Through a one-of-a-kind experiment at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, nuclear physicists have precisely measured the weak interaction between protons and neutrons. The result quantifies the weak force theory as predicted by the Standard Model of Particle Physics. The team’s weak force observation, detailed in Physical Review Letters, was measured through a precision experiment called n3He, or n-helium-3, that ran at ORNL’s Spallation Neutron Source, or SNS. Their finding yielded the smallest uncertainty of any comparable weak…
Nanoscale vortices known as skyrmions can be created in many magnetic materials. For the first time, researchers at PSI have managed to create and identify antiferromagnetic skyrmions with a unique property: critical elements inside them are arranged in opposing directions. Scientists have succeeded in visualising this phenomenon using neutron scattering. Their discovery is a major step towards developing potential new applications, such as more efficient computers. The results of the research are published today in the journal Nature. Whether a…
Bringing the power of the sun to Earth requires sound theory, good engineering, and a little finesse. The process entails trapping charged, ultra-hot gas known as plasma so its particles can fuse and release enormous amounts of energy. The most widely used facilities for this process are doughnut-shaped tokamaks that hold plasma in place with strong magnets that are precisely shaped and positioned. But errors in the shaping or placement of these magnets can lead to poor confinement and loss…
It uses terahertz radiation to power a miniscule copper accelerator structure. Particle accelerators generate high-energy beams of electrons, protons and ions for a wide range of applications, including particle colliders that shed light on nature’s subatomic components, X-ray lasers that film atoms and molecules during chemical reactions and medical devices for treating cancer. As a rule of thumb, the longer the accelerator, the more powerful it is. Now, a team led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National…
While in a three-dimensional world, all particles must be either fermions or bosons, it is known that in fewer dimensions, the existence of particles with intermediate quantum statistics, known as anyons, is possible. Such fascinating objects are strongly believed to exist as emerging quasiparticles in fractional quantum Hall systems, but despite great efforts, experimental evidence of anyons has remained very limited. Since quantum statistics is defined through the behavior of the phase of the wave function, when two identical particles…
In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration delivered the first image of a black hole, revealing M 87*—the supermassive object in the center of M87. The EHT team, including a number of MPIfR scientists, has now analyzed archival data sets from 2009-2013, some of them not published before. The contribution of the APEX telescope is very important for the success of this analysis. The results reveal that the shadow was already present in earlier data, although it could not be…
Scientists analyze sunquakes to pinpoint flare energy source, perhaps predict flare severity. Solar flares are violent explosions on the sun that fling out high-energy charged particles, sometimes toward Earth, where they disrupt communications and endanger satellites and astronauts. But as scientists discovered in 1996, flares can also create seismic activity — sunquakes — releasing impulsive acoustic waves that penetrate deep into the sun’s interior. While the relationship between solar flares and sunquakes is still a mystery, new findings suggest that…
Between relativistic and classical wave regimes, newly discovered memory effect alters the Doppler wave signature. Wave scattering appears practically everywhere in everyday life–from conversations across rooms, to ocean waves breaking on a shore, from colorful sunsets, to radar waves reflecting from aircraft. Scattering phenomena also appear in realms as diverse as quantum mechanics and gravitation. According to Pavel Ginzburg, professor at Tel Aviv University’s School of Electrical Engineering, these phenomena become especially interesting when the waves in question encounter a…
Physicists at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, together with colleagues in Russia and Poland, have managed to achieve ultrastrong coupling between light and matter at room temperature. The discovery is of importance for fundamental research and might pave the way for advances within, for example, light sources, nanomachinery, and quantum technology. A set of two coupled oscillators is one of the most fundamental and abundant systems in physics. It is a very general toy model that describes a plethora…
Scientists at the Institute of Applied Physics at TU Dresden have come a step closer to the vision of a broad application of flexible, printable electronics. The team around Dr Hans Kleemann has succeeded for the first time in developing powerful vertical organic transistors with two independent control electrodes. The results have recently been published in the renowned online journal “Nature Communications”. High-definition roll-up televisions or foldable smartphones may soon no longer be unaffordable luxury goods that can be admired…
Astrophysicists at the University of Jena prove that dust particles in space are mixed with ice. The matter between the stars in a galaxy – called the interstellar medium – consists not only of gas, but also of a great deal of dust. At some point in time, stars and planets originated in such an environment, because the dust particles can clump together and merge into celestial bodies. Important chemical processes also take place on these particles, from which complex…
On Earth, auroras, also called northern lights, have always fascinated people. An international consortium involving the University of Bern has now discovered such auroras in the ultraviolet wavelength range at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, Chury for short. This phenomenon was detected thanks to the analysis of data from the European Space Agency ESA’s Rosetta mission. In the aurora borealis on Earth, electrically charged particles of the solar wind move along the Earth’s magnetic field. At high latitudes, these strike nitrogen and oxygen…
Scientists from Kiel find a new mechanism for the stabilization of skyrmions Tiny magnetic whirls that can occur in materials – so-called skyrmions – hold high promises for novel electronic devices or magnetic memory in which they are used as bits to store information. A fundamental prerequisite for any application is the stability of these magnetic whirls. A research team of the Institute of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics of Kiel University has now demonstrated that so far neglected magnetic interactions…
Physicists from Lancaster University have established why objects moving through superfluid helium-3 lack a speed limit in a continuation of earlier Lancaster research. Helium-3 is a rare isotope of helium, in which one neutron is missing. It becomes superfluid at extremely low temperatures, enabling unusual properties such as a lack of friction for moving objects. It was thought that the speed of objects moving through superfluid helium-3 was fundamentally limited to the critical Landau velocity, and that exceeding this speed…
Self-induced ultrafast demagnetization limits the amount of light diffracted from magnetic samples at soft x-ray energies. Free electron X-ray lasers deliver intense ultrashort pulses of x-rays, which can be used to image nanometer-scale objects in a single shot. When the x-ray wavelength is tuned to an electronic resonance, magnetization patterns can be made visible. When using increasingly intense pulses, however, the magnetization image fades away. The mechanism responsible for this loss in resonant magnetic scattering intensity has now been clarified….
Theorists publish improved prediction for the tiny difference in kaon decays observed by experiments. -An international collaboration of theoretical physicists–including scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and the RIKEN-BNL Research Center (RBRC)–has published a new calculation relevant to the search for an explanation of the predominance of matter over antimatter in our universe. The collaboration, known as RBC-UKQCD, also includes scientists from CERN (the European particle physics laboratory), Columbia University, the University of Connecticut,…
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