… density fluctuations in amorphous silicon discovered Silicon does not have to be crystalline, but can also be produced as an amorphous thin film. In such amorphous films, the atomic structure is disordered like in a liquid or glass. If additional hydrogen is incorporated during the production of these thin layers, so-called a-Si:H layers are formed. “Such a-Si:H thin films have been known for decades and are used for various applications, for example as contact layers in world record tandem…
The artificial impactor disturbed boulders within a 30m radius from the center of the impact crater- providing important insight into asteroids’ resurfacing processes. Professor ARAKAWA Masahiko (Graduate School of Science, Kobe University, Japan) and members of the Hayabusa2 mission discovered more than 200 boulders ranging from 30cm to 6m in size, which either newly appeared or moved as a result of the artificial impact crater created by Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2’s Small Carry-on Impactor (SCI) on April 5th, 2019. Some boulders…
Neutrons make structural changes in molecular brushes visible They look like microscopic bottle brushes: Polymers with a backbone and tufts of side arms. This molecular design gives them unusual abilities: For example, they can bind active agents and release them again when the temperature changes. With the help of neutrons, a research team from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now succeeded to unveil the changes in the internal structure in course of the process. “The structure of the…
Researchers proposed a new approach to describe the interaction of metals with electromagnetic fluctuations (i.e., with random bursts of electric and magnetic fields). Researchers from Peter the Great St.Petersburg Polytechnic University (SPbPU) proposed a new approach to describe the interaction of metals with electromagnetic fluctuations (i.e., with random bursts of electric and magnetic fields). The obtained results have great potential for application in both fundamental physics and for creating nanodevices for various purposes. The article was published in the International…
Humankind’s next giant step may be onto Mars. But before those missions can begin, scientists need to make scores of breakthrough advances, including learning how to grow crops on the red planet. Practically speaking, astronauts cannot haul an endless supply of topsoil through space. So University of Georgia geologists are figuring out how best to use the materials already on the planet’s surface. To do that, they developed artificial soil mixtures that mimic materials found on Mars. In a new…
A joint research group led by Prof. Jens Eisert of Freie Universität Berlin and Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) has shown a way to simulate the quantum physical properties of complex solid state systems. This is done with the help of complex solid state systems that can be studied experimentally. The study was published in the renowned journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). “The real goal is a robust quantum computer that generates…
Using a new method, physicists at the Heidelberg Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics have investigated the ultrafast fragmentation of hydrogen molecules in intense laser fields in detail. They used the rotation of the molecule triggered by a laser pulse as an “internal clock” to measure the timing of the reaction that takes place in a second laser pulse in two steps. Such a “rotational clock” is a general concept applicable to sequential fragmentation processes in other molecules. [Physical Review…
For the first time, the SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) flying observatory has provided direct and unambiguous evidence of water molecules on the moon beyond the permanent shadow at the poles. The infrared observatory, which is owned jointly by the US space agency NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) was able to detect the molecules in the moon’s southern hemisphere using the FORCAST instrument. The research results were published on the 26th of October 2020 in the scientific…
Hitting a specific point on a screen with a laser pointer during a presentation isn’t easy – even the tiniest nervous shaking of the hand becomes one big scrawl at a distance. Now imagine having to do that with several laser pointers at once. That is exactly the problem faced by physicists who try to build quantum computers using individual trapped atoms. They, too, need to aim laser beams – hundreds or even thousands of them in the same apparatus…
Trigger and course of plasma instability explained / agreement with the experiment. Among the loads to which the plasma vessel in a fusion device may be exposed, so-called edge localised modes are particularly undesirable. By computer simulations the origin and the course of this plasma-edge instability could now be explained for the first time in detail. Edge Localised Modes, ELMs for short, are one of the disturbances of the plasma confinement that are caused by the interaction between the charged…
A crucial resolution barrier in cryo-electron microscopy has been broken. Holger Stark and his team at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Biophysical Chemistry have observed single atoms in a protein structure for the first time and taken the sharpest images ever with this method. Such unprecedented details are essential to understand how proteins perform their work in the living cell or cause diseases. The technique can in future also be used to develop active compounds for new drugs. Since…
The Polish-Israeli team from the Faculty of Physics of the University of Warsaw and the Weizmann Institute of Science has made another significant achievement in fluorescent microscopy. In the pages of the Optica journal the team presented a new method of microscopy which, in theory, has no resolution limit. In practice, the team managed to demonstrate a fourfold improvement over the diffraction limit. The continued development of biological sciences and medicine requires the ability to examine smaller and smaller objects….
Red dwarfs are the coolest kind of star. As such, they potentially allow liquid water to exist on planets that are quite close to them. In the search for habitable worlds beyond the borders of our solar system, this is a big advantage: the distance between an exoplanet and its star is a crucial factor for its detection. The closer the two are, the higher the chance that astronomers can detect the planet from Earth. “But these stars are rather…
Researchers at uOttawa have created a new method to measure the temporal evolution of electric fields with optical frequencies. The new approach, which works in ambient air, facilitates the direct measurement of the field waveform and could lead to breakthroughs in high-speed electronics. To learn more, we talked to Aleksey Korobenko, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Physics at the University of Ottawa, and lead author of “Femtosecond streaking in ambient air”, an article recently published in the journal…
A team of astronomers from the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA-TIFR) in Pune, and the Raman Research Institute (RRI), in Bengaluru, has used the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) to measure the atomic hydrogen content of galaxies seen as they were 8 billion years ago, when the universe was young. This is the earliest epoch in the universe for which there is a measurement of the atomic gas content of galaxies. This research has been published in the…
In the global race to measure ever shorter time spans, physicists from Goethe University Frankfurt have now taken the lead: together with colleagues at the accelerator facility DESY in Hamburg and the Fritz-Haber-Institute in Berlin, they have measured a process that lies within the realm of zeptoseconds for the first time: the propagation of light within a molecule. A zeptosecond is a trillionth of a billionth of a second (10 exp -21 seconds). In 1999, the Egyptian chemist Ahmed Zewail…
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