Between relativistic and classical wave regimes, newly discovered memory effect alters the Doppler wave signature. Wave scattering appears practically everywhere in everyday life–from conversations across rooms, to ocean waves breaking on a shore, from colorful sunsets, to radar waves reflecting from aircraft. Scattering phenomena also appear in realms as diverse as quantum mechanics and gravitation. According to Pavel Ginzburg, professor at Tel Aviv University’s School of Electrical Engineering, these phenomena become especially interesting when the waves in question encounter a…

Physicists at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, together with colleagues in Russia and Poland, have managed to achieve ultrastrong coupling between light and matter at room temperature. The discovery is of importance for fundamental research and might pave the way for advances within, for example, light sources, nanomachinery, and quantum technology. A set of two coupled oscillators is one of the most fundamental and abundant systems in physics. It is a very general toy model that describes a plethora…

Scientists at the Institute of Applied Physics at TU Dresden have come a step closer to the vision of a broad application of flexible, printable electronics. The team around Dr Hans Kleemann has succeeded for the first time in developing powerful vertical organic transistors with two independent control electrodes. The results have recently been published in the renowned online journal “Nature Communications”. High-definition roll-up televisions or foldable smartphones may soon no longer be unaffordable luxury goods that can be admired…

Astrophysicists at the University of Jena prove that dust particles in space are mixed with ice. The matter between the stars in a galaxy – called the interstellar medium – consists not only of gas, but also of a great deal of dust. At some point in time, stars and planets originated in such an environment, because the dust particles can clump together and merge into celestial bodies. Important chemical processes also take place on these particles, from which complex…

3D nonlinear ferro-fluid-based hyperbolic metamaterials may contribute to ultra-fast all-optical hyper-computing. Metamaterials–nanoengineered structures designed for precise control and manipulation of electromagnetic waves–have enabled such innovations as invisibility cloaks and super-resolution microscopes. Using transformation optics, these novel devices operate by manipulating light propagation in “optical spacetime,” which may be different from the actual physical spacetime. According to Igor Smolyaninov of the University of Maryland, “One of the more unusual applications of metamaterials was a theoretical proposal to construct a physical system…

On Earth, auroras, also called northern lights, have always fascinated people. An international consortium involving the University of Bern has now discovered such auroras in the ultraviolet wavelength range at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, Chury for short. This phenomenon was detected thanks to the analysis of data from the European Space Agency ESA’s Rosetta mission. In the aurora borealis on Earth, electrically charged particles of the solar wind move along the Earth’s magnetic field. At high latitudes, these strike nitrogen and oxygen…

Scientists from Kiel find a new mechanism for the stabilization of skyrmions Tiny magnetic whirls that can occur in materials – so-called skyrmions – hold high promises for novel electronic devices or magnetic memory in which they are used as bits to store information. A fundamental prerequisite for any application is the stability of these magnetic whirls. A research team of the Institute of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics of Kiel University has now demonstrated that so far neglected magnetic interactions…

Physicists from Lancaster University have established why objects moving through superfluid helium-3 lack a speed limit in a continuation of earlier Lancaster research. Helium-3 is a rare isotope of helium, in which one neutron is missing. It becomes superfluid at extremely low temperatures, enabling unusual properties such as a lack of friction for moving objects. It was thought that the speed of objects moving through superfluid helium-3 was fundamentally limited to the critical Landau velocity, and that exceeding this speed…

Self-induced ultrafast demagnetization limits the amount of light diffracted from magnetic samples at soft x-ray energies. Free electron X-ray lasers deliver intense ultrashort pulses of x-rays, which can be used to image nanometer-scale objects in a single shot. When the x-ray wavelength is tuned to an electronic resonance, magnetization patterns can be made visible. When using increasingly intense pulses, however, the magnetization image fades away. The mechanism responsible for this loss in resonant magnetic scattering intensity has now been clarified….

Theorists publish improved prediction for the tiny difference in kaon decays observed by experiments. -An international collaboration of theoretical physicists–including scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and the RIKEN-BNL Research Center (RBRC)–has published a new calculation relevant to the search for an explanation of the predominance of matter over antimatter in our universe. The collaboration, known as RBC-UKQCD, also includes scientists from CERN (the European particle physics laboratory), Columbia University, the University of Connecticut,…

This latest image of Jupiter, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope on 25 August 2020, was captured when the planet was 653 million kilometres from Earth. Hubble’s sharp view is giving researchers an updated weather report on the monster planet’s turbulent atmosphere, including a remarkable new storm brewing, and a cousin of the Great Red Spot changing colour — again. The new image also features Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. A unique and exciting detail of Hubble’s new snapshot appears…

Path to higher thermal insulation of the plasma / Reduction of plasma turbulence The turbulence code GENE (Gyrokinetic Electromagnetic Numerical Experiment), developed at Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) at Garching, Germany, has proven to be very useful for the theoretical description of turbulence in the plasma of tokamak-type fusion devices. Extended for the more complex geometry of stellarator-type devices, computer simulations with GENE now indicate a new method to reduce plasma turbulence in stellarator plasmas. This could significantly…

Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and King’s College London cleared the obstacle that had prevented the creation of electrically driven nanolasers for integrated circuits. The approach, reported in a recent paper in Nanophotonics, enables coherent light source design on the scale not only hundreds of times smaller than the thickness of a human hair but even smaller than the wavelength of light emitted by the laser. This lays the foundation for ultrafast optical data transfer in…

Mapping the atomic motion during a molecular vibration. One of the long-standing goals of research on the light-induced dynamics of molecules is to observe time-dependent changes in the structure of molecules, which result from the absorption of light, as directly and unambiguously as possible. To this end, researchers have developed and applied a plethora of approaches. Of particular promise among these approaches are several methods developed in the last years that rely on diffraction (of light or electrons) as means…

The ALICE experiment at the particle accelerator CERN in Geneva has the aim of providing new insights into an extremely hot and dense state of matter, the quark-gluon plasma. The entire matter of the universe was in this state just a few millionths of a second after the big bang, and the ALICE experiment will help researchers discover how the universe developed out of this primordial soup. An international team of scientists led by the physicist Harald Appelshäuser from Goethe…

Although Earth is uniquely situated in the solar system to support creatures that call it home, different forms of life could have once existed, or might still exist, on other planets. But finding traces of past or current lifeforms on other worlds is challenging. Now, researchers reporting in ACS’ Analytical Chemistry have developed a fully automated microchip electrophoresis analyzer that, when incorporated into a planetary rover, could someday detect organic biosignatures in extraterrestrial soil. One critical piece of evidence for…