Radio telescope images enable a new way to study magnetic fields in galaxy clusters millions of light years away. For the first time, researchers have observed plasma jets interacting with magnetic fields in a massive galaxy cluster 600 million light years away, thanks to the help of radio telescopes and supercomputer simulations. The findings, published in the journal Nature, can help clarify how such galaxy clusters evolve. Galaxy clusters can contain up to thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity….

A research team from TU Wien together with US research institutes came across a surprising form of ‘quantum criticality’; this could lead to a design concept for new materials. In everyday life, phase transitions usually have to do with temperature changes – for example, when an ice cube gets warmer and melts. But there are also different kinds of phase transitions, depending on other parameters such as magnetic field. In order to understand the quantum properties of materials, phase transitions…

The model can better predict the physical phenomenon inside of very-high-temperature pebble-bed reactors. When one of the largest modern earthquakes struck Japan on March 11, 2011, the nuclear reactors at Fukushima-Daiichi automatically shut down, as designed. The emergency systems, which would have helped maintain the necessary cooling of the core, were destroyed by the subsequent tsunami. Because the reactor could no longer cool itself, the core overheated, resulting in a severe nuclear meltdown, the likes of which haven’t been seen…

Analag-to-digital converters are a key component of nearly every piece of electronic equipment. To meet soaring demand for lightning-quick mobile technology, each year tech giants create faster, more powerful devices with longer-lasting battery power than previous models. A major reason companies like Apple and Samsung can miraculously pull this off year after year is because engineers and researchers around the world are designing increasingly power-efficient microchips that still deliver high speeds. To that end, researchers led by a team at…

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have traced the locations of five brief, powerful radio blasts to the spiral arms of five distant galaxies. Called fast radio bursts (FRBs), these extraordinary events generate as much energy in a thousandth of a second as the Sun does in a year. Because these transient radio pulses disappear in much less than the blink of an eye, researchers have had a hard time tracking down where they come from, much less determining what…

Scientists at Goethe University Frankfurt and the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration use data which produced the first image of a black hole to constrain its fundamental properties. Theoretical physicists at Goethe University Frankfurt have analysed data from the black hole M87* as part of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration to test Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. According to the tests, the size of the shadow from M87* is in excellent agreement being from a black hole in general…

Researchers from Friedrich Schiller University Jena, the University of California Berkeley and the Institut Polytechnique de Paris use intense laser light in the extreme ultraviolet spectrum to generate a non-linear optical process on a laboratory scale – a process which until now has only been possible in a large-scale research facility. As the team writes in the current issue of the journal “Science Advances”, they were able to achieve this effect for the first time with a laser source on…

Bees not only provide us humans with honey, but thanks to the pollination of herbs, shrubs and trees, they are significantly responsible for the preservation of species. As a result, they generate around 1.6 billion euros for agriculture and food production in Germany*. To help honey bees take flight and advance environmental and agricultural monitoring as well as research on bee health, a research project will now equip them with miniaturized, integrated sensor systems. Beekeeping is in vogue, and not…

Researchers have devised a method, using spin-torque oscillators, to harness wireless signals and convert them into energy to power small electronics. With the rise of the digital age, the amount of WiFi sources to transmit information wirelessly between devices has grown exponentially. This results in the widespread use of the 2.4GHz radio frequency that WiFi uses, with excess signals available to be tapped for alternative uses. To harness this under-utilised source of energy, a research team from the National University…

A chip-compatible 3D nanoscopy answers. Compared with the superresolution microscopy that bases on squeezing the point spread function in the spatial domain, the superresolution microscopy that broadens the detection range in the spatial frequency domain through the spatial-frequency-shift (SFS) effect shows intriguing advantages including large field of view, high speed, and good modularity, owing to its wide-field picture acquisition process and universal implementation without using special fluorophores labeling. To enable spatial-frequency-shift microscopy with a superresolution at the subwavelength scale, it…

Results from a Princeton-led experiment support a controversial theory that the electron is composed of two particles. A new discovery led by Princeton University could upend our understanding of how electrons behave under extreme conditions in quantum materials. The finding provides experimental evidence that this familiar building block of matter behaves as if it is made of two particles: one particle that gives the electron its negative charge and another that supplies its magnet-like property, known as spin. “We think…

Researchers at Osaka University use deep learning to reduce noise in the electrical current data collected from nanopores, which may lead to higher precision measurements when working with very tiny experiments or medical diagnostics. Scientists from the Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research at Osaka University used machine learning methods to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio in data collected when tiny spheres are passed through microscopic nanopores cut into silicon substrates. This work may lead to much more sensitive data collection…

Physicists at ETH Zurich demonstrate that a tiny cloud of atoms can be turned from a heat engine into a cooler by cranking up the interactions between the particles. When a piece of conducting material is heated up at one of its ends, a voltage difference can build up across the sample, which in turn can be converted into a current. This is the so-called Seebeck effect, the cornerstone of thermoelectric effects. In particular, the effect provides a route to…

Researchers at North Carolina State University have made what is believed to be the smallest state-of-the-art RFID chip, which should drive down the cost of RFID tags. In addition, the chip’s design makes it possible to embed RFID tags into high value chips, such as computer chips, boosting supply chain security for high-end technologies. “As far as we can tell, it’s the world’s smallest Gen2-compatible RFID chip,” says Paul Franzon, corresponding author of a paper on the work and Cirrus…

Glide symmetry offers a compact, flexible solution for suppression of channel crosstalk in SSPP transmission lines. Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) are highly localized surface waves on the interface between metal and dielectric in the optical frequency band. SSPs do not naturally exist in the microwave and terahertz frequencies, so “spoof” surface plasmon polaritons (SSPPs) are necessary for operations in those lower frequency bands. Like optical SPPs, microwave SSPPs exhibit highly localized electromagnetic fields, subwavelength resolution, and extraordinary field confinement. Therefore,…

Smaller, faster, more energy-efficient: future requirements to computing and data storage are hard to fulfill and alternative concepts are continuously explored. Small magnetic textures, so-called skyrmions, may become an ingredient in novel memory and logic devices. In order to be considered for technological application, however, fast and energy-efficient control of these nanometer-sized skyrmions is required. Magnetic skyrmions are particle-like magnetization patches that form as very small swirls in an otherwise uniformly magnetized material. In particular ferromagnetic thin films, skyrmions are…