The University of Surrey and Space Power are tackling the problem of powering satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) during their eclipse period when they cannot see the sun. By collaborating on a space infrastructure project, the joint team will develop new technology which uses lasers to beam solar power from satellites under solar illumination to small satellites orbiting closer to Earth during eclipse. The wireless, laser-based power beaming prototype will be the first developed outside of governmental organisations and…

A team mapping radio waves in the Universe has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour, and it’s unlike anything astronomers have seen before. The team who discovered it think it could be a neutron star or a white dwarf—collapsed cores of stars—with an ultra-powerful magnetic field. Spinning around in space, the strange object sends out a beam of radiation that crosses our line of sight, and for a minute in every twenty,…

Interfacial diffusion of nanoparticles strongly affected by their shape and surface coating. Named for a Roman god, Janus particles refer to nanoparticles that possess surfaces with two or more distinct physical chemical properties. The special nanoparticles were introduced to the scientific community by 1991 Nobel Prize winner Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, who pointed out that “objects with two sides of different wettability have the unique advantage of densely self-assembling at liquid-liquid interfaces,” and consequentially, generating new colloidal structures. The resulting chemical…

What size will a quantum computer need to be to break Bitcoin encryption or simulate molecules? Quantum computers are expected to be disruptive and potentially impact many industry sectors. So researchers in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands decided to explore two very different quantum problems: breaking the encryption of Bitcoin (a digital currency) and simulating the molecule responsible for biological nitrogen fixation. In AVS Quantum Science, from AIP Publishing, the researchers describe a tool they created to determine how…

ISTA professor Hausel publishes new theory about the fundamental mathematics underlying particle physics. Symmetries are fundamental to physics. Searching and analyzing them helped physicists to construct a theory of a whole zoo of particles making up our universe. Mathematicians however are focused on the abstract structures behind symmetries. Tamás Hausel, professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), together with Oxford scholar Nigel Hitchin, developed an elaborated theory around so-called Higgs bundles that sheds new light on problems…

Project consortium presents powerful IT infrastructure for innovative dual-arm AUV. Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), operated and controlled by artificial intelligence (AI) methods, inspect, maintain, and repair offshore installations underwater. A consortium led by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) developed a holistic solution in the Mare-IT project to make this vision a reality: an innovative, two-armed AUV for complex inspection and maintenance tasks, embedded in a powerful IT infrastructure that enables both intuitive control and monitoring of the…

24 Jan 2022, at 2 p.m. EST, Webb fired its onboard thrusters for nearly five minutes (297 seconds) to complete the final postlaunch course correction to Webb’s trajectory. This mid-course correction burn inserted Webb toward its final orbit around the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2, nearly 1 million miles away from the Earth. The final mid-course burn added only about 3.6 miles per hour (1.6 meters per second) – a mere walking pace – to Webb’s speed, which was all that…

TU Graz develops simulation tools for transponder occupancy. The simulation tool developed at the Institute of Microwave and Photonic Engineering shows the site-specific transponder occupancy caused by radar interrogations in Austrian or pan-European airspace. Transponders are part of the mandatory equipment of civil aircraft: they are electronic devices that respond to radar interrogations and thus help air traffic control and air collision avoidance systems of other aircraft in the sky to determine the exact position of the aircraft. The time…

Neutrons detect clogs non-destructively through the metal walls of pipelines. Industry and private consumers alike depend on oil and gas pipelines that stretch thousands of kilometers underwater. It is not uncommon for these pipelines to become clogged with deposits. Until now, there have been few means of identifying the formation of plugs in-situ and non-destructively. Measurements at the Research Neutron Source Heinz Maier-Leibnitz (FRM II) at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) now show that neutrons may provide the solution…

TACC supercomputers help scientists probe vortices and turbulence. The subject of vortices might seem esoteric. But their impact does make headlines, as seen recently in an outbreak of tornadoes, swirling vortices that killed at least 80 people across eight U.S. states in December 2021. Scientists today still don’t fully understand the dynamics of vortices, chaotic but coherent patterns common in nature that are also exemplified by hurricanes, eddies in a stream of air or water, aerodynamic drag, fuel combustion, and…

Steep sections on slippery ground, high steps, scree and forest trails full of roots: the path up the 1,098-​metre-high Mount Etzel at the southern end of Lake Zurich is peppered with numerous obstacles. But ANYmal, the quadrupedal robot from the Robotic Systems Lab at ETH Zurich, overcomes the 120 vertical metres effortlessly in a 31-​minute hike. That’s 4 minutes faster than the estimated duration for human hikers – and with no falls or missteps. This is made possible by a new…

The design of new materials allows for either improved efficiency of known applications or totally new applications that were out of reach with the previously existing materials. Indeed, tens of thousands of conventional materials such as metals and their alloys have been identified over the last hundred years. A similar number of possible 2D materials have been predicted to exist, but as of now, only a fraction of them have been produced in experiments. One reason for this is the…

Researchers at PSI have compared the electron distribution below the oxide layer of two semiconductors. The investigation is part of an effort to develop particularly stable quantum bits –and thus, in turn, particularly efficient quantum computers. They have now published their latest research, which is supported in part by Microsoft, in the scientific journal Advanced Quantum Technologies. By now, the future of computing is inconceivable without quantum computers. For the most part, these are still in the research phase. They…

By shaking an optical lattice potential, researchers in Cambridge have realized a discontinuous phase transition in a strongly correlated quantum gas, opening the door to quantum simulations of false vacuum decay in the early universe. Phase transitions are everywhere, ranging from water boiling to snowflakes melting, and from magnetic transitions in solids to cosmological phase transitions in the early universe. Particularly intriguing are quantum phase transitions that occur at temperatures close to absolute zero and are driven by quantum rather…

Often portrayed as destructive monsters that hold light captive, black holes take on a less villainous role in the latest research from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. A black hole at the heart of the dwarf galaxy Henize 2-10 is creating stars rather than gobbling them up. The black hole is apparently contributing to the firestorm of new star formation taking place in the galaxy. The dwarf galaxy lies 30 million light-years away, in the southern constellation Pyxis. A decade ago…

While foam is certainly desirable in the bathtub or on beer, preventing foam – for example in industrial processes – is a much-discussed topic. Often, oils or particles are added to liquids to prevent foaming. If these are harmful to health or the environment, they must be removed again using complex methods. A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research has now shown that so-called “superamphiphobic surfaces” can be used to prevent foaming. Foam formation and…