Droplets sliding over surfaces are relevant for many applications. The movement of the droplets is determined not only by the mechanical properties of the surface. A team led by Hans-Jürgen Butt at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research has now discovered that electrical charges also have a significant influence on the movement. This could help to optimize processes involving droplets in the future. From precise inkjet printing to clear vision through spectacle lenses – the influence of droplets and…
X-ray reveal how lattice and atomic spins jiggle together. Scientists have revealed how lattice vibrations and spins talk to each other in a hybrid excitation known as an electromagnon. To achieve this, they used a unique combination of experiments at the X-ray free electron laser SwissFEL. Understanding this fundamental process at the atomic level opens the door to ultrafast control of magnetism with light. Within the atomic lattice of a solid, particles and their various properties cooperate in wave like…
Particle accelerators hold great potential for semiconductor applications, medical imaging and therapy, and research in materials, energy and medicine. But conventional accelerators require plenty of elbow room — kilometers — making them expensive and limiting their presence to a handful of national labs and universities. Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin, several national laboratories, European universities and the Texas-based company TAU Systems Inc. have demonstrated a compact particle accelerator less than 20 meters long that produces an electron…
Adaptive optics (AO) is a technique used for real-time correction of phase aberrations by employing feedback to adjust the optical system. Polarization aberrations represent another significant type of distortion that can impact optical systems. Various factors, such as stressed optical elements, Fresnel effects, and polarizing effects in materials or biological tissues, can induce polarization aberrations. These aberrations affect both system resolution and the accuracy of vector information. Vectorial aberrations result from the combined effects of phase and polarization aberrations. They…
The Lorentz reciprocal theorem can now be applied to fluids with broken symmetries. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS) in Göttingen have found a way to accommodate this classical theorem also in fluids with odd viscosities. Their discovery opens a new way to explore systems with broken symmetries. Symmetries are fundamental to physics. Generally, a physical process is considered symmetric if it appears identical when viewed as a mirror image or when time is reversed….
Scientists have simulated conditions that allow hazy skies to form in water-rich exoplanets, a crucial step in determining how haziness muddles observations by ground and space telescopes. The research offers new tools to study the atmospheric chemistry of exoplanets and will help scientists model how water exoplanets form and evolve, findings that could help in the search for life beyond our solar system. “The big picture is whether there is life outside the solar system, but trying to answer that…
…that may provide a link to mysterious sources. An international research team led by Michael Kramer and Kuo Liu from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, have studied a rare species of ultra-dense stars, so called magnetars, to uncover an underlying law that appears to apply universally to a range of objects known as neutron stars. This law gives insight into how these sources produce radio emission and it may provide a link to the mysterious…
Second only to the Oh-My-God particle, the newly dubbed Amaterasu particle deepens the mystery of the origin, propagation and particle physics of rare, ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. In 1991, the University of Utah Fly’s Eye experiment detected the highest-energy cosmic ray ever observed. Later dubbed the Oh-My-God particle, the cosmic ray’s energy shocked astrophysicists. Nothing in our galaxy had the power to produce it, and the particle had more energy than was theoretically possible for cosmic rays traveling to Earth from…
Astrophysicists say they have found an answer to why spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way are largely missing from a part of our Local Universe called the Supergalactic Plane. The Supergalactic Plane is an enormous, flattened structure extending nearly a billion light years across in which our own Milky Way galaxy is embedded. While the Plane is teeming with bright elliptical galaxies, bright disk galaxies with spiral arms are conspicuously scarce. Now an international team of researchers, co-led by…
For the first time, researchers have succeeded in selectively exciting a molecule using a combination of two extreme-ultraviolet light sources and causing the molecule to dissociate while tracking it over time. This is another step towards specific quantum mechanical control of chemical reactions, which could enable new, previously unknown reaction channels. The interaction of light with matter, especially with molecules, plays an important role in many areas of nature, for example in biological processes such as photosynthesis. Technologies such as…
A ground-breaking new discovery by University of Leeds scientists could transform the way astronomers understand some of the biggest and most common stars in the Universe. Research by PhD student Jonathan Dodd and Professor René Oudmaijer, from the University’s School of Physics and Astronomy, points to intriguing new evidence that massive Be stars – until now mainly thought to exist in double stars – could in fact be “triples”. The remarkable discovery could revolutionise our understanding of the objects –…
Despite public perception, the Antarctic ozone hole has been remarkably massive and long-lived over the past four years, University of Otago researchers believe chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) aren’t the only things to blame. In a study, just published in Nature Communications, the group analysed the monthly and daily ozone changes, at different altitudes and latitudes within the Antarctic ozone hole, from 2004 to 2022. Lead author Hannah Kessenich, PhD candidate in the Department of Physics, says they found there is much less…
Commonly thought to be long-lived satellites of our galaxy, a new study now finds indications that most dwarf galaxies might in fact be destroyed soon after their entry into the Galactic halo. Thanks to the latest catalogue from ESA’s Gaia satellite, an international team has now demonstrated that dwarf galaxies might be out of equilibrium. The study opens important questions on the standard cosmological model, particularly on the prevalence of dark matter in our nearest environment. It has long been…
Quantum scientists have discovered a rare phenomenon that could hold the key to creating a ‘perfect switch’ in quantum devices which flips between being an insulator and superconductor. The research, led by the University of Bristol and published in Science, found these two opposing electronic states exist within purple bronze, a unique one-dimensional metal composed of individual conducting chains of atoms. Tiny changes in the material, for instance prompted by a small stimulus like heat or light, may trigger an…
The latest image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows a portion of the dense center of our galaxy in unprecedented detail, including never-before-seen features astronomers have yet to explain. The star-forming region, named Sagittarius C (Sgr C), is about 300 light-years from the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*. “There’s never been any infrared data on this region with the level of resolution and sensitivity we get with Webb, so we are seeing lots of features here…
Researchers at the University of Warsaw’s Faculty of Physics have superposed two light beams twisted in the clockwise direction to create anti-clockwise twists in the dark regions of the resultant superposition. The results of the research have been published in the prestigious journal “Optica”. This discovery has implications for the study of light-matter interactions and represents a step towards the observation of a peculiar phenomenon known as a quantum backflow. “Imagine that you are throwing a tennis ball. The ball…
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