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…
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…
Researchers at TU Berlin are developing an innovative production process that uses lunar regolith to create solar cells for a future lunar base. The construction of a lunar base as a starting point for further space exploration and future Mars missions is one of the core elements of current international space strategies. Key to this is providing a power supply that is as self-sufficient as possible. The German Space Agency at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) is now funding the…
In an era where understanding and manipulating light at the nanoscale is increasingly crucial, a groundbreaking paper in Nature: Light Science & Applications reveals a significant leap forward. A team of scientists from the Institut Langevin, ESPCI Paris, PSL University, CNRS have developed a sophisticated method to measure the enhancement of light interaction at the nanoscale using single molecules as probes. Central to this research are dielectric gap nanoantennas—developed and fabricated at the Imperial College London. Such structures are made…
New theoretical analysis places the likelihood of massive neutron stars hiding cores of deconfined quark matter between 80 and 90 percent. The result was reached through massive supercomputer runs utilizing Bayesian statistical inference. Neutron-star cores contain matter at the highest densities reached in our present-day Universe, with as much as two solar masses of matter compressed inside a sphere of 25 km in diameter. These astrophysical objects can indeed be thought of as giant atomic nuclei, with gravity compressing their…
Researchers at the University of Warsaw’s Faculty of Physics with colleagues from Stanford University and Oklahoma State University have introduced a quantum-inspired phase imaging method based on light intensity correlation measurements that is robust to phase noise. The results of the research have been published in the prestigious journal “Science Advances”. The new imaging method can operate even with extremely dim illumination and can prove useful in emerging applications such as in infrared and X-ray interferometric imaging and quantum and…
This whirling image features a bright spiral galaxy known as MCG-01-24-014, which is located about 275 million light-years from Earth. In addition to being a well-defined spiral galaxy, MCG-01-24-014 has an extremely energetic core known as an active galactic nucleus (AGN) and is categorized as a Type-2 Seyfert galaxy. Seyfert galaxies, along with quasars, host one of the most common subclasses of AGN. While the precise categorization of AGNs is nuanced, Seyfert galaxies tend to be relatively nearby and their central AGN does not outshine…
For the first time, an instrument to find planets light years away was used on an object in the Solar System, in a study on Jupiter’s winds. We find ourselves at a time when it has become almost commonplace to discover planets orbiting another star, with more than 5,000 already registered. The first distant worlds to incorporate this list were mainly giant planets, similar to but also very different in many ways from Jupiter and Saturn. Astrophysicists have already begun…
Feedback
