth in the big bang – the farthest individual star ever seen to date. The find is a huge leap further back in time from the previous single-star record holder; detected by Hubble in 2018. That star existed when the universe was about 4 billion years old, or 30 percent of its current age, at…

A collaborative new study led by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania demonstrates topological control capabilities in an acoustic system, with implications for applications such as 5G communications and quantum information processing. New research published in Nature Electronics describes topological control capabilities in an integrated acoustic-electronic system at technologically relevant frequencies. This work paves the way for additional research on topological properties in devices that use high-frequency sound waves, with potential applications including 5G communications and quantum information processing. The study was…

Team of U.S. and Chinese researchers confirms predictions about the quantum behavior of the exotic magnets. Working with a quantum material known as a kagome magnet, a team of Boston College physicists and colleagues have directly measured how individual electronic quantum states in the novel material respond to external magnetic fields by shifting energy in an unusual manner, the researchers report in the latest online edition of the journal Nature Physics. The measurements generated by the project are the first of…

Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) Department of Systems Engineering Assistant Professor Tony Pollman, along with university graduates U.S. Navy Lt. Nicholas Bailey and Lt. Christopher Girouard, were issued a provisional patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Feb. 10, for a novel apparatus using a dual-Stirling engine charge and recovery method for liquid air energy storage (LAES) systems. “This is a technology that has the potential to shape things we do in life,” said Pollman. Put simply, the dual-Stirling engine…

High resolution illumination of Earth’s interior down to the planet’s core with 3D global numerical simulations. Earthquakes do more than buckle streets and topple buildings. Seismic waves generated by earthquakes pass through the Earth, acting like a giant MRI machine and providing clues to what lies inside the planet. Seismologists have developed methods to take wave signals from the networks of seismometers at the Earth’s surface and reverse engineer features and characteristics of the medium they pass through, a process…

A POSTECH research team led by Professor Gil-Ho Lee and Gil Young Cho (Department of Physics) has developed a platform that can control the properties of solid materials with light and measure them. Recognized for developing a platform to control and measure the properties of materials in various ways with light, the findings from the study were published in the top international academic journal Nature on March 15, 2022 (GMT). The electrical properties of a material are determined by the…

The downpours, which can affect satellites and space travel, are caused by electromagnetic whistler waves, scientists say. UCLA scientists have discovered a new source of super-fast, energetic electrons raining down on Earth, a phenomenon that contributes to the colorful aurora borealis but also poses hazards to satellites, spacecraft and astronauts. The researchers observed unexpected, rapid “electron precipitation” from low-Earth orbit using the ELFIN mission, a pair of tiny satellites built and operated on the UCLA campus by undergraduate and graduate students…

Standard image sensors, like the billion or so already installed in practically every smartphone in use today, capture light intensity and color. Relying on common, off-the-shelf sensor technology – known as CMOS – these cameras have grown smaller and more powerful by the year and now offer tens-of-megapixels resolution. But they’ve still seen in only two dimensions, capturing images that are flat, like a drawing – until now. Researchers at Stanford University have created a new approach that allows standard…

Scientists studying V Hydrae (V Hya) have witnessed the star’s mysterious death throes in unprecedented detail. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the team discovered six slowly-expanding rings and two hourglass-shaped structures caused by the high-speed ejection of matter out into space. The results of the study are published in The Astrophysical Journal. V Hya is a carbon-rich asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star located approximately 1,300 light-years from Earth in the constellation…

Neodymium-Bismuth crystals belong to the wide range of materials with interesting magnetic properties. The Fermi surface which is measured in the experiments contains information on the transport properties of charge carriers in the crystal. While usually the Fermi surface consists of closed contours, disconnected sections known as Fermi arcs are very rare and can be signatures of unusual electronic states. Unusual magnetic splittings In a study, published now in Nature, the team presents experimental evidence for such Fermi arcs. They…

Scientists use gate set tomography to discover and validate a silicon qubit breakthrough. The Science Tiny quantum computing processors built from silicon have finally surpassed 99 percent fidelity in certain logic operations (“gates”). Quantum computers store information in the quantum state of a physical system (in this case, two silicon qubits) then manipulate the quantum state to perform a calculation in a manner that isn’t possible on a classical computer. Fidelity is a measure of how close the final quantum…

The way electrons flow in materials determine its electronic properties. For example, when a voltage is sustained across a conducting material, electrons start flowing, generating an electrical current. These electrons are often thought to flow in straight paths, moving along the electric field, much like a ball rolling down a hill. Yet these are not the only trajectories electrons can take: when a magnetic field is applied, the electrons no longer travel in straight paths along the electric field, but…

Can the neutrino eyes of humanity, observatories such as the IceCube in Antarctica, really see neutrinos coming from deep space? The answer is beginning to come from experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) where, amongst others, the internal structure of protons is being studied. According to the latest model by physicists from the IFJ PAS, this structure seems to be richer in charm particles to a degree that makes it difficult for terrestrial neutrino observers to interpret what they see. Contrary to popular…

A research group led by Prof. WU Kaifeng from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) revealed the mechanism for molecular spin-triplets formation from rapid spin-flip in colloidal nanocrystals and demonstrated its photochemical applications. The study was published in Chem on March 24. Traditionally, semiconductor spin properties are a territory of physics. Recent developments in solution-grown semiconductor materials, such as lead halide perovskites and colloidal nanocrystals, start to include chemists into this game. But the…

Researchers from NYU Abu Dhabi’s (NYUAD) Center for Space Science have discovered a new set of waves in the Sun that, unexpectedly, appear to travel much faster than predicted by theory. In the study, Discovery of high-frequency-retrograde vorticity waves in the Sun, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the researchers – led by Research Associate Chris S. Hanson — detailed how they analyzed 25 years of space and ground-based data to detect these waves. The high-frequency retrograde (HFR) waves –…

Quantum memristor as missing link between artificial intelligence and quantum computing. In recent years, artificial intelligence has become ubiquitous, with applications such as speech interpretation, image recognition, medical diagnosis, and many more. At the same time, quantum technology has been proven capable of computational power well beyond the reach of even the world’s largest supercomputer. Physicists at the University of Vienna have now demonstrated a new device, called quantum memristor, which may allow to combine these two worlds, thus unlocking…