Once upon a cosmic time, scientists assumed that stars apply an eternal magnetic brake, causing an endless slowdown of their rotation. With new observations and sophisticated methods, they now peeked into a star’s magnetic secrets and found it isn’t what they expected. The cosmic hotspots for finding alien neighbors might be around stars hitting their midlife crisis and beyond. This groundbreaking study, shedding light on magnetic phenomena and habitable environments, has been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. In 1995,…

Controllable light pulse pairs from a single fibre laser. In an innovative approach to controlling ultrashort laser flashes, researchers from the Universities of Bayreuth and Konstanz are using soliton physics and two pulse combs within a single laser. The method has the potential to drastically speed up and simplify laser applications. The results of the research have now been published in Science Advances. What for? The timing in the sequence of ultrashort laser pulses is crucial for a wide range…

Beta Pictoris, a young planetary system located just 63 light-years away, continues to intrigue scientists even after decades of in-depth study. It possesses the first dust disk imaged around another star — a disk of debris produced by collisions between asteroids, comets, and planetesimals. Observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope revealed a second debris disk in this system, inclined with respect to the outer disk, which was seen first. Now, a team of astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope…

Imagine a world where manufacturing becomes smarter, more efficient, and remarkably innovative. It’s no longer just a vision; it’s a reality with the unveiling of the groundbreaking “SeConRob“ project (Self-configuring Multi-Step Robotic Workflows). This exciting initiative, supported by Horizon Europe, is set to transform the manufacturing landscape from October 1, 2023, to September 30, 2026, with a budget of €2,992,178. We are delighted to introduce you to the key players behind this innovation – PROFACTOR GmbH (Austria), Safe Metal (France),…

Professor Gernot Friedrichs from Kiel University has developed a new approach for making interfering signals in laser absorption spectroscopy invisible. Laser-based absorption spectroscopy is an important method for determining the concentration of gas components in a sample. Modern devices are highly specialised for detecting very specific gases, such as trace gases in the atmosphere, in combustion exhaust fumes and in technical applications of plasmas. In order to do so, they measure the proportion of light of a specific wavelength that…

Be fast, avoid light, and roll through a curvy ramp: This is the recipe for a pioneering experiment proposed by theoretical physicists in a recent paper published in Physical Review Letters. An object evolving in a potential created through electrostatic or magnetic forces is expected to rapidly and reliably generate a macroscopic quantum superposition state. The boundary between everyday reality and the quantum world remains unclear. The more massive an object, the more localized it becomes when being made quantum…

Columbia engineers have built a new AI that shatters a long-held belief in forensics–that fingerprints from different fingers of the same person are unique. It turns out they are similar, only we’ve been comparing fingerprints the wrong way! From “Law and Order” to “CSI,” not to mention real life, investigators have used fingerprints as the gold standard for linking criminals to a crime. But if a perpetrator leaves prints from different fingers in two different crime scenes, these scenes are…

Feldspar is very common in rocks. As atmospheric dust, this mineral contributes efficiently to cloud formation. Researchers at TU Wien have now discovered what happens during this process. Feldspar is a ubiquitous mineral and makes up about half of the Earth’s crust. In the Earth’s atmosphere, feldspars play a surprisingly important role. Fine powder carried by air influences cloud formation. Water molecules adhere better to feldspar dust than to other particles. Tiny feldspar grains, floating in the atmosphere, thus become…

Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have found a brown dwarf (an object more massive than Jupiter but smaller than a star) with infrared emission from methane, likely due to energy in its upper atmosphere. This is an unexpected discovery because the brown dwarf, W1935, is cold and lacks a host star; therefore, there is no obvious source for the upper atmosphere energy. The team speculates that the methane emission may be due to processes generating aurorae. These findings are being presented at…

At Photonics West 2024 in San Francisco (USA), the Ferdinand-Braun-Institut (FBH) will be presenting novel and advanced diode lasers and UV light-emitting diodes (LEDs). FBH will be participating in both the trade fair (January 27 to February 1, 2024) and the accompanying conferences (January 30 to February 1, 2024) with more than 20 scientific talks. At stand 4205-43 in the German Pavilion, the Berlin-based institute will be showcasing its full range of services ¬– from design and chip development to…

Lateral force microscopy reveals previously unseen hydrogen atoms. Study published in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”. Researchers at the University of Regensburg and the Graz University of Technology have shown that hydrogen atoms at the sides of molecules lying on a surface can directly be seen. The study, published in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”, describes that by looking beside the molecules, the position and presence of the previously-hidden hydrogen atoms could…

An international team of researchers led by Mungo Frost from the SLAC research centre in California has gained new insights into the formation of diamond rain on icy planets such as Neptune and Uranus, using the X-ray laser European XFEL in Schenefeld. The results, which have now been published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy, also provide clues to the formation of the complex magnetic fields of these planets. In earlier work on X-ray lasers, scientists had already discovered that…

The Japan-led XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) observatory has released a first look at the unprecedented data it will collect when science operations begin later this year. The satellite’s science team released a snapshot of a cluster of hundreds of galaxies and a spectrum of stellar wreckage in a neighboring galaxy, which gives scientists a detailed look at its chemical makeup. “XRISM will provide the international science community with a new glimpse of the hidden X-ray sky,” said Richard Kelley, the…

Researchers have developed a new mathematical framework that can shed light on small-scale turbulent flow to better understand the turbulence phenomena. Weather forecasting is important for various sectors, including agriculture, military operations, and aviation, as well as for predicting natural disasters like tornados and cyclones. It relies on predicting the movement of air in the atmosphere, which is characterized by turbulent flows resulting in chaotic eddies of air. However, accurately predicting this turbulence has remained significantly challenging owing to the…

A German-Swedish team has succeeded in simultaneously studying the rapid motion of electrons with high spatial accuracy and a temporal resolution in the attosecond range. The researchers combined a special type of electron microscopy, known as photoemission electron microscopy (PEEM), with the power of attosecond physics. They used unimaginably short flashes of light to precisely control the movement of electrons and record their behaviour. In the future, the method could be used to better understand the behaviour of electrons in…

Tiled titanium:sapphire laser amplification promises to enhance the experimental capability of ultra-intense ultrashort lasers for strong-field laser physics. Ultra-intense ultrashort lasers have a wide-ranging scope of applications, encompassing basic physics, national security, industrial service, and health care. In basic physics, such lasers have become a powerful tool for researching strong-field laser physics, especially for laser-driven radiation sources, laser particle acceleration, vacuum quantum electrodynamics, and so on. A dramatic increase in peak laser power, from the 1996 1-petawatt “Nova” to the…