Future urban air mobility… For the first time, visitors at the 2024 Olympic Games will be able to fly to venues using air taxis. Vertical takeoff aircraft such as drones, multirotors and air taxis will take off from and land on pads known as vertiports. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques FHR are developing an entirely digital sensor network, including a radar sensor, that in the future will be able to closely monitor air…

The German eROSITA consortium, which includes researchers from Universität Hamburg, today published the data from its part in the first all-sky survey with the eROSITA soft X-ray imaging telescope on board the Spectrum-RG satellite. The first eROSITA all-sky survey catalog (eRASS1) is the largest X-ray catalog ever published with around 900,000 different sources. Along with the data, the consortium released today a series of scientific papers describing new results ranging from studies of the habitability of planets to the discovery…

The popular Winter School on Planetary Geologic Mapping, co-organized by Constructor University, returned to Constructor for its fourth installment, taking place January 22–26, 2024. Around 600 students and young scientists from around the world participated in the program. Together with Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Dr. Angelo Pio Rossi and his team, attendees focused on the planetary mapping of Venus, Icy Satellites and Small Bodies, supporting current and future planetary missions. As one of the centers for planetary geologic…

Int. research team demonstrates robust light propagation in open systems. An int. cooperation of physicists from the University of Rostock, the Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat, the Julius-Maximilians University of Würzburg and the Indiana University Indianapolis (IUPUI) have shown for the first time that light can propagate without any loss in systems that interact with their environment. Previously, it was assumed that such open systems inevitably would exhibit exponential amplification or damping of light and thus lead to the instability of…

Research team presents heavyweight champion. Superconductivity is known for more than hundred years and is well understood for so-called conventional superconductors. More recent, however, are unconventional superconductors, for which it is unclear yet how they work. A team from HZDR, together with colleagues from CEA, the Tohoku University in Japan, and the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, has now gained new insights. They could explain why a new material remains superconducting even at extremely high magnetic fields…

Artificial intelligence using neural networks performs calculations digitally with the help of microelectronic chips. Physicists at Leipzig University have now created a type of neural network that works not with electricity but with so-called active colloidal particles. In their publication in the prestigious journal “Nature Communications”, the researchers describe how these microparticles can be used as a physical system for artificial intelligence and the prediction of time series. “Our neural network belongs to the field of physical reservoir computing, which…

A theoretical framework for measuring the Reynolds similitude in superfluids could help demonstrate the existence of quantum viscosity. Every fluid — from Earth’s atmosphere to blood pumping through the human body — has viscosity, a quantifiable characteristic describing how the fluid will deform when it encounters some other matter. If the viscosity is higher, the fluid flows calmly, a state known as laminar. If the viscosity decreases, the fluid undergoes the transition from laminar to turbulent flow. The degree of…

Researchers have developed a robotic sensor that incorporates artificial intelligence techniques to read braille at speeds roughly double that of most human readers. The research team, from the University of Cambridge, used machine learning algorithms to teach a robotic sensor to quickly slide over lines of braille text. The robot was able to read the braille at 315 words per minute at close to 90% accuracy. Although the robot braille reader was not developed as an assistive technology, the researchers…

It’s oh-so-easy to be absolutely mesmerized by these spiral galaxies. Follow their clearly defined arms, which are brimming with stars, to their centers, where there may be old star clusters and – sometimes – active supermassive black holes. Only NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope can deliver highly detailed scenes of nearby galaxies in a combination of near- and mid-infrared light – and a set of these images was publicly released today. These Webb images are part of a large, long-standing project, the…

… in extreme fields with the heaviest two-electron ion. Recently, an international research team has successfully carried out a high precision x-ray spectroscopy measurement on helium-like uranium, the simplest and heaviest many-electron atomic system. The obtained results allow, for the first time in this regime, to disentangle and to test separately high-order (two-loop) one-electron and two-electron quantum electrodynamics (QED) effects and set a new important benchmark for QED in the strong field domain. Moreover, the achieved accuracy of 37 parts…

Study validates method for guided discovery of 3D flat-band materials. Rice University scientists have discovered a first-of-its-kind material, a 3D crystalline metal in which quantum correlations and the geometry of the crystal structure combine to frustrate the movement of electrons and lock them in place. The find is detailed in a study published in Nature Physics. The paper also describes the theoretical design principle and experimental methodology that guided the research team to the material. One part copper, two parts vanadium…

– builds excitement for Perseverance rover’s samples. Findings reveal eons of environmental changes and offer hope that the rover’s soil and rock samples hold traces of life. If life ever existed on Mars, the Perseverance rover’s verification of lake sediments at the base of the Jezero crater reinforces the hope that traces might be found in the crater. In new research published in the journal Science Advances, a team led by UCLA and The University of Oslo shows that at…

Study opens up new paradigm in skyrmionics research. Researchers at the University of Augsburg and the University of Vienna have discovered co-existing magnetic skyrmions and antiskyrmions of arbitrary topological charge at room temperature in magnetic Co/Ni multilayer thin films. Their findings have been published in the renowned journal Nature Physics and open up the possibility for a new paradigm in skyrmionics research. The discovery of novel spin objects with arbitrary topological charge promises to contribute to advances in fundamental and…

University of Stuttgart strengthens promising field of research. Quantum computers are regarded as one of the next big sensations in science and industry. What the basic building blocks of technically mature computers, the qubits, will consist of in the future, is still a current research question. Dr. Lorenzo Tesi from the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the University of Stuttgart is investigating molecular spin qubits. The chemical scientist is establishing an Emmy Noether junior research group for the still young…

HKU physicists overcoming optical loss in polariton system with synthetic complex frequency waves. A collaborative research team co-led by Professor Shuang ZHANG, the Interim Head of the Department of Physics, The University of Hong Kong (HKU), along with Professor Qing DAI from National Center for Nanoscience and Technology, China, has introduced a solution to a prevalent issue in the realm of nanophotonics – the study of light at an extremely small scale. Their findings, recently published in the prestigious academic…

It is easy to be optimistic about hydrogen as an ideal fuel. It is much more difficult to come up with a solution to an absolutely fundamental problem: how to store this fuel efficiently? A Swiss-Polish team of experimental and theoretical physicists has found the answer to the question of why previous attempts to use the promising magnesium hydride for this purpose have proved unsatisfactory – and why they may succeed in the future. Hydrogen has long been seen as…