Scientists have combined NASA data and cutting-edge image processing to gain new insight into the solar structures that create the Sun’s flow of high-speed solar wind, detailed in new research published today in The Astrophysical Journal. This first look at relatively small features, dubbed “plumelets,” could help scientists understand how and why disturbances form in the solar wind. The Sun’s magnetic influence stretches billions of miles, far past the orbit of Pluto and the planets, defined by a driving force:…
Scientists at the University of Bonn have built hair-thin optical fibre filters in a very simple way. They are not only extremely compact and stable, but also colour-tunable. This means they can be used in quantum technology and as sensors for temperature or for detecting atmospheric gases. The results have been published in the journal “Optics Express”. Optical fibers not much thicker than a human hair today not only constitute the backbone of our world-wide information exchange. They are also…
Transport processes are ubiquitous in nature but still raise many questions. The research team around Florian Meinert from the 5th Institute of Physics at the University of Stuttgart has now developed a new method that allows them to observe a single charged particle on its path through a dense cloud of ultracold atoms. The results were published in the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters and are subject in a Viewpoint of the accompanying popular science journal Physics. Meinert‘s team uses…
Hard X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) have delivered intense, ultrashort X-ray pulses for over a decade. One of the most promising applications of XFELs is in biology, where researchers can capture images down to the atomic scale even before the radiation damage destroys the sample. In physics and chemistry, these X-rays can also shed light on the fastest processes occurring in nature with a shutter speed lasting only one femtosecond – equivalent to a millionth of a billionth of a second….
Fabian Schneider leads the new research group “Stellar Evolution Theory” (SET) at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS). The astrophysicist explores the turbulent life of massive binary stars and their explosive deaths in supernovae. He was awarded an ERC Starting Grant of about € 1.5 million by the European Research Council (ERC). He will use the funds to establish his own junior research group at HITS. Stars are the basic building blocks of the visible Universe. Astrophysicists are particularly…
Research team confirms a new nuclear property predicted by theory Scientists are able to selectively knockout nucleons and preformed nuclear clusters from atomic nuclei using high-energy proton beams. In an experiment performed at the Research Center for Nuclear Physics (RCNP) in Osaka in Japan, the existence of preformed helium nuclei at the surface of several tin isotopes could be identified in a reaction. The results confirm a theory, which predicts the formation of helium clusters in low-density nuclear matter and…
Heidelberg astrophysicists study interstellar gas clouds as part of an international cooperation Computer simulations of turbulence in interstellar gas and molecular clouds – simulations so complex they were inconceivable until now – have provided important new insights into the role turbulence plays in the formation of stars. For the first time, the results of the calculations suggest how these turbulent movements transition from the supersonic to the subsonic range. The work was conducted by an international research team led by…
Liquids are ubiquitous in Nature: from the water that we consume daily to superfluid helium which is a quantum liquid appearing at temperatures as low as only a few degrees above the absolute zero. A common feature of these vastly different liquids is being self-bound in free space in the form of droplets. Understanding from a microscopic perspective how a liquid is formed by adding particles one by one is a significant challenge. Recently, a new type of quantum droplets…
Physicists at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered how to locally add electrical charge to an atomically thin graphene device by layering flakes of another thin material, alpha-RuCl3, on top of it. A paper published in the journal Nano Letters describes the charge transfer process in detail. Gaining control of the flow of electrical current through atomically thin materials is important to potential future applications in photovoltaics or computing. “In my field, where we study van der Waals heterostructures…
When two atomically thin layers of a material are stacked and twisted slightly on top of one another, they can develop radically different properties. They may become superconducting or even develop magnetic or electronic properties due to the interaction of their two layers. The challenge for scientists is to find out precisely what happens in these ultra-thin double layers – and how these changes can be induced and tuned. Now a research team from the United States and Germany has…
On April 15, 2020, a brief burst of high-energy light swept through the solar system, triggering instruments on several NASA and European spacecraft. Now, multiple international science teams conclude that the blast came from a supermagnetized stellar remnant known as a magnetar located in a neighboring galaxy. This finding confirms long-held suspicions that some gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) – cosmic eruptions detected in the sky almost daily – are in fact powerful flares from magnetars relatively close to home. “This has…
Scientists tame photon-magnon interaction. Working with theorists in the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, researchers in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have achieved a scientific control that is a first of its kind. They demonstrated a novel approach that allows real-time control of the interactions between microwave photons and magnons, potentially leading to advances in electronic devices and quantum signal processing. Microwave photons are elementary particles forming the electromagnetic waves that we use…
Quantum entanglement is key for next-generation computing and communications technology, Aalto researchers can now produce it using temperature differences. A joint group of scientists from Finland, Russia, China and the USA have demonstrated that temperature difference can be used to entangle pairs of electrons in superconducting structures. The experimental discovery, published in Nature Communications, promises powerful applications in quantum devices, bringing us one step closer towards applications of the second quantum revolution. The team, led by Professor Pertti Hakonen from…
The exponential growth of data traffic in our digital age poses some real challenges on processing power. And with the advent of machine learning and AI in, for example, self-driving vehicles and speech recognition, the upward trend is set to continue. All this places a heavy burden on the ability of current computer processors to keep up with demand. Now, an international team of scientists has turned to light to tackle the problem. The researchers developed a new approach and…
They are not yet usable as building blocks – but the lanes melted with the laser are a first step towards 3D-printed buildings, landing points, and roads made of moon dust. In the MOONRISE project, the team of scientists from the Institute of Space Systems (IRAS) at the Technical University of Braunschweig and the Laser Zentrum Hannover e.V. (LZH) have succeeded in both melting regolith under lunar gravity and “printing” joint lanes. At the end of the two-year project funded…
All photo-electronic devices work on the basis that the materials inside them absorb, transmit and reflect light. Understanding the photo properties of a specific material at the atomic level not only helps to decide what material to choose for a given application but also opens up ways to control such properties on demand. In a new collaborative work, researchers from Italy, Germany and the United States show how ‘kicking’ the atoms in a CuGeO3 crystal with an infrared laser pulse…
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