Physicists have resolved a long-lasting discrepancy between the measured velocities of interstellar oxygen atoms and other elements in our galaxy: a difference of 380 km/s, which astrophysical measurements of X-ray absorption by oxygen atoms gave, had given astrophysicists a headache. At such speeds, a substantial fraction of this important element could in principle move away from the galactic disk, since the escape speed from the Milky Way at the solar system is 580 km/s. There was suspicion of a problem…
Researchers from Osaka University accurately and arbitrarily control flying velocities of light bullets, offering new opportunities for optical and physical applications. Though it sounds like something straight out of science fiction, controlling the speed of light has in fact been a long-standing challenge for physicists. In a study recently published in Communications Physics, researchers from Osaka University generated light bullets with highly controllable velocities. According to Albert Einstein’s principle of relativity, the speed of light is constant and cannot be…
European fusion device once again will work with deuterium-tritium plasmas in 2021 Plasma experiments that generate fusion energy are planned for next year at the Joint European Torus JET, the world’s largest fusion device at Culham/UK. Scientists of Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) at Garching have contributed intensively to the preparations. Today, JET is the only device that can experiment with the fuel of a future fusion power plant. In the European fusion research programme, the JET tokamak…
Researchers have used AI to control beams for the next generation of smaller, cheaper accelerators for research, medical and industrial applications. Experiments led by Imperial College London researchers, using the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Central Laser Facility (CLF), showed that an algorithm was able to tune the complex parameters involved in controlling the next generation of plasma-based particle accelerators. The algorithm was able to optimize the accelerator much more quickly than a human operator, and could even outperform experiments…
At the end of 2019, the neutron source used for materials research at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) was shut down as planned. Now the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Zentrum (MLZ) in Munich is taking over two scientific instruments from the HZB. The Federal Ministry of Science and Research (BMBF) is funding the relocation and adaptation with 5.62 million euros. Currently the MLZ provides its users with 26 scientific instruments for neutron research in Garching. Four more are still under construction. Now, the…
Physicists use antiferromagnetic rust to carry information over long distances at room temperature. Be it with smartphones, laptops, or mainframes: The transmission, processing, and storage of information is currently based on a single class of material – as it was in the early days of computer science about 60 years ago. A new class of magnetic materials, however, could raise information technology to a new level. Antiferromagnetic insulators enable computing speeds that are a thousand times faster than conventional electronics,…
High-precision measurements of the strong interaction between stable and unstable particles. The positively charged protons in atomic nuclei should actually repel each other, and yet even heavy nuclei with many protons and neutrons stick together. The so-called strong interaction is responsible for this. Prof. Laura Fabbietti and her research group at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have now developed a method to precisely measure the strong interaction utilizing particle collisions in the ALICE experiment at CERN in Geneva. The…
First Bend and then Turn The water on Earth makes our planet inhabitable. It absorbs the Sun’s energy and releases it in the form of heat. An international research collaboration headed by the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) has now shown how and how fast the stored energy in the water molecules is released to heat strongly depends on the radiation’s energy. The scientists found that the energy of a bent water molecule can be rapidly released by…
JILA researchers have developed tools to “turn on” quantum gases of ultracold molecules, gaining control of long-distance molecular interactions for potential applications such as encoding data for quantum computing and simulations. The new scheme for nudging a molecular gas down to its lowest energy state, called quantum degeneracy, while suppressing chemical reactions that break up molecules finally makes it possible to explore exotic quantum states in which all the molecules interact with one another. The research is described in the…
Investigation of femtosecond time-resolved x-ray scattering signals reveals a faster chiral compared to collinear magnetic order dynamics A joint research project of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), the University of Siegen, Forschungszentrum Jülich, and the Elettra Synchrotron Trieste has achieved a new milestone for the ultra-fast control of magnetism. The international team has been working on magnetization configurations that exhibit chiral twisting. Chirality is a symmetry breaking, which occurs, for example, in nature in molecules that are essential for life….
A team of researchers from Italy, Norway, and Germany has demonstrated that the properties of molecules undergo significant changes when interacting with quantized electromagnetic fields in optical cavities. Using novel theoretical methodologies and computational simulations, the team revealed that the ground- and excited-state chemistry of molecules can be modified by a confinement in space. They show how the transfer of electrons inside the system can be controlled by modulating the frequency of the cavity field. Their newly-developed methodology could have…
Orbiting instrument hints at how stored magnetic energy heats solar atmosphere. A phenomenon first detected in the solar wind may help solve a long-standing mystery about the sun: why the solar atmosphere is millions of degrees hotter than the surface. Images from the Earth-orbiting Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, aka IRIS, and the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, aka AIA, show evidence that low-lying magnetic loops are heated to millions of degrees Kelvin. Researchers at Rice University, the University of Colorado Boulder and…
Astronomers have caught a rare look at a rapidly fading shroud of gas around an aging star. Archival data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reveal that the nebula Hen 3-1357, nicknamed the Stingray nebula, has faded precipitously over just the past two decades. Witnessing such a swift rate of change in a planetary nebula is exceeding rare, say researchers. Images captured by Hubble in 2016, when compared to Hubble images taken in 1996, show a nebula that has drastically dimmed…
International research team describes 50 years of photonic artificial intelligence / Publication in “Nature” In a recent nature perspective, international experts in the field of optical neural networks, optical deep learning and photonic computing have put their expertise together to review the path from pathbreaking optical neural networks and optical computing realizations in the past fifty years and how they advanced to photonic artificial intelligence applications. The team, which includes the physicist Prof. Cornelia Denz from the Institute of Applied…
Researchers have developed new 3D-printed microlenses with adjustable refractive indices – a property that gives them highly specialized light-focusing abilities. This advancement is poised to improve imaging, computing and communications by significantly increasing the data-routing capability of computer chips and other optical systems, the researchers said. The study was led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers Paul Braun and Lynford Goddard and is the first to demonstrate the ability to adjust the direction in which light bends and travels through…
Hypersonic flight is conventionally referred to as the ability to fly at speeds significantly faster than the speed of sound and presents an extraordinary set of technical challenges. As an example, when a space capsule re-enters Earth’s atmosphere, it reaches hypersonic speeds–more than five times the speed of sound–and generates temperatures over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit on its exterior surface. Designing a thermal protection system to keep astronauts and cargo safe requires an understanding at the molecular level of the complicated…
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